Gary James' Interview With Peter Lewis of
Moby Grape



Their first album was ranked at #121 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. Writer Robert Christgau called their first album one of the "40 Essential Albums of 1967." They performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967. They toured with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. They performed at Bill Graham's Fillmore East and Fillmore West. In September of 2007, they performed for over 40,000 fans as the Summer Of Love 40th Anniversary Celebration in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The group we are talking about is San Francisco's Moby Grape. Moby Grape member Peter Lewis fills us in on his own history as well as the history of the group.

Q - Peter, I've always thought if you were born in Hollywood you had a great advantage over people who weren't and were trying to break into show biz or the music business. And, if you had a parent or parents who were in show biz (Note: Peter's mother was famed actress Loretta Young), you really had a leg up on everybody else. But in reading your story, that doesn't seem to be the case. Should you and everyone else in the band have paid more attention to the business side of the music business?

A - So far as show business connection, as you mentioned, in my case it didn't help. My mother had no interest in me becoming a Hippie Rock star. In fact, when I decided to pursue music instead of staying in college, she kicked me out of her house, although we made up a few years later after she saw me on TV. If what you mean by the "business side", keeping yourself rehearsed and ready to perform each time Moby Grape got onstage, I would say we all should have paid more attention to that. Of course we were fools to ever sign away our publishing rights and name to our manager, who is now deceased. But so far as marketing strategy, booking, record deals and all the rest, it's like Jerry Miller, our lead guitar player used to say, "We're musicians, not businessmen."

Q - Since your mother was so successful, did you ever ask for her advice of any kind? Did you ask her to recommend an attorney? An agent? A business manager?

A - The short answer is no. Although my sister was a TV actress and producer and my brother a documentary film maker and newscaster, our mother had no interest in promoting a life in show business for any of her kids. I used to think this was just a matter of not wanting to share the limelight. But later in life I began to believe she was trying to protect us from exactly the kind of thing that happened to Moby Grape. My guess now is that it was a little bit of both.

Q - You attended military school. Did the discipline of having that background prepare you for life on the road?

A - At the military school I went to there was a demerit system where we were allowed a certain amount of demerits each week. Doing things like talking when there was silence in the mess hall or skylarking, looking around in ranks would get you demerits. If a cadet got more than let's say fifteen demerits in one week, he would go to detention, which meant sitting in a classroom on Saturday from 9 AM to 4 PM, facing the clock on the wall. The punishment was to sit up straight while looking at the second hand of a clock going around and around for seven hours. There was no talking or books allowed. If a cadet tried to rest his head on his hands or put it down to sleep on his desk, he would be ordered to stand up at parade rest for the remainder of the day. I was in detention at least once a month. I spent four years at that place. I guess the intended effect was to make the cadets aware of the fact they cannot just do anything they feel like doing in life without suffering the consequences. Later on, as fate would have it, the whole counterculture, including me in Moby Grape, seemed bent on attempting to prove Saint John's Military Academy wrong. In the end I would say this attempt failed and that is why I'm still alive.

Q - Then you joined the Air Force. What did you do in the Air Force?

A - I was in the Air National Guard. I joined when I was at Purdue University in their professional pilot program where an Air Force recruiter signed us all up. I had already developed a serious dislike for the military, but in those days it was that or the draft. Sometime after that, while still in school, I heard Bob Dylan. I remember this as the first time anybody in show business or otherwise really made any sense to me. To make a long story short, when the time came I never showed up for the indoctrination. They could have given me a court martial, but this would have let me sit out the Vietnam War in a military prison. So, the Air Force gave me a discharge for the convenience of the government, which took away my commission and put me back in the draft. I got my draft notice about a month later. But as it turned out, the Air Force had outfoxed themselves. At the end of the induction process when the sergeant looked at my papers and saw that I had already been discharged from the Air Force, I got rejected by the Army. Apparently you can't be discharged twice from the U.S. military.

Q - You were a commercial pilot at one point. That sounds like a pretty good job. Were you piloting domestic or international flights?

A - I had and have a commercial pilot's license, but I never went for an airline job. I was actually on the way to my first interview with TWA when it hit me, I would be spending the rest of my life on some tarmac, waiting for my turn to take off. Instead, I went to Wallache's Music Store and bought a Rickenbacker twelve-string (guitar). I was still living at my mom's hose at the time. This is when I started letting my hair grow and playing along with The Byrds' first album. She waited about two months for me to come back to my senses and then one night my mother came into my room and told me I had to cut my hair or get out. After I got out on my own I formed a band called Peter And The Wolves. We played in clubs all over California for about a year, doing cover tunes. It was during that time I met Bob Mosby. It was he and I that founded Moby Grape in Northern California.

Q - You were in a group called The Cornells. Was that a recording group or a group that performed in clubs?

A - We did both. We made a Surf record called "Beach Bound" and also played high school dances, fraternity parties, nightclubs and some Rock And Roll Review shows. We even backed up Wayne Newton in one of them. We also made an appearance and played on two network TV shows, I've Got A Secret and The Les Crane Show. This was a case where having a famous mother was an advantage. But I was not the only celebrity's son in The Cornells. The drummer was Charlie Correll, whose father Charles Correll was Amos from the popular Amos And Andy radio show. The other guitar player was Bob Linkletter, whose father, Art Linkletter had several TV talk shows. Jim O'Keefe, our sax player's dad was Dennis O'Keefe, the actor.

Q - To be in San Francisco in the 1960s and be a musician would seem to many people to have been the glory days of Rock Music. Was it?

A - It felt like a tribal gathering and my first real memories of being a part of this began at The Ark. The Ark was an old, old ferry boat turned nightclub in Sausalito. Moby Grape was the house band there when one night Big Brother And The Holding Company came in to check us out. Unlike a lot of San Francisco bands that either played Folk or Blues based Rock with long jams, we were trying to write three to four minute Pop songs. Anyway, during one of our breaks I remember being out in the parking lot when Sam Andrew from Big Brother came up to me and said, "You guys are better than The Beatles, but don't expect anyone to rush the stage when you start playing in the city." I soon learned what he meant. To play at The Fillmore and Avalon was not like putting on a show in those days. It was more like presiding over a kind of psychedelic ritual that lasted three days with three bands in rotating sets, playing Friday and Saturday nights plus a matinee on Sunday afternoon. The idea here was at the end of the weekend there would be no difference between the musicians and the people. I guess you might say both the musicians and the audience were trying to turn music into a religion.

Q - You toured with Janis Joplin. Did you get to spend any time with her? What was she like?

A - Like most of the bands in the beginning of the San Francisco music scene, Big Brother lived together and saw themselves as much a family as they were a band. I would say for Janis, as it was for us, all this changed after The Monterey Pop Festival. Anyway, part of the San Francisco music scene was about making free music and when most of the San Francisco bands, including Big Brother, heard the promoter was planning to make a major movie of the Monterey concert, they refused to be filmed. I remember talking to Janis about this when she jammed with us at Moby Grape's release party. As you can see in the movie, she and Big Brother changed their minds sometime in the week between the party and Monterey. To be fair, most of the rest of us also gave in. But, as I see it, the Monterey Pop Festival was the end of the counterculture I found in San Francisco when I first got their. Music was not gonna become our new religion. It was, as Don Henley later put it, The End of the Innocence.

Q - You also toured with Jimi Hendrix. What was he like?

A - Hendrix was a very sweet person and shy compared to his stage persona. I first met him when he played with Ike and Tina Turner. They used to d occasional one-nighters at Gazzari's on The Strip when Peter And The Wolves were the house band. He had no Afro then and wore a plain suit. So, when I saw him play his set at Monterey a couple of years later I didn't make the connection. I learned he was the same person who I hung out with later in his motel room. Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding were also there. It was the first time I dropped acid and what I remember most about that was sitting in a chair, watching light from the bathroom shining through the other three guy's Afro hairdos. It make them look like angels to me. My only other memory of that night was asking Jimi how he got from being Ike Turner's sideman to become a musical voodoo priest. He told me one morning he just never woke up from a dream about it. I'm still trying to figure that out. But, I know he was telling the truth.

Q - You toured with The Stones. Was Brian Jones a part of the group then?

A - I don't know where you heard that, but we never toured with The Stones. We only interacted with them at a time when my marriage was falling apart. Moby Grape was stuck in New York and I was trying to make up my mind whether to fly back and murder my wife's boyfriend in California, or jump off the roof of my mother's apartment building, where I was staying at the time. In the end, I only wound up raiding her medicine cabinet for downers to keep myself sedated while we finished our second record for Columbia. In the meantime we had signed a management agreement with Allen Klein's American business partner, Michael Gruber, who was in charge of handling The Stones in America, which meant keeping them beyond the reach of both the law and the press. The Salvation was a private club that Michael had cooked up as a haven for The Stones when they were in New York. As fate would have it, The Salvation was actually the whole top floor of the apartment building that was right next to my mother's building on Central Park South. Although there was no formal bar, it did have a state of the art sound system, elaborate bathrooms, plush carpet and soft couches with mirror-topped tables in front of them for an obvious reason. Moby Grape spent a lot of time hanging out at The Salvation. Sometimes The Stones were there and sometimes not.

Q - Back to The Monterey Pop Festival, what was that like to perform there?

A - My memories will be forever eclipsed by another event that took place there. I have already mentioned how most of the San Francisco bands had flipped on not allowing their performances to be filmed, and Moby Grape was no exception. But, unlike the other bands, we had lost the right to make a decision about that. This was because we had foolishly signed the ownership rights to the name Moby Grape away to our first manager, the infamous Matthew Katz. In the meantime, Katz had gotten into an argument with Lou Adler, who was the producer of Monterey Pop and manager of The Mamas And The Papas. It was the day before the festival began. We were in the middle of a sound check when it got interrupted by Katz screaming at Lou Adler off stage. He wanted a million dollars to allow the filming of our performance. We were supposed to play right before Jimi Hendrix in a prime spot, But, the infuriated Lou Adler rescheduled us to open the show on Friday night. We fired Katz right then and there, which started a forty year long lawsuit. We finally won and got our name and publishing back. But our chance at Rock stadiums were gone.

Q - You performed in both the Fillmore East and Fillmore West. How often in each? How did Bill Graham treat you? Which venue did you like better and why?

A - I don't recall how many times we played at either the Fillmore West or East. Bill Graham was a tough, fair, passionate man that gave 100% of himself to anything he believed in. Before the weekend shows we used to play football with him and he crew. It was supposed to be touch, but Bill and his boys didn't mind hard blocks and pushing. I still remember how it hurt being knocked on that wooden dance floor.

Q - Rolling Stone's Encyclopedia Of Rock had this to say about Moby Grape: "Of the many groups to emerge from San Francisco in the late '60s, Moby Grape stood out as the band that most preferred structured songs as opposed to free jaming." Do you agree with that statement? Does that mean Moby Grape was trying to get a hit record on the charts?

A - Like any of the bands in the '60s we would have loved to be number one on the charts. So far as the structure of our songs was concerned, you might say they were arranged to be as interesting as possible. But, we did a lot of free form jamming at the end of them when we played 'live'. On a record however, we kept our songs to three or four minutes, not so much because we were trying to get a hit off one of them, but because of not wanting to make the audience listen weary

Q - You were friends with Linda McCartney. Was that when she was Linda Eastman? What was she like? Did she ever introduce you to Paul or any of the other Beatles?

A - I met Linda at a gig we did at the Fillmore East. She was a photographer and was there to photograph the band. I wasn't doing so well that night and I guess she took pity on me. Anyway, Linda was a very nurturing person and the night ended up with her taking me back to her apartment. We became friends after that and I would stay with her and her daughter, Heather, when I was in New York. Then I called one time and the phone was disconnected. Years later I ran into Paul's publicist and asked him to send a copy of my first solo record to Linda. It was Linda who turned me on to the great '60s singer / songwriters like Fred Neil and Tim Hardin. A week or so later she was telling me she had gotten the CD and was going to write again after listening to it. A couple of days after I got the letter I heard she passed away.

Q - You were part of The Electric Prunes from 2000 to 2003. Did you like that time in your life?

A - Yes! I would like to think of that time as the sugar at the bottom of my glass, career wise. Working with James Lowe and Mark Tulin, who's since passed, as well as the other Electric Prunes, was pure fun. I did two records with them, "Artifact" and "California".

Q - Speaking of records, you did two records with John De Nicola's record label, Omad Records. Today, you're a solo artist. Do you still perform?

A - I still perform with my daughter, Arwen and our friend George Adrian. In fact, we have a 'live' performance to be released on DVD.

Official Website: MobyGrape.us

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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