Moby Grape — Grape Jam

Moby Grape was one of those groups that I just didn’t even give a chance back in the day when I was getting into psychedelic music and the San Francisco sound. I don’t know why – maybe I thought the name was trying too hard to be psychedelic (though I certainly had The Electric Prunes, so . . . maybe not a purist). Maybe I knew that not all SF psych bands were created equal, in my eyes, and that few of them were Jefferson Airplane. Even though Moby Grape featured a former member (and manager) of the Airplane, I just paid them no mind in the years when I could have had any of their records for a couple of dollars.

But then, a mere four decades later, I suddenly got into pretty much anything that Mike Bloomfield and/or Al Kooper touched – and while they weren’t part of Moby Grape, they guested on this live-in-studio jam album, and so I was interested. Way back in February 2020, when we didn’t know the world was going to go to hell, our little local music group organized a record crawl, and one of the stops was Siren Records up in Doylestown. That was my first visit there (and there haven’t been a lot since) and I went a little happily nuts with great finds – a whole bunch of blues, some lovely pop treats I’d missed over the years, Stephen Stills’ first solo, a gorgeous release of Animalisms, even a number of comedy records – and this 1968 release. Every time I’ve ever seen it, I’ve ignored it. This time, I picked it up, saw pics of Bloomfield and Kooper on the back, and put it in my voluminous stack.

It’s fantastic. Kooper and Bloomfield were at their best improvising – check out “The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper” for a small bit of evidence. In this one, they’re playing along with some of Moby Grape (apparently not all were there) . . . and it really is just a jam. Truly one of my favorite new albums of the past couple of years – and there have been a lot. I play this, and then Live Adventures, and then Super Session . . . then maybe Electric Flag. It’s a real groove.

But am I interested in the regular Moby Grape? Well, sometime maybe I’ll actually give them a try.