Anyone see the recent news about Detroit? Total deconstruction of roughly one quarter of the total city and a return to the agrarian roots that were lost to the automobile for a hundred years. Welcome to the 21st century where we all plant crops in cities to feed ourselves, and we try to remember things that were once an important part of our cultural make-up. The new plan beats the daylights out of our current factory farms and CAFOS and might spur a resurgence of community fresh healthy foods and the arts on local levels. Maybe Motown Records will resurrect itself as Gro-town Records. Go Detroit!
In my world of reconnecting with the a lost past while looking at the future, I have been in touch over the last couple of weeks with David West of Play Ball! Musical Services. His name may not be familiar to many readers of this little blog of mine, but he is a wonderful multifaceted musician/producer. He co-founded the Cache Valley Drifters in the early 1970s, and the band did some marvelous work on Flying Fish Records during that crazy decade. He also contributed backing and songs for the late great Kate Wolf.
As a quick aside, many may not remember Kate Wolf. I had the great pleasure to meet and get to know her a little bit when I worked at KPFA in Berkeley, CA for about six years from 1977 to 1983. Everyone at the station loved her, but her biggest booster was the warm and talented Robbie Osman. Robbie has a tremendous roots and folk program, Across the Great Divide, that has run for decades at 94.1. He has championed Kate's music passionately for all these years, and deserves special mention as a great human being keeping culture alive in America. We were all devastated when she succumbed to cancer at such a young age in 1986, and on the brink of national stardom. Derk Richardson did a fine article for the San Francisco Chronicle back in 1999 that lives on the Internet as a glowing tribute to Kate's legacy.
I rediscovered David West through the Youtube clip when I ran across the terrific song by Peter Lewis, America, that I put up on my last blog post. I needed a copy of Peter's concert, Live in Bremen, and could find no one in the states who was selling it at any reasonable price. Anyway, after a few e-mails the good old US Postal Service delivered my new CD.
The record and liner notes are well worth the small green Andy Jackson photo I sent in exchange for the CD. The record contains some great stories surrounding two classic Moby Grape songs, Murder In My Heart For the Judge and Right Before My Eyes. The story of Murder In My Heart involves Stephen Stills and Neil Young when they were still in Buffalo Springfield, and came to San Francisco to check out the fuss over Moby Grape. In Neil Young's book, Shakey, he talks of the meeting. Peter Lewis did an interview a few years back that also has the full details. When you hear the original concept that Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson put down for the tune played by Peter and David it becomes a wonderful historical musical artifact of pop conscience. His take on copyright is touched with humility and truth. Peter's story regarding the dinner setting at his mother's home with the assembled guests of Hollywood stars all dining at Loretta Young's table, which led to writing Right Before My Eyes, is quite remarkable in its honesty and detail.
The Live In Bremen record shines with an acoustic warmth that covers material from Moby Grape through Peter's first solo record, Peter Lewis. He also plays a great Gene Clark Byrds song, Set You Free This Time, as a wonderful tribute to an obvious key influence, which originally appeared on the Byrds second album. The album the band members all finally got to play on.
Peter Lewis remains one of popular music's most under appreciated talents. He has penned a wealth of great songs over the years with Moby Grape, and on his own very limited released two solo records through a German record company, Taxim Records. Peter Lewis, the first solo album, was produced by John McFee from the Doobie Brothers and got rave reviews from Rolling Stone when it appeared fifteen years ago. The highly positive reviews could not muster many sales. The album remains largely an undiscovered jewel in the cluttered mine of pop music.
The album boasts the aforementioned talents of David West, and host of California Sound veterans from Byrds, Doobies and Credence Clearwater Revival with Cornelius Bumpus, John York, McFee, Stu Cook and Keith Knudsen all lending their talents to the project. The sound is pristine and the songs are all very strong. Changing, gets two treatments on this record, and though I am a bit partial to the second helping I can see why this tune has two versions. The song is a personal microcosm of the Moby Grape story from Peter Lewis. Moby Grape's last full fledged album, Legendary Grape, which was first released on cassette-only in 1990 under the name The Melvilles, also has this song. It did not make the original cassette-only version, but appeared on the lovingly restored first CD edition that the fine folks at DIG Music put out in 2003 to tantalize all Grape fans with what could have been all over again. The original release in 1990 went to only about 600 folks on the Herman Records fan list due to the continued legal problems of copyright.
Today, any rationale mind in the universe might have thought all the litigation was over, and the band could finally start receiving some of the proceeds from their artistry. Sundazed Records thinking there might be a real market for the original Columbia Records releases licensed the first four Moby Grape albums from Sony/BMG. Not more than a month after their first reissue date in 2007 did the legal bullshit start up again from lawyers at Sony/BMG, Matthew Katz and the band causing a stop to a very promising re-release. The debut release and Wow were pulled and remain out of print.They join 20 Granite Creek and Fine Wine as lost raisins pruned from the vines of commerce. The excellent Jerry Miller albums, Life is Like That and Live at Cole's remain in obscurity struggling to find ears after fourteen years of availability.
Hunter S Thompson once perfectly described the music business: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
The legal wrangling over the rights to both the name Moby Grape and for much of their catalog has now spanned the entire lifetime of the band and its four remaining founder members while outliving the remarkable Alexander Spence. It is not over to this day. There is a great, and fairly brief, detailed account of this ongoing battle that first appeared in Entertainment Law & Finance and was published by the author, Stan Soocher, on the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association website. This account is beyond anything fiction could imagine, and is the full truth and nothing but in the long litigious life cycle of malicious greed gone insane in today's world of corporatism.
Detroit has a good plan in bulldozing a corporate past that turned its back on the city when times got tough. Now the city turns the page and borrows from a more sustainable lesson with small farms and gardens to bring back culture and commerce. Music has been a huge casualty in the business world of merger consolidation and contracts, just ask the Moby Grape survivors. Bulldozing many of the older business models and laying waste to many of the parasites who sucked the sounds from the landscape over the past decades has been tough. It has forced me to piece together old puzzles and try to figure new meanings for lost art that big business in this country never cared for. If we are to "learn from our mistakes" we must have an honest history, and must find all the important cultural documents that made that history. If we embrace in our collective ignorance and pour down modified enhanced flavor substitutes we suffer from malnourishment as a consequence.
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