Moby Grape

The Place and the Time (Sundazed)

Moby Grape runoff remains as ripe as its Haight-Ashbury heyday. So do the lawsuits, resulting in New York restoration indie Sundazed’s recall of its 2007 deluxe reissues of the first three Moby Grape LPs. The SF quintet’s self-titled 1967 debut still spins a missing link between East Coast roots collaborative the Band and the powerhouse Bay Area psychedelia of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Proper refurbishment of Moby Grape and 1968’s subsequent Wow and its spin-off, Grape Jam, met with an unceremonious marketplace withdrawal equal to that of superb Columbia/Legacy yank Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape in 1993. The Vintage bonuses found their way on to the Sundazed series, of which both Moby Grape ’69 and Truly Fine Citizen, the group’s final two Columbia LPs, continue in print. The Place and the Time collects all the Sundazed extras save for the additional jams on Grape Jam and an alternate version of “Miller’s Blues” from the deleted Wow. Except for “Omaha,” Moby Grape’s signature scorcher, almost everything you need to know about five singer-songwriters mining country-folk-rock-jazz-‘n’-blues into a triple guitar threat of late-1960s firefight burns phosphorus right here and now.

***.5

This article appears in April 24 • 2009.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.