Moby Grape Guitarist and Founding Member Jerry Miller Dies at Age 81

Miller was one of the most influential musicians in the Bay Area music scene in the 1960s

Jerry Miller, guitarist and founding member of Moby Grape, has died at the age of 81.

A representative for the band confirmed to PEOPLE that Miller died suddenly on Saturday, July 20. No cause of death has been revealed.

Miller was born in 1943 and raised in Tacoma, Wash. During his teenage years, he began performing in the Pacific-Northwest bar-band scene — the same Jimi Hendrix found his footing in.

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“He was good, but somehow you didn’t think of him as the man who’d reinvent the electric guitar,” the late musician said of Hendrix in an interview with The Seattle Times in 2021. “The main thing you heard in those days was that he played too damn loud. Like me, I suppose.”

Miller was also a member of the Seattle rock band, The Frantics, and ended up touring with Texas rocker Bobby Fuller. He also played on an early demo of Fuller’s 1966 classic “I Fought The Law.”

Before The Frantics disbanded, they relocated to San Francisco, where bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were cutting their teeth. By 1966, three of The Frantics' former band members — Miller, Bob Mosley and Don Stevenson — joined the newly founded Moby Grape with guitarist Peter Lewis and former Airplane member Skip Spence.

At the time, they made a name for themselves in the psychedelic rock scene in the Bay Area. In the band, Miller was the lead guitarist and sang backup vocals. In 1967, the group released their self-titled debut album on Columbia Records.

Miller co-wrote many of the group's most renowned tracks, including "Hey Grandma," “8:05" and “Murder In My Heart For The Judge.”

The band's success was cut short in part due to Spence overusing LSD and experiencing a breakdown. (He died in 1999 at the age of 52.) "We could have had it all, but we ended up with pretty well nothing,” Miller told The Seattle Times.

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Miller moved onto his next project in 1969, forming the Rhythm Dukes with singer-songwriter Bill Champlin. The following year they released their only album, disbanding when Moby Grape reunited for their 1971 album, 20 Granite Creek.

Over the years, Moby Grape broke up and reunited several times, but Miller eventually focused on a solo career. In the 1990s, he returned home to Tacoma, Wash., still playing gigs.

In 2010, Miller teamed up with the surviving original members of Moby Grape and Spence’s son Omar to record an album, per Rolling Stone. However, it's never been released.

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