You'll know it as soon as you meet the guy: Don Stevenson has an enviable life. He resides in Whistler, for one. He shares a home with a wife and a little dog. He drives a nice car, if you're into that sort of thing. He plays music, his greatest love, as often as he can.
Some of you may recognize Stevenson as the guy playing goofy roles in local theatre productions. You might also know him as former head of sales at Club Intrawest, a position he held on and off for 14 years.
When speaking with him, you'll see he's an optimist, the kind of man who, at 69 years old, has taken life with a casual good humour, even when it got rough. But Stevenson has a regret you see, and it still burns deep.
He never met The Beatles. It pisses him off more than you know.
Keep in mind, thousands, possibly millions, of people are bummed that they never held audience with the world's most revered pop group, but most of these people wouldn't have had a reason to get close to the Beatles. But Stevenson did.
You see, he was famous — for a brief time in the late '60s as drummer for Moby Grape. They're regarded as one of the greatest rock bands to emerge from the San Francisco scene. Their songs "Omaha," "8:05" and "Hey Grandma!" (The last two of which were co-written by Stevenson) are classics of the era.
Moby Grape played with everyone, knew everyone — Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane. Jimi Hendrix opened for them on a West Coast tour. They shared dressing rooms with Jim Morrison.
But Stevenson never met the Beatles.
"It really pisses me off," Stevenson says now, staring down at his glass of wine at Southside Diner. "A couple guys from our band got to. They hung out got stoned, met John. They came to a couple of our shows when we were in London."
It certainly seems like a bigger deal today, now that the myth of the Beatles has seeped into the cultural fabric as it has, not to mention all the other rock stars listed above. Moby Grape could have had a spot in the annals of rock alongside their infamous contemporaries but, by 1970, it had all but fallen apart. As Jeff Tamarkin wrote in his Jefferson Airplane biography Got a Revolution, "The Grape's saga is one of squandered potential, absurdly misguided decisions, bad luck, blunders and excruciating heartbreak, all set to the tune of some of the greatest rock and roll ever to emerge from San Francisco. Moby Grape could have had it all, but they ended up with nothing, and less."
And, it's a story that only critics and Moby Grape fans seems to know about.
"People ask, 'who is this Moby Grape? What is the big deal about Moby Grape?'" says Gordon Stevens, an old friend of Stevenson's who played on the band's 1971 album 20 Granite Creek. "The thing is, there's no big deal about them. Not too many people give a shit, you know? But a lot of musicians do."
Stevenson says, "We came ... that close — " holding his hands out, forefinger and thumb less than an inch apart — "from having some ranch in Hawaii with cattle. But it doesn't matter. If you go check it out, we created some music that is worth listening to. We were concerned about our time we lived in. We were concerned about the war. We had some sense of social values. We cared about each other."
Life after grape
I meet him at Southside in late September. It's nearly empty, save for a few pairs of 8 p.m. diners. The satellite radio is tuned to the classic rock station, streaming Hendrix, Doors and the Stones as Stevenson tells intimate stories about some of them, letting be known, in his own humble way, that he was there, man.
"It was just mind blowing. And the music there (in San Francisco) was awesome," he says. "We'd get together with (Stephen) Stills and (Graham) Nash and those guys, play off of each other. It was really a hotbed of creativity. It was really wonderful. A wonderful time."
He has the West Coast drawl, a trace of possible surfer-boy affecting his speech. He's as cool as that black leather jacket he's wearing in the cold autumn evening, collar popped and coddling the hairline on the back of his neck. He carries none of the inflated sense of self one might expect from a fallen rock star, over-compensating for having "been there and done that" without being there now. His only regret seems to be that he never met John Lennon.
He's most excited when talking about Moby Grape as it stands today. They still play together with Spence's son Omar filling in. They played SXSW in 2009 with members of John Mellencamp's band. In the videos posted on YouTube, they sound invigorated — far more than the average 70-year-old probably should.
They've also recorded an album together — an incredible album, in fact, of all-new originals written by all the members that might never see the light of day.
David Fricke, Rolling Stone senior writer, wrote in October 2010, "The San Francisco quintet blessed with the voices, songs and guitars to become America's Beatles and Rolling Stones combined, that all but crashed on arrival — are stubbornly present, vibrant and adding to their discography."
He was writing in part about Stevenson's debut solo album King of Fools, released 44 years after Moby Grape played their first show. With Stevens and Miller backing him up, Stevenson channels Randy Newman and Jerry Garcia's solo work. Fricke writes that it's a reminder "that Moby Grape were and still are the unique sum of remarkable parts."
"Don's really a cool guy and he's been through a lot of shit," Stevens says. "He keeps his head up. He carries a lot of wisdom with him. He's learned a lot and he's put it to good use. He's a survivor in the true sense, you know?"
Earlier this year, Stevenson was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He says he came close to losing the battle but as of September, he's cancer-free — thanks, in no small part he says, to keeping a positive mindset.
"You have all these positive messages that you send to people because really the most important thing in life is your attitude," says Stevenson. "It really is. Not your friends or your job. Every relationship, everything that you're in, it's your attitude," he says. "We're all going to get shit on. The rain comes on the just, and the unjust. But what happens is that, the one thing that you can choose — you can't choose what's going to happen — but you can (choose to) be a 'mistic.' That is, you can be pessimistic or optimistic."
He's posted several new songs on Facetracks, the proceeds of which will be donated to cancer research.
So what happened?
Moby Grape formed in 1966, after Jefferson Airplane's manager, Matthew Katz, encouraged Spence, the Airplane's first drummer, to start a similar band with several group members singing and writing.
At the same time, Stevenson and Miller had been living in the Bay Area. The two had been friends since their high school days in Seattle, and had been playing in a band together called the Frantics. Legend has it that Jerry Garcia had convinced them to move the band down to San Francisco after a chance encounter (Stevenson claims this is false). The Frantics landed a gig playing at a topless bar. The band broke up soon after.
Shortly after, they met Mosely, and through him they met Lewis. Lewis knew Spence, who had said that he was looking to form a new band. The five of them auditioned together in an open jam. Stevenson says the connection was immediate.
"It was like love at first sight," Stevenson says. "It was remarkable but (Miller and I) tried to play it cool, like, 'Yeah, whatever.' We drove back down to the peninsula and the whole way back down we were just freaking out about how good it sounded."
And that was that. They started playing around the Bay Area, quickly gaining notoriety as San Francisco blew up all around them. It didn't take long for the record companies to come a-knocking. They all wanted a piece of the "San Francisco sound" and Moby Grape was a front-runner. They courted 14 different labels before whittling the decision down to signing with either Paul Rothchild from Elektra, or Dave Rubinson from Columbia.
"Columbia had said, 'we're going to make you stars. We're going to make it so you can't walk down your street,'" Stevenson says. "That was pretty seductive."
Moby Grape recorded their first album within three weeks. In summer of 1967, Columbia released five singles at the same time — an unheard of strategy at the time that made the band appear, to those outside of San Francisco anyway, like a marketing construct.
"We were so not a hype band. We just liked to play, so we lost a little respect," Stevenson says.
That is, until the album came out. In June of 1967, rock fans were obsessed with two albums: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band and Moby Grape. According to the biography Hammer of the Gods, Jimmy Page discovered Robert Plant in a Birmingham nightclub singing Moby Grape covers and, afterward, asked him to join what would become Led Zeppelin. (Upon induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Robert Plant cited Moby Grape as his favourite band.)
Moby Grape is a perfect document of the psychedelic era, blending rock, country and blues in a way that is still unmatched. It peaked at number 27 on the Billboard charts. Rock scribe Mark Deming wrote, "While history remembers the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane as being more important, the truth is neither group ever made an album quite this good."
So what happened? Bad management, in part.
"We should have gone with Rothchild," Stevenson says.
Rothchild went on to sign a little-known band called the Doors. Their story is well documented. Moby Grape, on the other hand, "was chopped up in the back rooms of Columbia" with Katz at the helm.
The band was famously omitted from the film documenting the Monterey Pop Festival — which is credited with launching the careers of The Who, Hendrix, Joplin — because Katz, who owned all the copyrights to their name and music, requested an "obscene amount of money" for rights to the coverage.
By 1968 things began to unravel. The band was recording its second album at the time and Spence began abusing LSD. One day, believing he was the Antichrist, he felt he had to save both Stevenson and Lewis from themselves and showed up at their hotel and used a fire axe to chop his way through the door to Stevenson's room. Stevenson had been in the studio recording at the time.
Spence was admitted to the Manhattan Detention Centre for six months, treated regularly with Thorazine, before he was released. The second album Wow peaked at #20 on the Billboard 200 album chart but the success wouldn't last long. Spence left the band in 1969. By 1971, the band had lost its steam. They'd play together on and off for the next 40 years but never managed to reclaim fame.
"One day you're driving down the street in a big black car and everybody treats you like a movie star and the next day you look around and you're playing back in bars again," Stevenson says.
The members were entangled in lawsuits with Katz, who owned all the copyrights, for over 30 years to regain control of the Moby Grape name and music. In the 70s, Katz hired five new musicians with no connection to the original band members and had them perform as Moby Grape. People would pay for a ticket to see a completely different set of musicians.
They finally fought and won the rights to the name back in 1996 after a lengthy and litigious court battle. Glendon Miskel, a San Francisco entertainment lawyer, fought the case pro bono for 20 years, eventually winning back their royalties and rights to the name and the music. Stevenson says Miskel became almost obsessed with the band and he helped set several precedents in California entertainment law. (Miskel died of esophageal cancer in June 2011. Katz, who was one of the first litigants in the Napster case, made an unsuccessful bid for Malibu City Council in 2010).
And so it goes
Moby Grape's story deserves a more in-depth treatment than these few words can provide. Both Stevens and Stevenson say people have tried biopics and documentaries a number of times over the years, but nothing's ever materialized.
Peter Lewis and Jerry Miller both continue to record and tour. Jerry Miller was listed #68 on Rolling Stone's 100 greatest guitar players of all time. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Skip Spence spent many years on the street and died in 1999 in Santa Cruz, where he'd been residing in a group home. Bob Mosely ended up in much the same state — after enlisting in the army and subsequently being kicked out, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He too ended up on the street during the '80s. Stevenson ended up in Whistler, selling time-shares, the only member to have found a successful career outside of music.
"People were crazy. I mean really crazy," says Stevenson. "People who get cheques from the government kind of crazy, you know. But that's what creates this wonderful music and these guys were beautiful and I love them to death, with all my heart. And I still do."
He says a lot of Moby Grape's unravelling had to do with the liberal drug use and heady experimentation of the era that the band rose out of.
"What can you say, there were a lot of people (like that) at that time," he says. "It's like poker; you're all in — all in. Some win, some lose."
"And you won?" I ask.
He laughs. "I guess." Then he turns his gaze to the table, an apologetic smile stretching across his face.
