ALBUMS THAT GOT SCREWED: What's Big and Purple and Torments Captain Ahab?

The story of Moby Grape is one of rock's great cautionary tales. It involves so many elements a great Tragic Band Saga has to have, including a greedy manager, incompetent executives, and mental illness. Before they were completely undone, though, the Bay Area's Moby Grape did manage to complete one underheard classic: their self-titled 1967 debut.

Moby Grape was a hugely promising young band. So promising, in fact, that Columbia Records promoted them with the unusual stunt of releasing five singles at once. It backfired, and the singles sank. The group's disappointing second album further led to accusations of empty hype. Unstable lineups and LSD-related breakdowns followed, until the group finally gave up sometime in the mid 1970s.

Moby Grape made one of the greatest debut albums of all time, and were rewarded with obscurity. Guitarists Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis and Skip Spence, drummer Don Stevenson, and bassist Bob Mosley all wrote and sang, and they all did it pretty well. Miller and Stevenson's "8:05", along with Spence's "Omaha," became country-rock cult classics and inspired dozens of covers. The album is so good, even its minute-long novelty "Naked if I Want To" works. (Inexplicably, the band reprised the song on a later album, a sign of a creative nose dive if there ever was one.)

It was Spence who lost his wits to LSD. Since he was a former member of the Jefferson Airplane, nobody should have been surprised. Though the group had plenty of singing and songwriting talent, they had lost their creative rudder, and never recovered from his bad trip. In later years, the group would wrangle over ownership with their former manager, and were even reduced to gigging under the name Maybe Grope, which is very funny and terribly sad. But they left behind one album as good as any by their contemporaries the Buffalo Springfield or the Grateful Dead, and we all owe it to ourselves to give it a spin. And tell two friends.

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "8:05" by Moby Grape
AVAILABLE ON: Moby Grape; iTunes