Moby Grape – "Omaha" (1967)

Listen, my love

Get under the covers

Squeeze me real tight

All of your lovin'!

[The following post about Moby Grape's "Omaha" – a member of the 2022 class of the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE' ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME – originally appeared on November 30, 2012.]

*     *     *     *     *

You remember the old grade school joke that asked "What's big and purple and lives in the ocean?"  The punchline was "Moby Grape."  And that's how this band got its name.

Jeff Tamarkin has been a pop music journalist for some 25 years.  In his book, Got a Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of the Jefferson Airplane, he wrote this about Moby Grape:

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.  

In other words, if it wasn't for bad luck, Moby Grape wouldn't have had no luck at all (to quote "Born Under a Bad Sign").  

For example, the band appeared at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but their appearance was not included in the famous documentary movie about the festival because of legal squabbles.  (The Moby Grape footage filmed for the Monterey Pop movie was finally shown publicly in 2007.)

*     *     *     *     *

You may wonder why Tamarkin was commenting on Moby Grape in a book about the Jefferson Airplane.  For one thing, one of Moby Grape's guitarists was Skip Spence, who played drums on the Jefferson Airplane's first album. 

Spence formed Moby Grape at the behest of Matthew Katz, who had been the Airplane's first manager.  The members of that group had a falling out with Katz, and it's hard to explain why Spence decided that he should be Moby Grape's manager.

Matthew Katz in 1967

Katz paid Moby Grape's rent and living expenses when they were trying to the group off the ground.  In exchange, he added a provision to his management contract giving him ownership of the band's name.  

This turned out not to be such a good idea – the group's members litigated with Katz off and on until 2006, when a California appeals court brought the unhappy saga to an end by upholding a lower court's decision that the band owned the Moby Grape name and its songs and recordings.  (One of the band members told Jeff Tamarkin that he "wouldn't piss in [Katz's] face if his eyebrows were on fire.")

*     *     *     *     *

That court decision came far too late for Skip Spence, who had died of lung cancer in 1999, just two days before his 53rd birthday.

Spence, a charismatic and energetic performer who has been described as "one of psychedelic rock's brightest lights," wrote "Omaha" for Moby Grape's eponymous debut album.  

"Omaha" is two and a half minutes of country-folk-psychedelic pop perfection.  

Rolling Stone summed the song up as follows:

Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis and Skip Spence compete in a three-way guitar battle for two and a quarter red-hot minutes, each of them charging at Spence's song from different angles, no one yielding to anyone else.

"Omaha" was the one of five singles that Columbia Records released simultaneously when the Moby Grape album was issued.  It was the only one to chart, but only made it to the #88 spot on the Billboard "Hot 100."

Moby Grape concert poster

Why did Columbia release five singles from the same album simultaneously?  Moby Grape's debut album was hyped like crazy, and maybe some brainiac at that record company decided that releasing five singles all at once would get lots of attention and capitalize on that hype.  

In reality, the release of five singles at the same time guaranteed that none of the five would get the kind of attention a pop record needs to thrive.  Moby Grape wasn't the Beatles, after all.

*     *     *     *     *

When the group went to New York to record its second album, Skip Spence fell in with a bad crowd.  (My mother always warned me about that, and I bet Skip's mother did the same.)

Under the influence of LSD, he took a fire axe to the hotel-room door of Don Stevenson, who was one of his bandmates – he apparently thought he needed to kill Stevenson to save him.

Skip and Don Stevenson
before the axe attack

Spence ended up in the notorious Manhattan jail, the Tombs.  From there, he was transferred to Bellevue, New York City's famous public psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as having schizophrenia. 

While he was in Bellevue, Spence wrote a bunch of songs.  When he was released in 1969, he headed to Nashville and recorded a solo album titled Oar.  

When I call Oar a "solo" album, I mean that literally – Spence did everything on the record himself.  (Apparently he thought he was doing a demo record, but the producer decided to release it as is.) 

One critic described Oar as "[c]ombining the ramblings of a man on the brink of mental collapse with some real moments of flippancy and laughter – a genuinely strange record."

Another critic had this to say about the album: "The majority of the sounds on this long-player remain teetering near the precipice of sanity."

According to one source, Oar was the lowest-selling album in Columbia Records history when it was deleted from the company's catalogue a year later. 

Spence moved back to California, where he lived for another 30 years, but there was no there there for most of that time.

The other band members helped support him after his breakdown.  Spence consumed mass quantities of heroin and cocaine, and was once involuntarily committed to a California mental hospital.  Another one of the Grape's guitarists, Peter Lewis, later described what was Spence was like during those years:

Skippy was just hanging around. He hadn't been all there for years, because he'd been into heroin all that time.  In fact, he actually OD'ed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe.  All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water.  

Now he was snortin' big clumps of coke, and nothing would happen to him.  We couldn't have him around because he'd be pacing the room, describing axe murders.  So we got him a little place of his own.  He had a little white rat named Oswald that would snort coke, too.  

He'd never washed his dishes, and he'd try to get these little grammar school girls to go into the house with him.  He was real bad.  One of the parents finally called the cops, and they took him to the County Mental Health Hospital in Santa Cruz.  Where they immediately lost him, and he turned up days later in the women's ward.

Skip Spence -- nearing the end

Much of Spence's later life was spent in institutions or transient accommodations or simply homeless.  Spence's fate is even sadder than that of Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators, whose drug use led to his being institutionalized and given electroshock treatment.  

Erickson eventually found doctors who could help him, and he is now performing and recording again.  But Spence never turned things around.  He didn't make a record in the 30 years that he lived following the release of Oar.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to "Omaha."

Click here to see Moby Grape perform "Omaha" on The Mike Douglas Show – Douglas introduced them as the "Moby Grapes."

Click on the link below to buy "Omaha" from Amazon:

Moby Grape – "Murder in My Heart for the Judge" (1968)

That mean old judge wouldn’t budge

I’ve got murder in my heart for the judge

More and more American judges are going beyond jail time and fines and handing out more creative sentences to offenders.

Punishments involving public shaming have become quite common.

For example, a woman was caught on camera driving on a sidewalk to get around a school bus that was dropping off children was ordered to spend two hours standing at a nearby intersection and holding a sign that read, “Only an idiot would drive on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus”:

Public-shaming punishments have been ordered in much more serious cases as well.  In Houston, a judge sentenced a couple that embezzled $265,000 from a fund for crime victims to stand in front of a local mall with a sign reading “I am a thief” for five hours every weekend for six years.  The judge also ordered the couple to post a sign that said “The occupants of this residence are convicted thieves” in front of their home.

That’s some serious public shaming.

*     *     *     *     * 

Ohio judge Michael Cicconetti is not averse to ordering a public-shaming punishment when it’s appropriate.  For example, he told an 18-year-old man convicted of stealing from an adult video store that he could either spend 30 days in jail or sit outside the store wearing a blindfold and holding a sign that that read “See no evil.”  (Not surprisingly, the miscreant chose the latter option.) 

Cicconetti also ordered a man found guilty of soliciting a prostitute to wear a chicken suit around town:

The punishment was apparently inspired by the notorious “Chicken Ranch” brothel, which was the subject of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  

(I suspect that the message that the judge intended to send by means of the chicken suit sentence went right over the heads of most local residents.)

*     *     *     *     *

Cicconetti has handed down some other unusual non-shaming punishments as well.

When a 19-year-old was found guilty of stiffing a cab driver on a $100 fare, Judge Cicconetti gave her the choice of spending 30 days in jail or walking 30 miles – the distance that the cab driver drove her.  She chose to walk the 30 miles.

And a woman who had pepper-sprayed a man at a local Burger King for no good reason agreed to be pepper-sprayed herself by her victim in order to avoid doing any jail time.  But the liquid given to the man to spray in her face was actually a harmless saline solution that local police use in training scenarios – the judge hoped to scare her straight without actually injuring her.

*     *     *     *     *

In one of his most famous cases, Cicconetti sentenced a woman to spend a cold night in the same woods where she had abandoned 35 kittens.

“She was harboring cats and she got overwhelmed and dumped them in the woods,” the judge said. “Her sentence was, ‘You go out in the woods the same way you dumped these kittens off.’”

“How would you like to be dumped off in the Metro Park at night, listening to the coyotes up on you, listening to the raccoons around you?” Cicconetti asked the woman before he sentenced her.

Judge Michael Cicconetti

That night the area was hit by a major snowstorm, and officials went to the park and picked the woman up around midnight. 

But Cicconetti believed the well-publicized punishment worked.  “We used to get abandoned cat cases.  We haven't in a while,” he said.

*     *     *     *     *

To Cicconetti, the unusual punishments are no laughing matter. He contends he's relieving an overcrowded jail system and at the same time sending a stern message.

“So many of these cases have received media attention. The people in this community know that if you come into this court, you never know what's going to happen,” Cicconetti said. “It does deter conduct for our community, and that's who I have to answer to.”

The judge acknowledged that there has been criticism of some of his creative sentences.  “There have been people that don't like [these sentences], that think I'm doing this for publicity,” he told one reporter.  

OF COURSE HE’S DOING IT FOR PUBLICITY!  Isn’t that as plain as the nose on your face?

But Judge Cicconetti scoffs at his critics.  “You get criticism, mostly from people hiding behind fictitious names on a blog,” he said.

(If the shoe fits . . .)

*     *     *     *     *

In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about a very peculiar creative sentence handed down by a judge from just a few miles up the road from my home town. 

*     *     *     *     *

“Murder in my Heart for the Judge,” was written by Moby Grape’s drummer, Don Stevenson, and released on the group’s 1968 album, Wow.

Click here to listen to “Murder in My Heart for the Judge.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon.

Moby Grape – "Murder In My Heart For The Judge" (1968)

I've got murder in my heart for the judge

That bad old judge wouldn't budge

I get a weekly e-mail from the American Bar Association Journal, which I usually delete without reading.  But for some reason, I took a look at the most recent one I received.

Virtually every one of the articles that e-mail linked to was interesting.  In the next few 2 or 3 lines posts, I'll summarize the most intriguing of those articles.  (Or maybe not.  I might change my mind.)

Today is Friday the 13th, which is an appropriate day to write about William Ray Phillips of Waco, Texas.  (If Mr. Phillips didn't have bad luck, he wouldn't have no luck at all.)  Here's the headline to the ABA Journal article about Philips, which pretty much says it all:

Angry at 10-year prison term, offender tries to arrange to kill judge and gets another 80 years

According to the article, the 64-year-old Phillips was sentenced to that 10-year prison term for failing to register as a sex offender.

William Ray Phillips

Phillips argued that the registration requirement didn't apply to his 2007 conviction for child abuse, which resulted in a 99-year prison term.  (His daughter had testified that Phillips had abused her from the time she was 18 months old until she was seven years old, and also took many lewd photographs of her.)  But his conviction was overturned by a Texas appeals court, which held that the statute of limitations for the crime had expired.  

However, Texas district judge Matt Johnson ruled that the sex-offender registration requirement still applied because Phillips had also been convicted of breaking a federal child-pornography law.

After he was sentenced, Phillips offered a hit man $30,000 to off Judge Johnson.  The only problem was that the hit man was actually an undercover Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent.

That was mistake #1.  Mistake #2 came when Phillips decided to go to trial instead of accepting a plea bargain  that called for a 30-year prison term for the solicitation of murder charge.  (He would have been eligible for parole after 15 years.)

Apparently Texas juries are not at all sympathetic to guys who sexually abuse their young daughters and try to arrange for the assassination of judges.  After deliberating less than an hour, the jury found Phillips guilty.  He was subsequently sentenced to 80 years in prison.  (He can seek parole in 30 years – when he'll be 94 years old.)

Click here to read the original article.

The Wow album cover

"Murder In My Heart For The Judge," which was written by Moby Grape drummer Don Stevenson, was released in 1968 on the group's Wow album.

Writer Jeff Tamarkin summed up Moby Grape's career in these words:

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."

Here's "Murder In My Heart For The Judge":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Moby Grape -- "Omaha" (1967)

Listen, my love

Get under the covers

Squeeze me real tight

All of your lovin'!

(Oh behave, Moby Grape!)

You remember the old grade school joke that asked "What's big and purple and lives in the ocean?"  The punchline was "Moby Grape."  And that's how this band got its name.

Jeff Tamarkin has been a pop music journalist for some 25 years.  In his book, Got a Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of the Jefferson Airplane, he wrote this about Moby Grape:

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.  

In other words, if it wasn't for bad luck, Moby Grape wouldn't have had no luck at all (to quote "Born Under a Bad Sign").  

For example, the band appeared at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but their appearance was not included in the famous documentary movie about the festival because of legal squabbles.  (The Moby Grape footage filmed for the Monterey Pop movie was finally shown publicly in 2007.)

*     *     *     *     *

You may wonder why Tamarkin was commenting on Moby Grape in a book about the Jefferson Airplane.  For one thing, one of Moby Grape's guitarists was Skip Spence, who played drums on the Jefferson Airplane's first album. 

Spence formed Moby Grape at the behest of Matthew Katz, who had been the Airplane's first manager.  The members of that group had a falling out with Katz, and it's hard to explain why Spence decided that he should be Moby Grape's manager.

Matthew Katz in 1967

Katz paid Moby Grape's rent and living expenses when they were trying to the group off the ground.  In exchange, he added a provision to his management contract giving him ownership of the band's name.  

This turned out not to be such a good idea – the group's members litigated with Katz off and on until 2006, when a California appeals court brought the unhappy saga to an end by upholding a lower court's decision that the band owned the Moby Grape name and its songs and recordings.  (One of the band members told Jeff Tamarkin that he "wouldn't piss in [Katz's] face if his eyebrows were on fire.")

*     *     *     *     *

That court decision came far too late for Skip Spence, who died of lung cancer in 1999, just two days before his 53rd birthday.

Spence, a charismatic and energetic performer who has been described as "one of psychedelic rock's brightest lights," wrote "Omaha" for Moby Grape's eponymous debut album.  

"Omaha" is two and a half minutes of country-folk-psychedelic pop perfection.  

Rolling Stone summed the song up as follows:

Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis and Skip Spence compete in a three-way guitar battle for two and a quarter red-hot minutes, each of them charging at Spence's song from different angles, no one yielding to anyone else.

"Omaha" was the one of five singles that Columbia Records released simultaneously when the Moby Grape album was issued.  It was the only one to chart, but only made it to the #88 spot on the Billboard "Hot 100."

Moby Grape concert poster

Why did Columbia release five singles from the same album simultaneously?  Moby Grape's debut album was hyped like crazy, and maybe some brainiac at that record company decided that releasing five singles all at once would get lots of attention and capitalize on that hype.  

In reality, the release of five singles at the same time guaranteed that none of the five would get the kind of attention a pop record needs to thrive.  Moby Grape wasn't the Beatles, after all.

*     *     *     *     *

When the group went to New York to record its second album, Skip Spence fell in with a bad crowd.  (My mother always warned me about that, and I bet Skip's mother did the same.)

Under the influence of LSD, he took a fire axe to the hotel-room door of Don Stevenson, who was one of his bandmates – he apparently thought he needed to kill Stevenson to save him.

Skip and Don Stevenson
before the axe attack

Spence ended up in the notorious Manhattan jail, the Tombs.  From there, he was transferred to Bellevue, New York City's famous public psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as having schizophrenia. 

While he was in Bellevue, Spence wrote a bunch of songs.  When he was released in 1969, he headed to Nashville and recorded a solo album titled Oar.  

When I call Oar a "solo" album, I mean that literally – Spence did everything on the record himself.  (Apparently he thought he was doing a demo record, but the producer decided to release it as is.) 

One critic described Oar as "[c]ombining the ramblings of a man on the brink of mental collapse with some real moments of flippancy and laughter – a genuinely strange record."

Another critic had this to say about the album: "The majority of the sounds on this long-player remain teetering near the precipice of sanity."

According to one source, Oar was the lowest-selling album in Columbia Records history when it was deleted from the company's catalogue a year later. 

Spence moved back to California, where he lived for another 30 years, but there was no there there for most of that time.

The other band members helped support him after his breakdown.  Spence consumed mass quantities of heroin and cocaine, and was once involuntarily committed to a California mental hospital.  Another one of the Grape's guitarists, Peter Lewis, later described what was Spence was like during those years:

Skippy was just hanging around. He hadn't been all there for years, because he'd been into heroin all that time.  In fact, he actually OD'ed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe.  All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water.  

Now he was snortin' big clumps of coke, and nothing would happen to him.  We couldn't have him around because he'd be pacing the room, describing axe murders.  So we got him a little place of his own.  He had a little white rat named Oswald that would snort coke, too.  

He'd never washed his dishes, and he'd try to get these little grammar school girls to go into the house with him.  He was real bad.  One of the parents finally called the cops, and they took him to the County Mental Health Hospital in Santa Cruz.  Where they immediately lost him, and he turned up days later in the women's ward.

Skip Spence -- nearing the end

Much of Spence's later life was spent in institutions or transient accommodations or simply homeless.  Spence's fate is even sadder than that of Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators, whose drug use led to his being institutionalized and given electroshock treatment.  

Erickson eventually found doctors who could help him, and he is now performing and recording again.  But Spence never turned things around.  He didn't make a record in the 30 years that he lived following the release of Oar.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to "Omaha."

Click here to see Moby Grape perform "Omaha" on The Mike Douglas Show – Douglas introduced them as the "Moby Grapes."

Click on the link below to buy "Omaha" from Amazon: