Bad Vibes in the Summer of Love: Moby Grape and The Dark Side of '60s Rock

About this event

During a summer that kicked off with the release of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the mounting of the Monterey Pop Festival, few wanted to know about the detritus that was swept under the rug as a result of that otherwise magical time sixty years ago. We only want to remember the face paint and the dancing in the streets—but LSD unlocked many a mind that should truly have stayed shut. There is no better example than the band Moby Grape, whose story is perfectly representative of the dark side of the 1960s. Three of the five members were songwriters—great ones, at that—and they were primed for a great career. So what went wrong? The story of Moby Grape includes disastrous tours, lawsuits, police busts, horribly nefarious managers, a fake touring version of the band, mysterious black magic witches, drug-induced madness, insane asylums, and attempted axe murder. And, no joke—that’s just within the band’s first two years. Dave Gebroe (creator/host of music obsessives’ podcast Discograffiti) explains how certain acts got trampled in the post-Sgt Pepper zeitgeist of the times, through the lens of the craziest tale of ‘em all: Moby Grape.