Consumer Guide Album

Moby Grape: Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape [Columbia/Legacy, 1993]
They were quintessentially inauthentic--three bar-band honchos, a showbiz kid, a hippie head case, and a svengali with a specialty in indentured servitude. Their accomplishment was nothing less and nothing more than the invention of El Lay country-rock--in San Francisco, where they were dismissed as phonies and interlopers. The Eagles would have happened without them, Poco too, but these guys got to the hyper harmonies and amped-up licks before they constituted any kind of copout. They also played the blues, jammed supernaturally hard, and put 14 loopy, optimistic songs that saw beyond the provincial counterculture of the Haight on a debut album ineptly overhyped by a label that still doesn't know what to do with it. The canard that they never cut another decent track is no more absurd than said label's assurances that they have two-and-a-half hours of memorable music in them. Yet only on this two-CD set can you purchase Moby Grape. Conveniently, it comprises the first 14 cuts. And typically, the sublime "Fall on You" is wrecked by a minute of producer gab even more justly unreleased than the rest of the crap that fills out the package. De trop, de trop, de trop--their motto and their curse. B+