SPILL FEATURE: FRANK ZAPPA’S GHOST – A CONVERSATION WITH PETER LEWIS (MOBY GRAPE)

FRANK ZAPPA’S GHOST

A CONVERSATION WITH PETER LEWIS (MOBY GRAPE)

In 1966, Skip Spence (formerly of The Jefferson Airplane) joined forces with Jerry Miller, Bob Mosley, Don Stevenson and Peter Lewis to form the band Moby Grape. The band went on to huge success and have remained together, in what form or the other, since their debut album in 1967. Over the years, Lewis has been one consistent member of the band. However, Peter Lewis has also struck out on his own and had a successful solo career. He is back with a new album, Imagination, his first since 2019’s The Road To Zion.

“I work with John DeNicola, my producer in New York. We did one record before this (The Road To Zion) and it went pretty well, so when you get a bunch more tunes you just do it again, and that was what this was,” Lewis told me during our recent telephone conversation. “Sort of the next step. I wrote a couple of songs on this record with him, he’s a songwriter himself. He wrote “The Time Of My Life” for the movie Dirty Dancing.”

And during the last few years, while Lewis has been performing solo and with Moby Grape, he has been writing and stockpiling songs. He has also been working with his daughter, who seems to be following her father’s footsteps in the world of music.

“I work with my daughter, Arwen Lewis. She wants to be a musician. I’ve been working with her over the past ten years. She just did a record with John too, actually two of them. One is a cover album of Moby Grape songs and the other she did of her own music called Under The Stars, which is great.”

Lewis is clear that art is a shared experience and comes from going out, rather than staying in. “Without pressure, there is no art. I was reading a book by Thomas Mann. It suggests that you can’t do that from your living room, you have to go out and have experiences to write about. The same with music. Any art, some sort of situation must exist in order to create it. It gets born through pain, or disappointment in some way. The creator responds to that.”

One song on his new album, “Frank Zappa’s Ghost” came to Lewis from a different source. “I got that idea because I heard him singing it in a dream. “Frank Zappa’s ghost…” and the music underneath it and the chords. And I just put it on a machine and we flushed it out later. He used to hold court in L.A., when I was down there at a place called Canter’s, where all the musicians would hang out. And Frank was always in there and had a booth full of people gathered around him. He was a subculture hero. The way he looked and when you hear his music it fit the way he looked. I thought of that song “Frank Zappa’s Ghost” too as the person may die but their spirit and their spiritual energy doesn’t. Somebody has to deal with that. The people who knew Frank or his family, and that song is really about that. Him saying ‘remind them I am still here.’

IMAGINATION ALBUM REVIEW

Trying to figure things out, including himself, has always been a common thread for Lewis, both solo and the songs he wrote for Moby Grape.

“Well, that’s right. It was the 60s and I think in San Francisco in particular, it wasn’t about describing the subculture, it was being part of it. It was very experimental. The subculture was just emerging as a response to everything else going on in the world. There were The Beatniks before us, like Ginsberg, Kerouac and people like that who just didn’t want to live a meaningless life, or what they thought was a meaningless life. The object, of course, is to experience some personal freedom in a world that is becoming more and more monotonous. The 60s was about not doing that and taking a different path and I think the music was supposed to reflect that.”

And the music had an incredible impact on a young Peter Lewis. “So, you try to talk about things that are going on in the world. I really liked it, that appealed to me. When I first heard The Lovin’s Spoonful or The Byrds, I was a pilot. It made me second guess the course I was taking with my life. I was a musician in high school, and I was having serious doubts about spending my life on a tarmac and smelling jet fumes. I was taking a walk down the strip, and there was music coming out of a nightclub. And it was a song that I heard on the radio that I liked. I looked up at the marquee and it was The Lovin’ Spoonful and I walked in there. When I came out, I didn’t go for my interview at TWA, I went and got a 12-string guitar, a Guild Thunderbird, which the Lovin’ Spoonful’s guitarist was playing.”

However, not everyone shared his enthusiasm for a career choice. His mother, famed movie star Loretta Young, was not impressed. “I was staying with my mom and I went to my room. And I was playing my guitar over and over with the records and she came in and told me I ‘had to cut my hair or get out’. So, I left. No argument, I just grabbed my guitar and slept in my car and wandered around the strip asking people if they were musicians and if they wanted to start a band. And that led me forming Peter And The Wolves and a year later I got together with Bob Mosley and went to San Francisco and that was Moby Grape.”

While Moby Grape made their mark on rock history, so too did Lewis as a solo artist. His music is honest and personal. Yet, people can and should be able to get quite a lot from his new album and his other work. “I just hope they get some kind of an enhanced awareness of the world around them. That is as much as I can do to say, ‘this is how I see it’. There is definitely hope. The truth is we are all mortal, but that is ok. Nobody forgets…just because we die doesn’t mean our spiritual energy does too. If we could see it that way, we wouldn’t be so self-centered, you know. And I think that is our hope. What I get freaked out about is when people become totally self-centered and just care about themselves and nobody else. You have to fight that. There is a tendency for us to look at the whole as if it just revolves around us, and really it doesn’t. I believe this, we are all part of just one thing and to have that vision is what I hope this album helps people get. It is my attempt to help people. All the music I ever played. I just wanted to help people.”

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Main Photo Credit: Arwen Lewis