Singer, songwriter, and bassist James Robert Mosley entered the world on December 4, 1942, in Paradise Valley, California, and passed his teenage years performing in assorted garage groups such as the Misfits, the Strangers, and the Frantics. Those Frantics later evolved into Moby Grape, whose original roster of Bob Mosley, Peter Lewis, Skip Spence, Don Stevenson, and Jerry Miller cut the celebrated yet star-crossed Moby Grape album for Columbia in 1967.
Chronic misfortune dogged the group through ill-conceived publicity schemes, mismanagement, and label blunders that blocked any sustained commercial breakthrough, while signs of mental illness surfaced in Spence and Mosley. Two further albums featuring the founding lineup were completed before Spence and Mosley both departed.
Mosley enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1969, finished basic training, then received a paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis—the same condition that had troubled Skip Spence—resulting in his discharge nine months later. He returned to the fold for the 1971 album 20 Granite Creek, after which the band fragmented. Reprise Records released his solo album Bob Mosley in 1972. By 1973 he had been named a ward of the State of California.
Late in the decade he joined the Ducks, who accompanied Neil Young during a string of unannounced bar shows around Santa Cruz in 1977. The 1989 release Live at Indigo Ranch appeared under the Mosley Grape name, and Mosley reunited with Miller, Stevenson, and Lewis as the Melvilles—legal constraints preventing use of the Moby Grape name—to record Legendary Grape, issued on cassette that year and thereafter circulating as a bootleg until DIG Music reissued it on CD with eight bonus tracks in 2003.
Moby Grape has reconvened in shifting lineups and under assorted names for occasional shows and projects, sometimes including Mosley. A soulful vocalist whose compositions skillfully linked country and blues, he supplied the early Grape catalog with “Mr. Blues,” “Bitter Wind,” “Rose Colored Eyes,” “Trucking Man,” “Hoochie,” “Lazy Me,” “Come in the Morning,” and additional sturdy numbers. An album he cut in the 1970s alongside members of Buddy Holly’s band the Crickets surfaced as Never Dreamed on the German label Taxim Records in 1999.
