NEW YORK, NY.- Jerry Miller, an acclaimed guitarist who emerged from the Pacific Northwest club circuit to make his mark on San Francisco’s psychedelic rock scene in the 1960s as a founding member of the lauded, if star-crossed, band Moby Grape, died Sunday at his home in Tacoma, Washington. He was 81.

His grandson, Cody Miller, said that he died in his sleep but that the cause was not yet known.

Miller, whose fans came to include Eric Clapton and Robert Plant, played lead in the potent three-guitar attack of Moby Grape, a San Francisco quintet that hit its zenith in 1967, the year of the so-called Summer of Love.

During its brief but shimmering heyday, Moby Grape was considered one of the top bands of the flower-power era. But while its psychedelic contemporaries in the city’s flourishing rock scene tended toward through-the-looking-glass lyrics and cosmic free jams, Moby Grape set itself apart by cranking out an earthy mix of blues, country, folk and chugging rock ‘n’ roll — an eclectic approach that fit Miller’s musical philosophy, which he described in a 2013 interview with the website Blues.Gr as “a jolly good mix-up.”

Moby Grape’s debut album, called simply “Moby Grape” and released in 1967, contained 13 songs packed into 31 minutes. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it No. 124 on its original list of rock’s 500 greatest albums, describing it as “genuine hippie power pop.”

Miller had a writing credit on six of those tracks, including “Hey Grandma” and “8:05,” which came to be hailed as classics of the era. The album was “one of the finest (perhaps the finest) to come out of the San Francisco psychedelic scene,” Mark Deming wrote on the site Allmusic.com.

While he was a noteworthy songwriter, Miller drew even more praise for his fretwork as a member in good standing of an elite San Francisco club of paisley-era guitar wizards, including Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane.

In 2010, critic David Fricke listed Miller No. 68 in his Rolling Stone tally of the 100 greatest guitarists. “His playing,” Fricke wrote, “was never self-indulgent, and his soloing was propulsive, always aware of where the song was headed.”

In June 1967, Moby Grape cemented its place in the budding rock establishment with a performance at the landmark Monterey International Pop Festival, which marked a coming-out party for a friend of Miller’s from his teens, Seattle-reared Jimmy Hendrix, who by then had swapped the “-my” in his name for an “i” and had begun his ascent into the rock pantheon.

In all, Miller said in the 2013 interview, 1967 was the year “when everything was perfect.”

That perfection would not last.

Jerry Adolph Miller Jr. was born July 10, 1943, in Tacoma, the eldest of two children of Jerry Miller Sr., a Navy veteran who worked in hospitals, and Norma (Leigh) Miller, who managed the home.

The product of a musical family — both parents, as did some of his grandparents, played guitar — Jerry was a 16-year-old student at Lincoln High School in Seattle when he bought a Gibson L-5 hollow body, which he named Beulah and played for the rest of his life.

Before long he was playing in Seattle-area bar bands, including the Frantics, which included future Moby Grape drummer Don Stevenson, and he had gotten to know Hendrix, another young local talent.

“He was good, but somehow you didn’t think of him as the man who’d reinvent the electric guitar,” Miller said in a 2021 interview with The Seattle Times. “The main thing you heard in those days was that he played too damn loud. Like me, I suppose.”

In 1966, the Frantics relocated to California. Before long, Miller and Stevenson joined forces with three other musicians to form Moby Grape: Skip Spence, a guitarist who had played drums with Jefferson Airplane; bassist Bob Mosley; and guitarist Peter Lewis.

The band’s name, an appropriately surrealist one for the times, came from the punchline of an absurdist joke: “What’s big, purple and swims in the ocean?”

Despite the band’s many triumphs throughout 1967, Moby Grape’s time at the top would prove fleeting. As Deming noted: “Moby Grape’s career was a long, sad series of minor disasters, in which nearly anything that could have gone wrong did.”

The troubles started when Columbia Records rolled the band out on a tidal wave of hype, declaring them San Francisco’s answer to the Beatles and releasing five singles simultaneously, assuring that no individual song would stand out. None made the Top 40.

The next year, the band set out for new sonic territory with its second release — actually two LPs, “Wow” and “Grape Jam,” packaged together — which incorporated strings, horns and extended jams of their own.

Still, none of the band’s post-1967 output hit home, with fans or critics, the way its sparkling debut had.

Moby Grape began to splinter, particularly after Spence went into a downward spiral fueled by heavy drug use and mental illness, which in 1968 landed him in Bellevue Hospital in New York. In 1969, Mosley did an about-face and abandoned the hippie capital of San Francisco to join the Marine Corps.

Miller and Stevenson formed the Rhythm Dukes, which served as a supporting act for the Dead, Canned Heat and other big acts. Miller eventually returned to Tacoma, where he performed as a solo artist and with various bands.

His survivors include his daughters, Colleen and Jaaron Miller; his sons, Dennis and Joseph; and five grandchildren. His marriage to Sherrill Tandberg ended in divorce.

Moby Grape performed reunion concerts over the years but could never recapture the magic of 1967. For Miller, a pinnacle came in the hours after Hendrix’s incendiary set at Monterey, California.

“We sat there together after the show, talking about the old days,” Miller said in a 2021 interview with The Seattle Times. “‘Is the Tiki Club still going?’ and ‘Whatever happened to so-and-so?’

“Here I was — me! — sitting with the biggest rock star in the world,” he added, “discussing life, while kids were throwing themselves at our feet.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.