Flamin Groovies

The Flamin' Groovies were an American rock music band of the 1960s and '70s. They began in San Francisco in 1965, founded by Cyril Jordan and Roy A. Loney. The Flamin' Groovies' early recordings reveal a debt to the Lovin' Spoonful. Their first album, 1969's Supersnazz, stylistically was something of a mixed bag, containing as it did both re-creations of 1950s rock and roll and more melodic, somewhat rueful songs that anticipated the power pop movement of the 1970s--a genre to which the Flamin' Groovies would eventually contribute significant work.

Their second album, 1970's Flamingo, revealed a musical approach that continued to draw upon '50s rock and roll as well as upon the work of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Flamingo is notable as well as the only album by the group to feature an apostrophe after "Flamin" (all the others are credited to "The Flamin Groovies").

Their next album, and last with Roy Loney, was the classic, Teenage Head. This album (1971) appears in the book, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. It was acknowledged by Mick Jagger as an excellent album with parallels to the Stones' Exile On Mainstreet (released same year) which, like Teenage Head,revisits the 1950s and roots rock. Teenage Head is also considered to be a classic in the proto-punk canon.

In 1971, after Teenage Head, Roy Loney left the Flamin' Groovies, and was replaced by singer and guitarist Chris Wilson, who, along with Jordan, began to move the group in a more overtly power-pop direction. Between 1971 and 1976, very little was heard of the group except maybe their 1972 anti-drug song Slow Death. In 1976, they teamed up with British producer Dave Edmunds, and recorded an album entitled Shake Some Action. This LP and the following effort, Now, are good examples of their somewhat self-conscious attempt to revive the sound of the classic mid-'60s pop groups; the song "Shake Some Action" is perhaps their best-known and most emblematic recording. As Cyril Jordan told an interviewer, "The time that we were personifying had died in America years before. We were trying to put it into a capsule." The Groovies continued in the same style until somewhere early in the 1980s.

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