The Flamin' Groovies

Some of the greatest riffs of the '60s garage-rock revolution were written in the '70s by San Francisco's Flamin' Groovies -- a disconnection that severely curtailed their popularity in their own time but only augmented their legend as the garage scene swelled into an obsessively historicized revival in the '80s and '90s. Their rediscovery led to literally dozens of reissues and bootlegs of live concerts, demos, and other unreleased recordings, of which only a fraction remain widely available. The Groovies' influence is tough to trace since the band's sound is deliberately derivative, but their stripped-down worship of the fundamentals of rock during a decade of excess certainly turned some ears at the dawn of punk, particularly after they moved to En gland and hooked up with pub rocker extraordinaire Dave Edmunds.

The Groovies formed in 1965 but did not record a disc until 1968's mini-album Sneakers, collected with some contemporaneous live tracks on Supersneakers. All the basic Groovies elements were loosely in place: the chugging Chuck Berry riffs, the Beatles melodies, the dreamy Byrds chords, the Jaggeresque snarl. But it wasn't until their first proper album, Supersnazz, that the young group perfected its distinctive boogie -- a heavy mid-tempo swagger leavened by clean, melodic guitar lines and a friendly beat -- or its exact relationship to the oldies. Supersnazz does that, honoring "The Girl Can't Help It" and "Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu" by not robbing the originals of their beautiful sleaze.

Flamingo and Teenage Head tighten the groove but do not budge an inch when it comes to the band's anti-nostalgic vision -- they saw themselves as keeping a tradition alive, not dancing with a corpse. There's nothing the band recorded during this period that isn't lean, mean, and pulsing with the passion of all the great rockers they sought to emulate; Teenage Head itself is a fierce garage-rock masterpiece that in spots ("Yesterday's Numbers," "High Flyin' Baby") handily competes with the best of the Stones of the same period. The Groovies' raw power is especially clear on some of the posthumous collections of demos and rehearsal tracks lovingly collected by Norton and other labels. California Born and Bred has some blazing run-throughs of the Who, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry covers, clearly unintended for public consumption, yet in all their raggedness, they now seem vital to the Groovies' story. In Person!!!! has a killer Fillmore West show from 1971, Slow Death demos, and TV appearances.

By 1972 the band was having much greater success in Europe than the States, so leader Cyril Jordan moved the group to En gland. (The other songwriting force, Roy Loney, was edged out and replaced by Chris Wilson.) Shake Some Action and Now, produced by Dave Edmunds, have a lighter sound, closer to the Byrds and Revolver-era Beatles than to Beggars Banquet. They even cover a couple early Beatles songs, "Misery" and "There's a Place." These albums are slightly more consistent than the earlier records and add smart new textures of guitar and vocal harmonies, but they lack the lust and rhythmic heft of the San Francisco years. (Both, along with the slightly lesser Jumpin' in the Night, sadly are out of print, though once again it speaks to the oddity of their legend that it's easier to get many bootlegs than their original albums.)

The band's legend grew during the '80s, and by 1992 a disc of new material emerged under the Groovies' name. But on close inspection, Rock Juice credits only two musicians, Jordan and original bassist George Alexander, a slight relief given the weak material.

Despite a vast posthumous discography of demos, B sides, etc., the Groovies have only a handful of true anthologies. The best is Groovies' Greatest Grooves, a 24-track retrospective that gets almost everything, including the best of the band's many non-LP singles ("Slow Death," "Tallahassee Lassie"), though it's heavy on the Edmunds years and omits some essentials from the Teenage Head era. (BEN SISARIO)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide