The Flamin Groovies

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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, was marred by unsuitable production^[1], and 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, was a considerably stronger effort and revealed a band with a sly sense of humor and 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. It has been claimed that Flamingo is notable also as the only album by the group to feature an apostrophe after "Flamin" (all the others credited to "The Flamin Groovies"), but the LP covers and labels of Sneakers, Teenage Head, Shake Some Action, Now, and Jumpin' In the Night feature such apostrophes, too. The last (officially released) album with Roy Loney, Teenage Head, is perhaps their most mature effort with this line up and is in many ways the culmination of their all previous work. The band only rarely managed to achieve this level of consistency on an album again, although they still managed to produce the occasional classic single.

In 1971 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 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 the early 1980s.