Roy Loney: Teenage Monster – California Born and Bred

Roy Loney Interview by John Battles

The Flamin’ Groovies, from San Francisco, are completely ignored by most articles and books on the San Francisco scene, while bands that lived nearby, moved there, or just played there for a while get all the praise and attention. Look up just about any famous S.F. band and you’ll find that the members were born and raised elsewhere. The Flamin’ Groovies started, like so many other great American bands, in public school. Lead singer Roy Loney was born April 13, 1946 in San Francisco. He was singing as a school kid and formed the first version of what would soon become The Flamin’ Groovies in 1965.

“It all started with me and Tim Lynch, we’d known each other since the first grade. In Junior High, we started a little group with our friend, Jeff Young, doing mainly Kingston Trio songs. People don’t remember how big The Kingston Trio were! They were almost like The Beatles in their time, they were huge, just monstrous. Everything they did went gold instantly, they were just amazingly big, and we were totally big fans.” Note: The Kingston Trio (from San Francisco) had 10 top 20 hits from 1958 to ’63 and five of their LPs went to #1. “We did that through High School, and then, Jeff dropped out, and me and Tim became a duo. Somewhere along the line, we decided, ‘Why don’t we try some rock’n’roll?’ We were listening to The Beatles and The Stones and stuff, and rock’n’roll was starting to sound good again after that drought, y’know? It was a long drought, after Elvis went into the army, it became pop again, and it was pretty hard to listen to the radio. I couldn’t listen to The Four Seasons and stuff like that, it was just driving me nuts! So, we became folkies for four or five years, but then rock ‘n’ roll started sounding good again. The Beatles and The Stones were playing the same kind of stuff we listened to, so we said, ‘Hey, let’s try that.’ So, we got a hold of George Alexander, we went to high school with him, and said, ‘Wanna be in our band?’ He said, ‘Sure! What do you want me to DO?,’ ‘Learn to play the bass,’ he said, ‘No problem!’ so that was it. He just picked up a bass and learned how to play it.

He was hanging out at the bowling alley a lot, that was the place to hang out. George was kind of a pool hustler, so he was hanging out at the pool hall part of the bowling alley, where he met Ron Greco, who was a drummer, and a younger guy. We were out of high school and into college, and Greco was probably 15, 16. He auditioned, and we liked him, but we couldn’t come up with another guitar player, and one day, Greco said, ‘I got this kid, Cyril, why don’t I bring him along?’ He was even younger, he seemed like he was about twelve! I think he was actually about sixteen. Basically, he had memorized a lot of The Beatles’ guitar solos, but he couldn’t play chords at all, but he memorized a lot of the solos and things, so we said, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good.’ He was a real great kid, we really enjoyed being around him, he was a lot of fun.

At that point, we said, ‘Well, let’s try this.’ We did the audition at Tim Lynch’s house, and we played ‘I’m Crying’ by The Animals, we did ‘Tell Me’ by The Stones, we did ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’ like The Beatles did it, and maybe ‘Around and Around.’ That was all we knew, we were playing on semi-acoustic instruments. I had this twelve string with a pickup, and we had no equipment to speak of. The P.A. went through Tim’s parents’ stereo! We said, ‘Let’s do it!’ We ended up rehearsing a lot in Ron Greco’s garage. We really were a garage band, it was one garage or the other, either Tim’s garage or Greco’s garage. The thing about Greco’s garage that was so great was, where he lived, the teenage girls coming home from school would always stop by and watch us rehearse. Having an audience really made it a lot more fun, cute girls…..They all had a crush on Ron Greco, because he kind of looked like Paul McCartney, he was a really good looking kid, you know. That was great, we always played better when there was a lot of girls watching. We didn’t really write, we just tried to learn our favorite records for the most part. We were The Chosen Few at the beginning. After awhile, we dropped that and became The Lost and Found.

There’s some demos and stuff out now by a band called The Chosen Few, and there’s a single out, and everybody thinks it’s early Groovies!” Note: One group called The Chosen Few featured Ron Asheton, later of The Stooges

1965 is the year that the San Francisco rock and roll scene really got started. The Beau Brummels and We Five both had national hits, The Great Society (with Grace Slick) recorded the original version of “Somebody To Love” and Country Joe And The Fish recorded a self released E.P. The influential May 14 Rolling Stones show at The Civic Auditorium also featured The L.A. based Byrds and Paul Revere And The Raiders, and the local group The Mojo Men. In 1966, the last ever Beatle show was in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park (on Aug. 29). First (obscure, non hit) singles were released that year by The Charlatans (with Dan Hicks and Mike Wilhelm), The Grateful Dead, and Sly And The Family Stone, and there was a second Country Joe And The Fish E.P. On a national level RCA released the first Jefferson Airplane LP. Roy was at the late Skip Spence’s first gig playing drums for the Airplane. “Oh, yeah, it was great. We knew him as the drummer for the Airplane. When he quit the Airplane, we were really depressed. Skip was the best thing in the band in a lot of ways, because he was so much fun to watch, he put so much into it. He wasn’t a great drummer by any means, but he just put out, he was having a great time and it showed. The rest of ’em were kind of stiff, so when he left, and they brought in Spence (Spencer Dryden), they were still O.K., then, when they lost Signe Anderson, and brought in Grace Slick, we said, ‘Oh, forget it, this is the END! These guys are going NOWHERE!’ You know, because we loved Signe, and it took a while to get used to Grace Slick… Still getting used to her, to be honest.”

After The Chosen Few became Lost and Found they lost a battle of the bands to Butch Engle And The Styx. “We did things like battle of the bands, teen shows at the Y, we were playing Beatles, Stones, Kinks… Then, Cyril and Tim went to Europe, and we broke up for a period of time. During that period of time, we decided that we didn’t want Ron Greco to be our drummer. We played an audition at The Fillmore with Greco, and he couldn’t hear very well. He was playing the wrong songs half the time. We thought, ‘Well, that’s weird. You’d think he’d be better than that, you’d think he’d know, or be able to take some cues off of us.’ It was mainly that there were no monitors, and he was scared, it was a new thing.” Note: Ron Greco would resurface some ten years later as the bass player for the 70s San Francisco punk band Crime! “I’d hate to listen to a lot of our early shows because it was like that, the days before good monitors.

I have a tape of us at The Winterland, and it’s amazingly weird, because it’s like three different songs going on, three different keys, amazing! It’s barely listenable! It’s kind of scary when you think about it, but, that’s the way it was back then. We were playing off the echo that would come back at us from behind everything. It was weird. I will never play that tape for anybody! We did ‘Mystic Eyes’ and, of course, ‘Gloria’ by Them, ‘Last Time’ by The Stones, we even did some Herman’s Hermits, I think. We did a version of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ by Tom Jones at that show. Cyril liked to sing that one for some reason. We did that for a while, it was kind of an oddball arrangement. We did things like ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ I just liked that song, worked it up, made it sort of a ‘bloooze,’ see if we could get away with it.

“It was (mostly) just parties, teen clubs, that sort of thing. After we broke up, that summer, then got back together again, I think it was George who had been playing with a group called The Whistling Shrimp with Danny Mihm during the break, and he said, ‘We really ought to get this drummer, cause he’s really good.’ So, we met Danny, and hit it off right away. He was like us, really into the British Invasion stuff, though he was much more of a Blues purist than us. He was an army brat, lived with his folks. Anyway, he joined up, it went pretty well. I remember the very first place we played, it was a place called Dino and Carlo’s, and Danny couldn’t make our first show, so the very first Flamin’ Groovies show was played without drums! But, he did play the next night. It was very ramshackle back then, everything was pretty goofy. We barely had amps, you couldn’t believe the small little funky amps we were playing through. The guitars were like, Kents, and completely unknown brands from Taiwan and stuff. As we got better, we improved on everything, and everything got better as we went along.”

The classic Flamin’ Groovies line-up was in place by the Fall of 1966: Roy Loney (lead vcl., gt.), Tim Lynch (lead gt., vcls.), and George Alexander (bass, vcls.), all born the same year, Cyril Jordan (lead gt., vcls.), and Danny Mihm, who towers over the others (percussion). The next year they recorded the Sneakers 10” LP in a few hours, had 2000 pressed and released it on their own Snazz label. It features six Loney originals plus an instrumental. Parts might remind listeners of The Lovin’ Spoonful (“We were very influenced by them”) or Sopwith Camel while other parts have that high energy early S.F. sound like the best of Big Brother or Jefferson Airplane. Sneakers was first re-issued by Skydog in ’75 and is being re-issued by Sundazed with extra tracks.

Around the same time Cab Covay made a short b/w Groovies promo film called King Of The Cuts and a “werewolf” movie with band members in it. The band played at The Matrix, The Fillmore, and The Avalon, but mostly at smaller clubs. They opened for more famous bands including Cream, Blue Cheer, Steppenwolf, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother And The Holding Company, and The Jefferson Airplane. “We were pretty much frowned upon, here, in our early stage. We weren’t doing Top 40 stuff. We had these two minute songs, and they felt that we were an oldies group. We did play old songs, we got off on ’em, and we wrote songs that sounded like old songs. Our audience wasn’t big, we had our hard core of fans.We were outcasts here, because we didn’t really play what everybody else was playing. We didn’t do ten minute jams, we didn’t get really Psychedelic. We were still kinda good-timey rock’n’roll. We were considered an anachronism… But, not really… We weren’t doing The Crickets or something. I thought we sounded modern for the time, myself. The fact that you can listen to it now, and it still sounds good leads me to believe it may be true. We broke down and did a few long, bluesey jams, especially when we had to do three or four sets a night. At the last set, the harmonica player would be up there by himself, then another guy would come out… Like Cream used to do, one guy at a time, I do this little thing, then he adds his little thing., and it sort of ends up being a song… Then, we do two more songs, and we’re outta here! That’s when it was LATE, and we were getting tired.” The influences of other groups at the time were more obvious. “That’s true. If you listen to The Grateful Dead, you can see exactly where they’re coming from. When I used to see all these bands in the early days, all they did was covers, they would just do their favorite records, but twenty minute versions of them! I think their influences were pretty obvious!

“We didn’t hang with the groups that much. We hung with this really large group of people called The Circus. Mostly actors and different musicians, and we just hung out a lot. It was just a huge family, and that was where we did most of our socializing. We met people through that, when people would kind of wander in and out. (Fish guitarist) Barry Melton was part of that for a long stretch, so were Country Joe and (Quicksilver guitarist) John Cippolina, people like that. I remember being at The Fillmore all night, watching a set, and when the show was over, at two, somebody said, ‘Everybody’s going over to (Mike) Wilhelm’s house, they’re gonna have more music in the basement,’ so, half the audience would end up in somebody’s basement for another couple of sets! I saw so many great bands like Quicksilver and The Charlatans playing in garages, basements and stuff, it was great.

People just wanted to play all the time and get real stoned a lot, too. That was a big part of it, (stoner voice) ‘Gettin’ stoooned!’ We didn’t hang with the Bill Graham people at all. Our manager – had worked for Bill Graham… He served as Bill Graham’s right hand man, but he quit Bill Graham to become our manager, which I thought might have caused a bit of a rift between them, and that was why Graham didn’t want to hire us for a while, though, eventually he did. He was a great man. I saw him work his way up from nothing, so I know he deserved everything he got. He was a son of a bitch, but he was a pretty great man, too.”

In 1968 the band was signed to Epic. Loney had put down his guitar and concentrated on singing. Two singles were released, both with rockin’ covers on the A sides and originals on the Bs. “Rockin’ Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Flu”/”The First One’s Free” went top 40 in San Francisco. “Something Else”/”Laurie Did It” followed. All sides were also on The Flamin’ Groovies – Supersnazz released by Epic in ’69 around the same time as Dan Hicks And His Hot Licks – Original Recordings LP. Although both are excellent, neither was promoted well, reviews were scarce and sales were low. The Groovies’ album (with Bob Zoell’s great 30s style cartoon of the band on the cover) gets off to a rousing start with Loney’s “Love Have Mercy,” driven by boogie piano by guest musician Mike Lang. Loney starts with “Well I wanna tell ya we’re so happy you invited us into your home. We’d like to play a few songs for you right now. We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoy bringing them to you. Yeah.” Then he starts singing “I say ye-aaaaaaaaaah! Love have mer- cy. Don’t want be no slave. The way I love that woman lead to an early gra- ave. My my my. Well that felt all-right! – Alright! Lets get real gone!…” The LP has four Loney originals, four Loney/Jordan originals and covers of Huey Piano Smith’s “Rockin’ Pneumonia…,” Little Richard’s “The Girl Can’t Help It,” and Eddie Cochran’s “Somethin’ Else” with “Pistol Packin’ Mama” in a medley inspired by Gene Vincent. “That’s exactly where it comes from, because Eddie Cochran’s on his version of ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama,’ and so we said, ‘That’s really cool, let’s just put the two together. ‘Somethin’ Else’ was a song nobody had ever heard. It’s really weird, it’s just one of his singles that just sort of died, didn’t go anywhere.” Slade later did a live version of the “Pistol Packin’ Mama”/“Somethin’ Else” medley, learned from The Groovies.

“I always played a lot of Rockabilly. I was a big fan of Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, and Elvis was huge for me, so, I loved that stuff. That was always part of what I played. If I’d sit around with the guitar, that’s the kind of stuff I would play. Cyril’s music library pretty much started with The Beatles, Danny’s started with Muddy Waters, and mine started pretty much with Elvis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, that’s the stuff I grew up with, that’s my roots. Timmy and I shared a lot of the same roots, having known each other for so long. We went through The Kingston Trio thing for a while. You know, everybody’s accused me all throughout my career of being a Rockabilly guy, basically. (laughs) It’s my main influence, I guess it’s sort of there, Rockabilly and basic Rock’n’Roll… Back then, I was sort of an outsider with my Rockabilly thing. Except for Elvis, nobody listened to that kind of stuff. I was the guy who had the little Carl Perkins 45s and Eddie Cochran 45s, and everyone went, ‘Wow! What’s that?’ It’s amazing to me now how easy it is for the kids to just pick up the entire recorded history of Eddie Cochran on two CDs or something. Back then, you’d collect them a single at a time, and they were hard to find! It was great, I just collected everything I could get my hands on. I was picking up a lot of great things on labels like Sun and Ace. A friend of mine would go down there to the warehouses (in Memphis), pick ‘em up, and I’d buy ‘em here in the city by the dozen or so, or a box , whatever. You could sell ‘em off here for pretty high prices.

“That first album, Supersnazz, is pretty amazing to me, cos we were like kids in a candy shop! It’s like, ‘Okay, guys, we’re taking you down to Studio One, CBS in Hollywood. We’re gonna put you up in this mansion…’ Elvis lived there when he was making his movies. It was big, it had a pool, it had lots of rooms. So here we are, in Hollywood, going, ‘Okay, we’re gonna make the greatest album EVER!’ You know, we’re gonna be THE BEATLES, we’re gonna cover all of our influences and just blow everybody’s minds! We had a first-time producer, Steve Goldman, who was also out to prove himself, so we just recorded and recorded. We wanted to make it perfect, and also cover a lot of bases, and just show how versatile we were. We were scrambling to show everything we knew. It was a little over-ambitious. We had all the time in the world and a huge budget, so we just got into it. Steve did, too, it was his first shot producing, and he was out to make a masterpiece, but I think it needed just a few more rough edges. I still like parts of it, but, on the whole, it sounds a little sterile. It wasn’t much of what we sounded like live. Still, I think a lot of people like that album, but for different reasons than Flamingo or Teenage Head.” Note: Supersnazz is now the name of a cult Japanese all girl rock band.

In ’69, The Groovies toured around America, playing in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities. “We were on tour, and we did this show with The Stooges, this place called Ludlow’s Garage (in Cincinnati). The bill was Golden Earring, Flamin’ Groovies and The Stooges. The Stooges were just amazing. Our minds were absolutely blown. We just couldn’t believe it, ‘My God! This is so amazing!’ That changed everything. I actually think Detroit had a big effect on us Groovies in general. On the first tour, out in support of Supersnazz, we played at a place called The Palladium with Dave Edmunds and Love Sculpture, then we played The Grande with The MC5, and we played The East Town with…. it might’ve been The Stooges, but, the first time we saw The MC5, none of us could believe what we were seeing at all. It was just the most amazing show, and it totally changed things for us. We just went, ‘God, this is so heavy! It’s so fuckin’ heavy!’ They were doing a lot of schtick, lotta showbiz goin’ on, there, which is what we were already into, so we felt kindred, we really did, right away. The Five and The Stooges were coming from a lot of the same places we were. I think they were very similar in a lot of ways.” There’s an MC5 bootleg, recorded right after (lead singer) Robin Tyner left, which is basically a Flamin’ Groovies set (“Empty Heart,” “Let it Rock,” “Bo Diddley,” “Gloria,” “Louie, Louie”).

“We were never dropped by Epic. The thing was, Epic wasn’t sure what they wanted to do with us, and we met Richard Robinson in New York while we were touring, and he interviewed us for Hit Parader. He was the editor at the time, and he was also just starting to work for Buddha as a producer and kind of A & R guy.” The Flamin’ Groovies – Flamingo, produced by Robinson, was released by Kama Sutra in 1970. It has four Loney originals, five Loney/Jordan originals and a cover of Little Richard’s “Keep A Knockin’,” Commander Cody played piano on three tracks. “Flamingo is a lot harder edged than Supersnazz, and I think it’s Detroit – influenced in a big way. Detroit AND New York. We got harder, it wasn’t as jolly and good-timey, it had a little more edge to it, a little more bite. We took it a little more seriously, I think. We were trying to sound like a live band as much as possible. I don’t think it sounds polished at all. I think it sounds pretty raw. I was just talking to George the other night, and he said, ‘I don’t know how I ever played ‘Roadhouse’ that fast, I could never play it that fast! What were we doing?! It’s so out of control!’ It’s true, the version of ‘Roadhouse’ we went with on the album is the one that was most out of control, not the tightest by any means, but we liked the fact that it’s just sort of veering out of control…At any minute, you thought it was gonna blow up!

That’s why we went for it. We recorded the album here in San Francisco, and then I went to New York to mix it, and when I brought it back, everybody hated the mix! Everybody in the band said, ‘This stinks! This is fucking horrible!’ They expected it to sound fuller, or more polished, and I don’t think they remembered that there wasn’t that much ON it! There wasn’t much to really fill it out with! It was just US. It sounded like us, and I think maybe it was a shock to them… ‘What? But, you’re supposed to make it sound a lot better!’ ‘No, no, this is what we SOUND like!’ Now, people like it. I’ve gotta say, with that album, every other time I listen to it, I love it, next time, it’s like, ‘Well, I dunno’ then it’s ‘Oh, it’s great!,’ and then, ‘Boy, this sucks!’ and then, ‘No, that’s pretty good.’ So, I have a love/hate relationship with that album, but, most of the time, I like it. I think we all think of this as our raunchiest, rawest sounding record. Depending on how you feel about raunchy and raw at any given time, that’s how much you’ll like that record. But, I think it’s real representational of what we sounded like.”

The Flamingo cover has a special thanks to John Zacherle. “He was a friend of Richard’s, he came to the studio with him. Yeah, Zacherley was great, and, of course, he was an idol of mine as a kid. In fact, Famous Monsters magazine was the main connection between Cyril and I… We’re both monster movie freaks. We collected Famous Monsters magazines, and Zacherley was godlike to us. He’s a funny guy, but just really normal. I really liked him a lot, super cool dude. He was starting to make a bit of a comeback at that time, doing some more shows and recording.”

The band played The Fillmore East and at a press party at The Bottom Line to promote the album, but again the sales were low. Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, Bill Graham moved his Fillmore to The Carousel. The last old Fillmore (Straight Theater) show was Iggy And The Stooges, MC5, The Flamin’ Groovies and Alice Cooper. The Groovies rented the Fillmore in the Spring as a rehearsal hall and soon started promoting dances there and were the house band. “We ran the place for a year, it was our place, so we did what we wanted to, pretty much. We played with The Stooges, Alice Cooper, and Commander Cody, there was that show (immortalized on a now – famous poster by Mark T. Behrens).We brought in The Dead. Every night that The Dead played, it was jam-packed, also Freedom Highway, Mama Mae Thornton, Country Weather, The Charlatans, mostly bands we liked. Our manager was managing the place, he had an office there, so, we got to hang out there, we spent all our time there. We had the run of the building, which was pretty amazing. And, one of the great things that came out of that was, Pink Floyd was in town, and they wanted to tape this thing for PBS, and didn’t know where to do it, so we offered our place. Pink Floyd set up in the middle of the main room, and did a set!

The only people there were The Flamin’ Groovies and a few friends. That was pretty cool, ‘cause we were big Pink Floyd fans back then. It was about the time of Ummagumma, after Syd Barrett had left, unfortunately. I was a big Syd Barrett fan. They never get above a medium tempo, and they’re not great musicians by any means. Their tunes are so simplistic sometimes that you can’t believe it, and the lyrics are like, ‘Forget it,’ BUT, if you’re in the right mood, they’re kind of good. They’re kinda late night music for me, so is REM and The Dead. I can listen to The Dead as background music late at night, works fine for me, but not when I want to rock out.”

While playing at their own theatre, the band became more theatrical. “I started out as an actor, and I had been acting since I was about eight years old, amateur stuff for the most part. I went to San Francisco State on a Drama scholarship, and I starred in a lot of plays, and I won a scholarship to The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but I was very young, and I just didn’t feel up to it. So, I still think of myself as an actor who became a musician on the side, that’s how it was, back then. We’d appear in costumes, real costumes. We had this one thing that we used to do, that, unless you saw it, you wouldn’t have believed it. It was a thing called ‘American Soul Ballet,’ we had a song called ‘Do The Riot,’ it was kind of a ‘funk’ thing, it ended up being ‘American Soul Spiders,’ which is just a track, just the basic set up of the song. But, at one point in the song, these guys come out in Ku Klux Klan robes, waving American flags and dancing behind me, and then when I start this ‘riot’ thing, they pull off the Klan robes, and they’re cops! They pull out their clubs, and they drag me behind the amps and beat the SHIT out of me! Then, they drag me out to the front of the stage, and I’m just covered in blood, and then, they think I’m dead, but I get up and start doing these James Brown steps, and we’d just finish the thing out! I heard that Timothy Leary once said, ‘You know, I saw you do this THING!!’ It’s like, they still can’t believe that we actually DID it! We were very much into theatrics, but it was pretty stupid. I remember, once, in the front row of The Avalon Ballroom, a couple of girls threw up (laughs). They probably just saw this thing, all bloody and stuff, and took it way too seriously! There’s one gag that I liked where they’d carry me out like I was dead, holding a tambourine, and they’d set me down and I’d be totally stiff. Then, as the music started, the tambourine would start going, and I would start coming to life, y’know, stupid stuff like that. Of course, I was just very theatrical in my movements always, a lot of throwing myself off the stage. When I saw The Stooges, it got even worse!” (laughs).

On The Stooges’ song, “Gimme Some Skin,” Iggy yells, “GET FUCKED, BABY!!!” “He might have gotten that from us, because he played on our stage when it said ‘Get Fucked Baby,’ real fuckin’ big. I didn’t know he did that, though, that’s interesting. That song, ‘Roadhouse,’ was originally called ‘Get Fucked, Baby.’ ‘Get Fucked, Baby’ was sort of our slogan for The Flamin’ Groovies. It was on the stage, but you could only see it from the stage, so it was for the bands, pretty much. People could see it from the floor, but it would have been backwards. It was flat on the ground, embossed (in large tile letters) into the ground.”

In ’71 Kama Sutra released The Flamin’ Groovies – Teenage Head, considered by many fans to be the band’s greatest LP. The album was presented like a movie: The Flamin’ Groovies PRESENT Teenage Head. “Right, it was like a movie, Teenage Head Starring The Flamin’ Groovies.” It has one Loney original, six Loney/Jordan originals and covers of Robert Johnson’s “32-20” and Randy Newman’s “Have You Seen My Baby.” “Doctor Boogie” was from Dr. Ross. The album was, again, produced by Richard Robinson, this time in NYC. “To me, it sort of sounds like Beggar’s Banquet, definitely a Stonesey kind of thing, with a lot of slide and acoustic guitars. It’s definitely a Stones – influenced album. Jim Dickinson was in the studio, he played piano on a couple of tracks, and he was going, ‘Wowww, man, you guys know how to do this thang!’ He’d just come off of working with The Stones, and since we sounded like The Stones, he felt right at home. He said, ‘You guys are the real THANG!’ You know, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played on that record a lot, too, but they had their name taken off because their manager said it would ‘Reflect badly on them’! (laughs) In the original Thank you’s, I think they’re all in there individually.” The LP is dedicated to (among many others): Zacherle, The Mad Peck, Ed Ward, R. Meltzer, Dave Marsh, Lon Chaney, Tod Browning, The Iguanas, Lilian Roxon, and Kim Fowley. “Teenage Head”/”Evil Hearted Ada” was a non-selling single. The amazing title song (“I’m a child of the atom bomb, of rotten air and Viet Nam”) has a LOT in common with The Stooges’ “Search And Destroy” which wasn’t released until two years later.

Around the time of Teenage Head, The Groovies were going to play with Gene Vincent. “We met Gene. He was on Buddah at the time. He had decided that he wasn’t going to do rock’n’roll anymore, he was a country act.” Note: While Gene’s two unjustly maligned Buddah LPs leaned towards a country sound, he never really made the transition to country as Jerry Lee Lewis had. “Buddah flew us all down to L.A. for this big party for Sha Na Na at The Whisky, and that’s where we met Gene. He was a very sad man, a very broken man. Very nice, very sweet, but he just seemed kind of sad. He’d bloated up pretty big by that time. We said, ‘We’re on the same label, let’s do a record.’ I think the company was into it, it was just a matter of talking Gene into doing some rock’n’roll, and it just never happened. The Blue Caps play now, you know. I haven’t seen them, but I heard they’re great. I heard they’re like, not tight at all, but they’re just great to watch, they just dive into it head first. I’ve heard great things about the original Comets, too.”

Teenage Head was the last real Flamin’ Groovies album with Roy Loney. A live gig was recorded at The Fillmore West on 6/30/71 and broadcast on KSAN. It was later released as Slow Death Live in Europe by Lolita and Eva, and later as The Flamin’ Groovies – Bucketfull of Brains (Voxx) with liner notes by Miriam Linna. The one time president of The Flamin’ Groovies Fan Club, Miriam was one of the first writers to really appreciate and write about the band. The group on the live album had James Farrell replacing Tim Lynch, who had been arrested for draft evasion. The great (if lo-fi) show opens with Roy saying “This is a new song. It’s gonna be on our next album. It’s called – ‘Slow Death.’” The excellent intense song (one of the best drug songs even written) was soon recorded by a new line up of Groovies, and was also covered by The Dictators on their Bloodbrothers LP. Not long after that live show in ’72, Loney quit and worked as an A+R man at ABC Records for four years. He helped promote The Ramones (a band he loves), The Dwight Twilley Band and Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers when the label briefly distributed Sire and Shelter. Loney was replaced with singer Chris Wilson (who had been in the band Loose Gravel with James Farrell). Cyril Jordan, the kid of the group, became the leader.

In ’72, Flamin’ Groovies recording sessions were produced by Dave Edmunds in Wales. The planned Slow Death LP didn’t happen, but singles were released in England and France and the group became more popular in Europe. The Edmunds material was later released on various bootlegs and as The Rockfield Sessions. Greg Shaw’s Who Put The Bomp! magazine (#18) had The Flamin’ Groovies – Will ’75 Be Their Year? as the cover story along with a history of the band. In ’76, Flamin Groovies – Shake Some Action (Sire) was their best selling and best publicized LP, but still didn’t crack the American or British charts. The band, whose members had started wearing matching suits, sounded great but was relying more and more on 60s covers and harmonies. Their return to vinyl led Buddah to release the rival Still Shakin’ album. It features choice tracks from the two Kama Sutra LPs plus oldies outtakes from the Teenage Head sessions. “Little Queenie,” Loney’s last studio recording with the band, then came out as the b side of “Can’t Explain” (Skydog) in ’77. In ’78, Sire released The Flamin’ Groovies Now – with former Charlatan and long time band friend Mike Wilhelm replacing Farrell, who had left to join Loney, who had decided to record again. That year his fine solo debut was Roy Loney – Artistic As Hell (Albertson Frost), an E.P. of four originals. His backing band was Danny Mihm (drums), George Alexander (bass), and Tim Lynch and Cyril Jordan (guitars) – in other words: the 100 % original Flamin’ Groovies! The E. P. was dedicated to Sissy Spacek.

In ’79 Loney signed a deal with Solid Smoke, a small label known for its important Johnny Burnette Rock ’N’ Roll Trio compilation Tear It Up. Paul Burlison was lead guitarist of the wild mid-50s Memphis trio. “He didn’t sound like anyone else. Nobody played Rockabilly like THAT! Plucking the bass strings like that, and getting that buzzy, fuzzy attack, it was just, like, amazing. It was the beginning of heavy metal. I put him, Bo Diddley, and Link Wray at the top, as far as people that created heavy metal music. They got that distortion, that WEIRD crunchy, fuzzy, crunchy sound, man! Nobody else was doing it! Distortion, man, I mean, they were the guys who got the distortion thing going. They seemed like punks! Johnny Burnette seemed like a real punk to me, and so did Dorsey! These are punks, man! You don’t wanna get into a fight with these guys. I think Dorsey was a boxer, right?” Note: Both Burnettes were. “They looked tough. I thought they were real punky. I think Gene Vincent was real punky.”

The Flamin’ Groovies – Jumping In The Night (Sire), was the band’s last (and weakest) studio LP. The group carried on with more personnel changes, but always with Jordan and Alexander, until 1990. Meanwhile, Roy Loney And The Phantom Movers – Out After Dark was released by Solid Smoke in 1979 with 10 Loney originals plus covers of Elvis’ “Return To Sender” and Jackie Morningstar’s “Rockin’ In The Graveyard.” The Phantom Movers, with Loney, Mihm and guitarist James Farrell, had as many Flamin’ Groovie members as The Flamin’ Groovies did. At the time fans could find both LPs lumped in “New Wave” record bins. Loney became popular with rockabilly revival and Cramps fans.

Roy Loney and The Phantom Movers played Hurrah’s in New York City to promote the first LP and Loney was interviewed for Kicks #2, published by Miriam Linna and Billy Miller in Brooklyn. The Phantom Movers went on to record Phantom Tracks (Solid Smoke, 80), Contents Under Pressure (War Bride, 81), and Rock And Roll Dance Party (Rockhouse, 81). All the labels were basically Solid Smoke.

After the label died and The Phantom Movers broke up, Roy (with various musicians) recorded the albums Fast And Loose (83) and Roy Loney Live (84) for the French Lolita label, Scientific Bombs Away (Norton, 89), and the Roy Loney And The A-Bones – Boy Meets Bones E.P. (Norton, 93), with Miriam (who had once been in The Cramps) on drums. In ’94 Loney recruited three members of the Seattle band Young Fresh Fellows and they became The Longshots, recording the albums Full Grown Head (Shake) and Action Shots (Marilyn). Watch for Norton’s new Groovies comp California Born And Bred, featuring previously unreleased Loney era demos and live tracks.

The original Flamin’ Groovies represented something that people couldn’t really put a label on. “I think that was a problem in those days, that you couldn’t just say, ‘This is what these guys sound like.’ I’ve always been accused of changing my voice for every different song! Sort of like Fogerty, you go, ‘That’s Fogerty right there!’ Every time you hear a Creedence song, you know the voice. Well, I use different voices for different songs a lot, so you don’t even have a specific voice that comes to mind when you think of The Flamin’ Groovies, much less a style. I think your voice is your instrument, in that case. You use that instrument you need for that song. It’s the same way now. The original Flamin’ Groovies are getting back together, and we’re going over about 40 songs. It’s just a question of learning ’em, we know ‘em, basically, it’s just a matter of relearning all the nuances and stuff. We haven’t started rehearsing yet.” Note: The original group began rehearsing shortly after this interview, but have yet to make a public appearance as The Flamin’ Groovies. Loney later informed me that the reunion is temporarily on hold for now, until various band members have fulfilled other obligations. Roy has a new solo album on the way, and he recently opened for Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent of The Zombies in New York. Likewise, Cyril Jordan and Michael Wilhelm opened for The Chocolate Watchband in San Francisco recently. Various aggregations of ex-Groovies performing together have been turning up for a long time, but the first-ever regrouping of the original band should be nothing short of stellar, feller, as FJA would say. Get down, Groovies! Get Fucked, Baby! (Don’t mean maybe).

Thanks to Rick Lucey.

And an extra special groovy “Groovies” story
as told by Webmaster Morton!

“Flamin’ Groovies” Bonus Page

“Thanks.” and an untoward look was what I got in responce. The Groovies are great, all other S.F. bands are “fuck all.”