Flamin' Groovies
Shake Some Action

THE REVIEW

If there were a "Rock Losers' World Championship", played by all those who have poured sentiment, energy, passion, and technique into the cause without, however, receiving any feedback from the "field" ("zzeeero tituli", as someone might say today), my unabashed support would certainly go to a national team from San Francisco named the Flamin' Groovies. And it would be well-placed support, because these "midfielders with good feet" - a bit like Romeo Benetti, a bit like Arie Haan, five stars to those who remember them - during a career spanning over twenty years, including various offshoots of equal artistic merit and predictable box office failure, would have certainly brought home at least a couple of Rimet Cups and FIFA trophies.

Really, it's hard for me to think of a combo that, more than the Groovies, can be defined as the right band in the wrong place. That's not all. Always and only at the wrong time. They stuck to pure rock with unwavering commitment, and the world always ignored them, listening to something else depending on the times. Take note. Failure No.1: from the start, at the end of the Sixties, these five misfits had their hearts divided halfway between the rock'n'roll of the origins - Carl Perkins and Link Wray - and the energetic beat of the British Invasion bands - early Beatles, Yardbirds, Them, Pretty Things, and Kinks. Too bad that in their native Frisco and throughout the Bay, that was the time of the kaleidoscopic and hazy trips of the various Jefferson, Quicksilver, and Dead. Fast forward. Failure No.2: when the sound veers ("Teenage Head", especially) towards rollingstonian drive richly loaded, interspersed with ballads languidly interspersed with slide, piano, and harmonica that seem to be directly extracted from "Beggar's Banquet", we're once again out of step, with youth bowing to the zeppelin-sabbathian hard rock or about to bow to the glamour of the glam season.

And we come to the last, failure No.3: they try again in the mid-Seventies, after stringing together another couple of pearls in the form of singles that led the sales office of the record label to draw the usual graphs close to zero. With a new lineup, where the role of captains is indisputably held by the founders Cyril Jordan and George Alexander, they emigrated to Albion to get down to a new long-distance attempt after five years. Under the supervision of that old fox Dave Edmunds (I must have heard his name around here before, around these parts...), they emerge in the full punk era (1976) with another act of love towards rock'n'roll. And how could it end?

Precisely to be once more against the trend, "Shake Some Action" is a manifesto of power pop-rock so clean it smells like freshly done laundry, thus re-establishing a deep connection with the Byrds of "Younger Than Yesterday". Stealing the jingle-jangle pace of the guitars from McGuinn and the perfection of the vocal harmonies both from McGuinn and his lot and Lovin' Spoonful and Beau Brummels, Our Heroes deliver to the few who lent an ear yet another timeless and trend-free record. How to feel up-to-date listening to the Byrdsian-via-Big Star intermingling of the title-track or the conclusive "I Can't Hide", or the Beatlesque delicatessen derivations of "You Tore Me Down" and "Please Please Girl", when not directly revisiting from the Lennon-McCartney songbook ("Misery")? How to pierce the no future generation, when aligning sweet ballads to sway cheerfully to like in "Sometimes", "Yes It's True", "I'll Cry Alone", or "Teenage Confidential"? If then you also add the old passion for the bluesy rock of the fifties ("St. Louis Blues") or rock 'n' roll tout-court ("Let The Boy Rock 'n' Roll"), the game's set. Zzeeero tituli...

"Art and music not only need to be made but also received for what they are, without ulterior motives. Only then is there fun. Money, success, a career is a whole different story and, as far as I'm concerned, I'm not interested. If I had been interested in money, I would have dedicated myself to computers and the like and would have left rock 'n' roll a long time ago" - interview with Cyril Jordan, 1987.

Losers are born, and they, modestly, were born.

But how can you not love guys like this?