Flamin' Groovies High Flyin' Baby After two ordinary albums like Supersnazz and Flamingo, in 1971 Flamin’ Groovies are about to unleash their masterpiece.
As Cyril Jordan himself will declare to ZigZag magazine, Teenage Head is the album where the personality of the California band finally shines through.
Conceived and recorded amidst the immense chaos of New York, with a throng of friends and admirers witnessing the recording sessions (including Richard Meltzer from Crawdaddy and Lester Bangs), Teenage Head is one of the ten fundamental albums of pre-punk rock 'n' roll, bursting with grit inside and out, as well as an indispensable Groovies record, rolling stones-like to the point of overshadowing the Stones themselves and overflowing with slide guitars. Inside, there are some anthology numbers like the epic ballad Yesterday's Numbers and the title track, which remains a key piece in the history of rock 'n' roll for its perfect combination of lyrics and riffs, closing a perfect quadrilateral alongside My Generation, Satisfaction, and Search and Destroy.
No treatise is needed on the brash pride of being young; everything you need to know is written, in fire, in these four pieces.
The dirty opening of High Flyin’ Baby, with those guitars that sound like the tongues of slaves ready to clean your cock, and Roy Loney's voice filtered through studio effects designed by Richard Robinson to make the album's atmosphere even murkier, crumbles the walls.
This is the kind of thing that the Stooges will think of when it comes time to open their comeback album a couple of years later.
City Lights slips, musically and lyrically, into the acoustic Stones of No Expectations, reviving the memory of Brian Jones's slide guitar, which was the absolute protagonist of that piece. Randy Newman’s boogie Have You Seen My Baby? is one of the two covers on the album (the other is a version of Robert Johnson's classic 32-20 Blues, mistakenly listed as 32-02 on the original Kama Sutra cover that I hold in my hands, NdLYS).
The first side closes with another homage to the sound of Beggars Banquet: Yesterday's Numbers moves in perfect balance between acoustic guitars and Cyril Jordan's slide, which is in the best form ever.
The B-side opens with another monster track: Teenage Head contains all the Miracle Workers and Morlocks to come, and indeed they will include it in their collection of covers, drenched in maracas and infected by the harmonica.
Evil Hearted Ada, written solely by Roy Loney, immerses itself in the Sun sound of the always-beloved Presley, anticipating the Cramps and the gasping breaths of Lux Interior some half-dozen years later. Doctor Boogie is another theft from the Sun archives, this time at the expense of Doctor Ross and his Boogie Disease. Cyril and Roy write it in a rush, the same night they write Teenage Head, to quickly complete a setlist that hasn’t yet reached full consistency.
