Essential Rock Albums: The Flamin’ Groovies: Teenage Head
To fully appreciate what the original Groovies achieved with Teenage Head, it is worth taking a quick detour to examine their first two albums. As mentioned by me elsewhere, this was a Bay Area group that came together in the Summer of Love but largely eschewed the San Francisco sound.
The one slight exception to that statement is their first album Supersnazz released in 1969. There are several semi psychedelic flourishes sown into Supersnazz. For the most part, they don’t work well. The album is also undermined by a weak production and a softened approach to the arrangements. They almost sound a little Deadish at times.
This is most clearly seen in the covers. As their later work would amply demonstrate, these guys could make covers roar. Here, however, we have a mixed bag, The Girl Can’t Help It is given an inappropriate pop read. And the great Huey Smith’s Boogie Woogie Flu is a touch flat.
On the other hand, the originals are almost all solid efforts pointing the way forward. Note well here that singer Roy Loney either wrote or co-wrote the best originals.
To be clear, Cyril Jordan — Roy’s songwriting partner in those years — is one of the genuinely forgotten and/or under appreciated geniuses of Rock music. His guitar work is both original and fierce and he might truly be called the American Keith Richards. But it was his strategic instincts that sank what might have been one of the best original American Rock bands to come out of the 1960’s but that was still two years away at the time.
Anyway, the followup to Supersnazz was Flamingo, the title being a play on the band’s name. To say this was a leap forward would be to understate the jump taken. From skip to Olympic record sounds about right. All pretensions were set aside for straight ahead, pile driving, guitar driven Rock and Roll.
The pedal was to the metal and the brake lines were cut. Don’t believe me? Check out the first four tracks, as each successive tune tries to overwhelm the previous. Guitars snarl and Roy belts out the lyrics with wild abandon.
Aiding the effort was the crisp, friendly production missing from the first release. But the lion’s share of the credit goes to the entire band as it fired on all cylinders. So for the Groovies, the sophomore jinx was avoided but where do you go from a hot disc like Flamingo?
The answer was Teenage Head and the musical mashup was critical. Flamingo was Garage/Bar Band Rock mixed with a little Rockabilly and an overall 1950’a esthetic. Teenage Head added some Country and Blues to round out the Americana Grand Slam.
Take a listen to City Lights to see what I mean about the Country side of the Groovies. Sound familiar? If you noticed how close it sounds to The Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses then you won’t be surprised to know that it features Jim Dickerson playing the almost exact same tack piano part.
Admittedly, Wild Horses in various versions was released ahead of the entire Sticky Fingers album but Teenage Head in its entirety was released ahead of Fingers by a month. Allegedly, this led Mick Jagger to comment that it was the better album.
Setting aside Mick’s fickleness regarding his own band’s best work (After all, this is the same man who doesn’t quite understand why Exile On Main Street is so beloved by fans.) there is a counter narrative point to be made here.
The old saw is that America and Americans needed the British Invasion bands to reflect back on us our own musical traditions. In particular, this was almost exclusively limited to the Blues.
The problem is this widely accepted assertion is mostly myth. What the British Invasions did was to sweeten up the Blues, which, in turn, allowed some of those songs to rise to the top of the pop charts. That was an accomplishment to be sure but it is similar to the benign way we understand and discuss Columbus’s voyages today. He couldn’t or didn’t really discover anything. It was always there. Mike Bloomfield, for example, was literally playing with legendary Chicago Bluesmen while the entire British Invasion crowd were still learning cords.
And so it goes with The Groovies and The Stones. You can say they were reinventing Rock and Roll Americana but only if you ignore the inconvenient fact that Bob Dylan, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead and CCR (I could go on but you get the point) were already “reinventing” American Rock musical idioms.
So what you have with Teenage Head is an original distillation of all that is great and glorious about American musical traditions as channeled by Rock and Roll. The Country arrangements on Teenage Head are on a par with both The Stones (City Lights and 32–20 ) and The Byrds (Whiskey Woman). The overt Rockabilly numbers (Evil Hearted Ada and Doctor Boogie) jump almost as hard as Rip This Joint and Casino Boogie.
The Stones, of course, owned the Blues and the Groovies stay away from any straight up takes on that genre. Instead, they substituted several Garage Rock stompers (High Flying Baby and Teenage Head) that The Stones would be equally at home with.
It is, as I implied earlier, however, wrong to competitively rank the master works of any two bands. This is especially true as regards The Stones and The Groovies. They are different bands and different albums. Rather, my point is to provide a frame of reference if you are unfamiliar or unconvinced by my calling Teenage Head an essential Rock Album.
If I were, on the other hand, comparing those three albums (Fingers, Head and Exile), it would be easy to do. Mick had taken his lyrics to another level on Exile and Fingers and there just is no sense in making any comparison. The same can be said for the guitar work of Mick Taylor and Keith Richards. They were operating at a level that neither would reach again. But what of the overall aesthetic?
While each album celebrates musical Americana, there is only one American band actually present. And for all it lacks in lyrics and technique, Teenage Head is free of the world weary, jet setting pretense that slightly mares Fingers and Exile. It is what it is…a good time. And ain’t that the point?
Incidentally, while Cyril may not be Mick T. or Keith he plays one hell of a guitar throughout all of Teenage Head. It might just be second only to them in 1971 and 1972 so far as Roots Rock goes…and the rest of the band hangs tough with him.
In the end, the final irony here is that after compiling an American Rock masterpiece, band co-founder Cyril Jordan forced Roy Loney out and took the group to England to adopt a British approach to his muse. It was almost as if he was saying, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” It is a move that, to me, made no sense. He tabled something original in favor of something derivative.
I have to imagine Cyril was disappointed with the impact the band to that point was having…or to be more precise, not having. Turning the Groovies into an imitation British Invasion band midway through the 1970’s, just as Punk was about to break, would seem to be a stunningly bad bet but it did in fact pan out in the short run. Oh but what might have been…. Listen up and see.
