Flamin' Groovies's Community, tickets, shows, tour 2023-2024

The Flamin' Groovies were an American rock music band of the 1960s and '70s. They began in San Francisco in 1965, founded by Ron "The Ripper" Greco, 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, 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 all their 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 (born 10 September 1952, Waltham, Massachusetts), 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" (co-written by Loney). 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. The Groovies were the only band besides The Grateful Dead from the 1960s San Francisco scene to survive into the 1980s. After some inferior re-recordings of their older material featuring only Jordan and bassist George Alexander from the original band, the Groovies disbanded in 1992 .

There has been some talk of a Groovies reunion in the 2000s, but as of December 2007 no plans for shows or recordings have materialized. Cyril Jordan since 2005 has founded a new band Magic Christian with Clem Burke from Blondie on drums Eddie Munoz from The Plimsouls on bass and Paul Kopf on vocals.