Important Gigs in My Life # 11 The Flamin' Groovies - 6/6/19

A couple of days before I was due to see the Flamin' Groovies, the band published an announcement on the Facebook page for the gig:

"Please be advised that it is with great sadness and concern that the Flamin' Groovies must announce that Roy Loney took a bad fall at the airport in San Francisco on his way to join the European tour, and sustained a head injury for which he was hospitalized.

Roy's condition is presently not stable, and he is unable to travel. While we all hold hope for Roy's speedy recovery, it is unlikely that he will join the Flamin' Groovies' tour.
The tour will start as planned, with the band performing a set including much of the "Teenage Head" album.

We greatly appreciate the cooperation of the concert promoters, fans, and everyone in dealing with this unfortunate situation, and would like to assure that the band will put on a great show that will not disappoint."

They did not as it transpired but the announcement did. The opportunity to see Loney playing with Cyril Jordan had been one of the reasons I had been looking forward to seeing them play. Both founding members and probably the two most important figures in the long and illustrious career of the band, two men who had only recently started playing again decades after Loney's departure from the Groovies in 1972.

I was particularly interested in seeing Loney as he had been a major player on their two fabulous early albums Flamingo and Teenage Head. Mick Jagger had said at the time that the latter was a better record than Sticky Fingers. High praise indeed but Teenage Head certainly deserves it. It's one of the most underrated albums in the whole rock canon. Loney had left shortly afterwards after apparent musical differences with Jordan, the former seeming to favour the Stones road while Jordan preferred to follow the Byrds and Beatles route.

Anyhow, I took the taxi to Newcastle's Cluny with somewhat mixed feelings as I was going to see a band who had clearly had to rethink how they were going to play things in a couple of days. it might be rather messy. I shouldn't have doubted them.

As I said The Flamin' Groovies have a long and distinguished history, probably as distinguished and certainly as long as pretty much anybody still playing on the circuit. In many ways they're the band who link the Sixties and Seventie,s having started off on the fringes of the Haight Ashbury scene in San Francisco where they took a quite different approach to most of the long-hair bands emerging at the same time.

By contrast with most of their immediate contemporaries the Groovies favoured a stripped down Rock and Roll approach which harked back to the Fifties  and  the British Invasion bands of the mid-Sixties. They had marginal commercial success but in many respects were ahead of their time, looking forward to the more direct approach of Punk. In many respects their true contemporaries were The MC5, The Stooges, The Velvet Underground and later the Dolls and The Modern Lovers.

By the time Punk finally came along the Groovies were again slightly out of time, their approach too trad and their playing frankly too good to fit. Famously The Ramones supported them at their first UK gig at The Roundhouse in '76 and nobody talks about the headliners when remembering that gig nowadays. A few years on down the line the lack of recognition along with the rigours of touring and escalating drug issues within the band ground them down. That it seemed was that.

Decades on as often happens the band reconvened with a mixture of old and new members. they even put out an album of new material in 2017. Reconciliation with Loney appeared to be the icing on the cake. But his fall and withdrawal from the tour seemed to call that into question.

The band arrived promptly onstage at nine and after some initial mic problems kicked off. Into Shake Some Action. It was some statement. Probably the band's best known track and I'd say one of the best songs ever written, kicking off with it was some act of confidence. As if to say, 'We can play this first. We have plenty more up our sleeves.'

Next, a cover of The Byrds 'Feel a Whole Lot Better'. Again, an interesting thing to do. 'This is our heritage. This is where we come from.' As the evening proceeded I wondered where they were going to go. To The Stones or The Beatles. In the end they covered both territories consummately. They were a band who utterly knew exactly what they were doing.

The younger players in the band slotted in just wonderfully. The Groovies have had so many members down the years that the central question seemed to be not who you are but do you understand and fit in with the ethos. All five players evidently did. The drummer and support guitarist took turns with Loney's songs and though neither of them could match him voice wise the songs themselves sounded just fine. Altogether it was a wonderful evening. A celebration of the sheer joy and power of music. Appropriate on the night that Dr.John died though we didn't know it at the time.

The crowd were hugely appreciative. Of a certain age naturally and including a number of people I knew personally. It was a wonderful Newcastle night. A party in a city which I've learned over the ten years that I've lived here, really knows how to throw them.

The set was short but frankly it didn't matter. Everybody who was there got more than their moneys worth. They played one song for their encore and it was inevitably Slow Death. One of their finest and most blazing statements. I'm so glad that I was there to see them the evening seemed to be represent everything that the band stand for. They didn't mention Loney once. Not because they didn't care. They clearly care all to much. But they understood the thing to do was get out there and play and give their audience a night to remember. They did that utterly in spades. It was a joy.