Ahead of five rare UK shows, ever-present frontman, guitarist and last remaining original Flamin’ Groovies member Cyril Jordan invites us to a 50th-anniversary birthday party in honour of the Californian group’s signature single, Shake Some Action, which is often rated as among the greatest rock’n’roll singles of the 70s
Rolling Stone magazine once hailed the Flamin’ Groovies as “maybe the greatest rock’n’roll band to ever come out of San Francisco”.
We’re probably the only rock’n’roll band from there. The Grateful Dead were psychedelic improv-meets-folk rock. None of those bands were influenced by Little Richard, but we recorded two of his songs.
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These upcoming dates celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the power-pop anthem Shake Some Action, and the album of the same name. What do you recall of the song’s birth?
We cut that song at Rockfield in Wales at Christmas of 1975, eleven years after the British Invasion. I like to write in sections, and over a three-month period I tried in vain to finish them. In the end I put all of my ideas together to make one whole song.
Did you recognise it immediately as a hit?
No [laughs]. Not at all.
Shake Some Action was produced by Dave Edmunds. How did you get on with him?
I had been turned on to Dave with I Hear You Knocking [1970]. Hearing it on the radio, I stopped the car and turned up the volume. When I heard it had been cut at Rockfield, which seemed to me to be the new Sun Studios [in Memphis], I swore to myself that one day I would go to Rockfield and record with Dave Edmunds. It happened, and it was fantastic.
Cited as a watershed moment in the birth of punk, Flamin’ Groovies’ 1976 headline gig at the Roundhouse in London had two notable support acts: Ramones and The Stranglers. How did that happen?
Back then we had some clout, so I would call up friends in England and ask them about the up-and-coming local groups. One year it would be the Boomtown Rats, the next The Stranglers and then Dr Feelgood. On our last tour of England it was The Damned.
Groovies lead singer of the era, Chris Wilson, once called the Ramones “Nice kids but limited players”. Do you agree?
Well, we were quite a lot older than those guys. We were advanced guitar players. We were fingerpickers. As a barre chord guy, Johnny was always amazed by that. One of the reasons the punk scene was so radical is that the players were not advanced. They made a noise. That’s what it was all about.
But it could be a special noise.
In 1972 I became friends with Malcolm McLaren [Sex Pistols manager]. Three years later we played the annual NME party at Dingwalls [in London’s Camden Lock], and Malcolm came by along with this new band he was managing. One of them proceeds to steal our briefcase which contains the band’s passports, five thousand pounds in cash and my fuzz-tone pedal.
At the hotel, one of their roadies returns the briefcase, saying it had been taken “by mistake”. We open the thing up and everything is there – except the fuzz-tone. It all made complete sense to me the first time I heard [Pistols’ debut album] Never Mind The Bollocks. Years later I found out Steve Jones had stolen it.
On this tour, apart from Shake Some Action – obviously – what else can we expect to hear?
We’ll do maybe eighty per cent of the songs from that album, plus an assortment of others that are stuck to my shoe like gum. It will be a mish-mash of earlier songs, the stuff from Shake Some Action and brand-new material that I’ve written. It’s still an energetic rock’n’roll show.
The Flamon’ Groovies UK tour begins this evening (September 15) in Bristol, followed by dates in Leeds, Edinburgh, Nottingham and London. Find tickets.