Death by Grease

I was starting to write about what happened to the Flamin' Groovies after Roy Loney left in 1971, but then remembered that I wrote about most of it back in July 2007, so I'll just link to that post.

All the song links are dead, and the great video of "Slow Death" has also been taken off youtube, but this performance of "Roll Over Beethoven" is still there. There's so little film of the Groovies (from any era), that it's nice to have anything.



Here's a youtube version of "Slow Death" (with a slide show). The short version is Roy left the band, the Groovies hired a new vocalist (Chris Wilson from the band Loose Gravel) and began recording demos to shop to record labels. The first label that took the bait was UA, who flew the Groovies to London and hooked them up with legendary producer Dave Edmunds. These sessions with Edmunds produced one monster single ("Slow Death") and two more future classics ("Shake Some Action" and "You Tore Me Down") that they left in the can after "Slow Death" didn't chart and UA lost interest in the band.

"You Tore Me Down" came out as the debut single on BOMP records in 1974, and it and "Shake Some Action" were unearthed a few years later for the Shake Some Action album, but all seven songs on the Rockfield sessions are available here (tracks 8-14). The Groovies recorded another batch of demos in the early 70s that Skydog Records from France put out on an EP called Grease in 1974. The Groovies sent Skydog some rough two-track demos recorded in Cyril Jordan's garage, and they decided to release the demos.

These performances are extremely lo-fi, but energetic -- Chuck Eddy named Grease as one of the greatest heavy metal albums ever (?) in his book Stairway to Heaven, Highway to Hell, and the demos later got reissued on the Norton CD Slow Death (also on emusic). It includes pre-Rockfield versions of "Slow Death" and "Shake Some Action" as well as a great outtake ("When I Heard Your Name") that never made it to a Groovies LP.

Many biographies say that the Flamin' Groovies "laid low" between Teenage Head in 1971 and Shake Some Action in 1976, but they were active for the entire time, just under the radar.