Jumpin' In The Night

Continuing the Groovies story with their final "proper" studio album, 1979's Jumpin' In The Night.



I have a soft spot for Jumpin' In The Night, since it was my first Flamin' Groovies purchase. I bought the cassette at local Tower Records after I heard the title track on KSAN, and thought it sounded like a long lost Beatles song. The rest of the songs on the album weren't as good as "Jumpin' In The Night", but they did play a bunch of old songs from the 60s, even including a Beatles' song "Please Please Me".

After I made the jump from AM radio to FM radio, but still thought that all music should sound like the Beatles, so "Jumpin' In The Night" made a good bridge between old and new wave. I remember hearing "Shake Some Action" on KSAN, and bought that record a few months later (on vinyl, because I couldn't find it on tape). After that, I gradually worked my way backward through the rest of their catalog, and it took me more than ten years to find all their old albums listed in the Rolling Stone Record Guide.

For this reason, Jumpin' In The Night will always have a special place in my world, but as a listening experience, it sounds like another not as good followup to Shake Some Action. They were writing fewer and fewer original songs and depending more and more on covers -- 8 of the 13 songs on Jumpin' In The Night are cover tunes, including 3 Byrds' songs. The originals also sound just like covers -- "Jumpin' In The Night" is Richard Barrett's "Some Other Guy" (recorded by the Beatles in 1962), "In The USA" is a virtual rewrite of Chuck Berry's "Back In The USA", "First Plane Home" is a copy/homage to the Kinks' "Gotta Get The First Plane" home, etc. As the 70s came to a close, the Groovies were becoming more and more like 60s revivalists, turning even "modern" songs like Warren Zevon's "Werewolves Of London") into 12-string janglefests.

This was the Flamin' Groovies third album in a three album contract with Sire, and they ended up getting dropped after it came out. They were able to tour the U.S. and Europe behind the album, including some high profile shows opening for Edmunds and Rockpile, before heading back to San Francisco and becomeing another struggling local Bay Area band without a record contract.