Shake Some Action

If I was ever forced to take five or ten or however many albums to a proverbial desert island, The Flamin' Groovies' Shake Some Action would be one of the first ones I would grab. Sometimes I think it's a near-perfect embodiment of my musical aesthetic in a single package.

After shopping around various record labels during the early 1970s, the Groovies finally signed with Sire, who sent them back to Rockfield to make an entire album with Dave Edmunds. It was like wrapping up their 1972 UA sessions a few years later for a different label. Over those three years, they'd picked up a new drummer (David Wright), and changed their point of reference from the Stones to the Beatles. Greg Shaw of BOMP magazine used the term "power pop" to describe the Groovies new sound.

At the dawn of punk rock, there were few things less uncool than a band that looked and sounded like the early Beatles. For the release of Shake Some Action, Sire set up a showcase gig at the London Roundhouse on the U.S. Bicentennial (July 4, 1976) for the Groovies and another band they'd just signed called the Ramones. This show would later become a rock trivia question ("Who did the Ramones open for in their first performance in England?"), but at the time it was probably like watching the future of rock open for the past.

Looking back, Shake Some Action just happened to be released a few years too late. It did manage to chart in the U.S. (peaking at #142), and the title track was a near-hit in parts of Europe, but it sounded just a bit out of step when punk started to happen.

The album sounds like a lost early Beatles album, 14 short songs divided into two sides of seven, with seven originals and seven covers of songs by the Beatles ("Misery"), the Stones ("She Said Yeah"), Chuck Berry ("Don't You Lie To Me"), the Raiders ("Sometimes"), the Charlatans ("I Saw Her"), the Lovin' Spoonful ("Let The Boy Rock & Roll") and W.C. Handy ("St. Louis Blues", the most recorded song ever).

Over the years, some party poopers have complained about all the covers on this album, but they were all fairly obscure (even the Beatles track), and matched up well with the seven original songs. Everyone should know the title track "Shake Some Action" (I think I've got that song encoded in my genome -- there long stretches of DNA that repeat that A-Bm-G-Bm intro), but there's also "You Tore Me Down", "I Can't Hide", "I'll Cry Alone", "Yes It's True", "Please Please Girl", etc.. a whole slab of future classics.

All the Flamin' Groovies Sire albums were reissued a few years ago, so SSA should be easy to find on amazon and iTunes. The best way to get everything in one place is to get this collection which seems to be out of print, but includes lots of outtakes like this rough demo of "Shake Some Action"