Flamin' Groovies are shaking the joint again

Time has rarely been in sync with the Flamin' Groovies. Thrashing through 1950s-style rock'n'roll, the San Francisco-formed band's nascent late-1960s/early-1970s efforts came across as retro while anticipating punk, even as the bluesy raunch of 1971's Teenage Head drew comparisons - some favourable - to the Rolling Stones' contemporaneous Sticky Fingers.

The line-up that released three albums between 1976 and 1979, including the much-lauded, Dave Edmunds-produced Shake Some Action (1976), had relocated to England and never toured the US with its more Beatles-influenced power pop which predated early 1980s bands that took a similar path.

By the time Cracker covered Shake Some Action on the 1995 Clueless movie soundtrack, drawing new attention to the band, leader/guitarist Cyril Jordan had been out of the music business for five years, not writing songs, playing guitar or even listening to music, he says.

Fast forward to today, and the Groovies are touring with the Shake Some Action core of Jordan, singer Chris Wilson and original bassist George Alexander. The current tour, which covers much of the US, will take the band to Europe in June for a month's worth of dates and then back to the US. After re-forming last year, the Groovies toured Japan and Australia, also playing several California dates and performing at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tribute to the Rolling Stones.

More than 45 years after they formed, the Flamin' Groovies are covering more ground than ever before. Time has caught up with them at last. "It wasn't my idea," Jordan, 65, says during a New Orleans tour stop. "We started getting phone calls from promoters. Word got out that Chris and I were back on track a year before, and I think by February last year it was apparent that it would be really dumb not to do this because the purse was big."

Back when the core Groovies line-up broke up in 1980, relations among the bandmates had grown rough, Jordan says. "It's like a married couple whose financial times have gone into the gutter, and now they're yelling at each other all the time," he says. "So, yeah, it was not a nice ending. Very painful, very painful ending. And we were a bunch of die-hards, so we held on as long as we could until there was no reason to do it anymore. We lost our record deal. We moved back to America. We lost our connections in Europe. It wasn't just us going down. It was everybody in the industry that we knew. Everybody was so coked out that they were going down too."

While he kept a version of the Groovies going for a while, Jordan, who designed the band's graphics, also worked as an illustrator and drew Mickey Mouse comic-book covers for Disney. When Cracker covered Shake Some Action in Clueless, Jordan says, "I got pulled back into the biz."