Rating My CD's: I'm a Monster

22. The Flamin' Groovies -- Teenage Head

The Flamin' Groovies sit at a strange intersection of American Rock music. They came along too late to be considered merely garage rock, way too early to be punk. You can't quite classify them as part of the Velvets-MC5-Stooges-New York Dolls proto-Punk crew: they've got too much country in them. But try to toss them off as just another early 70's Hard Rock Stonesclone, and all that feedback, that clear speedfreak-soul line tracing back to the Sonics and Little Richard, comes in and dances on your head. In the end, like the Cramps, the Groovies sit their own perch on the great tree of Rock n' Roll.

Teenage Head, their offering from that Dark Year of Our Lord, 1971 (Hunter Thompson never quite rose above the silly, did he?), exemplifies this straddle perfectly. There's a wonderfully Stones-y swagger to the opener, "High-Flyin' Baby" to the point where you could well believe this was a cut that some Under Assistant West Coast Producer Man decided to cut from the Sticky Fingers sessions (The liner notes even claim that Mick Jagger thought Teenage Head superior to that album). "City Lights," which follows, goes full country-blues.

The rockabilly beast I was expecting finally emerged on "Have You Seen My Baby?" but then goes back down again for another song in the key of Sticky (albeit with some nice Iggyish screaming during the bridge), "Yesterday's Numbers." It's a lovely warm boogie, and it does nothing to prepare for the unholy growl of "Teenage Head":

I'm a Monster
Got a revved-up teenage head
Teenage Monster
California born and bred


Half a boy and half a man
Half on see and half on land...Oh, bye
bye-bye

It takes a moment, I think, to fully appreciate the wierdness of this, the Warholian commodifying of the commonplace. What the hell does any of it mean, especially when strung together? It's almost as though they cast the "Teen" culture of the day as some kind of uncanny being from a 50's B-movie. If they did, this was a level of irony and post-modernism leagues beyond anything Nirvana came up with twenty years later. The Elvis parody of "Evil-Hearted Ada" seems to backs up such an idea.

And if not -- if they just picked words and notions up and threw them against the wall until they thought it sounded good -- then they were themselves the Teenage Head. Either would be complimentary.

My comparison to the Cramps seems the more apt: there's an ooze-and-throb to this album that seems to forshadow the whole concept of psychobilly. Certainly the band can muster the speed: "Teenage Head" burns at quite a clip, as does "Evil-Hearted Ada." And the bonus tracks feature crunched-out covers of "That'll Be the Day," Chuck Berry's "Carol," and one of the best versions of "Louie, Louie" yet put to record (better than the Kingsmen, better even than the Sonics).

70's rock has the reputation of being self-indulgent and overwrought: from the bombast of Boston to the elitism of Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, to say nothing of Punk's thoroughgoing obnoxiousness. But that's only the official story. If one has ears and patience, you can find amid the debris of Teenage Nonsense a few that had Heads for what was going on, and sufficent flamin' groove to stir the mess together.

Grade: L