Roy Loney

Teenage Monster —
California Born and Bred

Interview by John Battles

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There’s some demos and stuff out now by a band called The Chosen Few, and there’s a single out, and everybody thinks it’s early Groovies!” Note: One group called The Chosen Few featured Ron Asheton, later of The Stooges

     1965 is the year that the San Francisco rock and roll scene really got started. The Beau Brummels and We Five both had national hits, The Great Society (with Grace Slick) recorded the original version of “Somebody To Love” and Country Joe And The Fish recorded a self released E.P. The influential May 14 Rolling Stones show at The Civic Auditorium also featured The L.A. based Byrds and Paul Revere And The Raiders, and the local group The Mojo Men. In 1966, the last ever Beatle show was in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park (on Aug. 29). First (obscure, non hit) singles were released that year by The Charlatans (with Dan Hicks and Mike Wilhelm), The Grateful Dead, and Sly And The Family Stone, and there was a second Country Joe And The Fish E.P. On a national level RCA released the first Jefferson Airplane LP. Roy was at the late Skip Spence’s first gig playing drums for the Airplane. “Oh, yeah, it was great. We knew him as the drummer for the Airplane. When he quit the Airplane, we were really depressed. Skip was the best thing in the band in a lot of ways, because he was so much fun to watch, he put so much into it. He wasn’t a great drummer by any means, but he just put out, he was having a great time and it showed. The rest of ’em were kind of stiff, so when he left, and they brought in Spence (Spencer Dryden), they were still O.K., then, when they lost Signe Anderson, and brought in Grace Slick, we said, ‘Oh, forget it, this is the END! These guys are going NOWHERE!’ You know, because we loved Signe, and it took a while to get used to Grace Slick… Still getting used to her, to be honest.”

     After The Chosen Few became Lost and Found they lost a battle of the bands to Butch Engle And The Styx. “We did things like battle of the bands, teen shows at the Y, we were playing Beatles, Stones, Kinks… Then, Cyril and Tim went to Europe, and we broke up for a period of time. During that period of time, we decided that we didn’t want Ron Greco to be our drummer. We played an audition at The Fillmore with Greco, and he couldn’t hear very well. He was playing the wrong songs half the time. We thought, ‘Well, that’s weird. You’d think he’d be better than that, you’d think he’d know, or be able to take some cues off of us.’ It was mainly that there were no monitors, and he was scared, it was a new thing.” Note: Ron Greco would resurface some ten years later as the bass player for the 70s San Francisco punk band Crime! “I’d hate to listen to a lot of our early shows because it was like that, the days before good monitors.

. I have a tape of us at The Winterland, and it’s amazingly weird, because it’s like three different songs going on, three different keys, amazing! It’s barely listenable! It’s kind of scary when you think about it, but, that’s the way it was back then. We were playing off the echo that would come back at us from behind everything. It was weird. I will never play that tape for anybody! We did ‘Mystic Eyes’ and, of course, ‘Gloria’ by Them, ‘Last Time’ by The Stones, we even did some Herman’s Hermits, I think. We did a version of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ by Tom Jones at that show. Cyril liked to sing that one for some reason. We did that for a while, it was kind of an oddball arrangement. We did things like ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ I just liked that song, worked it up, made it sort of a ‘bloooze,’ see if we could get away with it.

     “It was (mostly) just parties, teen clubs, that sort of thing. After we broke up, that summer, then got back together again, I think it was George who had been playing with a group called The Whistling Shrimp with Danny Mihm during the break, and he said, ‘We really ought to get this drummer, cause he’s really good.’ So, we met Danny, and hit it off right away. He was like us, really into the British Invasion stuff, though he was much more of a Blues purist than us. He was an army brat, lived with his folks. Anyway, he joined up, it went pretty well. I remember the very first place we played, it was a place called Dino and Carlo’s, and Danny couldn’t make our first show, so the very first Flamin’ Groovies show was played without drums! But, he did play the next night. It was very ramshackle back then, everything was pretty goofy. We barely had amps, you couldn’t believe the small little funky amps we were playing through. The guitars were like, Kents, and completely unknown brands from Taiwan and stuff. As we got better, we improved on everything, and everything got better as we went along.”

     The classic Flamin’ Groovies line-up was in place by the Fall of 1966: Roy Loney (lead vcl., gt.), Tim Lynch (lead gt., vcls.), and George Alexander (bass, vcls.), all born the same year, Cyril Jordan (lead gt., vcls.), and Danny Mihm, who towers over the others (percussion). The next year they recorded the Sneakers 10” LP in a few hours, had 2000 pressed and released it on their own Snazz label. It features six Loney originals plus an instrumental. Parts might remind listeners of The Lovin’ Spoonful (“We were very influenced by them”) or Sopwith Camel while other parts have that high energy early S.F. sound like the best of Big Brother or Jefferson Airplane. Sneakers was first re-issued by Skydog in ’75 and is being re-issued by Sundazed with extra tracks.