Two for Tuesday

Hello and Happy (belated) New Year from the slowest moving blog on the planet. First off, for those of you wondering, there is a best of 2012 post coming soon, so get ready for that. And for those of you who weren’t wondering, the facts remain the same.

In (another) effort to keep this spot active with a minimum of time/effort, I’m stealing an idea from my buddy Dustin, who runs the American Wind blog over here. For those of you who celebrate motorcycling and other cool things, his is a site not to miss.

What Dustin does is have a song each Saturday, usually something pretty obscure, always something worth taking the time for. With that in mind, I thought I’d have a “Shake the Mondays” tune, but out of the gate I couldn’t narrow things down to one track, so instead decided on a “Two for Tuesday” set up.

The first installment comes from 60/70s blues/proto punk/power pop/garage rockers, the Flamin’ Groovies…a band whose (ridiculous) name I’d always seen here and there, but had never heard them until a couple of years ago when a buddy sent me the title track of their 1976 release, Shake Some Action. I dug it a lot, even put the album on my Amazon wish list, but never got around to picking it up.

A few weeks ago I ran across their third album, Teenage Head from 1971, and since it was at a reasonable price, I snagged it up. Reading up on it after the fact, I learned that, coming out the same year as the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Sir Mick allegedly commented on the similarities between the two albums and claimed the F’Groovies had done a better job. Dang. And since SF is my hands down favorite Stones album, how could I go wrong with Teenage Head?

So…without turning this into an all out album review, here are the first two tracks… The revved up  and raucous High Flyin’ Baby, which would fit very nicely amongst Captain Beefheart’s early, more accessible amped-blues outings, and the low key, but no less dangerous, City Lights, which is Stones-ish in a more Let It Bleed sort of way, and really more 70s Kink-ish or the Dead than that.

But this is just to give you a reference point, ‘cos these songs shine as their own pieces, and the rest of the album follows suit, so I hope they kick start your day in the way they’re intended.