The Flamin' Groovies - Teenage Head, Kama Sutra Records, K SBS 2031, 1971 The Flamin' Groovies covered a lot of ground in their most active fertile decade ('68-'78). They were pioneers who sowed seeds that sprouted into many of the most important rock sub-genres of the 70s and 80s, and they still cast a long shadow to this day. From (in their various phases) classic boogie woogie roots rock to UK Pub Rock, to "power pop", to "new wave", to the meta-genre of the Merseyside/Mod/60s punk/Nuggets revivalists, they seem to have done everything flawlessly before everyone else caught on, and did it uniquely with nary a misstep. There are superlative things to be said about each of these phases and their associated recordings. It's all classic stuff, especially the Dave Edmunds produced songs "Shake Some Action", "You Tore Me Down", and "Slow Death", recorded in 1972 after the band decamped to London from San Francisco. "Shake Some Action", in particular, was ridiculously ahead of its time. (That song was not to be released till the 1976 Sire album of that title, which is the form in which I first heard it, riding the knob on the left hand of the dial late one night I will never forget: it has played in my head incessantly since then.. It is truly a monumental feat of pop music writing and production.) Their "Merseyside" experiments, which dare the listener to tell the actual Beatles covers from their own British invasion songs they wrote themselves is itself a whole nother category of wonderworking. But this little write up is about Teenage Head, their third full-length album. It is often compared favorably to the contemporaneously-released Sticky Fingers. And there is a sense in which it is indeed an unsung American Sticky Fingers. Part of the glory of the Rolling Stones of that era was the melding of various strands of American music pastiche into a surprisingly coherent sort of redefinition of rock and roll for the then-new era. Teenage Head does this as w...