A PAIR OF SUPERSNAZZES:
ROY LONEY and DANNY MIHM Interviewed by JUD COST

In what must have been a supremely bittersweet moment of irony for the band, the Flamin' Groovies were recently voted by the pop music critics of the San Francisco Chronicle (that's mostly Joel Selvin and James Sullivan these days) to the number four slot in that daily newspaper's list of The Top 100: Bay Area's All-Time Best Bands. They were nosed out only by Sly and The Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead, leaving plenty of more high profile outifts wallowing in their wake. I haven't spoken to any of the Groovies since the results were announced, but I'll bet their reaction might have parroted the lyrics to that song by the Grass Roots, "Where were you when I needed you?"

In their heyday--led by Roy Loney from 1965 until he split in 1971 and thereafter by Cyril Jordan until the band's demise in 1987--the Flamin' Groovies couldn't get arrested at home. For some paranormal reason that might only be explained on a future installment of the X-Files, the Groovies were frequently ridiculed in the local press, snubbed by the godfathers of psychedelia and--the unkindest cut of all--ignored by hip local music fans only too eager to embrace any number of visiting English combos with one half the talent of these home-grown prophets without honor.

That's not to say the Groovies didn't have a devoted following--and still do. It's just that their fan base has been sprinkled in little pockets throughout the world. As Loney puts it, "If we could have gathered our fans from all over the world in one place it would have been different."

Although they no longer perform under the name Flamin' Groovies, an aggregation billed as the Fondellas--with Loney on vocals, original drummer Danny Mihm and guitarist James Ferrell, among others--were caught late in `99 pounding out Groovies classics like "Slow Death" and "Teenage Head." And they sounded mighty fine doing it too.

Loney and Mihm--the towering skinsman outspoken and irreverent as always--recently sat down to spill the beans on the recording of Supersnazz, their fabulous debut longplayer. As usual, there was way too much info to include in the CD's liner notes, so here it is, the director's cut from the act you've known for all these years: ladies & gentlemen, the Flamin' Groovies.

Roy Loney Interview
How did you get signed by Epic so early in your career to record your first album, Supersnazz?
We'd put out our own (ten-inch) record, Sneakers--just recorded some tunes--because we hadn't had any labels sniffing around at that point. But then there was this boom, when every major label wanted some San Francisco groups. We got signed at the same time as Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, so we were the San Francisco groups for them, for Epic. We were shocked, to be honest. We hadn't been together that long, and we didn't think a major label would be interested. But sure enough, they were. It was just that big sweep. Everybody was getting signed. I don't remember meeting anybody, but I'm sure somebody checked us out live.

Did you deal with Epic, or was it done through your manager?
So much of this was done through our manager at the time, Alfred Kramer. He was one of these manager kind of guys. We "didn't need to know what was going on." He had all the ramifications. He was "doin' it." He was "takin' care of business." It was: "Don't worry about it, guys. I'm taking care of it. Hey, we got ya a great deal here." So we were pretty amazed. Wow, signed to Epic. We're gonna go to LA, live in Hollywood for a couple of months. We're gonna be put up in this mansion, right above the Sunset Strip. It was a house, supposedly the house where Elvis stayed whenever he made a movie. It had a swimming pool and sunken bath tubs--everybody had their own section of the house. Pretty swank! And here we are, a bunch of kids from San Francisco--wow. We really felt we were hitting the big time. It was great. Here we are in Hollywood, the entertainment capitol of the world. Not only that, we're getting paid union scale for our sessions. It was pretty amazing. It was really hot that summer so we spent a lot of time at Barney's Beanery and Sandy Koufax's Tropicana.

CBS really went first class on your living accommodations?
CBS always did it that way. You got everything, carte blanche. Great! Superb! We thought we were gonna make the next Sgt. Pepper--the album of all time. We really thought so--we were gonna blow everybody's mind and be the next big thing.

Who did Epic assign to work with you in the studio?
We had this producer, Stephen Goldman, and it was his very first production job. He was assigned to us, but he came and checked us out live first and he loved us. Because it was his first production job he wanted to prove himself in a big way too, to be the next Phil Spector. So we really spent a lot of time on this record--a month and a half in Studio A at CBS. It was very expensive. We just took forever. On one vocal track on a song called "A Part From That"--basically it was just me and Cyril doing this really tight two-part harmony--it took us like three days to get it perfect. We wanted it to be Simon & Garfunkel-perfect. So we spent a ton of money and a ton of time doin' it. We weren't even thinking about making any of it back. That was the last thing on our mind, and Stephen Goldman's mind obviously. We were just going to make this amazing album. Sure enough, we spent about $65,000 to cut it. And back then, for a group that was completely unknown, that was quite a bit of money.

How was it living in Tinseltown in the summer of `68?
It was so much fun living in LA. We'd play live on the weekend at some psychedelic hall in San Diego with a light show. Back then everybody--the Kweskin Jug Band, Muddy Waters--everybody had a light show (laughs). Or we'd go to Santa Barbara where we played with Poco and Canned Heat, or we'd play the Whisky. And we'd go see the Burrito Brothers all the time when they were the house band at the Whisky.

Go to any wild Hollywood parties in those days?
Cyril and I went to this weird party at Sal Mineo's house. Of course, he wasn't there. But somebody had taken over his house, and everybody was dropping acid and mescaline. We got stoned out of our brains and everybody left but Cyril and I. So, we wake up on the floor, everybody's passed out, and we don't know where we are. We're in this house in Laurel Canyon, but there are no street signs anywhere nearby. We're just coming down from acid and we don't have a clue where we are. We did know we were somewhere in the Hollywood area, at least (laughs). Finally I took a long walk down the hill and found a street sign and, "OK, this is kinda where we are." So I called somebody to come pick us up.

Hang out with any celebrities in those days?
We'd run into the usual people at the Whisky. Rock Hudson was pretty standard and Caesar Romero--guys who made the scene. We saw a lotta movie stars hanging out. We were real starry-eyed back then.

Did you have most of the songs written before you recorded Supersnazz?
We pretty much had most of the material written before we came down, although we did work up some stuff in the studio. "Brushfire" and "Around The Corner" were ideas Cyril and I finished off in the studio. We'd turned a corner in our writing, and it was great having all this production at our fingertips, all the parts we wanted, string quartets, horn sections. We just went kinda crazy. We wanted to do a little bit of everything on this record.

Who did the arrangements for the sessions?
Jack Nitzsche did the string arrangements on "A Part From That" and the horns on "The Girl Can't Help It." Steve Goldman knew Jack and we were real excited about meeting him, and he was just coming off working on Let It Bleed with the Stones. So he came in and did kind of a rush job. We had to rewrite the arrangements, so we gave him this little tiny billing on the record (laughs). Tom Scott played clarinet on "Bam Balam," and Mike Lang played piano on everything, a great session pianist. Curtis Amy played tenor. It was our chance to do the big production trip. It was our epic for Epic (laughs).

How did it sound to you when you were finally finished?
At the time, we were overwhelmed with the sound. We thought it sounded fantastic: super sound in the studio on those nice big speakers. "We're gonna be millionaires." We were pretty happy with it. But we labored over the mix, instead of having it be loose and fun, with heavy edges showing a little bit. Everybody in San Francisco really liked it when we got home, although it didn't sound much like the live band. It sounded real produced. But this was our one shot at doing the super-production, Sgt. Pepper thing. We stripped it down after that, so our records sounded more like our live sound.

Did everybody stay in LA until you'd finished the album?
After we cut the album only Cyril and Alfred and I stayed down there, and we moved to Chateau Marmont, a big house where John Belushi croaked. The mix was arduous, hours and hours and hours. He was trying to make it absolutely perfect.

Where did you get those wacky costumes you wore on the photo on the back of the album?
They took us to Northern Costumers--the place who does all the movies--and we just picked out stuff, funny costumes. We were originally gonna have a cartoon cover. And then Bob Zoell, this Disney fanatic, walks into the studio one night and shows us this stuff. We're real Disney fanatics too and we go "WOW!" He told us, "I'd like to do a rendering of you guys on the cover." At the time, I wondered if it was a bad thing to do, a cover with cartoons on it. I go back and forth on it. They wouldn't take it seriously, I was thinking. They wouldn't know who we were, that maybe we were a made-up group, like the Archies. And having us dress up in silly costumes on the back, we looked like a bunch of dodos. I sometimes thought it was a blessing and a curse.

The album kind of sank without a trace when it was released.
By the time we'd spent all that money cutting the record they didn't want to put any money into promoting it. So they just threw it out there, like they did with the Hot Licks.
Dan Hicks gave me this great clip from a trade magazine from that time, with the band captioned under the photo as "Don Licks & The Hot Licks." Not off to a very good start.

Did you really get paid scale for recording the album?
We did. We'd go down to the union office to get our checks when we got paid for our studio time. Johnny Otis had an office there, working for the union. He was a super nice guy: "Great to see young guys starting out." It's funny, but I'd never weighed more than 114 pounds in my life, but after a summer in LA, I was up to 125 and people would say, "What happened?" Hey, I was just eating and drinking and partying all the time.

Do you remember your reaction when you finally heard the finished product?
I think we were sent a couple of acetates, and we sat down and listened to it. We had been listening to it on these huge speakers at CBS and, of course, it lost something. Put it on your own little machine and it's, "Wait a minute. What happened? I can't crank it up loud enough." And, of course, anytime you hear your record for the first time all you hear are the mistakes, what you don't like about it--"Oh, jeez, that didn't work."

They played the single on AM radio in the Bay Area right away.
We got the single "Rockin' Pneumonia" into the Top 100 at KYA, the local AM radio station, and it actually charted for a few weeks. But they hadn't pressed enough records for the stores, so sales just stopped at a certain point. And we bought a lot of the records that were in the stores, to keep it in the charts. Every time we found it in a store we bought every copy they had. Of course, it has the famous misspelled title on it, "Rockin' Pneumonia & The Boggie Woggie Flu" (laughs). Then they put out "Somethin' Else" after that, which barely came out and was hard to find. You can find promo copies but not too many store copies.

How did Epic perceive you as a musical attraction?
They saw us as an oldies band: "Let's put out the oldies, not the originals." They saw us as a retro, oldies revival band--which we weren't--but we certainly had roots in that. In live sets we'd mix in covers with our originals. But they thought that was our strong point. And the Sha Na Na thing was happening.

Did you tour right away to support the album?
We went on the road to support the album and ended up in New York City--and that's where we met Richard Robinson, working for Hit Parader magazine. He wanted to interview us, and was doing a little production on the side for Kama Sutra. "I love the Epic album," he told us. "What's your deal? Do you have to do another album? You think you could get out of your contract with Epic?" And we said we didn't think it would be hard because we didn't make them any money, to speak of. So Alfred went to Epic and they were more than happy to let us go. They didn't want to spend any more money on us.

Is that all Bob Zoell did for Supersnazz, just the cover cartoon?
It's possible he has other things, but, as I remember, he pretty much nailed it the first time. Everywhere I go there's that little guy, the bug. It comes in so handy. If they don't have a picture they just go with the little cartoon bug guy.

Someone told me recently you made a movie around the time of Supersnazz.
We shot a film called King Of The Cuts. It was shot silent in 16mm by Cab Covay. He was this friend of ours, Paul Brown, who was going to SF state at the time and studying film. We went into a studio and dubbed on the sound. The music in it is basically Sneakers. It's about 20 minutes long, shot during the Supersnazz period, and based kind of on A Hard Day's Night: wacky little slapstick bits and great footage of us onstage. We played a political rally for Bobby Kennedy, and the night before we had played Woody Allen's birthday party, something that (SF Chronicle writer) John Wasserman had set up. We wore weird costumes just for the hell of it. I was a clown and Cyril was the Mad Hatter. George was a gangster, Timmy's an Elizabethan troubador and Danny ... I can't remember. All the footage of us onstage we're wearing these wacky costumes.

Did you ever think about doing any more films?
We did two films. The other was called Bruce And The Wolfcar, another bizarre little silent with dubbed-on sound--kind of a Wolfman theme and then we destroyed this car. It's not totally Flamin' Groovies, but Cyril and I are in it a lot. It was cut around the same time, and it has a couple of Groovies songs that never surfaced anywhere else: "Where Have All The Cars Gone?" and the other was "I Want To Hold Your Fine Stuff." He's still got the two 16mm prints. I think each one is in the 20-minute range.

Was that it for the film career?
There was another film that got lost unfortunately--disappeared off the face of the earth--called The Psychedelic Frug Party. We shot it for Campus Capers, the SF State variety show. One year I was in Campus Capers, this all-original-material student show they did year after year. I'd sing and dance and do comedy bits, and Cyril, and George too, played back-up. So Cyril and I did some music for the show and we said, "Let's make a little film for it." We sort of based it on Blow-Up. I play this photographer following the Groovies around. It got lost. We never really played much of Supersnazz live. We did "Rockin' Pneumonia," "The First One's Free," "Love Have Mercy" and maybe "Somethin' Else"--but not much more.

It seemed San Francisco never properly appreciated the greatness of the Flamin' Groovies.
We got overlooked around here. We always did. We didn't get taken seriously. People seemed to think we were a bunch of kids, second-stringers. We had a following and people still come up and say, "I was such a big fan of you guys." But there just weren't enough to make a big impact. If we could have gathered our fans from all over the world in one place, it would have been different. And the local bands frowned on us. We weren't psychedelic, and we didn't take a political stance. We were just having fun. Some people like Gary Duncan (Quicksilver Messenger Service) liked us and John Fogerty (Creedence Clearwater) liked us. You'd meet certain guys, just here and there--but most of `em thought: "Oh yeah, they play that `50s stuff." Janis Joplin just hated us, except when we did this blues version of "Heartbreak Hotel," and she'd tell us, "That's the only good thing you played all night." Yeah, we never got much feedback here. We were always bigger outta town: in Detroit, LA or New York. To this day, I go to New York City and I'm treated like a god. Back here it's, "Oh yeah, Roy." You can see me walking down the street anytime. No big thing.

Danny Mihm Interview:
Roy says you stayed in Elvis' house in Hollywood while you cut Supersnazz. What was it like?
The decor made it look like Liberace's house: lurid lime-green wallpaper with gold tigers and palm trees. It had sunken bath rooms and all the linen said "E. Presley"--it was cool. They took some pictures of us all in the pool. And it had underground viewing slits. You could go down in this underground room, underneath the diving board and you could watch girls jump into the pool. Elvis had it together. And the pool had all these cheapo fake Roman statues of naked girls around it, made out of plaster. We threw `em all in the pool and they dissolved (guffaws). I think the story was that they regularly rented that place out to bands, because Canned Heat was in there right before we were. So they must have had rock & roll band damage awareness. But we didn't do anything else to it. At that time we were young and weren't into trashing the place. We were all pretty friendly back then and it was cool because everybody had a room with a sunken bathtub--and it was Elvis' house. We had our girlfriends down there with us.

What do you remember about recording Supersnazz?
We pretty much got carte blanche treatment from CBS, getting paid every other day for our studio time, like regular musicians. It was pretty hip. A lot of Supersnazz was really good material that maybe didn't get recorded correctly. Roy was the leader and he had his own agenda, and he might have had something in mind that didn't really ever happen. Back then we had a couple of really long, pretentious stage numbers we did because Loney had this big theatrical streak in him. He still does. He's an actor and he loves using all that jazz. One of `em was called something like "American Soul Spiders Ballet." It went on for about a year and a half.

The album had almost nothing to do with how you sounded live back then.
Right, the thing was we didn't sound like that live. We were way raunchier, but I was thinking if people liked Supersnazz because of the production and the lightness of it, when they'd come and see us live we might be way too heavy for `em. But I think, by and large, it's a pretty good album. The rock `n' roll cuts like "The Girl Can't Help It" may suffer a little because we used to just blast those out live. But some of those other tracks with the piano and the clarinet came out pretty good, because if you like them, that's the way they were supposed to sound. And we still had a bunch of that Lovin' Spoonful/Charlatans/Jim Kweskin sound in us. Then there's that other song, "Love Have Mercy." When we played that live it was more like a blues band doin' it, but for the album we really Yardbirds-ed it up.

Did the label think you were a revival band?
Because we played old rock songs it was easy for some people to think we were an oldies band, like Sha Na Na. But that's not what we were. "Rockin' Pneumonia" got into the charts for a while, and then Johnny Rivers comes along a little while later, records the same song and arranges it almost exactly like we did--and it was a huge hit. That was always Cyril's attitude: "If it's a good song, why can't you do it?" People used to always like it live because it was a hummable song.

How was Stephen Goldman to work with?
He was a likable guy and he really liked the band, but I don't think he knew where we were coming from--and as a result he produced the hell out of the album. He overdid it a bit. He wanted to do a good job and stay in the studio as long as he could, and we didn't care because they were paying for it. No way we could ever make anything beyond our studio costs unless it had been a really huge hit, which it wasn't.

Tell me about the photo shoot with the crazy costumes?
That football outfit I wore used to belong to (silent film comedian) Harold Lloyd. At first we were all gonna be the same thing, but we couldn't agree on what we were gonna be. I wanted us to be musketeers, Roy wanted us to be the characters from "Alice In Wonderland," and it wound up that everybody just grabbed a costume. When we were taking those pictures, Timmy went outside the photo studio and started walking down the street. And some women saw him with this cowboy outfit, wearing a pair of six-shooters, so they called the cops. The cops followed him back into the studio, and it was like a marijuana inferno in there when they walked in. But they were cool and left. That costume stuff was always Roy's idea. When the Groovies started, Roy was trying to be like Richard Burton. I just wanted pictures of the band.

Did Bob Zoell do anything else for Supersnazz?
He did another part for the inside that never turned up, an airbrushed picture--all of us, wearing different kinds of cowboy shirts surrounded by stars that were made into lariats--a combination of our photos with the little bug guys he used for the front cover. The English bands had the right idea: glossy covers with pictures of the group in different, moody kinds of lighting. But we had (pfffzzzt) psychedelia (laughs).