One minute into Flamin’ Groovies’ new song “End of the World,” something sounds familiar. Suddenly, the venerable garage-rock band is reproducing the backbone of its signature hit, 1976’s “Shake Some Action.” “We were trying to figure out what to do with that ride-out — I forget who started going into it, I think it was Cyril (Jordan, the founding guitarist), and the rest of us just joined in,” singer Chris Wilson recalls. “It was esoterically done. We weren’t doing it on purpose — but we kind of were.”
After decades of inactivity, San Francisco’s Groovies have over the past few years discovered a nice balance between honoring the band’s legacy and moving forward with a fresh, contemporary approach. The band’s new album, “Fantastic Plastic,” contains not just the self-referential quote in “End of the World” but nods to the Beatles (“Crazy Macy” borrows from “Slow Down”), the Byrds (Jordan clearly knows all the Roger McGuinn licks and isn’t afraid to use them) and even Motorhead (“Just Like a Hurricane”). Yet it never gets bogged down with sentimentality, perhaps because the long-separated band members are so happy to be playing with each other again for the past five years.
“I love this record and everybody’s parts are great. We got to do this Beatles ‘Help!’ bit in the middle of ‘What the Hell’s Goin’ On’ that was highly enjoyable,” says Wilson, 65, by phone from his home in Gresham, Ore., in a jolly half-hour interview interrupted by planes flying overhead and sketchy cellphone service. “You get to play funny instruments now and then, and I played wah-wah guitar. It was an immense amount of fun.”
The Groovies’ most potent lineup, including Wilson, Jordan and bassist George Alexander, reunited in 2013. The band formed in 1965, then spewed out a prolific rush of underrated classics, including 1969’s delightfully titled “Supersnazz” and 1971’s all-over-the-place “Teenage Head.” Original singer Roy Loney split after “Teenage Head,” and Wilson, a Waltham, Mass., native who had encountered the band in Boston, moved to the Bay Area to replace him. It’s Wilson’s voice that plays against Jordan’s simplistic yet unforgettable electric-guitar lines in “Shake Some Action.”
“Fantastic Planet” is the band’s first album in 38 years containing both Wilson and Jordan. The reunion began when Wilson showed up in London, where he lived for years, to join the Groovies onstage. Wilson and Jordan began to trade songs together for the first time in decades (they wrote “Shake Some Action” and other Groovies near-hits together). “We were able to get days in here and there, when we happened to be in San Francisco at the same time,” Wilson says. “It’s all been knocked out, like, ‘Oh, God, everything at the last minute’ and ‘will we make it?’ It’s like one of those cliffhangers you used to see in the cinema between Flash Gordon and … Frankenstein.”
In the interview, Wilson frequently loses focus and goes off on poignant and highly entertaining tangents. He pays tribute to rocker Tom Petty, who died Oct. 2, whom Wilson met a couple of times briefly in the ’70s. (“I was sitting out on my balcony … watching a golden eagle … just as I was listening to ‘I Won’t Back Down,’ which brought me to tears.”) He rips the “idiot teenager” who reportedly started the recent Oregon forest fires. And a discussion of the “terrible terrorist atrocities” in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 59 people and wounded hundreds of others, leads to Wilson recalling his uncles and father who were outspoken anti-fascists and “took bullets for this country.”
Wilson’s family is from Scotland, and his father and uncles played blues songs on “them great big giant harmonicas, and I think my Uncle Tommy played a banjo” when he was growing up. “You used to have to do a turn on Christmas Eve and everybody had to get up and say a poem or play a funny song — and boy, did they have funny songs,” he says. “When I was about 7, it became aware to my folks that I had a very pretty singing voice. I used to start aping Byrds songs, and they went, ‘Oh, that’s good, we’ve got to look into that.’ They took me to the local choirmaster and I had classical training and could sing.”
The remembrance leads Wilson into a prolonged opera chorus, then shift into Tuvan throat singing. “I became a chameleonic singer,” he says. “I love aping other styles.”
When talking about the Groovies, Wilson says cryptically that his life the last six years has been “either absolutely fantastic or incredibly, downtroddingly depressing, horrible.” It turns out, though, that he’s referring to political unrest and attacks like the one in Vegas. “I know this country cleans itself out like a river system every once in a while, a load … builds up in the banks and in the eddies, and a big flood has to flush it all out of the river smoathes.” He pauses. “‘Smoathes’? Is that such a word? It runs smoothly, was what I was trying to say! But it came out as ‘smoathes’ because this is very, very nice French wine that I’m drinking.” He laughs uproariously before saying goodbye.
When: 8 p.m. Thursday
Where: Space, 1245 Chicago Ave., Evanston
Tickets: $22-35; 847-492-8860 or www.evanstonspace.com
Steve Knopper is a freelance writer.
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