Roy Loney

Teenage Monster —
California Born and Bred

Interview by John Battles

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The Flamin’ Groovies, from San Francisco, are completely ignored by most articles and books on the San Francisco scene, while bands that lived nearby, moved there, or just played there for a while get all the praise and attention. Look up just about any famous S.F. band and you’ll find that the members were born and raised elsewhere. The Flamin’ Groovies started, like so many other great American bands, in public school. Lead singer Roy Loney was born April 13, 1946 in San Francisco. He was singing as a school kid and formed the first version of what would soon become The Flamin’ Groovies in 1965.

     “It all started with me and Tim Lynch, we’d known each other since the first grade. In Junior High, we started a little group with our friend, Jeff Young, doing mainly Kingston Trio songs. People don’t remember how big The Kingston Trio were! They were almost like The Beatles in their time, they were huge, just monstrous. Everything they did went gold instantly, they were just amazingly big, and we were totally big fans.” Note: The Kingston Trio (from San Francisco) had 10 top 20 hits from 1958 to ’63 and five of their LPs went to #1. “We did that through High School, and then, Jeff dropped out, and me and Tim became a duo. Somewhere along the line, we decided, ‘Why don’t we try some rock’n’roll?’ We were listening to The Beatles and The Stones and stuff, and rock’n’roll was starting to sound good again after that drought, y’know? It was a long drought, after Elvis went into the army, it became pop again, and it was pretty hard to listen to the radio. I couldn’t listen to The Four Seasons and stuff like that, it was just driving me nuts! So, we became folkies for four or five years, but then rock ‘n’ roll started sounding good again. The Beatles and The Stones were playing the same kind of stuff we listened to, so we said, ‘Hey, let’s try that.’ So, we got a hold of George Alexander, we went to high school with him, and said, ‘Wanna be in our band?’ He said, ‘Sure! What do you want me to DO?,’ ‘Learn to play the bass,’ he said, ‘No problem!’ so that was it. He just picked up a bass and learned how to play it.

He was hanging out at the bowling alley a lot, that was the place to hang out. George was kind of a pool hustler, so he was hanging out at the pool hall part of the bowling alley, where he met Ron Greco, who was a drummer, and a younger guy. We were out of high school and into college, and Greco was probably 15, 16. He auditioned, and we liked him, but we couldn’t come up with another guitar player, and one day, Greco said, ‘I got this kid, Cyril, why don’t I bring him along?’ He was even younger, he seemed like he was about twelve! I think he was actually about sixteen. Basically, he had memorized a lot of The Beatles’ guitar solos, but he couldn’t play chords at all, but he memorized a lot of the solos and things, so we said, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good.’ He was a real great kid, we really enjoyed being around him, he was a lot of fun.

     At that point, we said, ‘Well, let’s try this.’ We did the audition at Tim Lynch’s house, and we played ‘I’m Crying’ by The Animals, we did ‘Tell Me’ by The Stones, we did ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’ like The Beatles did it, and maybe ‘Around and Around.’ That was all we knew, we were playing on semi-acoustic instruments. I had this twelve string with a pickup, and we had no equipment to speak of. The P.A. went through Tim’s parents’ stereo! We said, ‘Let’s do it!’ We ended up rehearsing a lot in Ron Greco’s garage. We really were a garage band, it was one garage or the other, either Tim’s garage or Greco’s garage. The thing about Greco’s garage that was so great was, where he lived, the teenage girls coming home from school would always stop by and watch us rehearse. Having an audience really made it a lot more fun, cute girls.....They all had a crush on Ron Greco, because he kind of looked like Paul McCartney, he was a really good looking kid, you know. That was great, we always played better when there was a lot of girls watching. We didn’t really write, we just tried to learn our favorite records for the most part. We were The Chosen Few at the beginning. After awhile, we dropped that and became The Lost and Found.