ROY LONEY & THE LONGSHOTS
Drunkard in the Think Tank
Career Records
· Forgotten but not yet gone, thank Dionysus.
Although it’s a secret known only by true connoisseurs of primal, loin-busting rock ’n’ roll, Roy Loney was one of the greatest forces to emerge from the San Francisco Bay area music scene in the late-1960s. As co-founder of the incredible Flamin’ Groovies, Loney paired with lead guitarist Cyril Jordan for some of the most formidable boogie-woogie freak-outs in history, before leaving the band in 1972 to pursue a solo career. His musical output since has been sporadic, marked by long absences from the studio, but the 57-year-old Loney has continued to release mind-altering guitar rock albums, culminating, or so we thought, with the 1994 release of Full Grown Head, featuring Scott McCaughey and other members of the Young Fresh Fellows backing him up under the self-deprecating moniker "The Longshots."
Reassembling the same band (and a few other middle-aged heads) a decade later, Drunkard in the Think Tank picks up where that record left off, somehow putting a fresh spin on a mélange of genres that one would have thought were all but tapped out by now. Loney’s distillation of all things rock ’n’ roll bears the markings of a man who has been ripping it up for more than 40 years, yet still maintains that fundamentally youthful esprit that separates the witty bon vivants from the dimwit poseurs. Loney may be a drunkard, but as the album title suggests, that doesn’t mean the lights have gone out upstairs.
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