My Top 1000 Songs #703: Shake Some Action

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.] 

After a few years of relative obscurity, San Francisco late 60s/early 70s garage band Flamin' Groovies shuffled the line-up and moved in a more pop direction. They recorded two amazing, jangly power pop tracks in 1972--the unabashedly Beatlesque "You Tore Me Down" and the anthemic "Shake Some Action." But jangly power pop was out of favor at the time (as the tragic commercial failure of Big Star until their rediscovery many years later confirmed), and the songs were shelved. Both finally emerged in 1976 on the Shake Some Action LP--still ahead of their time, though with artists like Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds (the latter of whom produced the LP) breaking through in the UK, and US acts like the Plimsouls and dB's right around the corner, a little more ready for primetime.

"Shake" is as definitive a moment in the genre as one can find, and holds up well today, simultaneously looking back to the pre-psychedelia Beatles and the Who while paving the way for the whole late 70s skinny tie revival.

Live 1986:

Wonderful, slightly more muscular cover from the late great Tommy Keene:

Later cover from Cracker: