The Sonics arrived out of the Pacific Northwest garage scene kicking and shrieking their way to cult notoriety with a short, sharp, shock of a debut album that has since influenced countless major league artists that followed in its turbulent wake. Vintage Rock steps outside the classic rockabilly and rock’n’roll remit to revisit a proto-punk perennial…
Words by Rik Flynn
There are few bands that hold such powerful sway in the record collections of musical giants past and present than 60s garage tearaways, The Sonics. Theirs is one enviable list of esteemed admirers – and it covers the length and breadth of the spectrum. The likes of The Rolling Stones, Iggy And The Stooges, MC5, Brian Setzer, The Cramps and The Clash have all counted themselves among the numerous devotees of the wildest- of-wild quintets out of Tacoma, Washington.
Not to mention being dubbed as both the ‘Grandfathers Of Grunge’, revered amongst the Seattle elite that birthed Mudhoney and Nirvana, and the ‘Godfathers Of Punk’, a scene that literally picked up where they left off, with notable devotees including the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra and the mighty Ramones.
Their reach continues to spread too, on to a swathe of diverse modern creatives that includes The White Stripes, The Hives, The Flaming Lips and LCD Soundsystem, who even name-dropped them as signifiers of hip on their debut single, Losing My Edge. Plenty of upstarts from punk, garage, grunge, alt-rock, blues-rock, pure rock, psychobilly, rockabilly, rock’n’roll and on, have all followed The Sonics’ lead and gone on to major success. There are, we guarantee, still numerous teenage dirtbags in all corners of the globe huddled around the speakers right this second, delighting in the rip-roaring, proto-punk magnificence of 1960’s stone cold classic, Here Are The Sonics!!!
Feeling Supersonic
In fact, the one band a little outside of the classic rockabilly and rock’n’roll remit of Vintage Rock, that seems to crop up over and over – and over – again, adored by the great and the good of the rockin’ scene, is The Sonics. And that, of course, includes us. When asked a few years ago to pick out a song for Steve Lamacq’s BBC 6 music show, our thoughts immediately homed in on Strychnine, a heavy-handed, two-minute-13-second dose of what makes Here Are The Sonics!!! such a feral, untethered masterpiece.
In some ways, the album’s a bit of an anomaly. On the one hand it led the charge for garage rock in the 60s and punk in the 70s, yet it’s a record that still has its roots firmly – and with its tracklist, obviously – planted in the classic sides of the rock’n’roll era. The Sonics clearly loved the greats of the 50s and early 60s and expressed that admiration via their unhinged, shrieking reworkings of the rock’n’roll and R&B greats of the golden era: recalcitrant attacks on Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Barrett Strong, Rufus Thomas and Richard Berry all appear on Here Are The Sonics!!! – and they’re some of the finest recastings you’re ever likely to hear.
What started out as low-key, no-fuss garage band from the Pacific Northwest, would rise to something much, much more important. And six decades on from its release, it’s time to raise a glass to – it’s more than fair to say – one of the most influential albums of all time.
Boom Boys
Taking their lead from the tougher-edged sounds of the rock’n’roll greats and building on the guitar-assaulting lead of the likes of scuzzy instrumentalists Link Wray and Duane Eddy, and bluesman Freddie King, the band emerged from a Northwest scene that birthed 60s garage pioneers The Kingsmen (of Louie Louie fame), The Frantics, The Wailers and Paul Revere & The Raiders. Born of blue collar workers, The Sonics were first set in motion in 1960 by guitarist Larry Parypa, begun as an instrumental outfit with older brother Andy, his other brother Jerry on sax, and even their mother, who was known to pick up the bass in early rehearsal sessions. A revolving cast of band members led, by late 1963, to their classic line-up, with Larry and Andy joined by drummer Bob Bennett, saxophonist Rob Lind, and keyboard player Gerry Roslie, all of whom were original members of The Searchers (not the Merseybeat one).
Named after the ear-splitting sonic booms that reverberated from the nearby US Air Force base, The Sonics were ready to rampage. Yet Tacoma was hardly a springboard for musical glory. “It was like we were out in the Gobi Desert back then,” singer Roslie explained to Elsewhere. “Hardly nobody came from here that had made it.” But shaking the garage doors and rattling the basements of their locality – the only place, says Roslie, where their unkempt racket would be tolerated by parents – came the sound of sheer, unadulterated youthful passion.
Yet where other bands in their neighbourhood favoured the saccharine sweet melodies of The Beatles, then rapidly growing in stature in the US, bar ripping though a raucous Drive My Car, The Sonics travelled elsewhere. Somewhere far more energetic, far more fierce. But perhaps not so much by design… “A lot of groups changed over and tried to sound like The Beatles,” Roslie continued. “We didn’t, because whenever we tried doing something pretty it ended up being rough. It always turns out rough.”
Play Hard
Said Rob Lind to All That Jam: “We just wanted to rock’n’roll. We wanted to play hard. And as we got popular and started to be hired – now they call ’em shows but in those days they were dances – we learned that that’s what the crowd wanted, they wanted to dance. So we did everything we could figure out of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis… anything that came out in popular music that rocked, we wanted to do that. At that time we were one of the few groups that were doin’ that. We were down in Tacoma rockin’ our socks off. And number one also is because we liked that stuff!”
It wasn’t until 1964, when Gerry would take on vocal duties – mastering those unhinged, fearsome shrieks of Little Richard himself and harnessing them as his own – that the group really worked that rough hewn sound into something special. The quintet were soon discharging their incendiary set on the local youngsters, with enough chutzpah to fire up a small battalion, and rapidly building a devoted following thanks to reckless, rebellious showdowns at regional nightspots, The Red Carpet, the Spanish Castle Ballroom, St. Mary’s Parish Hall, the Evergreen Ballroom, Skateland in nearby Olympia, and Perl’s up the road in Bremerton.
Witch Trial
By now, the bassist of local garage heroes The Wailers, Buck Ormsby, had taken on the management of the band, signing them to his band’s label, Etiquette. The group’s high intensity was first bottled in late ’64 on debut single The Witch, a full-throttle, frenzied 45, telling the tale of a raven- haired “evil chick” behind the wheel of a big black car, coupled with an utterly rampant recasting of Little Richard’s Keep A-Knockin as its flip. Richard’s tune was the first song they’d cut during that inaugural session – “’Cos that was pretty harsh,” chuckled Lind.
Released that November, The Witch ramped up the band’s following, reported to be the best-selling local single of all time in the Northwest, selling 25,000 copies in two or three days despite zero love from local radio stations. “The story I get, and I have somewhere the clipping, is we were told our song was number two for about three weeks because of Downtown at number one,” Roslie explained to Elsewhere. “One of the disc jockeys told me that we were actually number one but they couldn’t put us there because then they’d have to play us. Business is business I guess and whoever has got the most money wins.” It’s the classic story of censorship upping notoriety, and The Witch would go on to open Here Are the Sonics!!! with its brutal stop-start riff and uncompromising swagger announcing the band perfectly.
“With The Witch and Psycho, nobody was doing songs like that,” Lind continued. “All of a sudden the rock stations are playing The Witch and Psycho which is just hard rock-three-chord-drum break-guitar-solo-songs – and at that point we were off and running.” In super-quick time, they’d gone from kids irking their elders from behind the garage doors to opening for The Beach Boys and touring the Northwest with The Kinks.
A Little Less Conversation
Laid down soon after at Audio Recording in Seattle, and issued in spring 1965, Here Are The Sonics!!! was firmly rooted in the band’s live sound. As such, production duties fell to legendary Northwest engineer Kearney Barton (the garage rock helmsman that produced The Wailers, The Ventures and The Kingsmen), who captured the rude raw materials at their epicentre, with little more than a humble two-track recorder and a solitary microphone. It was a tactic that emanated from far calmer waters. “When I was recording a choir and orchestra I used two mics and it came off great,” Barton said of his early days in the studio to Tape Op. “That led me along the way of simplicity rather than to use 77 million microphones for a very simple thing.”
The untethered, primal sound of Here Are The Sonics!!! of course benefitted greatly from Barton’s focus on that bare bones simplicity, plus a no-fear attitude when it came to sheer ear-bleeding volume. “My approach was to let them all play as loud as they wanted as long as it wasn’t overdriving the equipment too bad,” he continued. “I’d back them off their amps enough where I had good control and separation but not to the point that it was quiet enough to carry on a conversation – that wouldn’t be possible with them!”
And why would – and frankly how could – anyone attempt to interrupt The Sonics mid-flow? In fact, the band would later lose some of that early voodoo when future producers insisted they turn down their dials. But that wasn’t what The Sonics were about. Instead the power came from an unrelenting attitude, personified by the band’s yelping, screaming – manic – conduit, singer Gerry Roslie. “I always figured that Gerry Roslie was going to have to get a blood transfusion afterwards for his throat being turned to hamburger after the way he was doing his screaming!” joked Barton.
Roll Over Rock’n’Roll
From the whip-crack snap of the snare drum fill that sends The Witch careering forth, Here Are The Sonics!!! is a bleeding-knuckle ride that despatches everything in its path. It’s a drum sound initially inspired by The Dave Clark Five, and beloved of many, including Kurt Cobain, who gushed to CITR-FM in 1994: “Still to this day, it’s still my favourite drum sound. It sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever known!” And he surely does.
Here Are The Sonics!!! teeters – rather perilously – on the periphery of control, truly as WILD as they come. Beyond its opener, the album’s other originals have an equally unfettered reputation – Psycho, described by Jack Rabbit Slim’s Bob Butfoy in these pages as “drum driven carnage”; the hotrod-worshipping Boss Hosswith its pounding beat and Rob Lind’s sprawling sax; and their ode to vermin-poison, the fabulous aforementioned Strychnine; all instant classics packed with knock-out punch, and all flailing around in loose-limbed abandon, an unyielding attack on the senses.
Yet what links the album so beautifully to the golden era, is its covers – brash takes on rock’n’roll-era mainstays that shamelessly crank up the voltage, adding an explosive, rebellious spirit that aligned that revolutionary movement with a fresh generation of teenagers. Their dial-pushing take on The Contours’ 1962 hit Do You Love Me is a case in point, followed by their equally raucous version of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven. And for many, The Sonics’ version of Richard Berry’s 1960 classic Have Love Will Travel is the definitive one – “The saxophone solo alone should make their version of that song required listening,” wrote The Arizona Republic. It’s a track that’s been liberally used on TV to hawk everything from Land Rovers to bourbon and is regularly commandeered on-screen, from an airing in Guy Ritchie’s cult crime flick RocknRolla to rebel chef Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown.
Onwards to a slightly more measured – but still heavily scream-laden – take on Barrett Strong’s 1959 Motown hit Money (That’s What I Want); a dogeared recasting of Rufus Thomas’ signature cut, Walking The Dog; Nappy Brown’s 1957 calling card Night Time Is The Right Time; and closing on their manically paced reworking of Little Richard’s Good Golly Miss Molly. Add their version of The Fabulous Wailers’ Dirty Robber and the roof is less raised, more utterly incinerated.
Cult Heroes
At the time of its release, Here Are The Sonics!!! only managed to light fires locally – albeit a sizeable regional success – but has since gone on to become a cult go-to, heralded as a must-listen-to-before-you-die LP in listings the world over. And while two more albums, 1966’s Boom and 1967’s Introducing The Sonics would follow close behind, neither would quite match their debut.
It wasn’t until the band toured Europe some years later that they fully realised the scope of their influence, having met some of their famous fans on the road, The Clash, Pearl Jam and The Hives amongst them. And while the band revisited some of their tracks for the Sinderella LP in 1980, this newfound later-life glory prompted their first original material in almost half a century – albeit with two new members now in their ranks – with 2015’s excellent This Is the Sonics LP.
One of very few albums to warrant one exclamation mark, let alone three – and dangerous as they come – Here Are The Sonics!!! truly is a serious force to be reckoned with.
Listen here
Subscribe to Vintage Rock here
