It says something about the Generation Gap or lack thereof in Our Year of the Lord 1960 that when the larval version of The Sonics, who would go down in history as the founders of punk rock, came up short at practice, guitarist Larry Parypa’s mom would fill in on bass. We’ll never know if she helped influence their primal, pounding sound. I like to think she did.
Some five years and mucho line-up changes later The Sonics, a Tacoma, Washington quintet who look like nice wholesome boys on their album covers and most likely were just that, were in a recording studio in Seattle tearing the soundproofing off the walls and complaining to the sound engineers when the needle WASN’T in the red. Years later, The Stooges would go red too.
But here’s the thing. I can easily imagine—although I could be dead wrong—these guys retreating to the nearest pharmacy lunch counter after sessions to drink malted milks. With straws. The Sonics may be credited by many as punk’s originators, but they weren’t punks. They were just kids making an unholy din in a musical backwater, playing mostly well-known covers in place’s like Olympia’s Skateland and St. Mary’s Parish Hall, and their story is no different from the stories of so many other bands doing the same thing in rock ’n’ roll nowheres across the United States.
The Sonics had one regional hit and dreams of making the big time, but when they finally drove South in (I’m fantasizing here) a battered Beach Boys woodie station wagon with Bob Bennett’s drum kit roped to the roof to Hollywood the town ruined them, or rather they ruined themselves, because they had nothing to sell that anybody wanted (cover of “Money,” anybody?) and no choice really but to slicken up their sound and record the more restrained material that appeared on 1967’s Introducing the Sonics, which they hoped would get them radio play but didn’t. Later they’d dismiss it as “the worst garbage.”
And like that it was over. The Sonics left behind two impossibly raucous albums, 1965’s Here Are the Sonics and 1966’s Boom and a slew of go-nowhere singles. They had no nationwide hits and they never toured the country, much less overseas. I don’t even know if they played Hollywood. They were so far behind the times they were ahead of their time and it took the likes of The Stooges more than half a decade to catch up.
The Sonics are the garage rock equivalent of the Velvet Underground—they didn’t sell records, but they inspired legions of subsequent musicians. The difference between the two bands is that The Sonics were selling sound, not vision. They weren’t selling a look or a philosophy and they’d have found the idea that they were visionaries risible, almost as risible as the idea that they were giving birth to something. They were simply playing the music they loved as hard and loud as they could. They weren’t part of any “underground scene” and the songs they were hearing on the radio must have made it clear to them that pop music was moving in a direction that was antithetical to THEIR musical direction, if they even could be said to have one. No future indeed.
The Beatles, The Beach Boys… hell even The Rolling Stones, whose bread and butter had been interpretations of R&B standards, were pushing youth music forward in ways the Sonics never could. They were living in the past—the majority of the songs on Here Are the Sonics are covers, and not covers of songs that were then playing on the radio. They weren’t reinterpreting Dylan the way The Animals and The Byrds were. The only thing The Sonics knew how to do was play louder and harder and faster than anybody else in the universe, and loud hard and fast wasn’t a sellable commodity in the times leading up to LSD and “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pet Sounds and the Summer of Love. The Sonics motto wasn’t “Turn on, tune it, drop out.” It was “Turn on, fuck tuning, turn up as loud as humanly possible.”
I’ll tell you what Here Are the Sonics sounds like to me—the perfect frat party mix tape. Opener “The Witch” is a Roslie original, the band’s first single and the band’s big hit, by which I mean it really wowed the kids in the unhip vastness of the Pacific Northwest. Nix any notions about the song being proof that The Sonics were Satanists—they wouldn’t have known a pentagram from a pentangle, when get this they’re the same thing!
The witch in question is just a proto-Goth chick who dresses in black who you don’t want to get mixed up with because she’ll give you “the itch,” which makes her the sound like the kind of sexually-transmitted-disease-carrying female the WAC mom in “Surrender” warns her kid about! The song itself is great—it has this stop/start rhythm and is a real skull-crusher thanks to Bob Bennet’s proto-Bonham drum smash, and get this—in the studio they only used one microphone for Bennett’s entire kit, which left no less an authority on such things than Kurt Cobain stunned. He’d never heard anyone hit the drums harder. And the song’s primal guitar riff works in lockstep with Rob Lind’s saxophone, over top of which Gerry Roslie, who could out-scream anybody this side of Little Richard and wasn’t happy unless he demonstrated said skill at least five times on every song, shouts when other people would sing and screams when other people would shout.
The Sonics’cover of The Contours’ 1962 hit “Do You Love Me” (which, get this, The Contours only got to record because Motown’s Berry Gordy, who’d earmarked it for the Temptations, couldn’t find the Temps because they were in CHURCH) is over-the-top R&B-flavored raucous & roll, from Bennett’s hammering-at-the-gates-of-heaven intro to Roslie’s seven (I counted) blood-curdling screams, which you can actually rate by blood-curdlingness.
Song’s about a guy who couldn’t win his girl’s heart because he couldn’t cut a rug but he went to dancing school or something and now he can do the mashed potato and the twist and he keeps saying “Watch me now,” which I think Lou Reed stole for “Sweet Jane” but how am I supposed to prove it? I love the way Roslie sings “I can mash potatoes” instead of “I can mashed potato” like he’s trying to win his girl’s heart with his culinary skills, but what makes this song so great is it’s an atomic bomb—The Contours’ singer had lungs, but Roslie blows him to smithereens. Come 1973 Iggy Pop would sing about raw power. The Sonics had him beat by eight years.
Impossible to believe somebody, anybody, could breathe life into Chuck Berry’s hoary chestnut “Roll Over Beethoven,” but The Sonics kick the old warhorse in the caboose like they want to be the first to tell Tchaikovsky the news. The way Bennett hits the drums makes me think of Mike Tyson’s “Everybody has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth,” a trio of vocalists sing in tandem, and Roslie sends his fingers back and forth across the piano keys real zippy like. Throw in some handclaps and Parypa’s V2 guitar and what you have is a Biblical miracle—The Sonics don’t play the song so much as resurrect it, like Lazarus or Beethoven even, from the dead.
Roslie’s original “Boss Hoss” is a shambolic, high-velocity salute to his bitchin’ hotrod, and what hits you at first are Bennett’s slambamalam and Roslie’s hairy-chested vocals (he screams real good). Gary got the money to buy it from working after school, but I’m betting Rob Lind’s folks shelled out for his saxophone thinking he’d play very politely in the high-school marching band but came to regret it, because on his solo he plays the horn like it’s a 1×20 mm M61A1 Vulcan 6-barreled Gatling cannon just like the one he’d be using soon enough as a real life fighter pilot in Vietfuckingnam. Ack ack ack, don’t talk back.
And he does the same on follow-up “Dirty Robber,” a cover of an original by Tacoma band The Fabulous Wailers, who many consider America’s first garage rock band. But does he have a fuzz pedal on the thing? Sounds like it. Basic storyline: Roslie’s girl isn’t content to steal his heart—she steals his guitar too, but that’s okay because Gary’s a piano player! As he proves on the song, that is when he isn’t going “Waaaaaooooow!” Great guitar solo too, and Bennett hits the drums so hard knick-knacks were probably levitating above shelves in suburban tract houses from Seattle to Las Vegas.
The Sonics take Richard Berry and the Paroahs’s doo wop-flavored 1960 song “Have Love Will Travel” and make it their own by having the guitar, sax, and bass play the riff at the same time, while Roslie sings (to cop a line from Vivian Stanshall) like two separate gorillas and Bennett plays like two separate John Bonhams. And he slams the skins even harder on the Roslie original “Psycho,” on which Roslie sounds like three separate gorillas, serving up an album-topping scream to introduce a guitar solo that will incinerate your eyebrows before shutting things down (I’m talking about Roslie here) with five (you can count ‘em!) separate Little Richard barbaric yowls. And the wild thing is Roslie’s calling HER the psycho, which if she is, what does that make HIM? Warren Zevon’s excitable boy, I guess.
Next up is a cover of the “romance without finance is a nuisance” classic “Money (That’s What I Want),” which I’ve never liked and the Flying Lizards put me off forever, or so I thought until I heard The Sonics set it on fire, convincing me they don’t give a shit about the almighty green and may as well be COMMUNISTS. In short the words mean Bo Diddley—it’s the song they want, not money, because it gives them the perfect opportunity to make a currency-not-accepted racket. Roslie conserves all of his screams for one epic scream (the second and third come as mere aftershocks) and the way he manages to squeeze in that “stomp, shtomp, work it on out” is a marvel of vocal engineering. He must have used a shoehorn, I swear. The guitar solo is a marvel too.
The Sonics’ cover of Rufus Thomas’ “Walkin’ the Dog” is a pooch of a different color—Roslie adopts a slurred, laid-back approach on vocals, and instead of screaming he stutters and man is he a lousy stutterer but it’s actually endearing! And what with all the whistling and “Come here boy!” The Sonics’ version makes The Rolling Stones’ version sound like one tame Rover. The question is how they manage this, since Roslie’s doing a Jagger imitation, no doubt about it, and it took me a while to come up with the answer: Gary Roslie is a better Mick Jagger than Mick Jagger! Gary makes Mick sound like a slumming fop! Roslie was more than an Amazing Screaming Machine—he was one astounding mimic.
If “Walkin’ the Dog” is proof that Roslie’s something of a shapeshifter, he doubles down on the cover of Ray Charles’ (by way of Nappy Brown) “Night Time Is the Right Time,” which the Sonics give a rock feel thanks to Parypa’s guitar. Roslie goes black on the number, kicking Charles to the curb in favor of Little Richard. Not content to do a lot of extended screaming, he screams “Wow!” every chance he gets, and he gets a lot of chances. It’s amazing to hear his transformation into soul man, amazing too to hear Bennett NOT beating the drums on the head until they have to go to the ER. I don’t know how the band kept him from going Bonzo gonzo—maybe Roslie put a gun to his head, as Ronnie Van Zant is said to have done with Skynyrd drummer Bob Burns once. Guess “Saturday Nite Special” didn’t apply to Ronnie himself.
Some Herman Munster organ notes open band original and Nuggets fave “Strychnine,” in which Roslie claims it’s his favorite beverage when I’ll bet you his real preference was for Cream Soda. No matter, it’s a real go-getter what with guitar and sax working in lockstep and things slowly (by Sonics standards) hotter and hotter as the song goes along—why, Roslie doesn’t scream until the 35-second mark, which may be a personal record! Odd that the song most people think of when they think of The Sonics should be far from their most unhinged. Must be the whole “I prefer my poison to be poisonous” angle that gives the song its punk cachet—makes ‘em look like a pack of berserkers, when I suspect they swept the garage floor after practice, and even made sure dad’s tools were all in their proper place.
“Good Golly Miss Molly” is the one that hits me the least, because they were competing with Little Richard on his own turf and that was far crazier than drinking strychnine. Roslie can’t outscream him or match him on the old 88s, and by his barbaric standards Bennett sounds almost… subdued. Which isn’t to say the number doesn’t motorvate. And I’ll wager it sent the kids into a frenzy at St. Mary’s Parish Hall.
The Sonics were unselfconscious pioneers because it never occurred to them that they were pioneers. And they showed up at the wrong time–they were peddling a radical but anything but cutting edge sound attached to the songs of years gone by. They never stood a chance against the new recording techniques and psychedelic tidal wave that would make their hard-driving covers sound, if not quaint, certainly not hip. They weren’t far out or freaky or Dylan profound—they were covering songs The Beatles and Stones had long abandoned in favor of originals that spoke to a new generation.
It’s no shock that they got passed by—it was inevitable. 1965 was the year of Dylan and The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and The Byrds and The Who and The Lovin’ Spoonful and I could go on. The Sonics were covering oldies and may as well have been dinosaurs and they were treated accordingly. It wasn’t until bands like The Stooges and The MC5 came along that people even began to come to grips with their primal power, and by that time they were ancient history that never made it into the history books. Why, they may as well have been Bigfoot, a myth emitting bloodcurdling screams in the forests of the Pacific Northwest at night, waiting for a cult of believers to be born.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
