Tacoma, 1960: Two music-loving parents encourage their two sons to form a group, mum playing bass in rehearsals. Four years later with a different line-up* the band are making a noise on the local scene when Buck Ornsby the bassist from the Wailers** recruited them for their label. Early ’65 they cut their debut LP and changed music for ever; not all of it, just all the bits I like.
Leeds, 1991: My mate Matt asks me if I like the Sonics, confusion reigns as I assume he was referring to Sonic Youth in an overly familiar way. He hands me a C90 cassette with their only two albums on. I stick it on my cheap tape machine and it’s the only thing I play for a fortnight, the only thing I need.
Undisclosed bunker location, 2026: Here Are The Sonics is still vanquishing allcomers 35 years after I first pressed ‘play’, 62 years after it was released it is still making huge tranches of every single fucking thing I’ve played ever since sound insipid and underpowered. Boom!
Somehow these guys, along with Buck Ornsby producing, managed to catch lightning in a bottle. Recorded in a country and western studio, Audio Recording in Seattle, the Sonics ripped the soundproofing off the walls to make their sound live-r and were set up with two mics, one for the drums, one for everything else. Boy did it work!
Here Are The Sonics has one of the very best rock drum sounds ever captured^^ and there is a genuine air of mania and barely-suppressed violence crackling throughout every second of this performance. Even listening today I catch myself wondering how this LP was allowed? who sanctioned its release? then and now, it astonishes.
Proof? okay cue up the Sonics take on ‘Have Love Will Travel’, a cover of Richard Berry’s 1960 single. The Sonics have run it through a primitive Louie-Louie-Death-Ray-O-Matic-Smasher and the result is a low-slung thuggish knuckle dragger, which is brilliant. Then everything explodes into technicolour when a viciously scything, strafing sax break seemingly lurches in from nowhere. The affect is exactly like being punched in the face when you’re not expecting it.
Flip the beast and we get the Sonics best original, ‘Psycho’. Lead screamer Gerry Roslie really earns his daily bread here forcefully driving the whole song with absolute brute vocal force and then when he gets to the screaming … yeah. The bit where his scream melts into Larry Parypa’s unhinged guitar break … yeah. This music thing doesn’t get much better than this for me.
The band’s other originals ‘The Witch’, ‘Strychnine’ and ‘Boss Hoss’ are all blasters; each of them has been my favourite at different times. The band really could put a melody and a beat together, ‘Strychnine’ particularly stands the test of time^*.
In 1964 it was a very rare LP indeed that was created for LP’s sake, the whole point was to capture an act as they were, mostly for dancing purposes. So Here Are The Sonics is liberally sprinkled with the covers the band was performing in their set – Rufus Thomas, Little Richard, Berry Gordy Jr (twice!), Chuck Berry, the Wailers (I detect the hand of Mr Ornsby in this) and Nappy Brown. Each one pretty much run through the band’s own primitive lens and some better for it.
To wit I offer you the case of ‘Do You Love Me’, rarely has a question sounded quite as threatening – hell they even dispense with the question mark. I love love love the cover of ‘Nighttime Is The Right Time’ where Roslie excels again before Parypa just lets loose with that guitar again.
Throughout the band just absolutely smokes, drummer Bob Bennett is credited as ‘skin-driver’ and is well worthy of a mention in despatches, as is saxman (and future fighter pilot) Rob Lind, his sax is often mistaken for a fuzztone guitar in the mix; that’s a very good thing.
Like all too many protopunk garage prophets the Sonics enjoyed success in their locality before buckling and warping chasing success that never came. After a great second LP they were much diminished.
Just as those lone and level sands stretched far away, aural archaeologists dug them up and hipped others onto them who really dug them. The spirit of Here Are The Sonics and the influence of its bellicose sound informs all manner of punkers (of both the proto and terminal varieties) and later grunge bands.
Finding the Sonics felt like a return to base for me, they had influenced so many people I loved already, I was always going to fall hard for this righteous racket.
I commend Here Are The Sonics to you all gentle readers, it helps.
1307 Down.
*mum was ditched.
**of ‘Tall Cool One’ fame^.
^although ‘fame’ may be overegging it a tad. Still, its brilliant:
^^One Mr K Cobain of a nearby parish thought so.
^*the Fall did a particularly great cover of it on a John Peel session that I used to have on cassette.
The Fall were my intro to The Sonics, brilliant stuff. “… righteous racket”, I like that as well. Notebooks out, plagiaristic!
Thanks Tim. I do like me some righteous racket.
Love that closing line, “I was always going to fall hard for this righteous racket.”
Thank you Bruce!