[Today: Abrasive, savage, beautiful...]
Here Are The Sonics!!! is as abrasive, nasty and raw as you can possibly hope for from an album that dropped in 1965, near the height of Beatlemania. Founded in Tacoma, WA in 1960, The Sonics rotated through several different members before coalescing into their classic lineup: Andy Parypa on guitar, his brother Larry on bass, Bob Bennett behind the skins, Rob Lind on sax, and Gerry Roslie handling piano and vocals. Said Bennett in the reissue liner notes, “We wanted people to gasp, we wanted people to go ‘oh my gawd!’ And so that’s how we approached it. We wanted to blow people off their feet, not just with loudness, but with tightness, with music that made you want to dance.”
The most gasp-inducing element of The Sonics’ music has to be Roslie’s tonsil-shredding screams that punctuate nearly every other line of lyrics. His hyper-aggressive singing enabled a band of barely competent teens to pull off covers of well-known tunes like ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. Andy Parypa’s guitar is set for max distortion, and the band’s lack of chops only enhances the brutality of their sound. Their first single, ‘The Witch’ was originally written as a do-the-twist style dance number, before mutating into a heavy classic. The band was heartbroken by the result of the session, but Etiquette Records founder Buck Ormsby went ahead and released the song anyway, because he liked it.
When both ‘The Witch’ and B-side ‘Psycho’ shot up the charts, the group was rushed into the studio to record a full-length LP. Out of necessity, it was mostly covers with a few originals thrown in. But those originals – including ‘The Witch’ ‘Psycho’ and ‘Strychnine’ – are now considered to be some of the original blueprints for punk. Even though they had a massive local following and proved to be hugely influential, The Sonics’ sound was too savage for a national following, and they were never able to break through to a larger audience. And so after a handful of scorching albums, they quietly called it quits at the end of the 60s…
Listen: Psycho
Listen: Strychnine
Listen: The Witch
Tags: Andy Parypa, Bob Bennett, Buck Ormsby, debut album, Etiquette Records, Gerry Roslie, Here Are The Sonics, Larry Parypa, Rob Lind, The Sonics
30 April 2010 at 9:40 pm |
thanks for another good tip! They sound like a surf band that couldn’t play their instruments, but there is a certain something that makes them a good listen! Very cool!
1 May 2010 at 4:55 pm |
[...] still…) so I didn’t buy any new albums. I did find a beat up but very playable copy of Here Are The Sonics!!! and a thrashed but playable copy of Neil Young’s On The Beach, so good things can be found in [...]