Return of the Sonics’ boom
The garage rockers, a prototype for countless bands that followed, are back with raw sound
The Sonics of today operate much as the influential garage-rock band did during its brief run in the mid-1960s.
“We come out, and I mean this in a nice way, but we come out to punch you right in the mouth,” saxophonist Rob Lind says. “Our goal from the first song is to make people take two steps back.”
Disregard the early pioneers of rock ’n’ roll from the 1950s and toss aside the ubiquitous Beatles. Do that, and the Sonics hold as strong a stake as “the most influential rock band” as any group that has taken the stage and thrown its musical punches.
The cliché about bands such as the Velvet Underground and Big Star is that the scant few people who bought their albums upon release all started bands. The Sonics’ sway is more obvious and more widespread.
The band made music over the course of three years in the ’60s that became the prototype for garage rock, in turn informing a half century of subsequent garage rock, punk, hard rock, stoner rock, doom, grunge, metal and every flipping two-person band that has sprung up like heads on a hydra over the past 15 years — most notably the White Stripes and Black Keys.
Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant and Nirvana all cited the Sonics as a predecessor. The Hives took the energy and aesthetics of the Sonics’ “Have Love Will Travel” and essentially built a band around it. IKEA Sonics, if you will.
The Sonics are a decade into coming back to life, though they remain fairly scarce. That scarcity has worked in the band’s favor. When the Sonics cracked up in 1967, the band was protected from decades of musical trends that would’ve muddied the purity of the group’s primal sound.
“It did work out well because we didn’t get influenced or polluted by the 1970s,” Lind says. “We weren’t influenced by disco bands, hair bands, metal bands. When we started back up in 2007, it was like 1965. We started where we left off. It’s all we knew. We never could be the Eagles or the Byrds. We never tried four-part harmonies. What we are now is what we’ve always been.”
The Sonics’ beginnings were in Tacoma, Wash. Lind is quick to make distinctions between the city and nearby Seattle, which he described as “more metropolitan and urbane.
“Tacoma was more waterfront working class,” he says. “Our dads were all blue-collar, workingclass men. My dad worked a crane loading lumber onto ships.” Seattle had jazz bands. “Those guys were jazzy and swingy and into musicianship,” Lind says with a touch of mustard in his voice.
So when Lind, singer/ keyboardist Gerry Roslie, guitarist Larry Parypa, drummer Bob Bennett and bassist Andy Parypa started making music together, they went in another direction.
“People ask how we decided to invent garage rock,” Lind says. “That name came 20 years later. All we were trying to do was play rock ’n’ roll. To play Little Richard songs. Our drummer played as hard as he could. Our singer screamed his guts out. We put everything we had into it. We saw the crowd liked that. So we did it more.”
The songs were also unnerving for the era. “Some folks like water,” Roslie growled. “Some folks like wine. But I like the taste of straight strychnine.”
The band made only two albums — both between 1965 and 1966: “Here Are the Sonics!!!” and “Boom.” They mixed originals that would become garage-rock standards: “The Witch,” “Boss Hoss” and “Strychnine.” And they also roared through more familiar songs of the era, such as “Have Love Will Travel,” which has since shown up in a beer commercial and has also been covered by Sonics acolytes the Black Keys.
The rawness of the recordings sprung in part from the band’s brutish approach to performing live. But the Sonics were also on a tight budget that didn’t allow for multiple takes of any one song to be recorded.
“If we’d been smart, we would’ve rehearsed before going into the studio,” Lind says. “We went in, tuned up, and it was, ‘OK, what do you want to do?’ Jerry sang ‘Have Love Will Travel’ in one take. They asked, ‘Rob, do you want to play a sax solo?’ So I played that off the top of my head.”
Bands have for years attempted to replicate the primitivism of those records.
“It’s the sound of the records, as well as the spooky lyrics, that set them so far ahead of a lot of other ’60s garage bands,” says Scott McCaughey, frontman of the Young Fresh Fellows and the Minus 5, two current Pacific Northwest bands. “History has proven them geniuses, and the drum sound has probably never been bettered.”
And just like Lind’s “Have Love” solo, a necksnapping tat-tat-tat of notes, the Sonics were gone.
“It wasn’t a situation where we were giving each other obscene gestures and saying, ‘I never want to see you again,’ ” Lind says. “Life just hit us.”
Roslie started working in an asphalt business, Larry Parypa got into insurance. Lind enlisted in the Navy and ended up a pilot flying over South Vietnam and Laos. “Laos was a bad place at that time,” he says. “I was always incredibly alert until I crossed over into South Vietnam. It wasn’t the best place to be.”
He recalls drinking in an officers club where a Filipino band was playing. The saxophone player was a Sonics fan, so Lind was called into lighter duty for a few minutes.
When he got back to the States, Lind, like the other Sonics, found work outside music. He made a career as a commercial airline pilot.
In the Sonics’ absence, the band’s sound took root.
“The two true Sonics LPs of the time are hugely influential,” McCaughey says. “Not just in the raw punk-garage sound — though that obviously was huge — but also in the DIY aspect. A group of like-minded local bands that created a scene, a label, publishing company, live gigging circuit. I see them as the godfathers of bands like the Young Fresh Fellows and Mudhoney. And they were surely inspiration to the founders of Sub Pop and all the other cool labels that popped up in the Northwest. I guess you could argue that without the Sonics, there may not have been a Seattle scene or a “grunge” movement.
“I can’t rank them as influential as the Beatles, Beach Boys, Stones, Who, Kinks. But no doubt they were a heavy influence on other influential groups — the Cramps, White Stripes, Mudhoney, Nirvana. Considering them a seminal proto-metal band might be a stretch, but all that heaviness had to come from somewhere, and those records were about as heavy as you could get in 1965, along with the Kinks, anyway.”
In 2000, the Experience Music Project Museum opened in Seattle and made the Sonics an offer to reunite for the site’s grand opening. They passed, so McCaughey and members of Mudhoney assembled as a Sonics cover band.
In 2007, the New York festival Cavestomp! made the Sonics another offer, and the core trio of Roslie, Larry Parypa and Lind returned to the stage.
“We made a deal with each other,” Lind says. “We decided if we could do it, and be good at it, and protect the legacy of the Sonics from the ’60s, we could do it. But we swore if it wasn’t working, we wouldn’t let ourselves be pathetic.”
The response was strongly favorable.
“They were really good,” McCaughey says. “Certainly that’s not always the case with bands from the ’60s who try to cash in late in their years.”
The band slipped right back into its groove. A few more shows followed, including some dates with Robert Plant, who selected the Sonics as his opener.
The members also had kids approaching them after shows, talking about their favorite modern bands who steered credit to the Sonics.
“We really had no idea,” Lind says.
The group waited a spell before releasing “This Is the Sonics,” in 2015, with Dusty Watson on drums and Freddie Dennis on bass and vocals. Watson’s punk credits date to the ’70s, and Dennis did time in the Kingsmen in the ’70s, so his garage-rock bona fides are square.
The Sonics’ third album followed its predecessor by 50 years. As with the show, they wanted it to be right. The members knew they couldn’t “just make an album of ’60s songs like all this time hadn’t passed,” Lind says.
“This Is the Sonics” nicely captures the band’s energy without sounding like a museum piece. It retains the rawness of old.
Since that album came out, Roslie’s health has forced him out of touring, so for this rare Texas tour, Dennis will do the screaming. Larry Parypa, too, has had to curb his appearances and will likely have Evan Foster of the Boss Martians playing his role on guitar. Which leaves Lind as the last original Sonic standing. He says the right players are in place to keep the Sonics’ sound alive.
And they’ll run through those familiar songs from decades ago. Neither Sonics’ album made Rolling Stone’s “40 most groundbreaking albums of all time” listicle. But those who care to know, know.
“We just didn’t know any of this until years later,” Lind says. “And when these other bands exploded all over the world, I was thrilled for them. And proud of them, especially Nirvana and Pearl Jam and those bands from the Northwest. I wish it happened for us, but it just wasn’t the right time. Things were regional. And we were locked in the garage.”