Here Are The Sonics, 60 Years Later

The following explains quite literally everything you need to know about how I experience music:

Before I ever heard the Beatles, I heard the Sonics.

Jerry Roslie (or Gerry, as it’s spelled in the liner notes): lead vocals, keys

Rob Lind: saxophone, vocals

Larry Parypa: guitar, vocals

Andy Parypa: bass, vocals

Bob Bennett: drums

design by John Vlahovich, photographed by Jini Dellaccio

So this is new.

For the first time in Vinyl Monday history, I’ve been too sick to make a video version of the review! I was too stuffed-up to film - no one deserves to hear me sound any more nasally than I do to begin with. Lucky for you, I am physically incapable doing nothing. So the Devoetees, Abble Scruffs, or simply Dave (I’ll be hosting a poll soon to figure out a name for you all) get this text version of Vinyl Monday first.

Being laid out in bed for a few days gave me some extra time to ruminate on the band in question. It’s true. I heard the Sonics before I ever heard the Beatles. Have Love Will Travel beat “You Can’t Do That” to my ears by a week when I was 13. These five schoolboys from Tacoma, Washington, dictated a lot of the sounds I'd go on to love.

What does most all of it all have in common? Absolutely crunchy recording fidelity and a delightful unsophistocation. Mark Arm of Mudhoney said the Sonics were “rooted in kind of ’50s R&B rock-and-roll, but like, as played by a freight train.” What really grabs me about their sound is that, when Here Are The Sonics was recorded, there were no fuzz boxes. Those only came on the market after they broke up. How did you get this crunchy distorted sound back then? Either you stabbed holes in the cones of your amps with a pencil or simply overdrive every amp you had! The latter is exactly what the Sonics did. Fuzz before fuzz. And how did you get reverb? You just shoved someone in a bathroom with a mic. That’s exactly what they did with Rob Lind recording Psycho!

I saw a comment under the White Light White Heat episode that was like, “No album is ahead of its time. Every album is of its time. You can say ‘influential’ but any album made in a certain year belongs to that time in history-” I’m sorry, that’s some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.

Seattle radio station programmers were shitting themselves when they were given “The Witch” to play.

When you put the Sonics next to most any other R&B-based band of the time, say the Rolling Stones, they’re the definition of ahead of their time! The only thing vaguely similar I can come up with were the Kinks, but they were across the pond and went in a way different direction.

Mike McCready of Pearl Jam described the Sonics as a primordial force. “They were before everybody and it was dark…” The most forward-attacking things about Here Are The Sonics are the vocals and drumming. Jerry Roslie and Bob Bennett are the undisputed MVPs of this album.

I don't want to spoil the story of The Witch before the video is out. But Here Are The Sonics’s opener pretty much lays out everything you need to know about the Sonics. “The Witch” was originally supposed to be dance craze bait. Do the mashed potato! Do the twist! Do...the witch? When Buck and the guys told Jerry that was fucking stupid, he instead reworked into the long tradition of rock-and-roll songs about the evil no-good woman. Of course, this came from the blues tradition. But Jerry’s search for a rhyme appears to have made this one about a girl with an STD! “She’s gonna make you itch/Cause she’s the witch!”

Incredible. No notes.

“The Witch” isn’t much more than two chords, maybe a third thrown in for the turnaround, that everyone plays together: guitar, bass, organ, and saxophone. They all link on the “Gatling-gun snare hook,” as Peter Bleecha phrased it. The rhythm section plus Rob Lind playing this motif make it sound like a ’60s Halloween novelty song in the best way possible. It’s not a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, it’s peering over the edge of your bed hoping whatever’s under there doesn’t grab you and drag you away. Jerry’s Wurlitzer wobbles, the saxophone buzzes. It’s high-voltage, like one of Dr. Frankenstein’s resurrecting contraptions. Pair that with Jerry’s electrocution screams and it’s perfect. He sounds like a mad scientist when the experiment’s gone wrong!

“The Witch” is driven into your skull by the “atomic tub-thumping” (no, not THAT Tubthumping!) of Bob. I don’t think you understand how hard Bob had to drum to sound like this on a record in 1965. Actually, it would’ve been ’64 when they recorded this! Back then, drummers weren’t mic’d. Bob would’ve been breaking sticks and heads left and right to cut through everyone in front of him.

He fires us into the beginning of Do You Love Me like a goddamn cannon. This is the first of the eight covers on Here Are The Sonics. Originally recorded by the Contours as an R&B tune, it’s become a certifiable rock-and-roll staple thanks to garage bands like the Sonics who loved it – and played it to death. While we love the Sonicsfor their sound, oft described as “primitive,” they were a rock-and-roll band at their core. Though there’s a noticeable improvement in recording fidelity between “The Witch” and this – they would’ve switched to Audio Recording Studio by now – everything still kinda mushes together. Sometimes you can pick out the saxophone. You can never pick out a bass guitar. You just kinda have to trust that it’s there. That’s by no fault of the guys. Since they were confined to 2-track, it seems Buck and the engineers had to pick one or two instruments to spotlight on each song. For “Do You Love Me,” they picked the vocals and piano. We get to hear Rob plus Larry and Andy Parypa on some awesome call-and-response. “Do the mashed potato!” “Mashed potato!” “I can do the twist!” “Do the twist!”

Jerry gets to play like a runaway train, mashing those chords out with glee. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! He’s at his whooping, hollering best on “Do You Love Me.” I hear more Little Richard than Screamin Jay in him here, especially in that last excitable “WAAAAH!” through the fadeout. He brings the energy.

If you’re not dancing, that’s not his problem!

Roll Over Beethoven is of course by rock-and-roll’s first guitar hero, Chuck Berry. He inspired so many teen boys of the ’50s and early ’60s to pick up an instrument, it’s honestly insane just how much of rock-and-roll he’s responsible for. Naturally, Larry and Jerry were chosen to be in the spotlight. This is a ’50s rock-and-roll tune, after all. You can’t have that without guitar and piano. The whole-arm swathes at the end had me cracking up. This is a group of neighborhood boys in a real recording studio making their very first album. They’re gonna exalt their heroes and ham it up while doing it. Note the juvenile, flat vocal delivery (I can’t find who sings lead on this one, but I know it wasn’t Jerry) and the delightfully off-beat hand-claps; you have to wonder if the playback system was broken when they dubbed these in!

Boss Hoss was written about Andy’s new car. It’s the weakest of the originals here. Awkward lines: “Everyone is so jealous at me” and “With this car I just can’t lose.” But you have to understand this is an album made by a band of under-20s. They write about cars and girls. Rob is finally picked to be center stage, and there he’ll stay for pretty much the rest of the LP. He buzzes away through the track and even gets a fire-spitting solo! It’s very rare nowadays that a saxophone makes it onto a rock record unless it’s a conscious reference to the pre-Beatles era (or maybe the Boss,) it’s so of its time.

Speaking of exalting their heroes: the Sonics covered their hero-band the Wailers (no, not those Wailers) and their song, Dirty Robber.

Listen to the Wailers’ version above and you’ll pick out strands of the Sonics’ DNA with ease. The rock-and-roll saxophone, high-energy vocal delivery, and 12-bar boogie-woogie arrangements are all there.

The Sonics put their “Dirty Robber” into overdrive. Kick up the tempo, hard-fire the drums, let Larry rip on a guitar solo, and a shockwave scream for good measure. That’s the Sonics formula and they’re sticking to it, dammit. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! If you can believe it, Jerry actually takes the vocals down a notch so he doesn’t completely explode on his screams...or run up any higher of a studio bill than they had already. He totally blew out the mic before this. You can hear the static. He’s clipping all over the place!

I’ve cited “Have Love Will Travel” in several past episodes as the song that rewired my brain. It’s now considered the Sonics’ signature song; despite being originally recorded by Richard Berry (no relation to Chuck) and the Pharaohs. It blew my mind that “Have Love Will Travel” was just a B-side for the Sonics! If I were at Etiquette, I would’ve issued this as a single pronto after the success of “The Witch.” The Sonics made some changes from the original; namely bringing the key down from G to C as not to kill Jerry. Larry took the original’s doo-woppy vocalizations, tweaked the notes slightly, and made it into the riff. He sets the groove in a twanging, almost Western way before Jerry rips into it with that iconic mic-wrecking “WAAAOH!”

Like “The Witch,” “Have Love Will Travel” works because of the sheer force of all the guys locking down on that riff. No one ever quite makes it up to the top note, giving it this ultra-cool snarl. The Parypa brothers pile-drive the song forward, Bob hammers it in so hard you’ll need a crowbar to get it out. Rob gives it this supercharged buzz. He’s one of the major draws of the Sonics’ “Have Love Will Travel” ...though I might be biased because this was the first rock-and-roll saxophone solo I’d ever heard. He pumps just about everything he’s got into it; burning rubber and leaving a trail of smoke in his wake.

And of course, there’s Jerry.

I don’t remember who said this, but the best rock-and-roll makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong by listening to it.

Jerry’s screams, yelps, ad-libs, and honks are what’s so right about doing wrong. His delivery is so convincing that for a decade I just assumed this was a Sonics original! That’s just how I felt when I was 13 listening to Jerry crank away at “Have Love Will Travel,” it’s still how I feel about it at almost 26. Holy fucking shit, I’ve been listening to “Have Love Will Travel” for almost half my life!

Side B kicks off with the machine gun fire of "Psycho." For the life of me, I cannot figure out why Bob’s drum break hasn’t been sampled up the wazoo. It’s the Amen Break four years before “Amen Brother!”

Whatever echo Buck attempted to put on Rob, it’s entirely swamped by the sheer onslaught of sound coming from the other four guys. So much for that. There’s a lot of funny stuff going on with “Psycho”’s recording. You can very clearly tell a different take was used on the key change, if not a take from a completely different studio!

“Psycho” so clearly shares its DNA with “Do You Love Me;” the chord progressions are just about bang-on. Where they deviate is the lyrics. Instead of listing off all the dance crazes he knows to impress his lover, Jerry wails of being under such emotional duress from this girl he’s losing it. He sure does sound like he’s losing it; his delivery is especially frenzied. Damn near hysterical! “Psycho” is also one of those exceedingly rare moments on Here Are The Sonics where the guitar does something different from everyone else. Larry’s loose-stringed strums rise above the rhythm section bone crush, and his solo just about lit a highway flare in the room.

The guys inject their manic lifeforce into Barrett Strong’s Money (That’s What I Want.) Now THIS was a rock-and-roll staple. It smacked the airwaves at just the right time. In August of 1959, a lot of the ’60s band guys were still in Boy Scouts. Or whatever the British equivalent of the Scouts were. We all know the Beatles’ rendition, but I have to take some time to give the Liverbirds their flowers for theirs.

(If you like what you heard, there’s a whole Dolls Pod episode about the Liverbirds!)

Of course the Sonics crank up the tempo of “Money,” but in doing so they lost the opportunity for those essential “That’s! What I want!” backing vocals. The song is literally called “Money (That’s What I Want)!” Larry throws these angular jaunts into the verses. This style of licks would become integral to the history of alt-rock: Talking Heads, The Clash, even Blur. Jerry throws in obligatory R&B dance hall ad-libs: “Stomp, shomp! Work it on out!” Or at least that’s what I think that’s what he says? There’s no official posting of the lyrics anywhere, and the vocals are so compressed that this whole album’s vowels are just fucked!

The Sonics take on some more rock standards in the form of Walkin’ The Dog and Night Time Is The Right Time. Though Jerry gets to womp it up to his Screamin’ Jay fullest on the downtempo “Night Time,” these two tracks are a clear dip in quality on Here Are The Sonics. That’s the one thing about this album. After nine or 10songs of plaster-you-to-the-wall two-minutes-and-change rockers, it gets redundant. You can tell these guys only knew this handful of chords. They were still pretty green as far as writing their own material went. But this knuckle-dragging brutality was the Northwest sound. The original Northwest sound! This was a local band out of a scene of local bands, and this is what the local bands played.

On the surface, Strychnine is about drinking poison for the hell of it; even harking it to others. “If you listen to what I say, you’ll try strychnine someday.” A careful lick on the keys, like peeking around a darkened corner, isanswered by Rob descending into the central motif. I know the Velvet Underground had no idea the Sonics existed – no one did until well into the ’80s – but this drumming is just like Mo Tucker’s on “Heroin.” Primitive, triangular, aggressive. The “Strychnine” riff feels like it’s upside down. It’s bizarre, bossy, loud basement-party rock and more Little Richardstein’s Monster vocals. But it’s pretty plain to see this isn’t a song about literalpoison. If “the Shangri-Las incident” is any indication, “Strychnine” song is about alcohol. “You may think it’s funny that I like this stuff/But once you’ve tried it, you can’t get enough.” Drinking cheap liquor will feel like drinking poison. Just ask college me!

Unfortunately, Here Are The Sonics ends with a lackluster cover of Good Golly Miss Molly. I’ll still dance to it. It’s impossible not to move to the Sonics. But this is the epitome of party rock. You’d just play something like this or throw it on to just get people moving. Considering the great material we’ve had before this – “The Witch,” “Have Love Will Travel,” “Psycho,” even their better covers like “Do You Love Me” – “Good Golly Miss Molly” is just good.

On the one hand, Here Are The Sonics is an album of standards every young rock band was playing at the time. Every band starts out as a really great cover band. You went to a birthday party, dance, barbecue, graduation, even a wedding, and these are the songs you’d hear. If you could play “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Money,” and a “Good Golly Miss Molly” worth listening to, you were on track. But on the other hand. You did NOT play any of those songs like THIS. Especially in 1965. The Sonics dipped their toe into spooky subject matter – hello, the Cramps!

The Sonics’ contemporaries – the Wailers, the Kingsmen, the Dynamics – sure weren’t singing about witches, psychos, or drinking poison. Paul Revere and the Raiders sure as shit weren’t!

But even when the Sonics played other people’s songs, they played them loud, aggressive, and delectably unrefined. They didn’t just play the standards, they unleashed themselves upon them. We’d have to wait over a decade for that quality to come back to rock-and-roll.

As for what happened to the Sonics? Etiquette Records erroneously put the kabosh on negotiations with Columbia; the indie label’s hubris told them they could get the Sonics further than a major label could. The guys’ move to California was ill-timed; the happy hippie Mecca just didn’t have the space for a rough-and-ready garage band. Something convinced them to cover Frank Zappa? And their 3rd LP tanked so hard it broke up the band. All the guys got big-boy jobs. Rob went into the military, Larry worked for an insurance firm, Andy was a wood shop teacher. Jerry started an asphalt business. Bob moved to Hawaii and became a car salesman. It’s all so crushingly...normal. As the recently-departed Bob Bennett said in Boom,

“I don’t know if we’d all like to forget about the Sonics...but I think we all still have a lot of the Sonics in us. It was a great band, even if we didn’t know it at the time.”

quoted from: Boom: A Film About the Sonics (dir. Jordan Albertsen, 2024)

It took decades for the Sonics to break out of their little Washington state bubble. But thanks to inclusions on a few compilations, the God of grunge himself Kurt Cobain’s endorsement…

“The Sonics recorded very, very cheaply on a two-track, you know, and they just used one microphone over the drums, and they got the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard. Still to this day, it’s still my favorite drum sound. It sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever known.” – Kurt Cobain, in interview with Nardwuar, 1/4/1994

“I hate the Sonics. They’re stupid.” – also Kurt Cobain, in interview with Nardwuar, 1/4/1994

well...kind of.

And a documentary that took 12 years to complete, these five guys from Tacoma finally got their dues. As for the documentary in question? It’s alright! It looks like a California denizen made it (and not in a good way,) and for a film with the subtitle A Film About The Sonics, it spends far too much of its 70-minute run time not about the Sonics. But hell, I’ll take it. I scoured for a book about these guys, and all I could find was an anthology of Pacific Northwest rock music. It’s about damn time someone told this band’s story.

You could’ve mellowed the Sonics out to sound like the Stones. They might’ve fared better on the radio that way. But that’d be copacetic. The Sonics were a garage band in the truest sense. Playing in garages doesn’t sound “good.” They’re so jagged around the edges, they might just have been the birth of garage punk. Or “proto-punk,” as we’d call it today. The Sonics came from an industrial city, that’s one of the few requirements for thatlabel in my book. And they certainly had the attitude.

Birth of proto-punk or not, the Sonics were absolutely the birth of my love for the genre. These guys had me seeking it out before I knew what it was. It’s very similar to how Siamese Dream, my first favorite album, dictated my music taste. The Sonics dictated the need for noise. From a production standpoint, Buck Ormsby did everything wrong with the Sonics. This is 2-track recording, mind you! And every single thing is overdriven to hell! But never before did a band so technically “wrong” in approach end up so right. They’re so wrong they wrapped around to the other end of the spectrum. But it fits. All the best rock feels like you’re doing something wrong by listening to it. 60 years later, Here Are The Sonics was so “wrong,” it was revolutionary.

Personal favorites: “The Witch,” “Do You Love Me,” “Have Love Will Travel,” “Psycho”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode below!

Albertsen, Jordan, dir. Boom: A Film About the Sonics. The Forge, 2024.

Bleecha, Peter. Sonic Boom: The History of Northwest Rock, from “Louie Louie” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2009.

MacKinney, Lisa. Dressed In Black: The Shangri-Las and Their Recorded History. Portland: Verse Chorus Press, 2025.

Swetz, Jenna. “Grandfathers of Grunge: The Sonics.” Tales of Tacoma, 5/15/2023. https://tacomatales.org/2023/05/15/grandfathers-of-grunge-the-sonics/

“Nardwuar vs. Nirvana pt 2 of 3.” originally filmed 1/4/1994. YouTube, Nardwuar, 5/25/2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHNEQFYiV4U