I KNEW THE DIFFERENCE between the basketball team and the 50’s rock-n-roll band ‘The Sonics’ early on because whenever I would talk about rock n roll, my dad would brag about knowing one of the members of the band.
Now and again, he would show me one of their records he had upstairs in the attic just to prove his point.
One day out of total pre-teenager curiosity, I started going through a stack of my dad’s records. “Peter Gunn” was the first record I put on. Right away, I had picked out the notes of the main verse on Grandpa’s acoustic guitar. The main riff was so tuff. So sexy sounding. I didn’t need to learn the rest of the song. Then, it was The Ventures. “Walk Don’t Run.” Real quick, I had gotten sick of the instrumentals. I loved the dirty guitar, the heavy bass guitar, the almost jungle beats of the drums, but I needed more. I had gone from The Partridge Family to KISS in the matter of one summer. I needed some kind of vocals to grab onto somewhere. I needed what they call a ‘Vocal Hook.’
Next, I put on the “Here Are The Sonics.”
And it was just like hearing KISS the first time, or like when I heard Van Halen for the first time. Everything changed. This music was like a horror movie. The drums were loud. The guitars were loud. And the singer screamed like the devil. It made me happy, scared and kind of nervous all at the same time. Was this what they call ‘Devil Music?’
I hope so.
The Sonics were from Bremerton.
I knew that my dad knew them. And my friend Shawn was taking drum lessons from one of the younger Parypa brothers. All of a sudden, local music was a big thing to me. I was just a young kid, but I had to know what was going on around town. I always had to know something I thought no one else knew. I would sit at the used record store on Pacific Ave and read the Rocket Magazine from front to back. I would listen to the older kids talk about going to Natasha’s to see bands. I would search the used record bins for anything I thought was local rock-n-roll.
This was the beginning of opening my ears, eyes, and mind to new music. This is also how I ended up stumbling onto this thing they call “Punk Rock.”
One day, after riding BMX in Hell’s Hole with the Russell brothers, they sat me down and played me the B-52’s and Devo. They ended with Iggy and The Stooges. I sat through the B-52’S and Devo. It was catchy, it was cool, it was new, and different, but when the needle landed on that Stooges record, and that noise started, everything kind of changed inside me again.
I got up, went right home and dug out that old Sonics record.
I listened to it differently this time. I felt those distorted, uptempo, pounding drums differently. I heard the evil vocals in a different way. I listened to the low fidelity recording differently. I felt the urgency differently, and once again… I felt like I knew something no one else did.
When my friend Burt first turned me on to the Ramones and the Los Angeles band “X,” I was only moderately impressed at first listen because I knew the first Punk Rock band actually came from right down the street on Ironsides Ave in Bremerton.
They are the fucking Sonics!
I have spent almost all my entire musical journey thinking all of that… until recently while sitting in the Roxy Theater, watching ‘BOOM: A Film About The Sonics.’
Here I am in Downtown Bremerton on a dark, rainy Saturday summer afternoon. I am somehow one of the youngest people in an almost empty movie theater, and we are about to watch a documentary on a band that I was always the first to know everything about. At the time, I even felt like I had the one up on this documentary.
Ten years prior by strange luck, I had a friend in the production crew at The Moore Theater. He gave me an all access pass to see The Sonics reunion show. I happened to be a fly on the wall backstage that night where pieces of this particular documentary was being filmed at the time.
I have been waiting for this documentary to hit the streets for like a decade now.
As one might expect, the film starts right off the bat with narration and clips of Jordan Albertson, the director, telling you his inspiration for doing the film. Then, a few burnt out grunge guys talk about The Sonics being a huge inspiration on them, and their sound.
I started feeling like they might as well have had my know-it-all ass in there talking at this point. Then, kind of like a Tarantino film, it shifts. And the real story with the real musicians, producers, managers and record label owners of The Sonics kicks right in like a cop’s foot through the front door of a trap house.
Yes, I knew pieces of the band’s history, but I did not know all of the history. And that’s what makes “BOOM: A Film About The Sonics” fresh and entertaining to me personally.
The stories from the actual members of the band. And Buck Ormsby, the man who put the Sonics on the map by releasing the Sonics’ original two albums. Hearing the actual members talk about the band they started as teenagers some 60 years ago. Hearing these cats talk about the nine lives of The Sonics makes you wonder just how many more lives this band has in the future.
Now after seeing, and listening to this documentary…
Do I still think songs like “Strychnine,” “Have Love Will Travel” and “Psycho” are possibly the first, if not, the best Punk Rock songs ever written? Yes. Do I think The Sonics’ drums and vocals are some of the best sounding Punk Rock drums and vocals? Yes. Do I still think The Sonics are one of the best kept secrets in rock-n-roll? Yes. Was there enough about my hometown Bremerton? No. Was there enough about The Sonics being from Bremerton? No.
But without spoiling anything…
Yes, The Sonics were originally formed in this town. But, the band that eventually became “The Sonics” were a mix of two original Sonics and members from an already somewhat successful band from Tacoma. The ballrooms and dance halls that The Sonics started playing once the right mix of people came along, at that time, were also mainly in Tacoma.
So, yes the band “The Sonics” was from Tacoma, but The Sonics were born in Bremerton. // CRAVIN MOORE
FIND MORE ABOUT ‘BOOM: A Film About The Sonics’ at sonicsfilm.com. Get tuned in, and turned on to these great Sonics records: “Here Are The Sonics” (1965) “Boom” (1966) “Introducing The Sonics” (1967) and “This Is The Sonics” (2015).
