Musical mayhem: the 1960s act Iggy Pop called “the first garage band”
No part of rock and roll was ever meant to sound nice and neat. If any of the biggest bands tried to scrub their sound clean in the studio, chances are they would get a lot of questionable glances from the biggest names in rock and roll. The ethos of any good rock outfit comes from playing in a garage, and Iggy Pop thought that the core of all good garage rock came from The Sonics.
When looking at what garage rock is, isn’t it just regular rock and roll? Sure, the sound might be a bit more abrasive than before, but garage rock was practically the first method through which artists found their calling anyway, so why not just call the genre for what it is?
Whereas most artists just saw garage rock as an excuse to make as much noise as possible, Pop wanted to give some actual meaning behind his songs. While I wish anyone the best of luck trying to find meaning in the lyrics to most of the band’s first songs, the importance came more from the performance aspect rather than what was on the page.
From Pop’s perspective, the whole reason why they worked is that they didn’t stick it out in your face too much. That sounds like an oxymoronic statement considering his wild performances, but beneath all of that fuzzy guitar and screaming was a deep frustration with the world that demanded to be let loose.
For all that Pop tried to push, he knew he wasn’t the first to try this idea. Coming out of Seattle, The Sonics were practically the garage band before the term even existed, creating the kind of abrasive music that no one would have thought could be a hit on tracks like ‘The Witch’.
When talking to Duff McKagan, the Guns N’ Roses bassist recalled Pop saying that everything about garage rock originated from them, telling Louder, “Everybody learned by playing The Stooges and The Sonics because everybody’s mom or dad or big sister had the first Sonics record in their house. I got to play on a record with Iggy, and I was talking about The Sonics, and he said, ‘Man, that was the first real garage rock band, and that band influenced The Stooges’.”
Considering the group started at the time when the British Invasion was underway, The Sonics were the ugly cousin of rock and roll. The entire premise of their sound was supposed to sound a bit grimy, which may have had a hand in putting together the beginnings of punk rock music without even knowing it.
Since they came from Seattle, there was one big word hanging in the background of history: grunge. Once the acts from Seattle in the 1990s started gaining traction, The Sonics would still be the go-to band everybody name-dropped as the true pioneers of the genre.
The Sonics never had any interest in being neat and tidy with their playing, and their willingness to embrace the sounds of raucous rock and roll is still reverberating through every group wanting to make harsh music.
