The Sonics: the most punk band of the 1960s
For most rock fans, punk rock didn’t truly get started until the mid-1970s. With most fans becoming sick of listening to the likes of Emerson, Lake and Palmer whenever they came on the radio, acts like The Clash and Sex Pistols were bringing rock and roll back to its roots, with some of the nastiest chords ever played by human hands. Although the genre may have started in the 1970s, The Sonics had their finger on the pulse years before.
Coming out around the same time The British Invasion sank its teeth into American shores, The Sonics hailed from Seattle with a distinctly gritty delivery. While there were many commonalities between them and acts like Dave Clark Five, the massive amount of guitar distortion put into their interpretations of songs like ‘Walking the Dog’ were distinctly rough.
Although the band did have their fair share of regional success at the time, they were never accepted by the masses in the same way acts like The Beach Boys were, with many never getting into their caustic sound. Then again, the band didn’t always make the best decisions regarding who they were playing with.
Despite having the chance to jam with various members of the Seattle music scene, they would remain an insular group, even denying a budding guitarist the opportunity to sit in with them after he claimed he had a guitar in his car. Little did the band know that guitarist would go on to become Jimi Hendrix, lighting fires in the hearts of guitar players all around the world when moving to England.
Even though the band would gain little notoriety as a footnote of the early 1960s rock scene, fans began to see the other side of them when they started to gain notoriety in the wake of punk. Despite being almost a decade too early, the band had already started to chomp away at the confines of safe rock and roll, making deliberately nasty songs.
Aside from just typical punk rock, the band would also gain a significant following in their home state when picked up as one of the earliest progenitors of grunge music. While they might not have been thinking about writing grunge music, bandleader Larry Parypa would talk about getting the most feral sounds out of his instrument as he could.
When talking about his sound, Parypa recalled making everything he could sound dark, telling Sonic Highways, “I would drop tune my E string to D so that it would be bigger and meaner sounding. I’d take a heavy pick and put screwdriver grooves in it, and then you scratch [the guitar] and get harmonic overtones. I was really into sounds like that. Make it sound mean.”
Just like the punks after him, Parypa never claimed to be the most proficient guitarist in the world, but he figured he’d try to create something that no one had heard before, explaining, “I wasn’t any good. I could barely play the darn thing, but make it so you’re squeezing the life out of that guitar neck.”
Even though The Sonics may continue to be an interesting case study of what the 1960s rock scene was, the band may very well have been legends had they been born a few years later and put some safety pins through their noses for good measure.
