Results for “fame”

Formed in 1958 in Tacoma in the northwest corner of America by guitarists Bob Bogle and Don Wilson, the Ventures are one of the most successful groups of the original rock’n’roll era and almost certainly the longest surviving US band still touring. In 2014, 81 year-old Don Wilson completed a gruelling 44-date concert tour of Japan which would put most musicians a fraction of his age on their knees. That’s not bad for two guys who started out with a couple of cheap guitars bought from a Seattle pawnshop along with a single amp which allowed them to play through it simultaneously.

They first met when Bob bought a car from Don at The Bargain Spot, his father’s second-hand dealership. The two struck up a friendship and before long Bob had secured Don a job at the construction company where he worked, the two spending most of their days manhandling bricks and their evenings honing their guitar skills.

Once they had become sufficiently skilled, they purchased new Fender guitars, named themselves the Versatones and began playing local gigs as a duo. During their travels they came across Nokie Edwards, an exceptionally gifted guitarist who was also plying his trade in the Tacoma area, most notably with emerging country star Buck Owens. Gradually a friendship developed between the three musicians. With the addition of George Babbitt on drums, in 1959 they recorded ‘Cookies & Coke’ on the Blue Horizon label, the first disc under the name the Ventures. Demonstrating an entrepreneurial spirit and can-do work ethic that would be permanent features of their long career, Blue Horizon was set up by Don and Bob with financial and organisational assistance from Josie Wilson, Don’s mother.

Despite their best efforts promoting ‘Cookies & Coke’, the disc failed to gather any momentum. Undeterred, in 1960 the Ventures returned to Joe Boles’ Seattle studio to record ‘Walk Don’t Run’, a Johnny Smith tune they had heard on a Chet Atkins LP. With the aid of Nokie’s friend Skip Moore sitting in on drums and a much simplified arrangement of the tune, within 12 takes they had crafted a worldwide smash hit. Unfortunately for him, Skip Moore opted to take a $25 session fee rather than a cut of the royalties and he did not stay with the band. Once ‘Walk Don’t Run’ began racing up the charts, the Ventures lost no time in recruiting exceptional local musician Howie Johnson to fill the vacant drum seat and it was the mighty Bogle / Wilson / Edwards / Johnson line-up that conjured up the magic alchemy of sounds which produced their early hits and first four albums.  

While hugely successful in late 1961 and early ’62, behind the scenes it was a tricky period for Don and Bob. Howie was involved in a road accident which forced him to leave the group and Nokie flirted with the idea of forming his own band, the Marksmen, with close friend Gene Moles. However, by the end of that time Don and Bob had recruited the outstanding Brooklyn-born Mel Taylor to the drum seat and Nokie had decided to return to the fold on a permanent basis. Things were looking up.

The Ventures and their producer Bob Reisdorff were now safely ensconced in Hollywood, the centre of the West Coast recording scene, and they had realised the enormous financial benefits of album sales. They were one of the first bands to focus more on LPs than 45s, turning out an average of four albums a year throughout the 60s. To cope with the big demands on their time, Bob Reisdorff began to draft in sessioneers to augment the band or on rare occasions to fill in for absent members, using musicians such as Billy Strange and Bud Coleman as well as two hugely talented Tulsa musicians newly arrived in Los Angeles: David Gates and Leon Russell.

In 1962 the Ventures undertook their first Japanese tour alongside Jo Ann Campbell and Bobby Vee. Their record company would not finance all the members going, so Don and Bob did it on their own, using pick-up Japanese musicians on drums and bass. They became the real stars of the show and when they returned for a full-band tour two years later there were crowds at the airport to welcome them and fanatical teenagers followed them wherever they went. They recorded LPs specifically for the Japanese market and turned out live albums most years, all of which sold by the lorry load. When the US recording industry finally cottoned on to the huge Japanese market in the 70s with releases such as “Bob Dylan At Budokan”, Ventures fans permitted themselves a wry smile, knowing their band had conquered Japan over a decade earlier.     

Although the Ventures were missing from the US singles charts during 1963, their “Play Telstar” LP reached an impressive #8 and a further four albums charted. Despite the arrival of the Beatles in the American charts in January 1964, the Ventures enjoyed another US Top 10 smash that summer with their inspired surf-based revival: ‘Walk Don’t Run ’64’. While many American bands fell by the wayside as the British invasion gathered pace, the Ventures enjoyed three US album chart entries in ’64, five in ’65, four in ’66 and ’67, two in ’68 and three in ’69, plus another four in the early 70s.  

In 1968 Nokie Edwards quit the band and was replaced by blues guitarist Gerry McGee, who had previously toured with Captain Beefheart and also worked with Delaney & Bonnie. At first it seemed a strange choice, a band who were by now thought of as old-fashioned being led by one of the new breed of hip guitar-slingers. What many did not realise at the time though was that Gerry had already had his own instrumental releases on Reprise in the early 60s, worked sessions with the Monkees and appeared as lead guitarist on one of Sandy Nelson’s mid-60s LPs. He was exactly what the Ventures needed. Like Nokie, he was a naturally gifted guitarist who also brought in some fresh influences and, while Don and Bob’s hands on the tiller meant the Ventures would never stray too far from their populist agenda, the new line-up was nevertheless portrayed on their first album together with long hair and kaftans. For a band which had steadfastly remained aloof from fashion and shunned any attempt to manufacture a hip image, that was a big change.

Shortly afterwards the Ventures enlisted their first official keyboard player: former Five Americans member John Durrill, who enjoyed a three-year stay with the band. Prior to this their most frequently used studio keyboard player during the mid to late 60s had been Evelyn Freeman, sister of renowned producer and arranger Ernie Freeman.

By the summer of ’69 the Ventures were standing at #4 in the US singles charts with ‘Hawaii Five-0’. However, for the post-Beatles generation of critics who set about re-writing the history of rock it was already too late. The Ventures were lazily written off as a 60s covers band who were neither radical nor revolutionary and therefore decidedly unworthy. Those critics had not been there to hear the Ventures’ early classics such as the fuzz extravaganza ‘The 2,000 Pound Bee’ or ‘The Swingin’ Creeper’. For every ‘Snoopy vs The Red Baron’ they were obliged to cover, there were a dozen sparkling original compositions bristling with invention and delivered with muscle and flair. In fact, a truly genuine “Best Of” compilation would consist almost exclusively of the band’s self-written material.

In 1972 Nokie Edwards returned to the band after McGee moved on. During the 70s the highly fragmented nature of the music scene made it increasingly difficult for them to find a commercial foothold or even a positive direction to follow. There was a disco album, a Latin album, albums dedicated to the Carpenters and Jim Croce and a crack at popularising classical music, but they were all in a middle-of-the-road style that some fans found unexciting. During this decade their presence gradually diminished in the States, although highly successful annual tours of Japan helped keep them afloat. Mel Taylor also took a break from the band from ’72 till ’79 and was replaced by Joe Barile.

By the beginning of the 80s the old guard of radicals and revolutionaries was giving way to an army of new wavers who were more interested in dancing and having fun. One of Los Angeles’ most popular DJs, KROQ’s Rodney Bingenheimer, began to notice that when he played his favourite Ventures tracks from the 60s at Hollywood’s Starwood club the dance floor would fill up with punks and new wavers. After he began to get requests to play this “new punk instrumental band” on his show, he arranged for them to perform at the Starwood. Although the Ventures were seasoned veterans, they felt a little apprehension at facing this young and aggressive-looking crowd. But they went down a storm and afterwards were visited backstage by members of Blondie, the B-52s, Dr Feelgood and Nick Lowe, who all congratulated them and expressed a debt to the band’s early records. In no time they were collaborating with all-girl new wave band the Go-Gos, and the Ramones were already sporting Ventures model Mosrite guitars to get their exciting sound. When their “30th Anniversary” DVD was belatedly issued in 1989 (it had been filmed five years earlier), it featured appearances by Peter Frampton, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Robbie Krieger, David Johansen, Chris Spedding and Max Weinberg, who all sat in with the band and acknowledged their huge influence. For the first time in years the Ventures undertook road tours of the USA and continued to enjoy further critical acclaim from artists such as Elliot Easton (the Cars), Jeff Cook (Alabama), Rick Derringer, Marky and Joey Ramone and jazz guitarist Al Di Meola. In ’85 Gerry McGee returned to the band after Nokie Edwards left to pursue his solo career once more. Sadly, original drummer Howie Johnson died in 1987.  

The surging popularity of the CD in the 90s saw the Ventures’ entire back catalogue released inJapan, the UK and, finally, in the US. There were even a couple of excellent new releases, “Wild Again” and “New Depths”, which approached the excellence of their 60s work. In 1997 Ace Records commenced their “Ventures In The Vaults” series, featuring rarities and unissued titles.

On a far less happy note, the band’s long-serving drummer Mel Taylor succumbed to lung cancer in 1996. Active almost until the very end, he was in the middle of a Japanese tour but was forced to return home and died 10 days later. He was replaced in the band by his son Leon Taylor, another great drummer. Further bad news arrived on 14 June 2009 when it was announced founder member Bob Bogle had died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He had largely retired from the band in 2005 when his illness began to take hold.

Bob Bogle’s place in the band was filled by Bob Spalding, who had been playing with the Ventures in various capacities as far back as 1981, subbing for Nokie, Gerry, Bob or Don as needed. He had recorded with the band Sweet Pain in 1970 and in 1972 was invited by Mel Taylor to tour Japan as a member of his band the Dynamics. Bob’s first gig with the Ventures occurred after Nokie Edwards was taken ill midway through a US tour in 1981. Bob is another exceptional guitarist and an excellent ambassador for the Ventures, having appeared at many fan gatherings over the years, including the Pipeline Convention in London on two occasions.

On their 50th Anniversary in 2008 the Ventures were at long last inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by John Fogerty who remarked, “This is long overdue. The Ventures have issued over 250 albums in their career. Think about that for a moment. These days, some of us are happy just to sell 250 albums.”

Currently the Ventures are Don Wilson, Gerry McGee, Bob Spalding and Leon Taylor. Long may they continue.

DAVE BURKE/ Pipeline Magazine

www.pipelinemag.co.uk

19 hits on Billboard magazine's Hot 100, of which eight made the Top 20, rank Lesley Gore as second only to Brenda Lee as the USA's top-selling solo female recording star of the mid-60s.

Lesley was not quite five when her brother Michael was born, yet had already amassed an impressive record collection and would spend hours listening to favourites such as Patti Page; her destiny was being forged. As Michael grew older, he exhibited an aptitude for the piano and soon fell into a routine of writing songs with Lesley. At school she excelled in the choir and was part of a girl group who sang solely Shirelles songs. By the age of 15 she had persuaded her parents to send her to a vocal coach. Before long she was singing occasionally with a band.

At a showcase for the group, Lesley caught the ear of Mercury Records' president Irving Green, who invited her to visit the company's New York HQ, where she met producer Quincy Jones. The pair clicked instantly, and a recording contract was offered. A few days later, Quincy arrived at her home with a stack of publishers' demos, from which they selected the song that would change her life.

Days after Lesley's 17th birthday, 'It's My Party' entered the charts on its way to #1. Even the Beatles were captivated by the vibrancy of the disc, asking George Martin to produce their records in a similar style. In classic soap opera fashion, the biter bit in 'Judy's Turn To Cry', a Top 5 sequel which consolidated her position as America's new pop princess. 'She's A Fool' made it three in a row, while her first LP made the upper reaches of the album chart.

If the USA hadn't chosen this moment to embrace the Beatles, Lesley would have also made #1 with 'You Don't Own Me'. Other Top 20 highlights of 1964 were 'That's The Way Boys Are' and 'Maybe I Know'. Her only sizeable hit of 1965 was 'Sunshine, Lollipops And Rainbows', but by then she was not just a pop star but also a full-time college student. Almost two years passed before producer Bob Crewe restored her to the Top 20 with 'California Nights'. The feat was aided by a television appearance in Batman singing what proved to be her final big hit.

Post-Mercury, Lesley recorded for Bob Crewe's short-lived Crewe label, surfacing next with a singer-songwriter LP for Mowest. She had been building up to this for years, having written many of her Mercury tracks. A 1975 reunion with Quincy Jones found her in a more soulful setting than before on an A&M album. In 1980 she and brother Michael received Grammy and Oscar nominations for 'Out Here On My Own', one of several songs they composed for the film Fame. Lesley also frequently performed live with her friend Lou Christie, with whom she recorded some duets.

In the 1990s she ventured into the world of journalism by interviewing k.d. lang for Ms magazine. In 1996 she was asked to write a song for the film Grace Of My Heart. The result was 'My Secret Love', lip-synched in the film by Bridget Fonda, whose character was partly based on Lesley. Gore died of lung cancer on February 16, 2015, she was 68 years old. Following her death, Neil Sedaka commented that she was "a phenomenal talent" and "a great songwriter in her own right." Gore's funeral was held on February 19, 2015 in New York City.

Etta James, who died aged 73 on 20 January 2012, was one of the greatest and most influential soul and R&B vocalists of all time. A regular in the Ace catalogue since our earliest days, Etta is currently represented with six collections of her classic recordings for the Modern and Chess labels.

She was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on 25 January 1938. Her mother Dorothy was just 14 at the time. Dorothy’s older sister Cozetta and her husband James acted as Jamesetta’s legal guardians until she was six months old, when Dorothy handed her over to foster parents.

Lula and Jesse Rogers had no children of their own and raised Jamesetta well. They sent her for tap dancing, ballet and drama classes and every year to summer camp. On Sundays she accompanied Lula Rogers to St Paul Baptist Church where the renowned Professor James Earle Hines directed the Echoes Of Eden choir. Jamesetta took voice tuition from Professor Hines, piano lessons from his wife and became a local child celebrity, performing on weekly radio broadcasts.

When Lula Rogers died in 1950, Jamesetta was taken in by Dorothy’s older brother and his wife. The upheaval brought out a rebellious streak in her. She bounced from school to school and began hanging around with street gangs. She became friendly with the Balinton family and joined the Lucky Twenties gang with one of the girls, Umpeylia. After one particularly violent rumble, Jamesetta was sent to a juvenile home for a month.

In 1953 she began singing with her friends Abye and Jean Mitchell, naming themselves the Creolettes. They worked up an act performing jazz songs and numbers by their favourite groups the Spaniels and the Chords. While singing at a record hop they got to meet the Midnighters, in town to promote their hit record ‘Work With Me, Annie’. After the show the girls sat down and wrote ‘Roll With Me, Henry’ in response to the Midnighters’ song.

Abye, the eldest of the Creolettes, inveigled her way backstage at a Johnny Otis show and persuaded him to audition the group. Otis liked their sound and offered them the chance to make some records.

On Thanksgiving Eve 1954 the girls entered the studio of the Bihari brothers’ Modern Records, one of LA’s leading independent labels, to cut ‘Roll With Me, Henry’, with Richard Berry helping out as the voice of Henry. Within days Otis was playing a dub of the song on his radio show. As a gimmick he invited listeners to phone in and suggest a name for the group, but he’d already decided to rechristen them the Peaches and to switch around Jamesetta’s name to Etta James, giving her lead billing.

Lest it prove too suggestive for airplay, the song was re-titled ‘The Wallflower’ upon its release in January 1955. The record entered the R&B charts in February, rising to #1, where it remained for a month. The Peaches were unhappy with Etta getting the main attention, but not as miffed as she was when Georgia Gibbs took her sanitised cover version of the song to #1 on the pop charts, or when a legal dispute delayed royalty payments.

Etta and the Peaches took to the road as featured vocalists with the Johnny Otis Show until Dorothy Hawkins reappeared to help extricate her daughter from her contract. By this time Otis had also discovered and recorded Etta’s friend Umpeylia Balinton, dubbing her Little Miss Sugar Pie. The Peaches did not sing on Etta’s next hit ‘Good Rockin’ Daddy’ or any of her other records, but they continued to tour with her, sometimes with Sugar Pie’s sister Francesca filling in.

Etta spent the next few years working the chitlin’ circuit. More records for Modern followed – including some cut at Cosimo Matassa’s studio inNew Orleans– but none were hits. She made many friends on the road, including Sam Cooke, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Little Willie John, Little Richard, Ruth Brown and Jackie Wilson.

In 1957 Etta met John Lewis, who became her manager. She worked on a bill with the Moonglows in Washington, DC and fell for their leader Harvey Fuqua. She and Fuqua recorded a single together, which Modern issued as by Betty & Dupree. With her career in the doldrums, at the suggestion of one of the Moonglows, Etta headed to Chicago, the home of Chess Records.

Her timing was good. Co-founder Leonard Chess was on the lookout for new female singers and signed her up, buying out her Modern contract. Her first job at the company was to sing background on Chuck Berry’s ‘Almost Grown’ and ‘Back In The USA’. While awaiting her own first session, Etta and the Moonglows took off on a tour of the South, where they all got busted for possessing drugs.

In January 1960 Etta recorded ‘All I Could Do Was Cry’, co-written by Motown’s Berry Gordy. The record was released on Chess’ jazz subsidiary Argo in March. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 two months later, peaking at #33 and at #2 on their R&B chart. By the end of 1960 Etta had amassed four hits, including two more duets with Harvey Fuqua.

Now 22, Etta began recording songs from a bygone era in an attempt to appear more sophisticated. Her version of the Glenn Miller evergreen ‘At Last’, with a lush orchestral arrangement by Riley Hampton, and her album of the same title were big sellers in 1961, setting the scene for ‘Trust In Me’, ‘Dream’, ‘It’s Too Soon To Know’ and many others.

Etta’s new success enabled her to buy a house in Los Angeles, but her mother got involved and messed up the deal. The place was about to be repossessed when Leonard Chess intervened and purchased the deeds, allowing Etta to remain there.

Etta was in New Orleanswhen she first tried heroin, thinking it was cocaine, and overdosed. In Indianapolis she was jailed for possession until John Lewis stumped up a bribe to get her out. On tour with her band, she witnessed her bass player and saxophonist both die from overdoses.

Leonard Chess came to the rescue again and arranged for Etta to be admitted to a convalescent home to clean up, but while there she was diagnosed with tetanus, from which she was lucky to survive. Months later, drug-free, she headed for New York, where she met up with Lewis; her downward spiral began again.

Etta and her friend Esther Phillips, a fellow addict, took to cashing bad cheques, for which Etta was caught and served time in New York’s Rikers Island prison. The dud cheque scam also landed her a four-month stretch in Cook County, a tough jail in Chicago. Other spells in prison and rehab followed.

But drugs did not impair Etta’s art. By the end of 1964 over 20 of her singles had reached the Billboard or Cash Box R&B charts, most of them also entering the Hot 100, including ‘Don’t Cry, Baby’, ‘Something’s Got A Hold On Me’, ‘Stop The Wedding’ and ‘Pushover’, all of which went Top 40. Her album “Etta James Rocks The House”, recorded live with her band the Kinfolks in Nashville in 1963, also sold well.

Etta yearned for a child. She attempted buy a baby from Mexico, but ended up getting ripped off. When the wife of Kinfolks saxophonist Garnel Cooper gave birth to twins, Etta offered to adopt one of them. She took care of the boy, but after six months his mother reclaimed him.

Despite all her troubles, Etta continued to make great records, including the duets ‘Do I Make Myself Clear’ and ‘In The Basement’ with her old friend Sugar Pie DeSanto (Umpeylia Balinton) and an excellent album, “Call My Name”, produced by Monk Higgins.

In 1967 Chess flew a pregnant Etta to Muscle Shoals to record at FAME Studios. The sessions yielded one of her biggest hits, ‘Tell Mama’; one of her greatest recordings, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’; and the “Tell Mama” album, her best-seller. She returned to FAME in 1968, son Donto in her arms. It was the last time she would ever see Leonard Chess.

Later that year bounty hunters caught up with Etta and escorted her to Anchorage, Alaska to face charges dating back two years. After 10 days in jail she was bailed to await trial, which took three months, during which time she landed a regular club gig, where she met and fell in love with Artis Mills. The case against her was eventually dropped, with the proviso that she not return to Anchorage for five years. She and Mills married and headed back to Los Angeles.

When in 1969 Leonard Chess died, Etta was concerned she might lose her house, but a few days later she took delivery of an envelope he had left for her. It contained the deeds. Even in death Chess treated her well.  

By 1972 Artis Mills had also succumbed to addiction. Etta and he resorted to pulling scams, cashing stolen cheques and worse to raise the money for drugs. They were on the run in Texas when narcotics agents arrested them. Exhausted by their Bonnie and Clyde lifestyle, for the sake of his wife Mills took the rap. He was jailed for 10 years and Etta was released on the condition that she enrol in a methadone programme.

Chess gave Etta a desk job at their New York office and arranged for her to get treatment, but before long she was hooked on both methadone and heroin. Again she was arrested and forced to return to Los Angeles to face outstanding charges. While her lawyer negotiated a deal with the courts, Etta went to work on the “Etta James” album with producer Gabriel Mekler. The record revealed a more rock-styled Etta and reached the pop and soul charts.

When her case came up, the judge gave her a choice: serve time in the notorious Corona Institute women’s prison or be admitted for therapy at the Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital. She chose Tarzana. The programme was tough, but worked, and Etta became a prize patient. She was allowed out for more recording sessions with Mekler and in 1974 released the album “Come A Little Closer”. Etta left Tarzana after 17 months and set up home with one of her counsellors. Her second son Sametto was born in 1976, not long after the release of “Etta Is Betta Than Evvah!”, her final Chess album.

In 1976 Etta and her band flew to Switzerland to perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Her first post-Chess album was “Deep In The Night”, produced by Jerry Wexler, who also set it up for her to open for the Rolling Stones on their US tour of 1978. Her next LP “Changes” was recorded in New Orleans with producer Allen Toussaint.

Etta had just finished the sound check for a gig in Dallas in 1981 when she encountered her husband Artis, who was out of jail on parole. She returned to visit him after his discharge to a halfway house and they reunited. The couple would remain together until Etta’s death.

Etta’s career received a boost in 1984 when she was asked to perform at the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics. Although she never considered herself a blues singer, a resurgence of interest in the music kept her in live work, but problems with substance abuse continued to plague her. In 1988 she booked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs to overcome a codeine dependency.

In 1988 Chris Blackwell signed Etta to his Island label, for which she recorded two albums produced by Barry Beckett. While in Nashville for the sessions she made a point of visiting the man she had been brought up to believe was her father, fabled pool player Minnesota Fats.

Etta received a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation in 1989. In 1992 she reunited with Jerry Wexler for the album “The Right Time”. Wexler also successfully campaigned for her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame the following year. Etta also attended the 1994 ceremony to present an award to Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her. Her autobiography Rage To Survive, co-written with David Ritz, was published the following year.

After several previous nominations, Etta won the Best Jazz Vocal Performance Grammy for 1994’s “Mystery Lady”, her album of songs associated with Billie Holiday. Seven further albums for Private Music followed, culminating in 2003’s “Let’s Roll”, which won the Best Contemporary Blues Grammy.

Etta had suffered from weight problems ever since childhood. A side effect of her drug use was that it had kept her slim. Without drugs she became increasingly obese. When all other remedies failed, Etta resorted to gastric bypass surgery. In 2004 a new slender Etta released “Blues To The Bone”, winning a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. The “All The Way” album followed in 2006.

In 2008 Etta was portrayed by Beyoncé Knowles in Cadillac Records, the film based on the story of Chess Records. The two women posed happily together for photographers at the Hollywood premiere, but Etta made headlines later when she criticised Beyoncé for singing ‘At Last’ at President Obama’s inauguration ball.

Subsequently, Etta was treated for several serious health issues. While hospitalised she became infected with the MRSA virus and was diagnosed with sepsis. Her family also revealed that she had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for two years. Etta’s final album “The Dreamer” was released in 2011, a few months before her death.

OK, who out there agrees with Ace that the world’s greatest dog-walker, original “Tiger Man” and former oldest living teenager/funkiest man alive Rufus Thomas ought to be in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame by now?

There probably has never been a greater example of rock’n’roll revisionism than the current respect accorded to the Sonics. Cult heroes may come and go, but the Sonics’ ascension to become the quintessential garage rock band of all time is truly remarkable. Unlike, say, the Stooges or the Velvet Underground, there was really no awareness of the Sonics, outside of their native Pacific Northwest, until the late 1980s. Slowly but surely, the bands distinctive brand of noise has percolated up through generations of rock fans to almost enter the mainstream. For instance, in the past few years, the Sonics’ paint-peeling take on Richard Berry’s ‘Have Love Will Travel’ has been a regular fixture of television ads the world over.

There’s a simple reason why the Sonics strike such a chord. Theirs is likely the sharpest definition of garage rock that has ever existed. The rough-hewn quintet from blue-collar Tacoma, Washington drew from the implicit rawness of the 50s heroes like Little Richard and Jerry Lee, revved it up with post-British Invasion attitude, threw in the Northwest’s own unique translation of R&B energy, and in the process arrived at a sound that is the very essence of what rock should be: rock’n’roll boiled down to its very nub.

The core of the Sonics were the Parypa brothers, Larry on guitar and Andy on bass, who founded the group in the late 1950s. Like every other neophyte rock’n’roll combo in the Northwest, they looked up to local bigwigs the Wailers for inspiration. The embryonic group mutated through different personnel until singer and keyboardist Jerry Roslie entered the fray in late 1963, bringing along his school pals Rob Lind on sax and Bob Bennett on drums. Within months of this new line-up coming together, a drastic change occurred. Together as a band, the Sonics amped up their sound to a cruder, rougher style, in an almost subconscious attempt to distil the furious energy that beat at the heart of the rock’n’roll and R&B they so enjoyed.

Headquartered at teen hotspot The Red Carpet in the Tacoma suburb of Lakewood, where the Sonics regularly jammed the joint, it wasn’t long before Buck Ormsby of the Wailers grabbed the quintet for the Wailers’ own Etiquette label. A first attempt to harness their fury in the recording studio left the group non-plussed, but when ‘The Witch’ was released in November 1964, it quickly began to get heavy airplay, capturing the imagination of teens around Puget Sound and beyond. No-one had heard rock quite that visceral on the radio in recent memory.

The follow-up, ‘Psycho’, was recorded in the spring at Kearney Barton’s famed Seattle facility, and was another Roslie-penned hamburger-throated opus. It became as big a hit with audiences and radio around the Northwest as ‘The Witch’, and both tunes rocked the airwaves well into the summer of 1965. The Sonics’ fiery template was firmly established by these first two singles, along with the fabulous sequels ‘Boss Hoss’ and ‘Shot Down’, and the entire contents of the album “Here Are The Sonics” - surely one of the most uncompromising debuts in rock history. Rather than pad out the record with the expected hits of the day, the band filled the grooves with choice interpretations of rock’n’roll and R&B classics, all laden with their patented trademarks – searing, abrasive guitar tones, guttural vocals and pounding, unrelenting drums. And Roslie displayed a very real knack for writing – and screaming - ear-catching originals such as the classic ‘Strychnine’.

Throughout most of 1965, the Sonics wreaked havoc on audiences the length and breadth of the Northwest and beyond, and simultaneously upped the ante of the entire region’s music scene. Most remarkably, the bands dynamism even effected a change upon their mentors the Wailers, whose post-Sonics recordings very clearly bore signs of their former apprentices’ influence. October of 1965 saw the release of a fourth Etiquette single, perhaps the most ferocious to date: ‘Cinderella’/ ‘Louie Louie’ was a double-whammy of epic proportions. It was accompanied by the Sonics’ second album, “Boom”, recorded at the lo-fi Wiley/Griffith studio in Tacoma but nevertheless continuing in the same full-blooded vein as previous releases.

Word had seeped out to other parts of the country about this wild young combo, and Sonics releases were getting a lot of interest from radio stations in markets as far away as Pittsburgh and Florida. This led the group to question Etiquette’s efficiency, and miscommunication between band and label ultimately meant that the Sonics decided to part ways with Ormsby in the spring of 1966. Waiting in the wings was Jerry Dennon, whose well-distributed Jerden imprint had most of the Northwest’s talent under contract. Dennon romanced the band with the possibility of national success.

At first, the Sonics’ Jerden singles acted as a natural progression from their no-holds-barred Etiquette sides, and the initial single, ‘You’ve Got Your Head On Backwards’, a Brit-styled pounder sung by Lind, was a strong seller in the autumn of 1966. At Dennon’s behest, the group traveled to Gold Star in Los Angeles for the sessions that would become their third and final album, “Introducing.” In retrospect, the sides the group cut there are certainly far better than is generally acknowledged, and including screamers such as ‘High Time’ and ‘Like No Other Man’. But the Sonics never really recaptured in Hollywood the pure unadulterated magic that their Etiquette sessions had in abundance, something reflected by the diminishing sales of their later Jerden releases.

From there on, it seemed all downhill. The combo continued for another year, making their first and only trip back east, but the military was at the door, and once they had finished with their education, various band members began to drop out in 1967 or, like Roslie, just quit unexpectedly. The single ‘Lost Love’ was their last rocking effort but in truth, there didn’t seem to be a place for Sonics-style dementia in the face of flower power. In a cruel twist of fate, a faceless Holiday Inn lounge act inherited the band’s good name, and watered it down well into the next decade.

However, the legend of Tacoma’s once-raging rock machine began to gather moss after collectors outside the Northwest happened across the amazing Etiquette records, and began theorising in magazines such as Creem in the mid-1970s as to what kind of band could have created such a noise. Shortly afterwards, a renewed energy resurfaced in rock’n’roll that correlated exactly with the emotions that the Sonics had espoused a decade before: punk rock. The resourceful Ormsby had hung onto the band’s vintage masters, and began to reissue them in an attempt to keep the band’s memory alive. He eventually struck a deal with Big Beat for a comprehensive anthology of the Sonics’ Etiquette material, which was released in 1993 as “Psycho-Sonic”.

Fast forward to the late 2000s. “Psycho-Sonic”, now remastered after the discovery of ear-blasting first-generation tapes, is one of the best-selling items in the entire Ace Records catalogue, in the process turning a couple of generations onto the band’s savage sound. The best of the Sonics’ Jerden sides, including unissued material, is included on the exhaustive Big Beat series “Northwest Battle Of The Bands”. And in an unprecedented and exciting turn of events, the Sonics have recently reformed around the core of Jerry, Larry and Rob to dish out some long-overdue authentic Sonics rock’n’roll, delighting fans around the world in the process. Make sure you don’t miss them – but grab a hold of “Psycho Sonic” first, to properly understand what all the fuss is about.