The Fat Angel Sings

“Rock and roll—it’s the only place you can scream like that without going to jail,” Sonics vocalist-keyboardist Gerry Roslie said a few years ago. That voice—sounding pissed and possessed—lit up the band’s two releases, 1965’s “Here Are The Sonics” and “Boom”, released the following year. The Sonics were uglier, louder and scarier band than anything that had floated this way during the British Invasion. They were also playing what was essentially punk rock in the small town of Tacoma, Washington. one year before bands like The Seeds and the 13th Floor Elevators had done anything, three years before the British gave us The Pretty Things or The Deviants, and almost five years before The Stooges and MC5 blew up Detroit. “Have Love Will Travel” isn’t as in-your-face as “The Witch” or “Strychnine,” but it’s still a primal slab of garage rock (the skronky sax solo rips, too). Some insist that punk rock started in the UK in the ’70s; the Sonics tell us otherwise.

The Sonics represent that raw melodic stuff that came out of garages just every so often. This track is as important as Dave Davies of the Kinks cutting up the speaker on his amp to create that raw gritty guitar sound that you find on tracks like You Really Got Me and All Day and All Of The Night.

In a fertile Pacific Northwest scene, The Sonics stood out for their dark subject matter on songs about poison, mental illness and the occult. One of these, “The Witch,” was enough of a local hit for the Tacoma, Washington., band in 1964 that they made it the opening track on their 1965 debut, Here Are the Sonics. Built around a creepy, lurching guitar riff pinned down by low moaning saxophone, it’s a short jump from “The Witch” to the campy B-movie horror imagery of bands like The Cramps.

One of Tacoma, Washington’s greatest musical exports were these five young men who added the perfect amount of danger and delinquency to their screaming, blasting compositions. Among their best is this short revved-up ode to leader Gerry Rosie’s beverage of choice—a straight shot of strychnine, the cure for what ails you. I’ll have what he’s having.