The Sonics are in their own way responsible for one of the more odd situations wherein I’ve run into someone I know in an almost totally improbable place. And The Sonics own involvement was also improbable, making the entire incident improbable2.
For a little context, The Sonics are a garage rock band founded just down the highway from me in Tacoma, Washington back in 1960, more than a decade before I was born. In fact I still hadn’t been born yet when they broke up, seemingly forever, in 1968. So the likelihood I’d ever see them live was extraordinarily close to zero. But the band re-launched itself in 2007 and I was fortunate enough to catch them do an in-store performance at Seattle’s Easy Street Records in 2015.1
So that was cool and everything. But the following year I had the chance to see them live again, this time in a massively random location – Reykjavik, Iceland. To this day I have no idea how a garage rock band, fronted by guys who were probably in their 70s at the time, were invited to play a music festival focused on indie-adjacent music in Iceland (though it probably had something to do with KEXP’s involvement in the festival). But that’s not the impost improbable part. No. Because right before the show I learned that one of the touring band members was a guitarist named Evan Foster. Which is relevant because I went to high school with Evan in the late 1980s and, to the best of my knowledge, hadn’t seen or spoken to him since then. And that’s how I found myself sitting in the bar at Reykjiavik’s KEX Hostel enjoying a pint with someone I hadn’t seen in close to 30 years. The world is both a huge and a small place.
Anyway… Here Are The Sonics!!! was the band’s debut album, originally released in 1965. My version, however, came out in 1980. My understanding is it was originally produced by Etiquette Records as part of a six LP box set called The Northwest Collection, which featured an assortment of 1960s-era garage rockers from the the Pacific Northwest. The records in the box set were packaged in thin jackets, more like inner sleeves with the artwork printed on them. However, this copy is in a full, sturdy jacket – so I suspect it was part of the same pressing, not simply a “loose” record from the box set itself.
This pressing sounds great. It’s wild how many of the songs are covers – I think only four of the 12 tracks are originals. What’s crazy is that the originals are BY FAR the best four songs on the record. It’s probably because they allow the guys to play in their own style, which is stripped down, edgy, and in-your-face garage rock. You could even call it proto-punk and I don’t think you’d get much in the way of argument from anyone. This release stands as an affordable alternative to the 1960s pressings if you’re primarily interested in the album for the music and not so much as a collectible.
- This performance was captured on a live album called, fittingly, Live At Easy Street. I remember way, way, way back in the day discovering that The Guess Who put out a record recorded live in Seattle, Live At The Paramount, and fantasizing about how amazing it would be to attend a show that was later put out as an album. This was back in the days, of course, when a band’s published canon was relatively small, long before artists like Pearl Jam and Metallica put out official versions of tons of their live shows. ↩︎