Music Reissues Weekly: The Sonics - High Time

“Theirs is truly rock in extremis, a précis of the youthful impetuosity and cathartic chaos at the heart of real rock ’n roll.”

This extract from the essay in the booklet coming with the handsome box set High Time bluntly lays it out: The Sonics, as is also said, played “it fierce and feral.” Although “The Witch,” the topside of their debut single, was issued in November 1964, it was and is as ferocious as The Stooges, the most untrammelled aspects of punk rock and, geographically closer to home for The Sonics, grunge at its grungiest. A first reaction to hearing the single out of the blue was that its brute force and fire were analogous to experiencing the 1977 version of Motörhead.

The Sonics were from Tacoma, Washington in America’s Pacific Northwest – the region which later birthed Mudhoney, Nirvana and Tad. The text by Grammy nominated music historian Alec Palao, the compiler of this set – also notes “to the bemusement of the original members, The Sonics [came to be] perceived as the antecedents of punk and heavy metal, as well as, in the late Eighties, the Northwest variant that melded both – grunge.” The roots of The Sonics’ approach to music lay in their appreciation of Little Richard.

High Time contains seven seven-inch singles. Three are as per two-siders issued in the Sixties: “The Witch” / Keep a' Knock'in" (released November 1964); “The Hustler” / “Boss Hoss” (May 1965); “Cinderella” / “Louie Louie” (November 1965). The other four collect tracks which were either single sides or album cuts to showcase the Sonics at their hardest hitting: “Psycho” / “Have Love Will Travel”; “Strychnine” / “Shot Down”; “You Got Your Head on Backwards” / “Like no Other Man”; “High Time” / “Maintaining my Cool” (the lacerating version here first surfaced on a 2002 compilation – this is its debut appearance on vinyl). This is the first-ever Sonics archive release to unite material from Etiquette and Jerden, the two labels to which The Sonics were signed over 1964 to 1967 (after this, up to 1969, there were singles on Jerden subsidiary Piccadilly, and then Uni and Pulsar – the latter by a line-up barely counting as The Sonics).

There have already been around 14 Sonics collections, about half of which have been either of material which was unissued at the time or were sets bringing together two or more of their albums. Surprisingly, although stand-alone versions of the three albums they originally issued have generally been easily available, the last attentive compilation was 1993’s Psycho-Sonic (later reissued in a remastered form) which brought an in-depth focus to the Etiquette period. It was issued by the same label as High Time. Considering their ever-snowballing status – underlined by the use of their version of “Have Love Will Travel” for a 2014 UK TV ad for the Land Rover Discovery car – the market in Sonics archive collections is not one which is crowded.

Overlooked overstates it a little, but unlike others in the pantheon of Sixties garage rockers, The Sonics were not retrospectively lighted upon in the same way and at the same time as roughly contemporary peers such as The Seeds, Shadows of Knight and so on. They were not on the fundamental 1972 double album Nuggets. They were not on the long-running Pebbles series of albums which debuted in 1978. Although they featured on a series of albums dedicated to the history of Northwest rock issued over 1976 to 1980, it was only from 1984 onwards – by when interest in garage-rock was fully bedded in – when tracks by The Sonics began regularly cropping up on compilations dedicated to the edgier aspects of US music from a couple of decades earlier. The Cramps 1980 version of “Strychnine” had a lot to do with this burgeoning, but initially tentative, rediscovery.

And now, in 2025, here is High Time – aesthetically, the most splendid Sonics collection so far. The sound is bright, direct, master-tape precise. This highlights the band’s power. It is all unfiltered and very alive. Every track – it doesn’t matter which – is an entry point into this most uncompromising, most wonderful band. Every household with the barest interest in music needs records by The Sonics. If such ownership is lacking, High Time is the perfect solution for this loss.

• Next week: Ruperts People, the deliberately generated Brit–psych band, are collected on Dream In My Mind - Anthology 1967–1999       
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