Song Of The Day 10/14/2015: The Sonics – “The Witch”
You Pick the Artist IV – Gina Marie Rossi gave me the Sonics. My personal vision of heaven is an eternal Battle of the Bands between the Sonics and the Monks. The winner? Us, the recently deceased audience. The Sonics were in roughly the second wave of rock and roll from the Pacific Northwest. Like the Fabulous Wailers, the Sonics were from Tacoma. I don’t know how they got away with recording the songs they did during their time: They were gut-booting punk rock, muss-free, with more than a little hostility. They took rock and roll to what must have seemed like its illogical extremes back in 1964, but surely everybody who was doing it at the time must have fantasized about how it would be to go too far with it. The Sonics were not afraid. They took it that far. Maybe everybody took the pills the government were handing out in dangerous urban areas at the time, except the Sonics. They refused. They weren’t going to take no Illuminati-hatched pharmaceutical plot lying down. They let you take the pills instead. And that’s how you conceived bratty little Junior, while the Sonics birthed rock and roll. And where’s Junior now, I ask you? Where is he now?
The Sonics came out with a new album just this year. My friend, erstwhile duet partner and co-conspirator in hotel-oriented carousal Jim Davies co-wrote one song for the album and played harp on another. As for my all-time favorite Sonics song, I’m of course tempted to go with “Psycho,” because it’s great, but also because it would have marked the third time that a totally different tune called “Psycho” was named Song Of The Day (Jack Kittel, Bobby Hendricks.) But I have to go with “The Witch,” their first single from 1964. The guitar. That’s basically it.
