How much is The Sonics worth?
| Net Worth: | $5 Million |
|---|---|
| Who: | Rock band |
| Formed: | 1960 |
| Country: | United States of America |
About The Sonics
The Sonics are a 1960-founded American garage rock band from Tacoma, Washington, with a $5 million combined wealth. The group performed early rock classics including “Louie, Louie” and “Skinny Minnie” in addition to their own songs like “Strychnine” “Psycho” and “The Witch”
However, for Tacoma’s best, it was an early regional hit by the Wailers, not to be confused with the Bob Marley-led band playing ska around the same time, that served as the catalyst for the Sonics’ formation: the Parypa brothers, Larry, Andy, and Jerry on saxophone, began performing the song in their home as early as 1960.
The classic “Louie Louie” looms large in the legend of the Sonics, as it did When they finally did, they named themselves the Sonics in honor of the “sonic booms” that the neighborhood would experience whenever a jet from the neighboring McChord Air Force Base exceeded the speed of sound. It took them another three years to find the ideal group of locals who would complete Larry and Andy’s band, despite having a name that was appropriate for what they had become.
In the meantime, Jerry Roslie, one of Rob Lind’s classmates from high school, had been playing boogie-woogie in the band room. Instead, Lind discovered his calling when he picked up a sax, and the two started playing in different bands around town together. They anticipated that meeting the Parypas and their drummer Bob Bennett would result in, well, a sonic boom, and they were right. Roslie yelled so loudly that he hardly managed to go through an entire set. Bennett beat the skins so hard that recording simply required a boom mic.
When Lind’s rhythm sax was mixed with Larry’s overloaded guitar and the dirtiest, most damaged amp he could locate, it produced some massive chords. The Sonics tried to break through when they added some original songs to their strong mix of covers, including Richard Berry’s “Louie Louie” and “Have Love, Will Travel,” They were arguably the loudest and most raw band of their day. In any case, the Wailers’ bassist believed this and signed them to his label, Etiquette. The band’s first single, “The Witch,” sold 15,000 copies in a single month, making it the biggest-selling 45 ever in the area.
Sadly, the Sonics might also have been the first rock group whose music was too loud for radio play. The song “The Witch” was heavily played on Seattle’s lesser stations, but the massive KJR outright refused to play it during the day, even going so far as to keep it off the top of their highly public and prominent airplay charts in order to avoid offending their Top 40 audience. The band released two excellent LPs of music, Here Are the Sonics!!! and Boom, and they rose to prominence in the Pacific Northwest. However, the Etiquette label was too small to help them succeed and was too reliant on them to give them up to a major.
Even worse, in 1967 psychedelic pop started to supplant garage, which resulted in a mediocre attempt to catch up (their third LP, oddly titled Introducing the Sonics). The now-adult band soon disbanded and moved on, but its influence on the development of punk, grunge, and the early 2000s garage-rock revival only intensified. The original band members were able to get together for two concerts, one in 1972 and the other on Halloween 2008, where they astonished audiences by sounding exactly the same wild and boisterous as they had done forty years before. A current iteration of the Sonics is led by Roslie, Lind, and Larry.
