MoPOP hosted an evening of unsung Pacific Northwest icons Saturday with a concert featuring PNW music stalwarts Girl Trouble, local tastemaking DJ Marco Collins and Tacoma’s own, The Sonics.
The occassion was for a screening of the documentary “BOOM: A Film About The Sonics.” The movie chronicles the career of the often forgotten pioneering local rock band The Sonics. It screened prior to the concert and was followed by a brief Q&A with the director Jordan Albertsen.
The Sonics were a cultural force in the Northwest during the early 1960s that were forgotten by history. Albertsen’s film sets out to find out what happened to band and follows their rise, fall and rise again, and is a must-watch for anyone interested in the history of rock music in the Northwest, as well as the history of rock ‘n’ roll itself.
The film features a who’s who of Seattle rock royalty including Nancy Wilson, Mike McCready, Kim Thayil, Chris Ballew, Mark Arm and many others, sharing their thoughts on the band and how The Sonics influenced a generation of Seattle musicians. Along with telling the story of the band, the movie also has a small subplot of a father-son bonding over The Sonics, which is the heart of the film and what makes it stand out in the extremely crowded pack of rock docs.
For their portion of the evening The Sonics performed an hourlong set filled with classics including “Boss Hoss,” “Cinderella,” “Money,” “Have Love Will Travel,” “Strychnine” and the encore of “Psycho” and “The Witch.” While the only original member onstage was saxophonist Rob Lind, it didn’t make a difference in the music’s impact. The band sounded as fresh and, as Mike McCready put it in “BOOM,” “fucking dangerous” as they must have sounded in the 1960s.
Given their influence on local musicians and lack of mainstream success, The Sonics are definitely unsung icons of the local scene and they weren’t the only unsung icons that performed. Girl Trouble, which is celebrating 40 yers as a band, were also on the bill and Marco Collins, a man who has also received the rock doc treatment, was on the ones and twos. The other unsung icon appearing was former Crocodile soundman Jim Anderson, who manned the soundboard for the show. All of these iconic scene heros on one bill made the show a special Seattle evening.
