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The Sonics: Explosives (BuckShot Records)

Mark Shipper, Phonograph Record, June 1973

SUPPOSE I TOLD you there actually existed a band at one time (say around 1965) who sounded like (but better than) the Kinks on 'All Day and All Of The Night', had a lead singer that could out-scream cats like Mitch Ryder and a young John Lennon, a guitarist right out of the Dave Davies/Jimmy Page School Of Raunch, and a drummer whose sound could only be likened to that of a firing squad of machine guns? Suppose I further told you that several of their records reached the top of the charts in one of the biggest cities in the USA, that their following in that town could be compared to the idolatry heaped upon the MC5 by Detroiters in the late sixties? You'd say I was crazy, any band with those credentials would've certainly become a national phenomenon and I would agree, but it never happened for the Sonics, from Seattle, Washington.

Total word count of piece: 799

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