It was the 1990s, and Jordan Albertsen was rocking out to Nevermind, just like every other teenage kid at that time.
His father, passing by his son’s room, listened for a moment, then told Jordan if he liked Nirvana, there was another band he might enjoy as well. The next day, he came home to find a copy of Here Are The Sonics waiting for him. Curious, he put the record on and dropped the needle, not knowing what to expect.
What came blasting out of the speakers was a revelation. “The Witch.” “Psycho.” “Strychnine.” The raw, unfettered proto-punk of this Pacific Northwest band who laid down their legend in the 1960s, “literally blew my mind,” Jordan says. “It was just raw and sexy and dangerous and cool, and I couldn’t believe it. It was just a life changing moment for me.” And how the heck did his dad know about these guys?
That experience kicked off a lifelong obsession with the band that finally reached fruition with the release of Jordan’s documentary Boom: A Film About The Sonics. The 16 year journey to complete the film is a testament to Jordan’s unrelenting devotion and determination, a process he compares to the film Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s epic about a an eccentric man trying to push a steamship over a hillside: “I was the only one pushing this boulder up the mountain.”
The Sonics sprang from the blue collar town of Tacoma, Washington, the classic lineup featuring Jerry Roslie (lead vocals, keyboards), Larry Parypa (guitar), Andy Parypa (bass), Rob Lind (sax and harmonica) and Bob Bennett (drums). The band’s wild rhythms enthralled Northwest audiences, but they never managed to achieve more than regional success, and had broken up by the end of the decade.
But in the best cult band tradition, their reputation steadily grew in the wake of their demise. Their original records slowly made their way around the globe; a Sonics track on a new compilation drew further interest among aficionados. The roots of grunge, of punk, of the Stooges, could all be found in their music. Where did it all spring from? The Sonics did it before anybody.
After the split, the band members left the music biz and moved on with their lives. They were bemused by the growing interest in their rock ‘n’ roll past. But in 2007, they finally gave in to the constant demands, and most of the group reunited for a performance at Brooklyn’s Cavestomp festival. They figured it would just be a one-off. But requests for more shows began to pour in. The band that had once considered a “tour” to be a trip to Spokane, Washington, was now playing shows in the UK and Europe. Then, in 2008, the Sonics returned to the Pacific Northwest for a show on Halloween — where Jordan was destined to have another revelation.
Now working as a film director in L.A., he flew back home to see a show by a band he’d never expected to see live, taking his dad along with them. “And they started playing and I was like, fuck, this is great,” he recalls. “Jerry sounds great; Larry killed it. It was so amazing. And it was about halfway through that show that I said to myself, ‘I’m going to make a fucking movie about the Sonics.’”
He scoured the internet for a contact that night, finally shooting off a message to a barebones email he’d found “that just said something like ‘management at Sonics dot com.’ So I stayed up all night and I wrote this wild pitch of a movie, this kind of insane, cinematic, very expensive movie: ‘I’m going to get all these interviews and then I’m going to do all these historical recreations’ — I had this pretty grand idea.”
If not quite drunk texting, Jordan’s passion was enough to pique the interest of Buck Ormsby, one-time member of Tacoma’s the Fabulous Wailers (“Tall Cool One”), who’d produced the Sonics’ records and was now looking after their business interests. “You sound like a crazy person,” Buck wrote in reply to Jordan’s missive. “I love it. Why don’t we get coffee in Tacoma? Can you come down today?” Jordan promptly borrowed his dad’s car and headed south. Now there were two people with the same dream, and in his enthusiasm, Jordan didn’t foresee any other obstacles. “I was young and I had just signed with a big agency, and I was like, well, shit, I can go down to L.A. and tell my agent about this and get a million bucks and we’ll be off and running. And Buck was like, ‘This sounds great. You’re ambitious and crazy. Let’s do this thing.’
“And my assumption was like, ‘Oh, this will be this fun little documentary I can knock out in six months while I’m doing all these other big movies, and it’s just going to be terrific,” Jordan continues. “And that’s not how things work.”
It turned out there weren’t any investors interested in putting up a million bucks for a film about a band with next to no name recognition. Jordan then hosted an online fundraiser “which totally bombed; I think it pulled in $11,000, five of which was given to the campaign by my father.” Jordan and Buck kept talking on the phone, trying to maintain their optimism. But the years were starting to take a toll on the older musician. Jordan, sensing something was wrong with his friend, suggested during one call that he come to Seattle to shoot Buck’s interview. “And there was this long pause,” he says, “and I remember Buck just saying to me, ‘I think that’s a good idea.’”
Against that ominous backdrop, the interview was completed, but on October 29, 2016, Buck Ormsby died. “That did two big things,” says Jordan. “It was like, well, now I need to figure this out, to do this movie for Buck, you know? But also, when he passed away, he was my contact to everybody. So there was no possible way that I could do the movie. We didn’t have any money, but now it was like everything that I had tried to put together, contact wise, it was just all gone. It was like the last nail in the coffin of the film. It was the lowest point of my life. I was super depressed and I just didn’t know what to do.”
Jordan went into retreat, moving with his girlfriend (now wife) into a house her family owned in Bozeman, Montana. He tried to put his Hollywood years behind him, working at a sushi restaurant (“They have them in Montana. Shockingly, this one was particularly pretty good”). And then came an unexpected twist, one that sounds like something — well, out of a movie.
On one raucous night, when the parking lot was full of “drunk college kids and cowboys” impatiently waiting for a table, Jordan got a call from a woman named Ashley. She explained they’d been driving on the road for hours, they were a group of 12 including some kids, everybody was tired and hungry, and could he arrange for a table right away?
Something about Ashley’s plight touched Jordan, and he agreed to set up a table for her party. And when he met the group on arrival in the parking lot, there was a man among them who seemed somehow familiar. “And he turns around and I’m like, ‘Holy shit, you’re Mike McCready!’ [Ashley turned out to be McCready’s wife]. And he looks at me and he goes, ‘Yeah, hey man!’ and holds out his hand. And I just had this weird moment where I paused and then I just vomited this movie pitch at him: ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for ten years. I’m making a movie about the Sonics and I just blah blah blah, blah, blah.’ I just like machine gunned out this pitch to him, and I must have seemed fucking crazy. But he took a step back and he was like, ‘Cool. I’m in.’”
Mike was as good as his word, pulling out his cell phone to contact other potential contributors. “He goes, ‘Who else do you need?’ And he just texted all these rock stars and completely validated the last eight years of my life, and just basically greenlit the movie. It was amazing.”
Filled with a renewed sense of purpose, Jordan was fired up. “At that point I was like, I still don’t have any money. But I said, ‘I’m just going to do it anyway. I’m going to go to Seattle. I’m going to knock out these interviews.’ I borrowed money from my parents. I did whatever I could to get the movie festival-ready. I had to teach myself how to be an editor. And that’s how I pieced it together to try to get it into film festivals.”
Ironically, the band members themselves were still puzzled as to why anyone would be interested in their youthful exploits. “Most of the struggle was just me trying to get these guys to realize how fucking great they were, you know? Some of the first conversations I had with Larry and Jerry were kind of like, ‘Why are you making a movie about us?’ And that was really their attitude, even to this day; there’s this sort of confusion over why anybody would give a shit about them.” That changed when the band members finally saw a screening of an earlier edit at the Tacoma Film Festival in 2018. “They all got a chance to see it and realize how much I loved them. I think they didn’t really understand how special they were to so many people. So that first screening really was pretty emotional for all of them.”
But there wasn’t a happily-ever-after ending just yet. Boom screened at a number of film festivals, but Jordan wasn’t completely satisfied, wanting to do some more work, “to trim the film up and clean it up a little bit and just make it look a little more polished.” Life events also intervened; deaths in the family, becoming a father and COVID brought further delays.
Some of that worked in Jordan’s favor. During the downtime, Larry Parypa came across two boxes of Sonics mementos in his garage, which provided a wealth of visual material: photos, newspaper clippings, ads and posters. “It was a literal goldmine,” says Jordan. “I think I pulled 200 images out of those two boxes that I ended up folding into the film.”
And a last minute interviewee also turned up in Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil. “I get this email from Kim and he’s like, ‘Hey, I heard about your movie, I’d love to be a part of it,’” Jordan recalls. “You know, I think I’d sent him probably 50 fucking emails and hadn’t gotten a reply. The interview ended up being this really amazing conversation. He was incredibly gracious with his time and just such a cool guy” (other interviewees include Mike McCready, Heart’s Nancy Wilson and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, among others).
Finally, the definitive cut of Boom made its theatrical premiere this past September 12 in Los Angeles. It’s since played in cities around the U.S., with bookings into the new year. UK and European screenings are being planned, along with the film’s release on streaming platforms and physical formats, and an accompanying soundtrack.
For a true believer like Jordan, rekindling interest in the band’s legacy is what’s been most important to him.
“I just want people to hear this music,” he says. “These five kids got together for this short period of time, and it was this perfect storm of personalities, of musicianship, and even the weather, right from the Northwest. There was just an innocence. And then to have somebody like Buck, who was willing to record them in the way that he did, where he didn’t clean up the sound, he let him just fucking go for it. And these two magical records [Here Are The Sonics and Boom] that came out of it; they are just two perfect albums and not enough people know about them. This band just kicked ass harder than anybody was kicking ass at that time. I never heard anyone that sounded as badass as the Sonics.”
It’s also given the band’s members a new appreciation for their not inconsiderable achievements; making music that inspired thousands of sonic explosions from other bands over the years, and songs that can still send a visceral thrill up the spine of a kid who’s hearing them for the first time. “It’s been this kind of surreal thing for the guys,” Jordan says. “Their grandkids, who may have missed some of those reunion shows, are old enough now to check out the film. And they’re like, ‘What the fuck? My grandpa was cool!’”
But Boom makes the case that some things never change. A half century on, the Sonics are still just as cool as they ever were.
VIDEO: Boom: A Film About the Sonics trailer
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Gillian G. Gaar
Seattle-based writer Gillian G. Gaar covers the arts,
entertainment, and travel.
Latest posts by Gillian G. Gaar (see all)
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