The Sonics

"We liked to get nasty," testifies Gerry Roslie, the wicked howling wolf and keyboardist behind the Sonics. "We were so forceful. Everyone in the band played each song like it was the last time they were going to play it – just killed it."

That sums up the Sonics brief but blistering tenure for Etiquette Records. From 1964 to '65, the Tacoma, Wash.-bred quintet was perhaps the definitive American garage rock group, channeling the fiery soul of Little Richard and Chess Records into a proto-punk buzz saw of teenage raunch and rebellion that ran counter to the budding flower power of the day.

The Sonics parted ways in 1967 and, aside from a one-off reunion in Seattle in 1972, never looked back. That is until Brooklyn's Cavestomp! festival persisted, giving the band nearly a year's notice to prepare for a reunion engagement. 2007, November, the band – including original guitarist Larry Parypa and saxophonist Rob Lind, with the newly acquired rhythm section of bassist Don Wilhelm and drummer Ricky Lynn Johnson – performed for the first time in nearly four decades.

"We had butterflies the size of buzzards," recalls Roslie. "Here we are, senior citizens, and you look out on all these young kids singing the words, and right off the bat they started a mosh pit. We were thinking: 'Oh my God. This is not quite like the old days.' It was great."

The legacy of the Sonics, captured by singles such as "The Witch," "Psycho," and "Strychnine," not to mention the group's essential second album, 1966's Boom, has reverberated through successive generations, as evidenced by modern revivalists on the order of Black Lips and Austin's the Strange Boys, but none more so than in the Pacific Northwest heyday of the early 1990s.

"I thought that was cool," Roslie says of the year punk broke. "It was a compliment, 'cause some of them said we were an influence, like that one fellow from Nevermind. What's his name again?"