INTRODUCTION

Once upon a time—decades prior to “grunge” rock being even a gleam in Sub Pop’s eye—the Pacific Northwest was the birthing ground to a rockin’ R&B scene that created its own unique strain of rock ’n’ roll. This was a distinctive “rude-jazz”–tinged mutation that erupted in the sea-port towns of Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland between the approximate years of 1958 and 1965 and would come to be called the original “Northwest Sound”—or in some circles the “Sea-Port Beat” or “Sea-Port Sound.”

Music critics, historians, and even a few ivory-tower academics have explored the saga of the scene that produced this energetic music. But the deep backstory has never been told by the musicians who created the sounds, as well as key local music industry figures who pushed a remarkable number of their recordings into genuine radio-hit status. Now those luminaries finally get a chance to have the story presented in their own words.

One of the Seattle scene’s most consequential music-biz cats of the 1940s and 1950s, Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, was well known for wielding a quiver of clever hipster sayings. Among them was one intended to encourage people around him to step up and speak what was on their mind: “Say the word, and you’ll be heard.” Interviews with over three hundred relevant individuals conducted between 1970 and 2021 provided the quoted recollections that make up the heart of this telling of their story.

The Northwest Sound’s origins trace back to a small circle of budding young players who had initially been inspired by the ’50s rhythm and blues hits they’d heard on records. Then, at mid-decade, a few promoters began bringing some of those very same hitmakers on tours through this region, so the locals got to witness genuine gutbucket R&B stars live and in person. By that point, a few leading local bands—in particular, Seattle’s Dave Lewis Combo and Tacoma’s Wailers—were carving out their own distinctive modes of rocking, and scores of subsequent bands copied their sounds. The eventual result was that a new mode of driving rock ’n’ roll emerged—one that was particularly beholden to rude jazz, with all the blatting saxophones and rumbling organs that label implies.

Forged in the high school gyms, skating rinks, community halls, National Guard armories, and rowdy dance halls of the region, the Northwest Sound evolved incrementally, by trial and error. Local bands employed a process of experimentation, gauging the audience response to their song selections and noting what tunes were most effective in rousing their dance crowds. Along the way, astute bands copped certain musical elements from the vocabulary used by various R&B stars, and then used those as building blocks to create their own musical language. The result was a slew of hit records that went from regional radio novelties to national and international hits. Local fans loved that their own town’s bands were successful, but outsiders also found these sounds impossible to resist.

So, while there are plenty of northwesterners who share a provincial pride in our region’s musical arts, there’s really no need to go too far out on a limb arguing that something unique and precious had occurred here. And that’s because experts from outside the region have already made that case for us.

As early 1968, Barret Hansen—the California-based ethnomusicologist (and future radio host known as “Dr. Demento”)—recognized that the Northwest had created something unique. He wrote that “there was, and perhaps still is, a very lively rock scene going on there, with a distinctive sound that has spread far and wide from the teen palaces of Portland, Tacoma and Seattle.”

In 1973, Mark Shipper, founder and editor of California’s Flash fanzine, wrote:

The story of rock ’n’ roll has been in large part the story of local sounds coming to national prominence—Liverpool, San Francisco, Detroit, to name a few. The distinctive “sound” of any given region usually came as a result of hordes of area bands that would attempt to imitate the local kingpins, thereby stamping their particular region with an instantly identifiable and recognizable music of its own. One very important but often overlooked sound was the one emanating from the Northwest USA.… These gritty bands were a far cry from what the rest of the country was listening to in the early 60s, and were, without realizing it, conditioning their audience to a taste and acceptance of music that those outside the Northwest simply would not be able to relate to. For this reason, major labels avoided the area and, as a result, the Northwest Sound to this day remains an obscurity.

That same year, Ken Barnes wrote in the Boston-based Fusion magazine, “All over the country during the mid-Sixties, local band scenes sprang up with groups playing a crude and derivative, exuberant and energetic brand of rock ’n’ roll for the home crowds. Great music came out of all these scenes, but unquestionably the raunchiest sounds emanated from the Pacific Northwest.”

Then, in 1976, the New York City–based founder of Kicks magazine and Norton Records, Billy Miller, confessed, “As a tried and true East Coaster I can’t tell downtown Seattle from uptown Tacoma—drop me off a bus in Portland and I may as well be on Mars. Despite my geographical shortcomings, however, I can spot a vintage Northwest disc at a hundred paces in a blizzard. It ain’t all that hard mind you. There’s a feel about the way they tend to pound a little harder and blast off faster than most rock & roll records.” What made the Northwest Sound stand out was that “in an era of especially thin sounding dance records, these bands unleashed conspicuously explosive vehicles of thunder.”

Echoing those thoughts, Greg Shaw, garage-rock historian and founder of California’s Bomp! magazine, wrote, “Not every region of the United States had its own distinctive sound in the Garage Band Era (prolific as they were, places like Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New England and Ohio certainly didn’t)—but everybody knows instantly what is meant by The Northwest Sound.”

Concurring with that observation, the British A&R agent Alec Palao once noted, “In regions as disparate as Texas, the Bay Area and the Southeast, white kids were playing black-styled R&B, but it would be safe to say that when it came to an unbridled fervor for rootsy rock and an accomplished reinterpretation of the same, the Pacific Northwest had everywhere else beat.”

Another Brit, music historian Vernon Joynson, once observed, “The Pacific Northwest, from the late fifties onwards, had been the home of some of the finest instrumental combos in the land, bands like The Wailers, The Ventures, and The Frantics. What characterized them from the ‘also rans’ of the era was their very strong, powerful, upfront rhythm section. The music of the Northwest was raw, aggressive, and powerful.”

The Los Angeles Reader once published an overview essay about our rock history that stated, “The thang in the Northwest was bruising, loud, and thoroughly unstudied bands that played primarily instrumental sets at local armories. Though the bands were white, they played gutbucket numbers, usually embellished with stomping horn lines and seesawing keyboard riffs, which bore a strong resemblance to instro R&B numbers of the day.”

In 1984, Greg Shaw weighed in on this topic once again, offering this not-so-secret recipe behind the Northwest’s magic music:

Take a loud, sloppy, grungy band, give ’em an old R&B riff like “Louie Louie” or any Little Richard song, add a vocalist who has mastered the blood-curdling visceral scream and a guitarist conditioned to spring into action at the words “Let’s give it to ’em!,” and record the whole thing live in some teenage nightclub in suburban Oregon or Washington, and you’ve got a prototypical Northwest disc. It became a matter of pride for the bands to outdo one another in greasy crudeness. The ‘frat bands’ so common around the country would wither like pale slugs in the noonday sun before the onslaught of the least memorable band at any Northwest high school. Maybe it was the presence since the late ’50s of such regional instrumental giants as the Raiders, Wailers, Ventures and others that taught area kids respect for the raunchy sax and powerhouse rhythm; whatever the sociological explanation, the Northwest had a standard of sonic integrity dimensions beyond that which prevailed elsewhere. The best Northwest bands, like the Sonics, hit realms of intensity unmatched by anybody, anywhere, anytime.

Grunge chronicler Brad Morrell noted, “There’s a tradition of hard-edged, raw, unsophisticated rock music from Washington State.… Part rock ’n’ roll instrumentals, part fierce rhythm and blues, their sound was blacker and heavier than anything from California or New York. As a result they were usually restricted to regional hits.”

That fact was certainly one of the reasons that even more records didn’t break out and decades later someone like Mark Shipper could fairly refer to Northwest rock as an “often overlooked sound” or the music critic Dave Marsh could reasonably describe all the local action as “a great lost rock ’n’ roll scene.” And he elaborated, “The biggest reason Seattle rock wasn’t mass merchandised stemmed from its content. Listening to the Wailers, the Sonics, the Frantics, and the rest involved direct and dangerous encounters with madness, poison, the edge of criminal lunacy. The best Seattle records sound like they were made by people involved in an occult ritual—in short, they appear as a prophecy of nineties grunge.”

But it was the late Simon Fraser University professor of urban geography Warren Gill who put it best, when in 1993 he posited that “the rhythm-and-blues-based music of the dance halls of the region was, in its own way, as fresh an interpretation of the African-American roots of rock ’n’ roll as that of the pioneers of the genre in the mid-1950s and the revival to come from the United Kingdom in the 1960s. In a period bereft of these elemental aspects of rock ’n’ roll, the Northwest Sound was not simply a return to a previously successful formula, but a different evolutionary direction in response to local conditions.”

Stomp and Shout is all about those “local conditions.”