Clinton filmmaker takes on pre-grunge band

Making a film about his favorite band may have sounded like a dream come true for Clinton resident Jordan Albertsen, but it was not an easy journey.

When Albertsen decided to create a documentary about Tacoma-based garage band the Sonics, he expected it would be a fun project to knock out in six months. Instead, it ended up becoming a massive, 15-year undertaking that consumed his entire life.

This September, the film finally reached its theatrical release, with one showing planned for South Whidbey. “Boom: A Film About the Sonics” will premiere at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 26 at The Clyde Theatre in Langley, with a Q&A to follow with Albertsen.

Albertsen is the writer, director, editor, producer and narrator of the documentary, which explores the origin of the Sonics, a 1960s band that went on to influence other Pacific Northwest bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Heart.

A 2001 graduate of South Whidbey High School, Albertsen was listening to a Nirvana album as a young teenager when his dad walked by and told him he might enjoy listening to the Sonics, dropping a “punk rock knowledge bomb” into his lap.

“I actually thought he was referring to the basketball team,” Albertsen said.

The five-man band predates the now-obsolete Seattle NBA team. Original members Jerry Roslie, Bob Bennett, Rob Lind, Larry and Andy Parypa played in dance halls and roller rinks around western Washington, which is where Albertsen’s father heard them while growing up in Bremerton.

Albertsen referred to the Sonics as being one of the great grandfathers of punk music.

“You can certainly make a hell of an argument that they were one of the first bands that made a real racket,” he said.

The Sonics definitely deviated from musical styles of the decade with their boisterous studio recordings. One of their first hits, “The Witch,” had limited airtime because people believed it to be “devil music,” as one member of the band called it.

The Sonics fell apart after just a few years, however. Two of the members served in Vietnam, and they all went on to work day jobs.

About 40 years later, the Sonics reunited in 2007. It was around this time that Albertsen, while attending one of their concerts the following year with his dad in Seattle, decided he would make a documentary about the band that continually captivated him as a fan.

“I hadn’t even considered the Sonics reuniting because they were such a mysterious group,” Albertsen said. “They weren’t in the public eye at all.”

He stayed up late that night crafting an elaborate pitch, which he emailed to Buck Ormsby, the man who produced the Sonics’ original two albums. He woke up the next morning with a reply and an invitation to meet Ormsby for coffee.

At the time, Albertsen was in his mid-20s and living in LA, where he had moved after high school to pursue a career in the film industry. He admits he may have been a little naive about what it would take to produce a documentary.

He set out to obtain financing, which he attempted to do for about five or six years. He encountered dead end after dead end. Eventually he had the idea to start a crowdfunding campaign, but it flopped, only raising $11,000, half of which came from his father.

Other film projects he had been working on in Hollywood subsequently failed, and he struggled to get a job just to pay the bills. He ended up moving with his girlfriend to her family home in Bozeman, Montana, where he worked as a host at a sushi restaurant.

From time to time he would talk with Ormsby, who was excited about the film and introduced Albertsen to his idols. But when Ormsby passed away in 2016, he lost his inroads to rock stars and other influential people. He worried constantly about letting his friend down by not finishing the documentary.

Until one fateful day at the Montana sushi restaurant, when he received a call from a woman who had been driving for 12 hours and needed a table for 12. It was an unbelievably busy day, a two-and-a-half-hour wait, Albertsen recalled, but something about her desperation to provide a nice meal for her kids after half a day spent in the car softened him.

When the large party arrived, he walked out into the parking lot to find them and realized it was Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready and his family.

“All of a sudden, I vomited this pitch at him,” Albertsen said.

McCready was a fan of the Sonics and showed interest in the project, and it wasn’t long before other famous musicians started reaching out to Albertsen about his documentary, including Nancy Wilson of Heart and Kim Thayil of Soundgarden.

His documentary debuted at film festivals all around the world in 2018. And then, over a six-year period, several things happened, from the loss of Albertsen’s brother and father to the birth of his two children.

“Life just became pretty intense for a minute there, and then COVID happened,” he said.

He had been thinking about editing the film some more when Larry Parypa, the Sonics guitarist, called to tell him that he had found some boxes in his garage containing the band’s memorabilia. The boxes were filled with everything he had been missing, including photo albums from the ‘60s and newspaper clippings.

“It was like this total treasure box of things for the film,” he said.

New footage was added to the documentary, which had its first premiere on Sept. 7 at the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture. The event was accompanied by a 60th anniversary concert of the Sonics. Though the band reunites sporadically to play reunion shows, some of the original members have since retired from performing.

Albertsen, who moved back to South Whidbey recently, continues to find it endearing that the band members are still trying to wrap their heads around their popularity outside of the Pacific Northwest, which viewers will see in his film.

“They were dangerous and sexy and cool, and that wasn’t really something you heard from music back then,” he said.

For more information, visit sonicsfilm.com.