Nobody left short of amazed when the Sonics played the Rickshaw Theatre last year.

Picture five men, three of them pushing 70, who more or less shuffled on-stage and then blew up like juvenile delinquents in heat. It was phenomenal, a complete victory for a band that hadn’t visited Vancouver since the ’60s. Back then, the Tacoma-based garage rockers were riding high on a string of regional hits that sounded like nothing else on Earth and still don’t. Their viciously groovy first single, “The Witch”, remains the template for any dance party that happens to break out at a knife fight, and provides us—according to science—with the real moment of conception of punk (Pointed Sticks would cover “The Witch” about 15 years later) and, a little later down the line, grunge.

The Sonics’ influence remains unchallenged. Just a few weeks ago, Paste Magazine named their version of “Have Love Will Travel” as the greatest garage-rock song of all time, beating out contemporaries like 13th Floor Elevators and relative newbies like Reigning Sound. Hearing about it for the first time, singer Jerry Roslie reckons they got it right with that.

“Oh, I certainly do,” he says, talking to the Straight from his home in Tacoma. “The only thing is I wish I’d written it. Gosh darn it. Oh well. Wow, Paste Magazine, huh?”

Roslie and the two other still-active original members—saxman Rob Lind and guitarist Larry Parypa (Roslie on Parypa: “Don’t loan him any money. Other than that, he’s a fine guitar player”)—would have remained lost youths ever enshrined on the covers of their two classic mid-’60s albums, Here Are the Sonics and Boom, if it hadn’t been for an entreaty from Cavestomp festival boss hoss Jon Weiss to regroup in 2007. And so it came to pass that the Sonics played New York for the first time ever.

“We called him up and said, ‘We might be able to do it but let us practise some more down the road and then we’ll get back to you.’ We stalled him. We had to,” Roslie recalls, adding that he never had any intention of getting back on-stage after a brief Sonics resurrection in 1980. “I was done. Done, you know? Done with the music business. But anyway, we did that and it was just amazing. We thought, ‘Man, these kids…’ They say people from New York, if they don’t like you, they’re gonna let you know. We thought we’d start out the evening with a gigantic tomato right in the head.”

There were no tomatoes, just the miraculous rebirth of a band that’s travelled the world ever since, trading on its legend in grand style and delivering an hour of authentic Pacific Northwest protopunk with the kind of feral power—according to science—they shouldn’t really be capable of. Roslie puts it down to “luck of the luck” that he can still wail like he did five decades ago. If you’ve heard the Little Richard–inspired screams he unleashes on sick originals like “Strychnine”, be assured that the man, somehow, has still got it. And so do the sold-out audiences that the Sonics have been greeted with in their glorious second act.

“They look just like the kids we played to back in the ’60s,” Roslie says with an incredulous laugh. “They’re that young and naive and stuff, and they’re jumping off the stage and stage-diving and mosh-pitting. It’s just amazing.”

The Sonics play at the Rickshaw Theatre next Thursday (October 2).