It’s hard not to feel sorry for Richard Berry. In the 1950s, he wrote and recorded two of the ur-texts of primitive rock’n’roll, and in neither case did his version capture the public imagination. It took The Kingsmen recording “Louie Louie”— and prompting an FBI investigation for possible obscenity — to transform that song from an amiable, Latin-inflected piece of soft R&B into the song that shook a million garages. And it took The Sonics — and then the music licensing business — to turn “Have Love, Will Travel” into one of the defining songs of the garage rock explosion of the 1960s.
Berry had been singing doo-wop in Los Angeles, first with The Flairs, then with his own backing group, The Pharaohs. His original recording of “Have Love, Will Travel”was charming, beginning with an unaccompanied “baw, baw-baw-baw, baw-baw-baw” vocal line that places it squarely in the time of Cadillacs with tail fins and Eisenhower-era wholesomeness. The Sonics, by contrast, were anything but wholesome.
The quintet from Tacoma, Washington — they took their name from the presence of Boeing’s HQ in nearby Seattle — were the most feral-sounding of a bunch of especially feral-sounding bands in the Pacific northwest in the mid-1960s, reputedly the loudest band in the world, and one for whom no extremity was too extreme (“Some folks like water/Some folks like wine /I like the taste /Of straight strychnine,” they offered on their own composition, “Strychnine”). Their 1965 version of “Have Love, Will Travel”slightly changed the key, making the central riff — a series of steps up and down — sound monstrous rather than affectionate. Singer Gerry Roslie opened the song with a scream, and Rob Lind’s saxophone solodidn’t bother with anything so bourgeois as a melody, consisting instead of a series of frantic squawks.
In truth, The Sonics had probably picked the song up from Paul Revere & the Raiders— the band who took garage rock into the US mainstream — who had recorded it the previous year (one of a string of 1964 recordings that themselves were likely intended to capitalise on the ubiquity of “Louie Louie”, by the long-forgotten likes of The Imperialites, The Hollywood Hurricanes, The Gallahads and The Offbeats). But The Sonics took it to a new dimension of musical violence, and it was their version that became the template for all subsequent cover versions, in which major label artists with big budgets tried to recreate the sound of young men with cheap equipment in a broken-down studio.
There is, for instance, no doubting the sincerity of The Black Keys,or indie supergroup The Jaded Hearts Club,but there’s just little point in their versions. Nor is their any doubt about the love for “Have Love, Will Travel” displayed by Bruce Springsteen (who released a version from 1988 on one of the live sets he sells through his website), even if his version has more in common with that by Hollywood stars Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd than The Sonics: it seems too big an arrangement for so small a song.
But it wasn’t musical reverence that made “Have Love, Will Travel” inescapable. It was The Sonics’ version being licensed to TV advertising. In 2004, it became the soundtrack to the campaign for the Land Rover Discovery (and later for the Land Rover LR3); three years later the UK insurance and financial services group LV took it up (and still uses versions of the song). In the US, it was used by BMW. And from there it went to Hollywood — the trailer for John Wick was cut to “Have Love, Will Travel” (though the song didn’t appear in the film), its frantic excitement ideally suited to teeing-up shots of Keanu Reeves killing people.
Rock’n’roll is as subject to the law of unintended consequences as any other field of human endeavour, and that Land Rover ad proved it. Its soundtrack led a new generation to track down The Sonics, and in 2007 the band reformed. This time they weren’t young men playing hops and clubs, but distinguished older gentlemen, with enough of a reputation to cross the Atlantic and play to 2,300 people at the Forum in London. When they introduced “Have Love, Will Travel” — to screams of approval — saxophonist Lind acknowledged the oddness: “This song’s for all of you that heard the song and went out and bought Land Rovers.”
What are your memories of ‘Have Love, Will Travel’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Vintage Jukebox; Etiquette Records; Legacy Recordings; Fat Possum; Infectious Music
Picture credit: GAB Archive/Redferns