“Have Love Will Travel” by The Sonics

Richard Berry wrote and cut "Have Love, Will Travel" at the tail end of the '50s, lifting the title from the western serial Have Gun, Will Travel, but it's the Sonics who turned it into a battering ram. Their version sits on the 1965 album Here Are The Sonics!!!, and it's about as intense as garage rock gets.

The Sonics shoved it up from G to C, took the riff Berry sang and handed it to the instruments: guitar, sax and bass all pounding the same figure while the drums boom like a demolition crew and the vocals come out as a scream. The sax gets its own break and growls so hard that some listeners have taken it for a fuzz guitar, though the guitar uses no fuzz at all. Nearly everyone who covered the song after the '60s copied this version, not Berry's.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.