Post by isis on Jul 26, 2007 19:18:53 GMT -5
Blue Cheer is still 'Louder than God'
J. Poet
Blue Cheer once was billed as the loudest rock band on planet Earth.
Inventors of the term “power trio,“ the threesome of Richard “Dickie” Peterson on lead vocals and bass, Paul Whaley on drums and Leigh Stephens on guitar were the progenitors of acid rock, heavy metal, speed metal, progressive rock and other forms of psychedelic mayhem.
Named after a batch of LSD created by Augustus Owsley Stanley, the band erupted onto the San Francisco scene in 1967. A year later, they scored a massive hit with an over-amped cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.”
The band’s debut, Vincebus Eruptum, was one of the most excessive albums of its time, spiked with distorted lead guitar solos that come at you from every direction at once, a drum sound powerful enough to crush your chest and punishing bass lines so nasty that you felt them as much as you heard them.
Looking back on that first album, Peterson says he’s still amazed at what the band accomplished.
“We blew the studio up with our guitars on the first day [of recording,]” Peterson says laughing. “They told us to set up like we did on stage. We put up six stacks of Marshalls and blew out all the equipment. We came back three days later, after they’d rebuilt the place. We did [Vincebus Eruptum] in three days, everything live. I did a couple of vocal overdubs to balance the sound. I usually did a scratch vocal, which was sometimes the best vocal, so that’s what you hear on some tracks.
“We thought ‘Summertime’ was filler. It always went over big live, but we didn’t think it was a single. I came up with the intro by borrowing a conglomeration of notes from different Otis Redding songs, just a round of flat thirds, which didn’t make any sense, but I was young and didn’t know any better. It’s one of the reasons I still hang out with younger musicians. They do things jaded older guys won’t do ’cause it’s not proper. Young guys will go places that are pure strokes of genius. So I like to sit in and give advice to younger musicians. Anyway, there were other things we had that were more aggressive than ‘Summertime.’ ‘Second Time Around’ and ‘Doctor Please’ were totally about sex and drugs, and that was what we were leaning towards. But we were young. I was only 19.”
Youthful energy powered the record, allowing Blue Cheer to bombard listeners with heavy, sonic cannonade.
“I can’t tell you what they did technically, but we had a good engineer,” says Peterson. “We wanted to have all the instruments coming at you from all directions at the same time. It was an Abe Kesh production, although that wall of sound was our idea.”
Peterson reckons Blue Cheer could only have come together in San Francisco in the ’60s.
“It was a unique time and place,” he says fondly. “All the rules people followed up to that time in music and art were thrown out the window. People were breaking new ground all over the place. [The city] was wide-open, and music was community driven. If you were a stranger, you could eat with The Diggers [an anarchist, guerilla street-theater group that served free food in Golden Gate Park every afternoon — ed.] or sleep with your friends and fans in communal houses. Today, most people think about music and hippie fashion and forget about the draft, Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. The injustices gave people things to rebel against. My generation had been misled, and we decided to create a more peaceful culture. In World War II, there were ideals behind the fighting. Since Vietnam, the wars have all been about maintaining business as usual.”
Needless to say, in those halcyon days, drugs played a big part in the evolution of both the culture and Blue Cheer’s sound.
“If you look at the back of [Vincebus Eruptum], you’ll see a poem by Augustus Owsley, the acid king,“ says Peterson. “There were drugs everywhere, and I really don’t know why I’m alive. A lot of people took trips, and some of 'em don’t get back. I don’t mean LSD particularly; it didn’t hurt me and expanded my awareness, but there were other drugs that did hurt me. It doesn’t matter if you get 'em on the street or from a pharmacy. I don’t think marijuana ever hurt me, but alcohol almost killed me a dozen times at least.”
Cheer actually started out as a more conventional guitar/bass/drums/keyboard outfit.
“We started with six pieces and got rid of two members to have a four piece,“ says Peterson. “My brother, Jerry, was gonna play rhythm guitar and sing, but he quit when we fired the rest of the band. That’s when I became the singer. I was the bass player and only sang one song on stage, although I did sing in a duet situation with my brother years before. Trimming down also made me become a songwriter, ‘cause there were no songs around we wanted to cover. We had to write our own.”
The hippie stereotype was people mellowing out to the music and relaxing. Blue Cheer became the opposite of mellow.
“There was a saying around San Francisco back then: ‘Kiss babies and eat flowers,’“ says Peterson. “Blue Cheer kissed flowers and ate babies. We were managed by a bunch of bikers and were younger and brasher and [played with] more energy compared to the other bands. We did play a lot of bike rallies in Germany [and] the U.S., and bikers always showed up to hear us, but we’re not a biker band. We’re just a powerful rock and roll band. We have an open policy about our fans: If they understand what we’re doing and want to come together and unite, that’s fine.”
Always playing at a high volume, Blue Cheer were said to be “Louder than God.” Peterson explained the band’s approach.
“We were in the ’Guinness Book of Records’ for a few years [as the loudest band] but lost the title to The Who. Our style came from wanting to use the overtones you could get out of the amps. We built a whole style of music on overtones. I remember seeing Muddy Waters at a blues festival when I was a teenager. I managed to get backstage, and at first I was too shy to speak to him. Finally, I asked him for some advice. I told him I played the bass, and he said: ‘Play the spaces between the notes. Guitar players will love you.’ And that’s what I do. The overtones between the notes are as import as the note itself. I use 'em to the maximum. In a trio, the whole rhythm comes from the bass and the bass drums. I take advantage of the low end with all its overtones to make my rhythms and patterns. My favorite bass player is Donald “Duck” Dunn [Booker T. and the MGs, The Blues Brothers]. Most of 'em play too much, but he’s minimal. I like a bass line that lets the groove carry the song.”
Led Zepplin may have been the first heavy-metal band to break into the mainstream, but Blue Cheer was breaking eardrums and destroying sound systems in ’67 and ’68, a full year before Zep unleashed their sonic assault. So who takes the title as the first metal band?
“This has been talked about for years,” Peterson says philosophically. “We’ve been called the ‘godfathers of heavy metal’ for years, but I think someone else has to decide that. There are aspects of metal in the music, but there’s also a lot of punk in the music, a lot of garage in our music. When I arrive at rehearsal with a new song, I don’t tell the guitar player or drummer what to play. If they ask what to play, I just say play good.
“I’m going into all this in the book I’m writing about the band, which is my life story, since it’s all I’ve ever done. I’ve played with other people, but since I was 19, Blue Cheer has been my life. I knew I was going to be a musician when I was 8. I never stopped pursuing music. I got that determination from my older brother, Jerry, who was a musician. I wanted to be like him. Born in Grand Forks, N.D., Peterson moved with his family to California when he was a baby. His dad played trombone and guitar, and he taught Jerry how to play accordion.
“It wasn’t unusual for my folks to roll back the carpet and dance to the record player,” says Peterson. “When rock caught on, my brother started playing guitar, and everything he did sifted down to me.” Peterson’s parents died when he was 10. Afterward, he and his brother lived on their own “until the state caught up to us.”
Jerry got married, and Richard was sent back east to live with his uncle.
“But, I was already a street kid who wanted to play music,“ says Peterson.
In junior high, Peterson discovered the bass through a friend.
“I knew in that instant the bass was what I had been searching for,” says Peterson. “I could play a few guitar chords, but picking up the bass, my whole concept of music changed.
“I started playing and singing with my brother, who was also a songwriter and a career criminal. He spent a lot of time in the penitentiary, but he always wrote songs. I have recordings of his songs, and they’re all great, although I haven’t used any of his material in the band yet. I buried him three years ago, and while he didn’t teach me music, he taught me how to learn music, how to take and recall things you hear and create new sounds with them.”
New sounds were Blue Cheer’s trademark early on. On its second album, Outside Inside, Cheer unveiled “Come and Get It,” possibly the first speed-metal song.
“Metal didn’t exist at that time,” Peterson says. “It was just a riff we put together. It felt good; we weren’t trying to create a new genre. When you’re in the middle of the creative process, you don’t think of something being new and different, you’re just doing it. I don’t know when they started considering Blue Cheer classic rock; it just happened. When you’re young and doing it, you’re not thinking. That’s why we covered ‘Satisfaction’ R&B style. In rehearsals, we used to f**k around with it to warm up, and after Otis Redding’s plane went down, we started playing it live and dedicating it to Otis.”
After Outside Inside, Blue Cheer went through a long period of shifting personnel that slowed their upward momentum. Guitarist Leigh Stephens left after Outside Inside, but his replacement Randy Holden only lasted eight months and three songs on New! Improved! Blue Cheer. He was replaced on the rest of the album by guitarist Bruce Stephens (no relationship to Leigh) and keyboard player Ralph “Burns” Kellogg.
By the eponymous fourth album, the band was exploring progressive rock. When original drummer Paul Whaley was replaced with Norman Mayell (Sopwith Camel) on Original Human Being, the band was using a horn section, sitars and arrangements that tapped on folk, blues and funky, Oakland-style R&B. Peterson was now the only original member of the band, and their last set, 1971’s Oh Pleasant Hope, sounds a bit tame and derivative compared with the glorious noise of just a few years before.
After taking a few years off, Peterson and Whaley reconvened in the early ’80s and moved to Germany, where Peterson met and married a German girl.
“We like the way musicians are treated In Europe,” Peterson says. “They understand you work hard, and they actually pay you. It’s not like they’re doing you a favor to let you play in a bar."
These days, Peterson and Whaley, are back on the road nonstop, planning a new album with guitarist Andrew “Duck” MacDonald, who has reignited the band’s old fire. Peterson met Duck in a recording studio. A dispute over a bottle of Jack Daniels owned by Duck — and drunk by Peterson — ensued.
“It took a lot of years to find the right guitar player, but he’s the one,” says Peterson. “We still do the same thing we’ve always done. We’re a power trio that plays rock ’n’ roll, and this summer we’ll be releasing a new album — What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make ... We’ve finished the recording, but we’re still doing post-production. It’s all new material, and it’ll speak for itself.”
And in case anyone is wondering, Peterson hasn’t gone deaf yet.
“At my last physical the doctor said: ‘My God, man, what did you do to your ears? You have calluses on your eardrums.’ I told him I play bass. Guitars rip your eardrums; bass players get calluses.”
[ back...]
On Newstands Now: Goldmine #706, Cover date Aug. 17, 2007
J. Poet
Blue Cheer once was billed as the loudest rock band on planet Earth.
Inventors of the term “power trio,“ the threesome of Richard “Dickie” Peterson on lead vocals and bass, Paul Whaley on drums and Leigh Stephens on guitar were the progenitors of acid rock, heavy metal, speed metal, progressive rock and other forms of psychedelic mayhem.
Named after a batch of LSD created by Augustus Owsley Stanley, the band erupted onto the San Francisco scene in 1967. A year later, they scored a massive hit with an over-amped cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.”
The band’s debut, Vincebus Eruptum, was one of the most excessive albums of its time, spiked with distorted lead guitar solos that come at you from every direction at once, a drum sound powerful enough to crush your chest and punishing bass lines so nasty that you felt them as much as you heard them.
Looking back on that first album, Peterson says he’s still amazed at what the band accomplished.
“We blew the studio up with our guitars on the first day [of recording,]” Peterson says laughing. “They told us to set up like we did on stage. We put up six stacks of Marshalls and blew out all the equipment. We came back three days later, after they’d rebuilt the place. We did [Vincebus Eruptum] in three days, everything live. I did a couple of vocal overdubs to balance the sound. I usually did a scratch vocal, which was sometimes the best vocal, so that’s what you hear on some tracks.
“We thought ‘Summertime’ was filler. It always went over big live, but we didn’t think it was a single. I came up with the intro by borrowing a conglomeration of notes from different Otis Redding songs, just a round of flat thirds, which didn’t make any sense, but I was young and didn’t know any better. It’s one of the reasons I still hang out with younger musicians. They do things jaded older guys won’t do ’cause it’s not proper. Young guys will go places that are pure strokes of genius. So I like to sit in and give advice to younger musicians. Anyway, there were other things we had that were more aggressive than ‘Summertime.’ ‘Second Time Around’ and ‘Doctor Please’ were totally about sex and drugs, and that was what we were leaning towards. But we were young. I was only 19.”
Youthful energy powered the record, allowing Blue Cheer to bombard listeners with heavy, sonic cannonade.
“I can’t tell you what they did technically, but we had a good engineer,” says Peterson. “We wanted to have all the instruments coming at you from all directions at the same time. It was an Abe Kesh production, although that wall of sound was our idea.”
Peterson reckons Blue Cheer could only have come together in San Francisco in the ’60s.
“It was a unique time and place,” he says fondly. “All the rules people followed up to that time in music and art were thrown out the window. People were breaking new ground all over the place. [The city] was wide-open, and music was community driven. If you were a stranger, you could eat with The Diggers [an anarchist, guerilla street-theater group that served free food in Golden Gate Park every afternoon — ed.] or sleep with your friends and fans in communal houses. Today, most people think about music and hippie fashion and forget about the draft, Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. The injustices gave people things to rebel against. My generation had been misled, and we decided to create a more peaceful culture. In World War II, there were ideals behind the fighting. Since Vietnam, the wars have all been about maintaining business as usual.”
Needless to say, in those halcyon days, drugs played a big part in the evolution of both the culture and Blue Cheer’s sound.
“If you look at the back of [Vincebus Eruptum], you’ll see a poem by Augustus Owsley, the acid king,“ says Peterson. “There were drugs everywhere, and I really don’t know why I’m alive. A lot of people took trips, and some of 'em don’t get back. I don’t mean LSD particularly; it didn’t hurt me and expanded my awareness, but there were other drugs that did hurt me. It doesn’t matter if you get 'em on the street or from a pharmacy. I don’t think marijuana ever hurt me, but alcohol almost killed me a dozen times at least.”
Cheer actually started out as a more conventional guitar/bass/drums/keyboard outfit.
“We started with six pieces and got rid of two members to have a four piece,“ says Peterson. “My brother, Jerry, was gonna play rhythm guitar and sing, but he quit when we fired the rest of the band. That’s when I became the singer. I was the bass player and only sang one song on stage, although I did sing in a duet situation with my brother years before. Trimming down also made me become a songwriter, ‘cause there were no songs around we wanted to cover. We had to write our own.”
The hippie stereotype was people mellowing out to the music and relaxing. Blue Cheer became the opposite of mellow.
“There was a saying around San Francisco back then: ‘Kiss babies and eat flowers,’“ says Peterson. “Blue Cheer kissed flowers and ate babies. We were managed by a bunch of bikers and were younger and brasher and [played with] more energy compared to the other bands. We did play a lot of bike rallies in Germany [and] the U.S., and bikers always showed up to hear us, but we’re not a biker band. We’re just a powerful rock and roll band. We have an open policy about our fans: If they understand what we’re doing and want to come together and unite, that’s fine.”
Always playing at a high volume, Blue Cheer were said to be “Louder than God.” Peterson explained the band’s approach.
“We were in the ’Guinness Book of Records’ for a few years [as the loudest band] but lost the title to The Who. Our style came from wanting to use the overtones you could get out of the amps. We built a whole style of music on overtones. I remember seeing Muddy Waters at a blues festival when I was a teenager. I managed to get backstage, and at first I was too shy to speak to him. Finally, I asked him for some advice. I told him I played the bass, and he said: ‘Play the spaces between the notes. Guitar players will love you.’ And that’s what I do. The overtones between the notes are as import as the note itself. I use 'em to the maximum. In a trio, the whole rhythm comes from the bass and the bass drums. I take advantage of the low end with all its overtones to make my rhythms and patterns. My favorite bass player is Donald “Duck” Dunn [Booker T. and the MGs, The Blues Brothers]. Most of 'em play too much, but he’s minimal. I like a bass line that lets the groove carry the song.”
Led Zepplin may have been the first heavy-metal band to break into the mainstream, but Blue Cheer was breaking eardrums and destroying sound systems in ’67 and ’68, a full year before Zep unleashed their sonic assault. So who takes the title as the first metal band?
“This has been talked about for years,” Peterson says philosophically. “We’ve been called the ‘godfathers of heavy metal’ for years, but I think someone else has to decide that. There are aspects of metal in the music, but there’s also a lot of punk in the music, a lot of garage in our music. When I arrive at rehearsal with a new song, I don’t tell the guitar player or drummer what to play. If they ask what to play, I just say play good.
“I’m going into all this in the book I’m writing about the band, which is my life story, since it’s all I’ve ever done. I’ve played with other people, but since I was 19, Blue Cheer has been my life. I knew I was going to be a musician when I was 8. I never stopped pursuing music. I got that determination from my older brother, Jerry, who was a musician. I wanted to be like him. Born in Grand Forks, N.D., Peterson moved with his family to California when he was a baby. His dad played trombone and guitar, and he taught Jerry how to play accordion.
“It wasn’t unusual for my folks to roll back the carpet and dance to the record player,” says Peterson. “When rock caught on, my brother started playing guitar, and everything he did sifted down to me.” Peterson’s parents died when he was 10. Afterward, he and his brother lived on their own “until the state caught up to us.”
Jerry got married, and Richard was sent back east to live with his uncle.
“But, I was already a street kid who wanted to play music,“ says Peterson.
In junior high, Peterson discovered the bass through a friend.
“I knew in that instant the bass was what I had been searching for,” says Peterson. “I could play a few guitar chords, but picking up the bass, my whole concept of music changed.
“I started playing and singing with my brother, who was also a songwriter and a career criminal. He spent a lot of time in the penitentiary, but he always wrote songs. I have recordings of his songs, and they’re all great, although I haven’t used any of his material in the band yet. I buried him three years ago, and while he didn’t teach me music, he taught me how to learn music, how to take and recall things you hear and create new sounds with them.”
New sounds were Blue Cheer’s trademark early on. On its second album, Outside Inside, Cheer unveiled “Come and Get It,” possibly the first speed-metal song.
“Metal didn’t exist at that time,” Peterson says. “It was just a riff we put together. It felt good; we weren’t trying to create a new genre. When you’re in the middle of the creative process, you don’t think of something being new and different, you’re just doing it. I don’t know when they started considering Blue Cheer classic rock; it just happened. When you’re young and doing it, you’re not thinking. That’s why we covered ‘Satisfaction’ R&B style. In rehearsals, we used to f**k around with it to warm up, and after Otis Redding’s plane went down, we started playing it live and dedicating it to Otis.”
After Outside Inside, Blue Cheer went through a long period of shifting personnel that slowed their upward momentum. Guitarist Leigh Stephens left after Outside Inside, but his replacement Randy Holden only lasted eight months and three songs on New! Improved! Blue Cheer. He was replaced on the rest of the album by guitarist Bruce Stephens (no relationship to Leigh) and keyboard player Ralph “Burns” Kellogg.
By the eponymous fourth album, the band was exploring progressive rock. When original drummer Paul Whaley was replaced with Norman Mayell (Sopwith Camel) on Original Human Being, the band was using a horn section, sitars and arrangements that tapped on folk, blues and funky, Oakland-style R&B. Peterson was now the only original member of the band, and their last set, 1971’s Oh Pleasant Hope, sounds a bit tame and derivative compared with the glorious noise of just a few years before.
After taking a few years off, Peterson and Whaley reconvened in the early ’80s and moved to Germany, where Peterson met and married a German girl.
“We like the way musicians are treated In Europe,” Peterson says. “They understand you work hard, and they actually pay you. It’s not like they’re doing you a favor to let you play in a bar."
These days, Peterson and Whaley, are back on the road nonstop, planning a new album with guitarist Andrew “Duck” MacDonald, who has reignited the band’s old fire. Peterson met Duck in a recording studio. A dispute over a bottle of Jack Daniels owned by Duck — and drunk by Peterson — ensued.
“It took a lot of years to find the right guitar player, but he’s the one,” says Peterson. “We still do the same thing we’ve always done. We’re a power trio that plays rock ’n’ roll, and this summer we’ll be releasing a new album — What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make ... We’ve finished the recording, but we’re still doing post-production. It’s all new material, and it’ll speak for itself.”
And in case anyone is wondering, Peterson hasn’t gone deaf yet.
“At my last physical the doctor said: ‘My God, man, what did you do to your ears? You have calluses on your eardrums.’ I told him I play bass. Guitars rip your eardrums; bass players get calluses.”
[ back...]
On Newstands Now: Goldmine #706, Cover date Aug. 17, 2007