And some more:
www.abqtrib.com/news/2008/jan/25/cd-reviews-blue-cheer-color-fred-blakes-magic-bull/CD reviews: Blue Cheer, The Color Fred, The Blakes, Magic Bullets, Vampire Weekend, Bullet for My Valentine
By Paul Maldonado (Contact)
Friday, January 25, 2008
Blue Cheer, "What Doesn't Kill You . . ." (Rainman Records/Shout Factory)
Forty-two years into their career, this San Francisco power trio is still going strong, as evinced on this release, the band's first new studio album since 1991.
This is a throwback/flashback to '60s hard rock in all its psychedelic, metal, grunge and garage glory. The group includes original members Dickie Peterson on bass and vocals and drummer Paul Whaley; guitarist Andrew "Duck" McDonald has been an off-and-on member for 20 years.
The new CD seems like a time capsule: funky, wah-wah slide guitar ("Piece o' the Pie"); tribal drumming heavy on the tom-toms ("Rollin' Dem Bones"); and Peterson's rough throaty vocals that sound almost painful to get the words out (most of the tunes).
Highlights include the slow-burning blues of "No Relief" and the psychedelic sludge of "I'm Gonna Get to You." The guys take a detour on "Young Lions in Paradise," a country-tinged slow jam, i.e., ballad, but recover nicely with a cover of Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign," where they funk it up by slowing it down.
Blue Cheer rocks the Launchpad, 618 Central Ave., at 8:30 p.m. Monday. SuperGiant opens the 21-and over show. $10 at the door or at Launchpad. 764-8887.
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Fri January 25, 2008
newsok.com/article/3196644/1201224727?pg=2Rocker finds peace with 'Blues' and Cheer
“We're American-made iron, not heavy metal. Heavy metal is high-end. We're low-end, man, we're low gear. We don't run at you with speed, we just slowly overwhelm you.”
Related Information
Blue Cheer
•With: The Disposables, Plaid Rabbit.
•Where: The Conservatory, 8911 N Western.
•When: 8 p.m. Saturday.
•Information: 879-9778.
By Gene Triplett
Entertainment Editor
Dickie Peterson is still fussing and hollering about his "Summertime Blues” more than 40 years after the sun went down on the Summer of Love.
He remembers a period in his career when he was loathe to sing that Eddie Cochran classic one more time, that 1958 hit that he and Blue Cheer bandmates Leigh Stephens and Paul Whaley resurrected in 1968 with a feedback-and-thunder cover that's now considered a classic in its own right. But he's made his peace with the song that's been his calling card, like it or not, ever since it peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard charts four decades ago.
"I can't walk into a place or even go to a jam session and not sing this song,” the bassist and vocalist said in a phone interview from his Sebastopol, Calif., home. "If somebody knows I'm from Blue Cheer, I've gotta do that song. The thing is, for a number of years I hated this, that I couldn't go anywhere without playing this song. As I grew older, I grew to realize how much I owed Eddie Cochran, how much I owe that song. That is a great song. And I feel privileged and honored every time I get to sing it.”
It was the band's only hit single, considered by many to be a prototype of heavy metal, along with the album that bore it, "Vincebus Eruptum.” It's even been said that The Who adopted the Cochran song as a concert staple after hearing Blue Cheer's version, which gives Peterson a laugh.
"I don't think their version touches ours,” Peterson said, his voice roughened from years of belting lyrics over a morass of grinding guitar. "Yes, they technically do these things that are more precise than we are. What I could compare it to is a Honda and a Harley. They're the Honda. We're low-end. We're American-made iron, not heavy metal. Heavy metal is high-end. We're low-end, man, we're low gear. We don't run at you with speed, we just slowly overwhelm you.”
The San Francisco power trio's career got its start when Peterson met a Hell's Angel member named "Clean Gut” Turk while tripping on LSD in Golden Gate Park. Peterson had been a motorcycle enthusiast and an admirer of the outlaw biker club since he was kid; "Gut” was a music lover. The two struck up a friendship.
"He himself was a really fantastic artist and a really good thinker,” Peterson said. "He developed into a mentor for me, and he taught me things about life and survival that I use to this day.”
Turk also became Blue Cheer's manager for a time, and the trio, in turn, was adopted as something of a Hell's Angels house band.
"The Angels were sort of like the hippie equivalent of the securities and, you know, Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary and all this stuff was happening,” Peterson said.
The counter-culture acid-rock movement was booming as well, led by such luminaries as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but the ultra-loud, acid-damaged music churned out by Peterson, guitarist Stephenson and drummer Whaley commanded little respect among Bay Area musicians.
"We were like 19 years old,” Peterson said. "We could barely play, which made us a lot of enemies around the San Francisco music scene, because these older guys were supposed to make it, not us.”
And make it Blue Cheer did, at least through 1971, before constant personnel changes and lack of a follow-up hit single caused the Phillips record label to drop the band from its roster, retaining the publishing rights to all of Peterson's original songs.
"I can say unequivocally, the stone fact is, bikers never ripped us off, and we've played for bikers for the last 40 years,” he said. "Never, ever, not one time did they ever rip us off. But the guys in the suits, they got us.”
Peterson, at that point the only remaining original member, decided to pull the plug on one of the most influential bands of the acid rock era.
But Peterson has never stopped working as a musician. He re-formed Blue Cheer in 1979, and various personnel lineups have been playing and recording off and on ever since. Peterson, Whaley and guitarist Andrew "Duck” MacDonald have just released an album of new material called "What Doesn't Kill You ...” and are on a tour that will bring them to Oklahoma City on Saturday.
"It's the only thing that keeps me alive, my friend,” said Peterson, 61. "I'll never stop playing. I've said it before. When I go, I want to be standing in front of my microphone with my hammer in my hand.”
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that's more like it ...
