BLUE CHEER AND THE FEEDBACK THAT ENDED REALITY

 It's claimed more often than not that Black Sabbath created heavy metal, a not unreasonable assumption, but I would argue the honor belong's to San Francisco's Blue Cheer. BC's brand of amplified raunch first came on us in 1966 with the release of their initial album Vincebus Eruptum. BS's first release was later, in 1970, and later still in the U.S. Both bands were universally reviled when they respectively appeared, and it was a while later, in waves of reconsideration and nostalgia, that both bands are given more credit for what they did. Blue Cheer has been one of my guilty pleasures for years, fast, atonal, loud enough to be made to record at the end of a San Francisco pier , amps aimed at the Bay, or playing so loud at a free concert that a dog keeled over and died. Their folklore spoke volumes as loud as their first two records.

It wasn't hip at all to like Blue Cheer when their 1968 debut, Vincebus Eruptum, was released. It was the usual accusations as the established critics expressed their disgust: out of tune, unable to play their instruments, unbelievably bad imitations of Hendrix and Cream. Some of us liked what these three guys were doing, though. I liked them precisely for the reason that others hated them: for being atonal, loud, full of feedback, distorted in ways that had nothing to do with conventional ideas of texture and musical color and everything to do with making you aware of the nature of the sound, which was sheer electricity wielded by some angry and impatient men eager to make a noise where there had previously been stultifying silence. Blue Cheer was the perfect band for the coming age of speed freakery. The chemical essence wants to take things apart and then reassemble them rapidly, haphazardly, inspired and excited momentarily by new combinations of components to be had from that which was gutted. Like it or not, something new was occurring here, and it was something that could only happen if the players—Dickie Peterson, bass and vocals; Leigh Stephens, guitar; Paul Whaley, drums—had more than a competent grasp of their instruments.

I was introduced to the solar skronk and abrasive swing of Sun Ra at the time through many visits to the Grande Ballroom and developed a taste for the mind-fuckery of free jazz that came from Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Ayler, and Coleman. It helped that WABX, the FM underground station in Detroit, played some Black avant-garde music. So I found similarities between what Blue Cheer was doing and the esteemed Black musicians who may have influenced them. The band may well have had no idea of what they were doing conceptually, and the conceit is mine alone. Still, all the same, Blue Cheer handily deconstructed the entire power-trio format, pushing into its three- or four-chord limit with long jams that were groaning, grainy, belching, aggressive, nonlinear improvisations keyed to emotion alone.

They were to the power trio what Neal Cassady was to drive. I consider Dick Peterson an able, if not great, bassist. Still, unquestionably, he was one of the most terrific white-blues screamers of all time—his singing was rage, self-pity, and uncontrollable impulse fused in each frayed, corrosive syllable he spat out. His bandsaw-on-steel vocals, joined with guitarist Leigh Stephens' PULVERIZING ATONAL GUITAR SOLOS and drummer Paul Whaley's trash-can demolition, laid the groundwork for a generation of metal and punk bands to come: MC5, STOOGES, MOUNTAIN, LED ZEP, RAMONES, MOTORHEAD, DEAD BOYS. Even the Velvet Underground, with their feedback skronk, couldn't match Blue Cheer's steel-belted forays into electrified abandon; the Velvets merely taunted the strings of their guitars, while Blue Cheer sounded like they punched holes in oil tankers. And Peterson's vocalizations were the perfect match: screech, rasp, and banshee wail all rolled into one bag of verbal outrage, maintaining a punk's slouch. His was the rusty yowl that deserved to be praised and dreaded for the unflinching combination of fear and rage it represented.

Leigh Stephens' broadsides were genuinely beautiful cascades of dissonance, pulverizing atonal breaks, the emphasis on pulverizing. I saw these guys at the Grande as well. It seems to me, thinking about it decades later, that this was not a man of sub-competence flailing and noodling about the frets, but someone who knew what he wanted to sound like and could get the result he desired, and that he was someone who could duplicate that sound on command. Paul Whaley, in turn, had the most expansive, most enormous, most sledgehammer-like drumming style of the period. His sound was of every building and bridge that ever collapsed under its own weight. This is to say that I think the first two Blue Cheer albums need to be reconsidered.