Music History – Louder than God

Dickie Peterson ends up settling in Germany and works as a day job as a warehouse clerk. When there are a few concerts coming up in a row, he takes a vacation. The concert organizer Kalle Becker books Blue Cheer 2000 for the Burg-Herzberg Festival and then becomes a kind of agent for the band. Among other things, Becker arranged a tour of Japan for her. “Peterson was the god for two weeks, and then he went back to his camp in Hanover and did his job,” says Gunter Lorz, the festival’s press officer.

The beginnings of the band, which formed in San Francisco in 1966, looked far more glamorous. Jim Morrison of the Doors once called them “the most powerful band I’ve ever seen.” There was also a persistent rumor that they were “louder than God.” The wild noise aura also includes the anecdote that music journalist Lester Bangs liked to tell. »A friend of mine had a record player that could rotate the platter in the opposite direction; When we played Blue Cheer’s first album, ‘Vincebus Eruptum,’ backwards, you couldn’t hear any difference from forwards.”

They have always been associated with the psychedelic sound of the late sixties. That’s true to a certain extent, they named themselves after an LSD derivative that the hippie chemist Owsley Stanley generously supplied them with, hung out with the Merry Pranksters and drummer Paul Whaley was in a relationship with Janis Joplin for a while – but the Haight -Ashbury scene is, above all, the breeding ground from which the monster rises. “First of all, we were a loud, hard-hitting rock’n’roll band, man,” said Dickie Peterson, the gang leader, to an interviewer in the Pittsburgh Post two years before his death. “Our only goal was to make music that was at least as much a physical experience as it was an acoustic experience.” The bell-bottoms were supposed to flap.

That’s why the second album in 1968 was titled “Outsideinside” – because, according to legend, some songs were so incredibly powerful that they could only be recorded outside. “Outsideinside” was a bit tamer, more moderate and more song-oriented than their huge hit “Vincebus Eruptum”. Yet they still sound like a hulking, brutal Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The Philips label hears this and immediately sends them to the studio. They don’t have enough of their own material yet, so cover songs are needed. Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” turns out to be a stroke of luck. »We were constantly changing it, adding and removing parts. “There were also large doses of LSD involved,” Peterson later said. Whatever the case, this wild, neglected single reached number 14 on the Billboard charts, and the success propelled her debut album “Vincebus Eruptum” to number 11.

The reviews are still good, but that will soon change. The press never really cared about Blue Cheer. This was not least because their manager Allen “Gut” Terk was a former member of the Hells Angels; they were simply considered insecure Cantonians. In a later interview, Dickie Peterson revealed that although they opposed the Vietnam War and gave the conservative government under Nixon the finger, not least because of its stricter drug policy, they also had nothing to do with the flower power dream castles.

“It was easy to hate us,” founding guitarist Leigh Stephens later admitted. The declared temperancer complained once too often about his two teammates’ lax approach to booze and drugs and was ultimately thrown out the door for it. From now on, the staff carousel rotates at a constant speed. From 1969 until the first disbandment in 1975, almost no year goes by without a line-up change. In the end, even band founder Dickie Peterson isn’t there anymore.

This inconsistency obviously affects the songs. The third album »New! Improved!« (1969) promises a lot but delivers little. The first side surprises with well-produced, laid-back country rock, the second side is closer to the original Blue Cheer sound, but sounds far too weak for their standards, more like a cross between Velvet Underground and Cream. Where has the destructive energy gone?

You’ll also ask yourself that about the next album. “Blue Cheer” from the same year continues on the mainstream rock track and is more reminiscent of a conventional Rolling Stones album of the time, only without the hits. Well, “Fools” and “Rock And Roll Queens” could be played on classic rock stations. Guitarist Gary Lee Yoder already has a hand in this, taking over the guitar on “The Original Human Being” (1970) and also singing most of the songs. It feels like the band is slowly slipping out of Dickie Peterson’s hands. The fairly hard songs “Good Times Are So Hard To Find”, “Make Me Laugh” and “Pilot” with their organ broadsides are more Steppenwolf than Blue Cheer. What’s more, they copy the Stax sound several times with aggressive soul brass. Of course, there’s always some blues and boogie there, as well as a weird, hippie sitar instrumental, “Babaji (Twilight Raga),” which sounds like a mockery of their own early work.

On the last album before the breakup, »Oh! Pleasant Hope” (1971), they no longer know whether they would rather be The Band or the Rolling Stones. They have lost the old Blue Cheer fans with their various molts and have not gained enough new ones. Given the falling sales figures, there is no particular need for Philips to offer them another contract, so Peterson is closing up shop for now.

However, the name still has a good ring to it, so he soon makes another attempt to revive Blue Cheer. He works on fresh songs with new staff, they record demos, but the negotiations with the labels all fail. Blue Cheer will be an on-off relationship for many years. It was only when, as a result of the 80s metal hype, Jon and Marsha Zazula from the Megaforce label remembered the old noisemakers and signed them for an album in 1984, did a little more continuity come back into their work.

The reunion album “The Beast Is Back” finally contains new songs, the sound is contemporary dirty and the new guitarist Tony Rainier shows the two veterans Peterson and Whaley the way into modernity. It’s certainly also due to co-producer Carl Canedy that Blue Cheer now sound a little like his regular band The Rods. With a little more courage and completely new material one could perhaps have found a connection to the current scene, but despite the retreading, the many old songs are audibly relics of another time, and so the album flops across the board.

A decade later one might have been able to score more points with the fact that the grunge and soon afterwards also the stoner rock scene, i.e. bands like Mudhoney, Melvins and Kyuss, have Blue Cheer in their ancestry. They are also traveling in Europe with Mudhoney. In the late eighties and nineties this became her main sphere of activity. They are now one of the oldies bands and regularly tour the provinces alongside generational colleagues such as Mountain, Groundhogs and Ten Years After.

Dickie Peterson died of prostate cancer on October 12, 2009; his last album, “What Doesn’t Kill You…” had been released two years earlier. A last sharp-edged piece of stoner that only the initiated notice. Peterson doesn’t let that dampen his spirits. “We always thought he was a dark rocker,” remembers Gunter Lorz, “but once you got to know him, after three minutes you entrusted him with your child. He didn’t care that he had a huge hit with “Summertime Blues.” He had been happy with the song for a long time. “First we loved it, then we hated it, now we’re used to live with it,” he is said to have said.