The Clinton years weren’t especially kind to psychedelic hard
rock or proto-metal, but when I think of Blue Cheer, I think of 1994.
It was the year a fellow college student forced me to listen to the San
Francisco trio’s watershed 1968 debut, Vincebus Eruptum. I had
probably heard their fuzzed-out cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime
Blues” on a now-defunct oldies radio station, but I wasn’t yet
impressed. It took a person with whom I had little in common to really
enlighten me—someone who was living in another time and
place.
When I think of 1994, I also think of alternative rock. The Smashing
Pumpkins, Nirvana, the Breeders—these were the posters adorning
the classic American dorm room. Even my slow-speaking
classmate—who sported a dumpy mullet and commuted to the rural
state school from his parents’ nearby home—knew “our” music. “You
know where that sound comes from?” he asked me in the darkroom of our
photography class, referring to an abrasive local three-piece.
“Fugazi?” I guessed. “I’ll show you,” he promised, his voice loud with
childlike enthusiasm.
He loaned me Vincebus Eruptum. To my surprise, it hit me like
a ton of bricks. With maximum push and Hendrix-style looseness, I came
to believe in Blue Cheer. Former guitarist Leigh Stephens’ lead wail on
“Out of Focus” and “Second Time Around” exposed the roots of Billy
Corgan’s most elaborate guitar escapades (“Silverfuck,” “Geek USA”).
And Nirvana’s three-piece grunge didn’t just crawl out of the Wishkah
River after all. Blue Cheer’s “Summertime Blues” seemed like the
epitome of raw teenage angst, recorded the year Kurt Cobain was born.
They took a safe, call-and-response pop song and turned it into a dirty
rock ‘n’ roll tornado. It still spins today.
In the 2005 documentary film Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey,
Rush frontman Geddy Lee echoed my old classmate’s sentiment: “If you
really want to go back to one of the early metal bands, you have to
look at Blue Cheer.” Sometimes great, and simple, minds think
alike.