To the best of my recollection, I was probably about 13 years old. I was working at a local department store (R.J. Mars) in Vernon, NJ, a small town in the cow country of Sussex country. It’s a very quiet, fairly rural area just south of Orange County, New York, a town full of craft stores, pubs and even more cows. My mother worked at a bank just nearby and I was taking guitar lessons at a plaza right across the street from my place of employ. A pretty cozy arrangement, all things considered. It was also frightfully dull to be a teenager there, being a town without even a movie theater or bookstore. And as I was quickly becoming a music obsessed lad, the total lack of a music store in town was crippling. To this point I had been a very timid, church going lad, my most exotic interest being old comic books. But something was changing in my brain cells, something that led me towards the esoteric in all things, most especially music. And so I was left to scour the few stores my parents would drive me to in their limited leisure time (being a lower middle class working family, money was not abundant) or raiding the record collections of older acquaintances. One of them was a woman my mother worked with, named Nancy. She was a pleasant woman with a rock and roll hippie vibe about her. It was clear she’d come of age in the late sixties, and it showed on her a bit. Being the naïve teenager I was, I assumed that everyone who passed through that wonderful era had huge record collections, bulging with arcane delights and treasures galore. It never crossed my mind that not every hippie was a huge music fan, or that they hadn’t already sold their collections for food, gas or ganja funds. Nancy, as it turns out, didn’t have a huge collection, but she did have one thing I was very interested in.
See, around this time my interest in heavy metal was becoming acute. I liked the stuff I heard on the radio (Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Van Halen, Quiet Riot, etc.) but I was starting to become aware that there were whole other strata to the music. Pouring over the pages of mainstream metal rags informed me that there was both a burgeoning metal underground of independent record labels and radical sounds, but also that the music had an extensive past as well. I knew about Zeppelin and Sabbath and Purple (everyone did…it was law in the school system I attended) and the classic rock radio stations around the area (WPDH…Poughkeepsie, NY’s finest!) helped fill in the other gaps in my knowledge. Also every so often, roughly once a year, magazines like Circus and Hit Parader ran badly written and lazily researched “history of metal” articles, in which they tracked the music’s history while expending the least amount of effort possible. But one name they always dropped, however fleetingly, was Blue Cheer. They often alleged that these guys were in fact the first heavy metal band, having released their debut album, the all heavy all the time Vincebus Eruptum in 1968. This would put the band slightly ahead of Zep, two years ahead of the Sabs, and since Deep Purple was still making largely floral psychedelia in ’68, it meant the Cheer may have trumped them as well. Sounded great! I just had to hear it, and off to the record stores I went to plunk down my stock boy paycheck in return for a beautiful copy of this holy relic.
One problem: this was 1982, and the album was out of print, out of circulation, and as it happens, pretty hard to find. When I asked the clerks at Sam Goody and Record Town about it, I was met with blank, uncomprehending expressions. Blue what? Who cheer? This clearly wasn’t going to be easy, and it was at this exact point that I discovered the phenomenon of out of print, deleted or otherwise difficult to find music. This meant I had to search for it, and that realization permanently infused in me the allure of this process. Having to search in basements, flea markets and garage sales for desired music increased my music obsession rather than frustrating me. It was like a drug; gotta have it, gotta hear it, gotta find it. And Blue Cheer was my first holy grail.
I wasn’t alone. Over the years I’ve discovered many, many other Cheer obsessives who were in the same position as me. Some were old enough to have been fans when the band was in action during their 1968-1971 heyday, some were just curious, enthralled by the scraps of sounds they’d been able to hear from this legendary act. But for me, this band was the musical equivalent of a gateway drug, cluing me onto the fact that much of the best rock music ever recorded was obscure, out of the way and otherwise underground in nature. In the case of experimental artists, obscurity is to be expected. But the Cheer is an example of a band that was popular in their day, but had been almost totally plowed under the waves of history. There were, I would soon find, lots of bands like this, mainly heavy and progressive rock bands of the early seventies who became forgotten through their own lack of success and the vagaries of fashion (punk did a lot to bury this music and rock critics were all too happy to help dig the graves). And so bands like Bloodrock, Bang, Cactus, Dust, Warhorse, Spooky Tooth and dozens more seemed to be forgotten by the dawn of the eighties, which is right when I got interested in this stuff.
But back in 1968, after downsizing their six piece line up to a trio and acquiring some serious amplification upgrades, Blue Cheer was an immediate sensation. Their debut album we’re speaking of shot to number 14 on the Billboard album charts, and it’s legendary take on Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” did even better as a single, getting up to number 11! The band appeared on The Steve Allen Show, performing at their now well known devastating volume levels, leading good ‘ol Steve to warn his audience as they started their second number, “It’s the Blue Cheer, run for your lives!” As was common in those days, the band issued another album in ’68, the notably sharper, tighter Outside Inside, which was probably a better album from a technical standpoint all the way around, but it didn’t sell. You can unleash any number of valid theories as to why, but I have mine. I get the idea that Blue Cheer was seen, due to their extreme volume and lead fisted playing, as a novelty act. Since they were ahead of the heavy metal curve and not nearly as musically advanced as Cream, Hendrix or even the Yardbirds, older, more sophisticated fans felt the Cheer were trading on extremity alone, with little musical value to back it up. Some of the evidence for this view is in the distorted grooves of Eruptum itself, and since the language of heavy metal wasn’t ingrained in the public mind yet, Blue Cheer sounded more like an anomaly than the new development in rock music that they were. Plus it seems more teenyboppers than serious rock heads were among the band’s first blast of fans, making them instantly unfashionable to the rock music fan elite. They proved the perceptions about their skills wrong with their subsequent work, but by then it was too late. By ’69-’70, Zeppelin were riding high, Sabbath were lurking in the shadows, and Deep Purple had finally cranked up their amps as well. The Cheer, despite carrying on fruitlessly, had become yesterday’s news with alarming.
And so I went through a mostly fruitless walkabout to find this sainted record, not even knowing at this point that Blue Cheer ever issued another album besides it (they did…5 more in fact during the initial stage of their career). I actually found a sealed copy at a dingy second hand crap store in Sugar Loaf, NY in ’83, but its owner wanted $25 for it, stressing that it’s hermetic status meant that it had “real sixties air in there, man!” I didn’t have $25 and I didn’t want 20 year old air, so I passed. Time went by and I finally thought to ask Nancy (remember Nancy? I mentioned her a while back) if she had a copy. Not only did she own a good condition copy of Vincebus Eruptum, she had actually seen the band live in ’68! A true believer! A witness! I was ecstatic and jealous and ready to mow her lawn until I was 30 to convince her to part with it. She wouldn’t, but she did agree to bring it over to my house and let me spin it. That was gonna have to be good enough for me.
And so on a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon, Nancy arrived at my parent’s house, mainly to do some kind of craft project with my Mother. But as promised she bought the album with her. So while my father got stupid (as was his wont) on can after can of cheap black beer whilst watching football, I eased Vincebus Eruptum onto the family turntable, slapped on the headphones and prepared to experience it.
The first thing I noticed was how much fuzzier, louder and spontaneous the music sounded when compared to what I understood heavy metal to be. This band was wilder and less concerned with chops than Zep for example, and a million times removed from the slick, glossy sheen I’d heard on modern records. You could hear (and feel if ya cranked it up enough) the vibration of the amplifiers, the guitar sound so caked in fuzz, you’d have thought it’s strings were covered in moss. Also, the bass was loud, much louder than on any album I’d previously heard. It moved in the same sort of fashion I’d heard on songs by Cream, but with less jazzy delicacy, sounding like a caveman was handling the instrument. And the drumming, courtesy monolithic skins-man Paul Whaley, was just wide the hell open, cymbals crashing, toms thudding, making the percussive thrashing of the Who’s Keith Moon sound pretty conservative by comparison (no mean feat, I should add). Needless to say, I liked it a lot.
But there’s a catch. As much as I loved this album, I was in a technologically challenged state at the time, lacking a cassette deck to make myself a copy of this masterpiece. So, handing it gratefully back to its owner, I had to resign myself to being satisfied with this brief glimpse of elder metal heaven. The search continued however, and as you can imagine I’d gotten interested in other things as well by this time. Providing a list of that stuff here would take up too much space, but suffice to say I had become a full blown rock junkie, seeking out everything from the Velvet Underground to Bathory with equal enthusiasm.
As time passed I turned up some terrible condition copies of Vincebus Eruptum, but passed on the purchase as they often looked like the previous owner had eaten off them. But in 1986, fate smiled on me when Rhino records, in vinyl form only, issued Louder Than God: The Best Of Blue Cheer, a well programmed and wonderfully packaged compilation. It included a bunch of tracks from Vincebus, as well as a healthy dose of stuff from their second and third albums, which to my joy were at least as good and maybe better than the other tracks. Also featuring a wonderful essay on the rear sleeve, it quoted one eye and ear witness to one of the band’s early concerts as saying that the band played so loud they “Turned the air into cottage cheese.” Far out. It finished up with some weed-burnt mellow acoustic numbers, but so what? I had honest to god Cheer in my collection, and the band I was playing in (yeah, my guitar lessons had launched me into the ranks of a garage band amongst my high school pals) immediately added the Cheer’s “Babylon” to our repertoire. But truth be told, I STILL didn’t have an actual copy of VIncebus Eruptum.
By this time, compact discs were replacing vinyl as the music format du jour, which was both good and bad news for music freaks like me. It meant that the going rate for new music releases jumped from around 9 bucks to 15, instantly putting some of us under stress to get higher paying jobs. But it also opened up the possibility for reissues of otherwise unavailable releases, and I quickly grabbed myself copies of both the Stooges first album (I was lucky enough to have Raw Power on vinyl) and Nico’s Chelsea Girl, two coveted masterpieces. I had moved my occupation to that of a local video store in lovely Oak Ridge, NJ, at which I managed a small music department. This gave me access to catalogs from music distributors, and I constantly checked to see if the Cheer’s albums were up for a dust off and re-release. But, amazing as it may seem, the album wasn’t back in domestic circulation until 1993, 25 years after its release. I immediately snatched up a copy, but after a full decade of searching for a copy, during which I had actually heard the album in full on a few occasions and now owned part of it on collection albums, the flimsy re-issue job done by Mercury records felt hollow and slipshod to me at the time.
But I soon got over it, especially when, at the right time of day and with the right substances involved, I was able to crank this monster up at a nice, all consuming volume and simply bathe in it. So what does Vincebus Eruptum sound like? It sounds like a crew of guys awash in enthusiasm and desire making a dense, vibrating heavy metal record before their skills were slick enough to pull it off professional-like. Now while I do insist that this is first true heavy metal album (simply because it’s the first chronological rock record to use full blown heavy amplification all the time, on every song) there are some small cracks of light that peer through the mayhem. Those cracks come in the form of recognizable blues structures and the small psych lulls that edge in from time to time.
But as the album lifts off the pad with the band’s hit, “Summertime Blues,” it’s all about the fuzz overload, period. Leigh Stephens was the possessor of an amazing guitar tone, more so in his soloing than in his rhythm work, but as the air raid siren, ambulatory timbre of his notes emerge, you know you’re in the presence of a dude in the throes of distortion and volume worship. You just can’t get those sounds out of a guitar under normal circumstances…you have to hurt it. And the way the band pile on this old rock ‘n roll nugget is just genius, taking a familiar structure, a familiar song and pulling it’s intestines out through it’s mouth and covering it with lighter fluid before setting the whole ablaze to melt into a putrid mass of acidic, corrosive dung, should have been enough to scare many timid listeners away. And it was a hit, man! A bona fide, chart climbing, take ads out in trade magazines hit! This means that it may be not only the first heavy metal single ever released, but the first hit heavy metal single ever released. Wild.
“Out Of Focus” is just around the corner, and this loping, lurching ride into slightly more restrained territory was written by bassist/vocalist Dickie Peterson when he was “deathly ill.” It’s not as earth quaking as the record’s other material, but still contains a snaking, twisting riff and more emergency broadcast system soloing from Stephens. I should mention that Peterson’s vocals have often been dismissed as mere Cro-Magnon grunts, but that’s a terrible mischaracterization. Compared to Tom Jones, he may have sounded a little out there to ears of the day, but his voice is more in line with good blues singers than some kind of prehistoric monster. My personal least favorite cut on the album, “Second Time Around,” comes up next, a churning cut that sort of runs in place a bit, and at least to my ears is the most undeveloped thing on the band’s first few albums. Let’s just leave it there, shall we?
The band’s take on Albert King’s “Rock Me Baby” might have suffered a similar fate, but fortunately the band amp it up, drag it out, and beat the crap out of it. The funny thing here is that band actually displays a lighter touch on this number, only to crank back up to kill levels come solo time. Why didn’t more listeners notice the deft playing here? Maybe they were too shocked by the speaker-quaking balance of the rest of the album to notice its more subtle points? Possibly, but four decades on the band still tear this one up in concert, proving their dedication to this blues standard. But the real treatment of an old school cut that Cheer really blow into orbit is Mose Allison’s “Parchman Farm,” somehow filtered through the band’s consciousness to be re-titled “Parchment Farm.” Here, the band get down to the mean business of plowing their way through a standard structure, but they infuse it with so much amplifier noise and off the rails energy, it honestly sounds like the song could fall apart at any second. Naturally it doesn’t, but the slow, thudding, middle section feels like the band needed a bit of a rest, so intense is the rest of this number. It’s another example of their ability to take the familiar and shove a big, super fuzz big muff boot up it’s backside, remaking it into something else altogether.
And while that cut will always be nearest and dearest to my heart, the heaviest, sickest, most outlandish number on the album is still to come in the form of “Doctor Please,” a nine minute trip through the newly plowed land called heavy. This one is the Cheer at the most wantonly destructive they’d ever be, throwing down another lumbering, stuttering riff, with a structure that basically takes two chords and wring their little necks until liquid noise oozes out of them. Stephens really gets gone on this one, wailing and pulling UFO-like noises out of his instrument, grinding the fuzz frequencies up in his strings as they bleed out of his Sherman tank sized amplifier (well, I guess it’s that big…I don’t know for sure, but that’s how it’s sounds). But the real mania of this track comes during it’s long, protracted coda, where the band thrash away on a two note theme for minute after minute, laying layers of noise, fuzz and sonic poop one on top of the other in a mantra-like delirium. Monotonous to some, bliss to others, this is the one indisputable time we hear the Cheer unleashing all of the obnoxious, brutal, sonic blast they were chided for trading in, and it’s a wonderfully harrowing performance.
So all things considered, Vincebus Eruptum is quite a trip, and it’s one of the few albums legendary for its visceral nature that lives up completely to its own reputation. Not only that, but 40 years after it’s release, people are still trying to play the “how did they do that” game with the album, marveling at the tones and frequencies the band wrung out of what was, let’s face facts, some fairly primitive equipment. Within a few more years the arsenal designed to create heavy metal music would advance by leaps and bounds, but in ’68 the cheer were working on tinker toys by comparison. And just a note about the album’s production; right around the same time this disc was being laid down, The Stooges were also recording their debut platter. According to Iggy Pop, the band had to bully producer John Cale into allowing them to play with their amps set at full blast, the man only allowing them to take their volume knobs up to the 9 setting. Vincebus Eruptum producer Abe “Voco” Kesch seems to have had no such compunctions, and apart from some recent stoner rock albums, this is one of the few records I’ve heard where you can hear amp vibration, speaker overload and other phenomena related to amps being set on Armageddon mode. Many producers, then and now, edit such sounds out or try to avoid them completely, but the ambience they can add to a band’s performance can be critical to capturing just how loud ‘n heavy they were playing. Electric Wizard clearly knows this and so did the Cheer.
So where does this leave me? Well, now that I’m looking down the barrel of turning 40 (a mere 4 days from the day I sit here writing this deal) I’m given to thinking back on my years as a music lunatic, mostly to remembering the key bands and albums that set me down this road to financial and moral ruin. While it would be a bit dramatic to say that Blue Cheer, and more specifically Vincebus Eruptum, ruined my life, it’s not out of hand at all to say that they did alter it considerably. And still, at least a few times a year, I lay down on the living room floor with the lights off, crank my amplifier up a few notches past its usual setting, and blast the album into my psyche once again. How long will I keep this behavior up? I have the feeling you could check in on me in five year intervals to come and find out that nothing has changed. Much like the band themselves, who, with some major ups and downs in the intervening years, are STILL at it, STILL performing at Hiroshima decibel levels, and STILL rolling down the road in search of sonic bliss and good weed. Knowing that makes me feel like I’m STILL on the band’s team in some way. It’s a good feeling. I think I’ll stick with it.
As a side note, I should point out the growing, fungus-like reach of Vincebus Eruptum. On the internet’s current biggest user driven website, Rate Your Music, the album stands with a rating of 3.81 out of possible 5. 840 people have rated the album, with most pegging it at a quality level of between 3.5 and 4.5. 98 users have rated it as a perfect, 5.0. It is rated as the #107th best album issued in 1968, and the 4,148th best album overall, for all times. Not bad for an album that was out of print for 25 years.
The band does indeed play on, their recently released 2007 album What Doesn’t Kill You being coupled with a world tour, a spiffy new band website and mucho exposure. It hasn’t sold buckets or anything, but it’s RYM rating is at 3.54, well above what many of their other moderately recent albums have scored.
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