Born Under a LOUD Sign (Nov. 2007)

    
    If you take  Eddie Cochran’s 1958 “Summertime Blues,” a  flying catalog of teenage frustration, and add the sound of his fatal car crash a couple of years later, you’ll be on the road to Blue Cheer’s 1968 hit version of that same song.
  The original rendition was a jittery, half-humorous rockabilly rant. The singer was venting, but shaking his head, giving up, because there just “Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”  Ten years after (as seen by so much of our nation‘s impressionable youth,  on Dick Clark’s often bland “American Bandstand“), Blue Cheer chanted like their tonsils would burst, while bobbing their outrageously long, thick, thicker, and thickest manes, banging their heads against invisible walls.  In a “Bandstand” excerpt on YouTube,  the wrong side o’ Frisco’s  unfrozen caveman proto-power trio also seems to be bouncing their skulls off of big muddy wheels of bass drums, bass guitar, all around brief screeches of lead guitar---gruesome signals that the brakes are gone. Truckin‘, but not like the Grateful Dead.  
   Some people were offended by this.    
   According to original BC guitarist Leigh Stephens, their first album,  thee 1968 Vincebus Eruptum, was supervised “by an off-duty cop, “ who must have been way off-duty.  But somehow a lot of it worked out. Indeed, leading rock critic Lester Bangs later pronounced  the results “grossly beautiful.“
The main problem, beyond their best early albums (also try the second 1968 release, Outsideinside--- with engineer-producer Eddie Kramer, who had already started playing a major role in Jimi Hendrix ventures----and don’t sleep on  BC alumnus Randy Holden’s Cheery-to-sludgy 1970 Population II), was that, although volume and emphasis could make a lot of other stuff irrelevant, they could also get to be as predictable as anything else.  Plus, what happens when you don’t die young, or at all? Bassist Dickie Petersen’s voice has gotten even rougher (maybe), but has also lasted for forty years of touring, born to push its way through outlandish inspirations, b-plus boogie, country rock, and basic bar-band lineups alike (Leigh Stephens left pretty quickly; original drummer Paul Whaley has come and gone).(Try ‘03’s Live In Japan.)
    Blue Cheer’s current guitarist-vocalist-producer, Andrew “Duck” MacDonald, does right by Whaley and Petersen on their new set, What Doesn’t Kill You…(Whaley’s back for half of it, then the drums of Sabs-inspired Pentagram’s Joe Hasselvander fill and fit in.) Almost all the songs are MacDonald/Peterson collaborations, or written by Petersen alone. “Rollin’ Dem Bones” isn’t a good opener, and BC’s cover of Albert King’s “Born Under A Bad Sign” isn’t that great, but several other tracks use “Sign” ‘s  innate kind of bump and grind, its bounce and stomp, as one heavy point of timely arrival and departure. Overdubbed guitar harmonies get a little fancy at times, but everybody on board (singing as well as playing) still knows when to stretch and otherwise torture notes, and when to curve and carve for the holidays.  “ Young Lions In Paradise” is soulful, rueful country, in the sense that a lot of today’s country (like Van Zant) is actually rootsy rock. The stated idea for this album is “Z Z Top meets Black Sabbath,” and it’s fun like that, but things don’t get supernatural unless they have to. Mainly, we get a scorched and fried community, so look out for  “Gypsy Rider,” and especially that “Maladjusted Child” (“She just ain’t right, I tells ya!”). You’ll hear them coming. Don Allred
 Blue Cheer will play at the Thirsty Ear this Friday night.