1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 109. Blue Cheer – Vincebus Eruptum (1968)

I’d not heard of Blue Cheer, but they’re one of those bands that went on for decades with a rotating door of personnel, according to Wikipedia.

My first thoughts on hearing this album were that they listened to the Jimi Hendrix Experience and thought “Nah, that sound just isn’t dirty enough.” The second was that their opening cover of Eddie Cochrane’s Summertime Blues is surely the birth of heavy metal. And then I went and did the research, and found I was right both times.

Blue Cheer cut themselves down to a “power trio” of guitar, bass, and drums, the same as the Hendrix Experience, but for this album they amped up the grunge, fuzzing and distorting everything. Vocalist Dickie Peterson has a raw rock scream of a voice, and perhaps they got overlooked because they fall somewhere in the overlap between Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. Still, like the Monks and The Sonics before them, Blue Cheer are very different to the hippy stuff surrounding them (and it probably comes as no surprise that their manager was a Hell’s Angel, the splendidly named Allen “Gut” Terk).

Deliciously grungy, and there are only six tracks on the album so there is plenty of room for them to degenerate into heavy guitar solos and walls of noise. Definitely one of those pleasant surprises from doing this list.