Blue Cheer

Slower, deeper, harder. There's a thundering difference between "hard" and "heavy", and to grasp it we need to go back to the origins of extreme sound. To become heavy, blues had to renounce itself. Curiously enough (though the move is actually entirely logical), this backflip could only happen in the very country where it all began. The hard rock that would flood the airwaves and fill stadiums — the British kind — still has its hands and feet tied to tradition. Black Sabbath would indeed muddy the themes, darken the atmospheres and simplify the structures (which, whatever anyone says, makes them more seminal for punk than for metal), but we're still talking about Black music played by white men, however cadaverous. On the soil where that tradition first sprouted, by contrast, the sequoias are uprooted like weeds. Mountain, Montrose, Blue Öyster Cult and above all the perennially obscure Sir Lord Baltimore: here, things change. To be evil in America, you have to forget you're the bastard son of the blues that nursed everyone. You don't need to be hard, you need to be heavy. The true Copernican revolution, however, predates the barbarians' uprising by at least a year.

We find ourselves in San Francisco in the years when it would be criminal to be anywhere else. Mystery solved: the trick isn't a hardening of the blues, but a dilation of psychedelia (which here would be more aptly renamed sickedelia). The emphasis isn't on the riffs, but on the sound itself: scorching. We're beyond lysergic haze here: this is the mental state of someone running a high fever, with no need for the pusher Steppenwolf would so love to stab. The name, shared by a popular detergent and a variety of LSD, could only be programmatically bipolar: Blue Cheer. A power trio, as the fashion of the time demanded, but this time it's the bassist, Dickie Peterson (who passed away in 2009), on vocals. A telling clue: the fulcrum must be sought down below, all the way to the depths of hell.

Not that his bandmates lag behind: drummer Paul Whaley (already a veteran of the essential yet little-known Oxford Circle) wields shortened drumsticks with special gloves; as for Leigh Stephens's guitars, they rarely make it to the end of a show in one piece. The power of their amplification, backed by six Marshall stacks with twenty-four cabinets, was unmatched on either coast: "They play so loud they turn the air into whipped cream," warns their manager and former Hells Angel Allen "Gut" Terk. It's said that Stephens went nearly deaf from prolonged exposure to that din. Fancy standing open-mouthed in front of a drainpipe? If the answer is yes, step right up — but be warned: more than dirty, this brew is hot, hot enough to melt the turntable platter. It will be precisely the cooling of that block of lava, in the hands of bolder blacksmiths, that forges heavy metal.

Revolutions, though, often have to start from a compromise that serves as bait. Were it not for the premonitory lack of color and the murderous stares of the hosts, the cover of "Vincebus Eruptum" (recorded in '67 and released in January of the following year) could almost still pass for the work of flower children. But it's the opening track that delivers the most diabolical move. The idea of kicking off with "Summertime Blues" is brilliant for at least three reasons: it's a rock'n'roll classic that erases the very idea of rock'n'roll; it contains the magic word in its name, yet there's no trace here of 12 bars or blue notes; and it deals with summer and sadness, both rendered in a way that's anything but carefree or wistful. The blows land like someone venting fury on a corpse. Few other covers have so savagely disfigured the original, to the point that if the vocals sang different words, it would be impossible to trace it back to its source.

And what a voice: a scream, but muffled somehow. A restrained big bang, a bar of Semtex that never goes off but threatens at every instant to do so: the sound of Blue Cheer is that of a fuse burning endlessly, the cynical crystallization of an unpleasant possibility. The instruments are wrung out to the limit, with the drums reduced to a tribal gurgle, the guitar ejecting pus like a ripe pimple, and the bass trying to stretch its arms toward the two epileptic maenads, only to be flung off the beat by one and off the staff by the other. Not even the lyrics are left in peace: some lines are arbitrarily excised, creating a crippling nonsense of emptiness. Everything seems staggering and out of tune, in the altered sense too. More than rock music, this orgy of miasmic fauvism recalls some ancestral pagan rite. A note for those who claim certain eras shouldn't be missed: released as a single, it was one of the season's hits.

The misdirection continues unabated with another surprise cover: did you really think you could shake your hips to the rhythm of "Rock Me Baby"? Instead, you'll burn alive, battered by vocal cords already in tatters over drums pounding like cannon fire. Hendrix at least tries to split the lead parts from the vocal ones; here it's hard to tell which end is the head and which the tail. There's no visceral quality to these flare-ups, only hypnotic torment. With fourth-degree burns, what do you do? You call the doctor, but the improbable figure who shows up looks like he stepped out of a horror film: no "Doctor Please" will help you here, your prayers won't sway him, and he'll treat you with a flamethrower in hand, applying the motto "fight fire with fire" in a morphine-addled hymn that redeems the world's pain.

And speaking of medical visits, here's a title that's honest for once: in the distorted world of Blue Cheer, everything is "Out Of Focus". These tracks have no defined outlines, resembling a shapeless sludge, and that's how they perceive themselves ("Tell me, what's wrong with me?"), but their impact is as sharp as a finger in the eye. The confusion evoked by the Great Helmsman must have a similar texture. That descending atonal scale, charged with the tension of a propitiatory rite, carries the unbearable weight of a death in the family, yet it's still preferable to the reactor/drill that sinks the ultra-acidic finale. The raucous invocations to the Lord, even more than the heavy-handed snuff depiction of the angel's rape, confirm the deeply religious — or blasphemous, take your pick — nature of their art.

After Eddie Cochran and B.B. King, now it's Mose Allison's (and Bukka White's) turn to get infected. Amid savage bellows and fade-to-blacks, the parchment of "Parchment Farm" is treated like toilet paper, and it takes the sheer brutality of the next retch to put its malice into perspective. Blind shoves, a drum solo like a rigged rollercoaster, then the collapse of the heavens: we're only at "Second Time Around", and already exhausted. This trash is as thirst-inducing as a marathon through the desert during a sandstorm. Even they notice, and decide to leave us in peace — the only compassionate act in the last half hour — pulling their own plug with a reckless yank.

The farewell note, however, promises nothing good: "It's the end of the line/ I don't know what to say/ I don't know what to do/ All I know, cannot leave with you/ I'm so sorry/ I'm bringing you down/ Well, I'll make it up next time I'm around". Every man for himself. Stoner, doom, sludge and post-metal, as the encyclopedists with their pinky raised in gangrenous anticipation like to remind us, have already fled the incubator.

Raise your hand if you've heard another of their albums. Not this writer, certainly. What follow-up could withstand the gravitational pull of this blazing meteor? "Vincebus Eruptum" has the pretension of giving itself a made-up scientific name, but back then nobody would have bet on its entry into any serious textbook. Now that the effects of that bender still haven't worn off, we can all the more thank them for daring so much. That terrible sound is still here, more massive than ever, and keeps getting stronger. Slower, deeper, harder. Heavier.

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15/08/2021