CANNABIS ERUPTUM: The Resurrection of Blue Cheer

When contemplating the origins of heavy metal, most rockers cast their gaze across the pond toward the four Brummie barflies commonly known as Black Sabbath. But before Ozzy and the boys had sold their souls for rock’n’roll, a few biker guys from Haight-Ashbury stood in front of a wall of amplifiers cranked to 11 and sent shock waves through the eardrums of hippies everywhere. They called themselves Blue Cheer—after a variety of acid—and they were the first true American metal band.

 “Around early 1965,” recalls founding guitarist/vocalist Dickie Peterson, “a couple of buddies and I wanted to start a rock’n’roll band, so we went out and bought—I swear to God this is true—we bought two kilos of weed, rented a flat, spread all the weed out on newspaper in the middle of the floor, and kept rolling and smoking until we could figure out what to do.”

These “inspiration sessions” soon attracted other ambitious young musicians, including guitarist Leigh Stephens and drummer Paul Whaley. But Peterson, Whaley and Stephens’ playing was so overpowering, they rapidly realized that Blue Cheer needed no other members. Streamlined into a power trio, the band was now ready to show the Flower Power scene what power really was.

“We were young, so we went places where a learned musician probably wouldn’t go,” says Peterson. “We had six stacks of Marshall amps, which back then nobody had, and our amps were all souped up. We added extra power tubes, transformers, different speakers. We were under assault everywhere we played by the Department of Health. Eventually, the Guinness Book of Records declared us the loudest band in the world—118 decibels, I think it was.” (That’s 13 decibels over the threshold for pain, for those keeping track.)

Cheer began gigging at every club in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and despite being dubbed “noise” by critics, they quickly earned the respect of fellow musicians on the scene. “Jim Morrison used to say that we were his favorite band,” Peterson brags. “He came to our shows at the Whiskey whenever we played. He’d be out in the middle of the dance floor by himself, doing some kind of bizarre dance and pouring whiskey over himself, and having a grand old time.”

Morrison wasn’t the only rock legend Cheer was tight with. “Paul and Janis [Joplin] were lovers for some time, while she was the singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company,” says Peterson. “She was a damn good singer, but at the time, she was still just another chick in the music scene. I used to yell at her because she’d lure Paul away from practice with really good grass or some other chemical. She was older than me, and she gave me some great advice about being onstage. She’d give me advice, then she’d give me Southern Comfort,” he laughs.

In 1968, Cheer released their first album ,Vincebus Eruptum, and had a big hit with their cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” which reached No. 14 on the Billboard chart. It wasn’t long before Cheer were touring with all the major acts of the day—Hendrix, Cream, the Dead, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, even the Stooges and the MC5. “We did this one show with the MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, and the cops tried to stop them from playing. But the management stepped in and supported the band, and they got to play. They were punk before there even was punk.”

Like most of their contemporaries, Cheer embraced the excessive lifestyle of the road. “Back then, when a band went out on tour, there would already be a bunch of weed waiting for them when they got to their hotel room—the promoters made sure of that. Man—there were so many tits and so much dope flying around, half the time you didn’t know what floor you were on!” he muses nostalgically. “It was great.”

Peterson recalls a particular time while on tour with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: “We’d just done some three-day rock festival at Gulfstream racetrack in Florida. Hendrix had rented a whole wing of the Castaways hotel—a big wing, six floors or so—just for the bands and crews. On the last night, we all wound up in Noel Redding’s room. I’d gotten to know Noel pretty well by then—he was this very crazy, eccentric Englishman who smoked a shitload of dope. So Noel and I are sitting at a coffee table in the middle of the room, and all around us are people—people behind us on their knees, more people behind them on the furniture, and even more people standing behind them. I’ve never seen so many people in a hotel room! And Noel is just sitting there, licking and sticking all these rolling papers together. Well, this motherfucker ended up rolling the biggest joint I’d ever seen in my life. And you’d think it wouldn’t burn, but goddamn, it did! He got the whole room stoned on that one joint.”

Despite being surrounded by and having a deep respect for hippie culture, Peterson was always a biker at heart. “When I was in the fourth or fifth grade in the Haight, my friends and I would dash down to the corner every day between 2:30 and 3 o’clock to see the Hells Angels ride by down Veteran Street toward the beach, to hang out by the Playland Fun House. To me, it seemed like they didn’t follow anybody’s rules. That was what I wanted—to be one of those guys.”

In addition to hippies, Hells Angels and proto-punks, Cheer were also close with psychonaut icons the Merry Pranksters. “Ken [Kesey] and the Pranksters used to come by our rehearsals on 24th and Mission Street, in the basement underneath this headshop called Joint Ventures,” recounts Peterson. “Kesey would sit down in front of Paul’s drum set, take a big hit of DMT, then stick his head inside the bass drums while we were playing. When the Pranksters were around, if you didn’t want to trip that day, then you’d better not eat or drink anything in the house.”

Peterson attributes much of his creative inspiration to drugs. “We didn’t do anything without smoking weed,” he admits. “It was like having a cup of coffee. We used to have kilos of marijuana in our flat. I’d come home sometimes and find the whole hallway stacked with bales of weed. And of course, we were all stoned on acid. Many of our songs were inspired by or written while tripping out: “Doctor Please,” “Out of Focus”—almost everything that I wrote back then, and that I write now. I come up with some of my best ideas not when I’m sitting down with a pen and paper, but when I’m at that perfect point of being high—when I’m thinking deep enough to add meaning to experiences, to turn words into meaning. There are certain doors of perception that open. LSD did that for me, and weed does that for me.”

But eventually, as every episode of Behind the Music has shown us, the reckless rock-star lifestyle always catches up with you. “We went through some real hard problems,” reflects Peterson somberly. “Knock on wood, man—that I’m walking around and am a breathing, healthy human being after some of the shit I did to my body. I was a heroin addict for 10 years, and an alcoholic for almost 20 years. I was running guns and selling drugs and doing all kinds of insane stuff.” Fortunately, Peterson’s family intervened. “My brother—who’d just gotten out of prison—saw what I was doing and just grabbed me, threw me in his car, took me to Sacramento and made me go into rehab.”

Thankfully, he was able to overcome his demons. “I’ve been clean now for about 20 years—except for pot. I’ve smoked pot since I was 18 years old—I’ll always smoke pot.”

In the early ’70s, after numerous lineup changes and lackluster sales, Peterson disbanded Cheer and moved to Germany. He attempted to revive the band a few times over the next two decades, without much success. It wasn’t until around 1990, when he met guitarist Andrew “Duck” McDonald, that the band’s resurrection began to pick up steam.

“I’d left a bottle of Jack in the studio, and when I came in the next morning, here’s this guy sitting there drinking my whiskey!” says McDonald. “I go, ‘Hey! What are you doing, man? That’s my Jack!’ And he goes, ‘Oh...yeah, well...you know...’ So I sat down next to him, and by the time we’d polished off the bottle, we were like brothers.” When Peterson called him in 1999 and asked him to go on tour in Japan with Cheer, McDonald jumped at the chance. “We’d never played together in our lives. I only rehearsed with him for one day before we hit the road, and then we recorded a live album the second night of the tour!”

Today, Dickie and Duck, along with original drummer Whaley, are back on track—headlining club tours and stoner rock festivals, and preparing to release a new studio album. In March of 2005, Blue Cheer played their first US show in 13 years at the Broken Spoke Saloon in Laconia, NH, during the town’s annual Motorcycle Week. They headlined two nights to a capacity crowd and, just like in the old days, blew the roof off the joint.

 “The manager of the club actually had the nerve to tell me we had to turn down!” laughs Peterson. “Can you believe that? I said to him, ‘Don’t you know who you hired, man? We’re Blue fuckin’ Cheer—we don’t know how to turn down.’”