Blue Cheer: Harder 'n' Louder Than The Rest

We were aiming to become louder and more powerful than anybody else in the world. It wasn't just limited to San Francisco.

-Dickie Peterson

Coming from the musical era of the '60s in San Francisco, Blue Cheer's music was obviously heavier and a whole lot louder than that of your civic counterparts of the time, such as Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Grateful Dead. At the time, were you guys intent on becoming heavier and louder than those bands or was that what just came out naturally?

Blue Cheer

Well, we were aiming to become louder and more powerful than anybody else in the world. It wasn't just limited to San Francisco.

Blue Cheer shared the stage with the likes of the Grateful Dead, Hendrix, and Santana. Any stories from those times that you'd like to share?

Well, I know that we always had a problem with the Grateful Dead because once they walked on the stage nobody else went on. They would go on for hours and I thought that this was really unprofessional, chicken shit bullshit because all of these bands, all of us needed our stage time and they would hog it. So, we started chasing their ladies around.

What was it like the first time that you saw Hendrix play?

This was a religious experience for me. I swear to God, that night at The Fillmore the man's feet left the ground, and I think all of these guitar players today owe him no matter how many practical skills they've learned. Everything they do, Hendrix did first. There has not been another Hendrix type guitarist that's come on the scene. Perhaps he's being born now. I don't know.

Any bands out there today that have caught your ear?

There are several bands but I don't really follow too much contemporary music. You get in my car and you get a lot of rhythm & blues.

The turbulence of that era obviously played a big part in the creative process of a lot of bands in the '60s. Would you say that was accurate as far as Blue Cheer was concerned?

Blue Cheer

Oh yes, it certainly did. I don't know that it was so much a political thing with us as much as it was a social thing.

So, the overall loudness is what evoked a semblance of the upheaval?

Yeah, I think the whole social, Vietnam, and anti-establishment protests were all things that I think helped our band.

What was it like being in a band during an American cultural revolution?

It was a time I'm sure none of us will ever forget because we were living in Haight-Ashbury, which was wide open. The Hell's Angels were basically the police department, LSD was legal [prior to October 1966], and the stuff that I miss very deeply was that everybody was everybody else's keeper. Everybody took care of each other. If you didn't have a place to sleep, somebody would take you home so you could sleep and they'd feed you.

A really deep community vibe, huh?

It was an alternative culture that was really working.

It must be a bummer to see Haight-Ashbury now since all that gentrification went down and with the McDonalds and the Gap up in there.

Dickie Peterson

Sort of, but there were so many people that were around at that time that I'm disappointed in personally. I think they're traitors to the revolution. I think they dropped the ball. They went back to selling insurance and real estate at daddy's office, which is what we were all against. We didn't want that but in the end I would say that the one thing that brought that era down was hard drugs.

I always saw it as kind of a cliché when people point the finger at Altamont as the single catalyst of what made it all come falling down. It was no doubt a major turning point but there is just so much more that led up to it.

I think of it in a different way. I think critics and historians want to look back at that and cite that as a reason, and it's kind of insane. If you look at concerts these days, you'll be lucky to walk out of them alive at some of these places. At some of these big concerts people are being crushed; there is so much going on. With Altamont, a guy got killed there and it was the first time, and now this happens all the time.

How does it feel to be playing to a new generation of fans?

We're so humbled by the fact that all these young people come out to our shows. Every night I can look down in front of my microphone and there's somebody much younger than me who knows all the words to the songs. We're very humbled by this, and it means more than I can actually put into words. I'm trying to figure out how to write a song about it. We not only crossed over to younger people but we bridged generation gaps. At any of our shows there are fathers and sons and daughters that come, and some people that say, "Hey man, I've been listening to your music since I was six hours old." It's humbling. It's not anything that we tried to do, it just happened.