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EARLY BLUE CHEER
Rare Images of One-Hit Wonder Unearthed (Click pictures for larger images)
By Mark Ellis
Kent State hadn’t happened yet. Nor had Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk. John Kennedy was four years gone, but Bobby was still alive. 1968 was both clear precursor to the more sobering upheavals of 1969, and the last year with any real connection to 1967’s Summer of Love. Napa High School was not the epicenter of the growing subculture, but damn close, only a chaparral-hilled thirty-nine miles from San Francisco. I had entered my junior year with a respectable percentage of a student body for whom said subculture was the main reason to get out of bed.
 Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Brian Jones were all still alive. Rock was in its psychedelic Golden Age, the Sergeant Pepper/Satanic Majesties era; “Light My Fire” was the national anthem. In Northern California, from a little town called Davis, we had our own claim to aural infamy, Blue Cheer, a proto-metal-acid-power-trio, whatever you want to call them. Named after a particularly epiphiphanic admixture of Owsley’s LSD, Blue Cheer, a band the critics mostly hated, had drilled and distorted it’s way onto the Billboard Top Twenty with a punishing cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.”
Tickets to Cheer’s upcoming Bill Graham sell-out at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds were scarce as the April concert date loomed, but I’d got in line in plenty of time to snag enough for a carload of my friends.
Though the band we were going to see was named after a hallucinogenic drug we’d dabbled with, the night of the Blue Cheer concert our stash consisted only of Mexican weed and the Southern Comfort Janis had made famous. I was designated driver not because I intended to stay sober, but because I was the only one with a car. My aunt had willed me her old 1947 Dodge sedan, a no seat belt, no headrest, manual-transmission slug of a vehicle which resembled nothing so much as a blackened potato on wheels.
 Forty years ago the drive from Napa to Sonoma was distinctly a country one, especially at night, with sudden curves winding through John Muir’s forests, and long bouncing threads over the vineyards. On concert nights, all the traffic was going toward Sonoma, our little big city, biggest around, not counting the forbidden Vallejo. On the way out the door I’d grabbed my Polaroid camera—in those days, before rock became really big business, nobody much cared if you brought a camera in.
We found a parking spot in the huge lot, and, the Southern Comfort gone and a few joints stashed in hideaway pockets, joined with thousands of other scruffy, stoner hippies thronging through the front doors of the exhibition hall. We soused around during a forgettable band’s opening set (who knows, it could have been Uriah Heep), trying to find familiar faces from Napa. An intermission, some more pot, and then Blue Cheer hit the stage. They led off with “Summertime Blues”, which thoroughly agitated the house, and they would go on to close with their big hit too. In between, guitarist Leigh Stevens unleashed a whammy-bar shriek-fest, Dickie Peterson laid a slab of white noise with his Precision bass, and drummer Paul Whaley pounded everything together like a demented shaman.
I was transfixed, of course, but not so much so that I forgot my camera. At what I thought were the perfect moments, I captured shots of each member of the band.
 The Sonoma cops would be on heightened alert, so we decide to smoke our last reefer before I ever turned the key in auntie’s old warhorse. I drove a few blocks toward what I thought was the way I came in, made a couple of turns that looked promising, and soon, I (we) got totally lost.
Here’s the thing; when you get lost, and there’s a good stretch of road in front of you, you tend to speed up, because you’re lost. I had driven us onto a back road stretch that felt totally wrong, so I sped up to find a place to safely turn around, or a major arterial, a sign, something. I was doing about fifty when I saw the barricades and blinking lights: Road Closed. Road Gone was more like it. I slammed through—the Dodge bumper impervious as the barricade splintered--and hit the kind of gravel and dirt that it is impossible to get control on.
The car fishtailed, swung completely around, careened sideways for 300 feet, throwing up a pall of dust and debris. It did not tip over.
We sat soundlessly, dusty air sneaking in through an opened wind-wing, silver motes in the light from an overhead pole. There was a man out walking through the darkened construction zone. He came up cautiously to the driver side when the dust cleared. I rolled down my window. ‘Everyone all right?” he said, staring in as if he had just missed seeing a carload of ghosts. He walked off muttering, as if we’d ruined his whole night.
I sobered up quickly, and restarted the stalled engine. We found the road that led to the highway back to Napa, and I took it, my friends, my memories, and my camera intact. They played “Summertime Blues” once on the radio on the ride home, but that wasn’t too strange. It seemed as if they played it every half hour that spring, and all summer long
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Mark Ellis is a Portland, OR writer |
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| Blue Cheer...The Beast is Back. |
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