What’s the most remarkable thing about Blue Cheer and their 1968 debut Vincebus Eruptum? Not that it led to their being proclaimed the loudest band ever to drive fans from the front of the stage. Or that it may have won them the label as the first heavy metal band (I couldn’t care less). It’s not even the fact that, speaking solely from the standpoint of mastery of their instruments, they make the troglodytes in the Troggs sound like effete prog-rockers, and that you walk away from Vincebus Eruptum with the suspicion that the first time the trio picked up their guitars and what not was two weeks after the album was recorded. Hell, it’s not even the fact that they were managed by a former Hell’s Angel, whose nickname was Gut!
No, what makes Vincebus Eruptum such a special case is that the same album of barely coherent blooze caterwaul that Lester Bangs saw fit to include in a 1981 Village Voice article “A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise” (along with EPs by No Wavers DNA and Mars and a 1964 Folkways album of field recordings entitled The Sounds of the Junkyard) somehow managed to climb to Number 11 on the Billboard charts. Can you believe that? Kids ate this shit up! They put it on their stereos and listened to it! When you’d have thought that, given the ineptitude displayed on said LP’s grooves, it would have gone out of print the day BEFORE it was released!
In short, the album is a damn inspiration. It may well be the most triumphant slab of barely coherent music ever recorded. True, the reason the young people of America bought the album was Blue Cheer’s truly barbaric cover of Eddie Cochran’s 1958 hit “Summertime Blues.” The Cheer’s cover made it to Number 14 on the singles charts, which meant that not only did the kids of the world (it went to Number 1 in the Netherlands!) know horrible music when they heard it, they dug it! And the kids are more than just alright, they’re always right! I like to think they loved the rest of the album too, even though it’s remaining songs make “Summertime Blues” sound like it was carefully produced over a period of weeks by George Martin.
Blue Cheer were a classic power trio—Dickie Peterson on vocals and bass, Leigh Stephens on guitar, and Paul Whaley on drums—and they were the unlikely product of a San Francisco scene that had flowers in its hair. These guys had no flowers in their hair. It’s true that Vincebus Eruptum is often filed under “psychedelic rock”—they even swiped their name from a particularly powerful batch of LSD brewed up by Acid King Augustus Owsley III—but they were Visigoths in the Temple of Love, brown acid in all but name. Most of the psychedelic bands coming out of Frisco were ex-folkies, and my guess is Blue Cheer had no use for folkies, music teachers either, and probably crawled out of the same junkyard immortalized in the Folkways recording cited above. And learned everything they needed to know about melody, rhythm, and all that hoo-hah from said album’s standout track, “Acetylene Torch, Cutting Apart an Automobile Engine.”
I have a very clear idea of what happened when these guys walked into the studio. Producer and disc jockey Abe “Voco” Kesh (who discovered the band, maybe under a rock!) said “What are we going for?” And the band said, “A couple of dinosaurs staggering around drunk at a party to the accompaniment of a deaf guy playing a guy with a metal plate in his head like a pair of bongos.” And Abe said, “Swell!” Peterson, who penned the originals on the LP, would later say, “Some songs I wrote have taken 20 years to really complete. And there are other songs like ‘Doctor Please’ or ‘Out of Focus’ that I wrote in ten minutes.” I don’t know exactly which songs it took him twenty years to write—a look at the dates tells me he commenced composing them at age two!—but they sound exactly the same as the songs it took him ten minutes to write. Genius is funny that way.
And I do mean genius, because despite what I’ve said above about it’s, er, lack of technical prowess Vincebus Eruptum is a brilliant album. It’s a prime example of what I can only call inspired ineptitude. It’s loud—some of the songs on their next album, the same year’s Outsideinside, were so loud they had to be recorded outdoors!—the boys can hardly hold it together, hell they CAN’T hold it together some of the time, and you can forget about melody and rhythm and all that unnecessary stuff. What it reminds me of more than anything else are the famous words of The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg, to wit “I hate music/It’s got too many notes.” These guys play lots of notes, but I’m not sure they could name them and they’re sure as hell not all playing the same ones at the same time. Vincebus Eruptum is a plugged-in radio tossed into a bathtub, and the trick to enjoying it and surviving the experience is making sure you’re not in the bathtub when you toss it in.
“Summertime Blues” was the bait on the hook that sold the album, but it’s also a ringer, in so far as the band somehow manages to play the whole song without the wheels falling off. They play it fast, too. Stephens’ guitar playing is unhinged—he’s all over the song like white on trash. For the most part he sounds like Jimi Hendrix playing backwards, but that doesn’t do his performance justice—at one point he sounds like a bolt of electricity climbing a rickety ladder, at another like a dolphin trying to play the zither, but bottom line is he’s just making it up as he goes along. It’s downright inspiring, you have no idea what he’s going to do next because I suspect HE has no idea what he’s going to do next, and I’m not talking about improvisation. I’m talking about winging it. Meanwhile, Peterson’s vocals are really acid-friendly, he sounds like he’s singing through some kind of cloth mesh or something, but he does the macho mumble real good. As for his bass you can hardly hear it, and the drums are mostly buried in there too—you get the idea Whaley was playing from across state lines.
“Rock Me Baby” is a primitive blues stomp. Stephens plays a simple repeated riff and you can practically feel him sweating trying to pull it off, while Peterson reminds me of the Grateful Dead’s Pigpen, which is to say he ain’t no pro but he’s got spirit. But the whole thing falls to pieces when Stephens launches into a solo that is so the antithesis of a great solo that it’s a great solo. I can honestly say I’ve never heard its equal. And when I say the song falls to pieces what I mean is that Whaley has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing so he just does what he feels, which is bang on the various pieces of his kit seemingly at random, producing a big rumbling noise that runs contrary to all conventional concepts of rhythm while Stephens does his best impersonation of plugged-in hummingbird. And Whaley continues to rumble on for the remainder of the song, probably because no one had the courage to tell him to stop. The goddamn song is legendary.
“Doctor Please” opens with Stephens playing some primordial grunge while Whaley bashes away helter skelter at the cymbals. Then in comes Peterson begging the doctor to shoot him up with some painkillers while Stephens stumbles over his own feet on guitar before doing his best Jimi Hendrix imitation (which isn’t very good, but has spunk!) while Whaley bashes away at the cymbals like he has a grudge against them or something. And the two of them go at it like this for minutes! Until Stephens starts playing faster and faster like somebody put a cattle prod to his ass and Peterson comes back in singing as if the song doesn’t have a melody, which is fine because it doesn’t! And it all ends in a firestorm of feedback and bad overdubs guaranteed to make you pick up the guitar to see if you can’t do worse!
“Out of Focus,” same deal, no melody to speak of, I guess you could call it a blues but all you’re getting is Peterson’s macho bluster over top of which Stephens plays along. But, and this is truly brilliant, at around the two-minute mark Stephens’ guitar runs smack into an overdub of Stephens’ guitar and it’s like Titanic meeting iceberg! They might have cooperated, but it’s obvious they hate one another, and the results are cataclysmic, not at all musical but fun to play over and over for laughs. No kidding, it’s like two rams batting heads, and the effect is painful and wonderful at the same time. Then things go back to normal, which is to say incompetence reigns o’er the planet again, until the song ends with Stephens playing some feedback that sounds like a dinosaur’s death cry as it sinks into a tarpit.
Blue Cheer’s take on Bukka White’s prison blues “Parchman Farm” (which was later covered by everybody and which for some inexplicable reason they’ve retitled “Parchment Farm,” as if parchment farming is a real thing!) is a real epic. It opens in furiously up-tempo mode and has Stephens turning crazy circles on guitar while Peterson ignores the melody (which is hardly there anyway) until the song stops, Stephens plays a solo you’d need the Mayan codex to translate, and then… nothing. Until Whaley comes back in a tribal fashion and Stephens goes completely off the plantation/prison with a wild-ass solo that makes no sense and is the better for it. Then back in comes Peterson whining about all he did was shoot his wife (they put you in prison for that?) and the song takes off again, although the forward momentum is thwarted somewhat by Stephens’ guitar din and Whaley’s refusal to play forwards instead of sideways, backwards, and upside down.
Closer “Second Time Around” is an acid-washed rave-up and really groovy; Peterson’s the most badass cracker on the block with the possible exception of Mark Farner, Whaley hits everything in sight with no regard for extraneous concepts like rhythm (he even plays a long solo, and it’s so bad I like it!) and once again thanks to the wonders of overdubbing Stephens runs head-first into himself. I’ve heard tons of encomiums for this immensely influential and yes revered (but for the wrong reasons!) album but the only person who ever got it right was Bangs, who in his article on horrible noise wrote “but what counts here… is that Stephens’s sub-sub-sub-sub-Hendrix guitar overdubs stumbled around each other so ineptly they verged on a truly bracing atonality.” Which is to say the producer must have been somewhere else when they did the overdubbing, because nobody not completely zonked on powerful downers (and Stephens didn’t do drugs!) could have been responsible for the literal train-on-train smash-up that is Stephens vs. Stephens on this one. Which the band doesn’t seem to want to end—it dies and comes back to life so many times you’ll want to treat it like a zombie and sever its head.
Vincebus Eruptum is Latin for “Victory Over Chaos,” but what’s the Latin for “Chaos Over Victory”? Because on this slab of vinyl chaos definitely prevails. But the chaos was a victory in and of itself—I can’t think of another rock album that has so been so universally lauded despite its players’ basic inability to conquer a simple melody. It’s a magnificent muddle, Vincebus Eruptum, and more so than any seventies punk album it’s proof that with the right drugs and sufficient chutzpah anybody could pick up some instruments, not learn how to play them, and produce a stone-cold classic. These guys make the New York Dolls sound like studio pros, and that’s a fact. Vincebus Eruptum is thunderously loud, thrillingly inept, and an inspiration to all. You could do this. Hell, with fortitude and enough Marshall amps you might—if luck is on your side—even do worse.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
