Another hot day coming up. I'm not going to tax your poor tired brains with anything difficult. Instead, we're going to go LOUD. But first, an aside about Kelley's stepfather, Arthur Woodbury.
Art is a musician. He was the first person, I think, to use the Stanford mainframe to compose. He was one of the first people to work on artificial intelligence there. He edited the first incarnation of Source magazine. He taught at the University of South Florida for more than twenty years. (Now he lives up the street.) But for our purposes today, all you need to know is that he played, briefly, with Blue Cheer in the early days.
Until two days ago, I had a vague notion that Blue Cheer hung out at the Fillmore, dropped acid, and played Big Brother & the Holding Company type hippie music. Ha! Wrong wrong wrong. Two days ago, FoAN Pierce, put up four YouTube videos of music for hot summer days on his blog (all fab--go look), one of which was Blue Cheer doing "Summertime Blues":
It completely did my head in: Blue Cheer were the first speed metal hair band! Whoa! (Okay, Status Quo maybe--maybe--were first but Blue Cheer, wow, just listen to them. Judas Priest, Metallica...all those people wouldn't exist without this sound.)
So, hey, watch it again, and this time turn it up to eleven.
7 comments:
WOW. Awesome info tidbit.
All those songs sure brought back memories.
I liked having the lyrics to the Mungo Jerry song, especially as I never quite got the da du da da parts.
Holy Cow. I never even heard of Blue Cheer before. Art sounds like a very interesting person.
Too Hot here too. Low 90s.
I seem to recall an article in Rolling Stone with a photo of Blue Cheer recording on a boat dock. They were surrounded by banks of speakers 10 or 15 feet high.
Yup. Listened to them in the 80's in Athens while washing dishes for Michael Stipe. (Stipe was the cook, I was the dishwasher.)
Beautiful hair: Breck. (A commercial reference that will surely date me.)
A hair band, sure, but speed metal? I don't think they were fast enough, at least on this song. And how ironic that their big hit was originally a rockabilly tune.
I think I have their first album, and maybe their second, on vinyl around here somewhere. The original copy, which I bought when it was current, got worn out.
Post a Comment