4/16/2007  - BLUE CHEER

http://www.myspace.com/bluecheer 

Concert Review: A wild Monday night with Blue Cheer

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

By Scott Mervis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Blue Cheer

The intensity was just a little higher later Monday night, or make that early Tuesday morning, at the 31st Street Pub, where Blue Cheer set out to re-arrange the cell structures of the 170 fans in the room.

Singer-bassist Dickie Peterson, still sporting wild hair and hippie shades, hit the stage just after midnight with the hilarious first words, "Hey Pittsburgh, the last time we were here was about 1968." Blue Cheer then proceeded to throw down the hammer of the gods with the biggest, fattest blues riffs on the planet.

Once billed as the World's Loudest Band, the San Francisco power trio has kept a pretty low profile the last, oh, 35 years, but its presence is felt in every stoner-rock band that followed in its wake.

Blue Cheer pounded out a set of sludgy amped-up blues driven by a relentless rhythm section and the psychedelic guitar heroics of Duck McDonald, a 20-year member who had no one screaming for Leigh Stephens. The band leaned heavily on the first two albums, apologizing to Mose Allison for turning "Parchment Farm" into pure metal nirvana and stalking through "The Hunter" with a cat-scratch vocal by Peterson.

As expected, Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" took on epic proportions, with McDonald stabbing away at the whiplash leads. It's no wonder this biker band would have scared the hippie kids tripping back in Haight-Asbury. Seeing them in the confines of the Pub felt like nothing less than a slice of local history.

I cut out toward the end, a little after 1, and walked two long blocks to my car. All the doors to the Pub were closed, but I could still hear Blue Cheer going at it. As far as I know, the place is still standing.

But as Leah McManigle, a member of the Pittsburgh band The Dirty Faces, noted on Tuesday, "Blue Cheer was so amazing, my kidneys still hurt this morning."

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