Label: Captain Trip Records (Japan), CTCD-077
Style: Hard Rock, Blues Rock
Country: North Dakota, U.S. (12.09.1946-12.10.2009)
Time: 43:52
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 302 Mb
Dickie Peterson, whose screaming vocals and pounding bass lines helped push the psychedelic blues-rock trio Blue Cheer into the musical territory that would later be called heavy metal, died Monday in Erkelenz, Germany. He was 63 and lived in Erkelenz and Cologne.
The cause was liver cancer, said Ron Rainey, his manager.
Blue Cheer, a San Francisco group formed in late 1966, took its name from a street brand of LSD but never exuded the peace and love vibe of groups like Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead. It stood for raw, animalistic power, on full display in the raucous, hard-driving “Summertime Blues,” the group’s biggest hit.
Pitted against Paul Whaley’s savagely thrashing drums and Leigh Stephens’s screeching guitar, Mr. Peterson, the group’s lead singer, adopted the only possible vocal strategy: he opened his mouth wide and emitted primal sounds at top volume.
“People keep trying to say that we’re heavy metal or grunge or punk, or we’re this or that,” Mr. Peterson told the Web site Stoner Rock in 2005. “The reality is, we’re just a power trio, and we play ultra blues, and it’s rock ‘n roll. It’s really simple what we do.”
Richard Allan Peterson was born on Sept. 12, 1946, and grew up in Grand Forks, N.D. He started playing bass guitar at 13, influenced by his brother, Jerre, who played guitar in an early, six-member version of Blue Cheer.
Mr. Peterson moved to San Francisco in the mid-1960s and, with his brother, began playing with Group B. He was thrown out of the band for insisting on a hard-rock style, which he indulged to the fullest with Blue Cheer.
Blue Cheer’s six-member configuration was quickly reduced to three to achieve a heavier sound, Mr. Peterson told Rocktober Magazine in 2007. In 1968, the group released the album “Vincebus Eruptum,” generally regarded as its best. It included the band’s cover version of the Eddie Cochran hit “Summertime Blues,” which reached No. 14 on the Billboard charts. The album rose to No. 11.
The group released several more albums in quick succession, notably “Outsideinside” (1968), “New! Improved! Blue Cheer” (1969) and “Blue Cheer” (1969), before breaking up in 1972.
Mr. Peterson’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Ilka, of Erkelenz; a daughter, Corrina Peterson Kaltenrieder of Fort Worth, Tex.; and a grandson.
In various configurations, but always with Mr. Peterson, new versions of Blue Cheer recorded many studio and live albums over the years. Mr. Peterson recorded two solo albums in the 1990s, “Child of the Darkness” and “Tramp,” and toured frequently with Blue Cheer in the United States and Europe.
(archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com)
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