Outsideinside (Blue Cheer, 1968)

Blue Cheer was kind of the soundtrack of my immediate post-college life. People kept talking about them like they were some great undiscovered gem of proto-metal, so I finally broke down and picked up a simple greatest hits package to see what the fuss was all about. About half of that compilation is very heavy, and the second half more laid-back. Outsideinside captures the band in their "heavy" phase, rocking the fashionable "power trio" sound that artists like Cream and Hendrix were making all the rage in the late 1960's.

The band's first album, Vincebus Eruptum, made a big splash locally in the SF Bay Area music scene thanks to an over the top version of Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues (predating the Who's version by a couple years!) that was far heavier than anything coming out of that music scene and instantly making the band the "darkest" element of a still red-hot "Summer of Love" vibe. As with many bands featured here, they wasted no time heading back to the studio to replicate the success, though with more mixed results. The second album kept the sledgehammer originals and super-charged cover songs, but added a little bit of extra keyboards here and there. This is done to great effect with the opening track "Feathers From Your Tree" and more subtly on the closer, "Babylon". While there's plenty of straightforward hard rock numbers here, one can sense the psychedelia creeping over many of the tracks. They generally handle the transition pretty well, though its clear that playing hard and stripped-down is their forte.

Nevertheless, the band would continue to shy away from the Vincebus Eruptum style. A former co-worker of mine saw them live around the time of this album and revealed a little secret that isn't as apparent to younger listeners like myself. Bassist/founder/leader Dickie Peterson was a perfectionist. As raw as everything sounded, it was not spontaneous. Any doubt of that should be cleared by the later albums, in which the original trio dissolved. In its stead, Peterson expanded the band with new membership, even bringing in Gary Lee Yoder to handle most of the vocals. Clearly the old scene was consolidating by the early 1970's, as the two were such bitter rivals in the 1960's that Peterson stole Yoder's drummer from the Oxford Circle, basically killing that band with only a single to its name.

Two-thirds of the old trio would come back together intermittently from the 1980's onward. In 2006 I was fortunate enough to see them on what would be their last tour (Peterson died a few years later). The entire setlist was from the first two albums and the band has for a long time embraced the notion that they helped found metal, and have always played in a much harder style than any of their four albums that follow this one.