[Chuzzlewit]

ahh Blue Cheer, I remember them, still have that album. Great record.. I seem to recall that the urban legend of that time was, that they were so loud that the drummer became deaf and he had to play by the vibrations of the music. Hah !... How about Jethro Tull 2nd lp (forgot the name) or the 3rd lp "Benefit". I agree with your other choices.

[BluesDuke]

I seem to recall that the urban legend of that time was, that they were so loud that the drummer became deaf and he had to play by the vibrations of the music.

That urban legend, not so. But one rumour about the original Blue Cheer that was true was that, opening a Fillmore show for Iron Butterfly, their amplifiers so completely obstructed the light show that Bill Graham refused to permit the band to play in his Fillmore venues again. And they never did, not even after they shifted gears entirely, halfway through the making of New! Improved! Blue Cheer toward a more conventional mixture of hard rock and soul built around an entirely different basic quartet setting. (New! Improved! began as the heavy trio, with Randy Holden replacing Leigh Stephens, but this lineup fell apart when the album was half finished, and bassist Dickie Peterson used a couple of studio players who'd appeared on their Outsideinside album to finish the set off, in a style which pretty much set the Cheer's future, what was left of it: melding hard rock and white soul. The album was released to indifferent acclaim, if you can call it that, but Peterson liked the new sound enough that he forged a set lineup - himself, keyboardsman Gary Yoder, drummer Norman Mayell, and guitarist Bruce Stephens - for Blue Cheer, the best complete set in the new style; the highlight was a bristling bluesrocker, "Saturday Freedom," and the entire set was very good stuff, though the band's original fans were screaming sellout now that the loud and heavy stuff was history. They had two more albums in them, The Original Human Being and Oh! Pleasant Hope, the latter a little more experimental - with the problem being, they were experimenting with sounds and impulses that had already been beaten into the ground by the psychedelic era they had initially been an arch part of, not to mention Peterson appearing on only two cuts though he's listed as the leader and bassist in the credits...the band by now was a hodgepodge of rotating members. They split for keeps in 1974.)