Blue Cheer
San Francisco's Blue Cheer took the blues-rock of their heroes and cranked it past the point of good sense, drowning three-chord songs in walls of amplifier distortion that critics still cite as proto-heavy-metal's opening shot. Subtlety was never the point — volume and fuzz were. Their raw, overdriven attack announced a new, uglier kind of loud.
the sound in question
1968
Doctor PleaseBlue Cheer
we haven’t charted Blue Cheer yet
this stretch of the river isn’t mapped. we trace the watershed one artist at a time — and we’re always heading further upstream.