Replay: Blue Cheer, Vincebus Eruptum, 1968

In his otherwise excellent and thorough Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal, David Konow fails to aggressively trace the origins of his subject. For Konow, heavy metal sprouted from industrial England in 1969 in the form of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. But what would later be called heavy metal first took form on the other side of the Atlantic at least a year earlier, with the release in January 1968 of San Francisco band Blue Cheer's debut album, Vincebus Eruptum.

Blue Cheer was arguably the first band for which volume and feedback were the first two commandments. Its six-track debut disc is best known for a raucous cover of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" that became a Top 40 hit. But the album as a whole is a more complex beast, a celebration of the glorious noise that can be made by three men with amplified instruments.

Part of the San Francisco scene of the late '60s, Blue Cheer was enmeshed in the drug culture (Blue Cheer was a nickname for LSD), hanging out with the Hell's Angels and performing alongside Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. But while Blue Cheer had a blues foundation in the spirit of Jimi Hendrix and the Yardbirds and a psychedelic worldview, it was the first band to sacrifice aural aesthetics in the name of loudness. You gotta believe that when Blue Cheer took the stage during the Summer of Love, half the audience fled in fear and disgust, while the other half rhythmically punched the sky in support of this dangerous new sound. Blue Cheer guitarist Leigh Stephens had no qualms about ditching a song's underlying groove right in the middle as he launched into a crazed, feedback-fueled solo ("Doctor Please"). We're not talking the mellifluous solos of Eric Clapton. Stephens' prolonged flights of guitar fancy were frenzied and often out of control. His solos sounded like he was grappling with a giant writhing snake, accomplishing what legendary rock critic Lester Bangs called a "truly bracing atonality."

It would be a reach to call Vincebus Eruptum a good album, let alone a classic. Of the six songs, only two covers, "Summertime Blues" and "Rock Me Baby," hold up 35 years later. (Blue Cheer's second album, Insideoutside, released later in 1968, is better.) But Vincebus Eruptum is nonetheless a fascinating artifact--proof that the founding fathers of heavy metal were from San Francisco, not Birmingham, England.--Geoff Schumacher