I’ve said a couple times now that I only like comps after the fact. When they’re first released and they need to be reviewed, they’re a pain in my ass, and they sit and sit and nag on me until I finally write them up. It’s not until a few years later, when the material is rare as hell and a few of the bands have collapsed, that I’m even remotely interested. You say Welcome to MeteorCity has a different version of a song from Lowrider? Sign me up.

For a while now I’ve been trying to chase down a copy of Bastards Will Pay: A Tribute to Trouble to absolutely no avail. Amazon, eBay, Gemm, physical stores, stoner and doom distros — nobody’s got this friggin’ thing. And yeah, I know I can just type it into Google and download it. I don’t wanna do that. I want to own it. I like my little plastic discs, thanks. You keep the cloud.

To quell my tributary jones and in the meantime hear a couple badass bands, I recently placed an order on the cheap for a copy of Blue Explosion: A Tribute to Blue Cheer on Black Widow Records out of Italy. Released in 1999 and featuring the likes of Drag Pack and Norrsken, among others who don’t exist anymore, it fits my law of comp appreciation perfectly. I don’t even know Garybaldi, but their version of “Fresh Fruit and Iceburgs” is killer and doomed and gives me something to look up tonight while I’m sitting on my ass, so that’s an immediate plus.

Perhaps best of all, though, is that Blue Explosion is bookended by Pentagram. And not just any Pentagram — it’s Joe Hasselvander on all the instruments and Bobby Liebling on vocals, and that’s it. They were working with Black Widow at that point (released Review Your Choices in ’99 and Sub-Basement in 2001 with the duo lineup), and so the disc opens with a nine-minute version of “Doctor Please” on which Hasselvander pretty much just jams with himself. It’s amazing, and his tones are unbelievably heavy. Internal Void follows with “Parchment Farm” and it’s like a one-two punch out of the Doom Capitol.

And Norrsken (the Swedish band from which both Witchcraft and Graveyard were born) are indeed a highlight — they present “Pilot” with expectedly killer vintage sounds — but Natas doing “Ride with Me” and Rise and Shine‘s take on “Sun Cycle” are also standouts, and “Peace of Mind” might be the most purely psychedelic I’ve ever heard Ufomammut sound. Whether it’s the boozy Euro-rock of Space Probe Taurus or the loose organ jamming of Standarte, I’m into it, and the fact that it’s all Blue Cheer material makes it even better.

So yeah, if it was coming across my desk for review now, I’d probably be all huffy-puffy about it and bitch about how compilation reviews are basically just plugs for the bands involved and there’s never any flow or basis for any overall analysis of the release, but in buying something like Blue Explosion: A Tribute to Blue Cheer, I don’t give a shit. It rocks and the rest is secondary to that. For something that was a consolation prize, I definitely feel like I won out.

Still gotta find that Trouble tribute, though.

If you’re reading this and you celebrate either the Jesus-in-Christmas or the secularized Xmas, then chances are congratulations are in order: You’ve made it through another one. The Patient Mrs. and I got back a little bit ago from the last of the familial hoedowns, and with that, an episode of Iron Chef America and our collected loot strewn about the place in Roman-style excess, the evening seems to have come to a conclusion. I hope you had a good one.

Since Friday was my office party and — class act that I am — I got loaded early, I never officially closed out the week, and I thought some Blue Cheer would be the way to go. In the car up to Connecticut and back yesterday and today it was Deep Purple, Sungrazer, Warning and Kyuss, but holiday Cheer is about as close as I get to holiday cheer, so I hope you enjoy it. I haven’t drooled over Outsideinside in a couple weeks anyway, so I’m due.

If you’re in the US and don’t have to work tomorrow, I hope your weekend continues to be excellent and that you get to relax a bit before having to cram five days’ worth of work into four the rest of this week. If Xmas isn’t in line with either your belief system, you’re celebrating Hanukkah, Lemmy‘s birthday, something else or nothing at all, I hope you had a good weekend whatever it may have entailed.

Along with a shit-ton of laundry, tomorrow I’m going to try to make my way through reviewing the new BeenObscene album, and this week I’ll have Six Dumb Questions with guitarist/graphic artist Scott Stearns of the recently-reviewed Bibilic Blood and the semi-recently-reviewed Morbid Wizard, as well as, I think some new music from Dwellers, who were reviewed just a couple days ago. Very timely around here all of a sudden.

In any case, much fun to come this week, so please, stay tuned. In the meantime, see you on the forum and back here tomorrow for more good times.

It was two years ago today, Oct. 12, that Blue Cheer‘s Dickie Peterson succumbed to liver cancer. I’m not going to write anything grand about the man’s legacy — it speaks for itself — I just thought the occasion was worth marking.

Last night after work, The Patient Mrs. and I hit the road north and west and got up to Buffalo, New York, where we stayed the night. This afternoon, after an unsuccessful attempt to hit a record store there called Spiral Scratch — whose noon opening time was, to be fair, qualified with an “ish” on their website — we made our way into Canada to cut west to our final destination, Detroit, which is where I’m posting from now.

Hell of a ride. I don’t think Canada was any more or less boring than western Pennsylvania or Ohio might have been, but it’s another stamp on my passport, anyway. Every time someone asked where we were headed and we told them, the response was, “Why would you go to Detroit? Nobody goes there.”

Fair enough question, but I like a lot of shit people don’t like, and yeah we saw some bombed-out looking shit on the way here, but whatever. No more than Newark or Paterson back in Jersey. Anyway, it’s a road trip, and I’ll be here through the weekend, so I don’t know how many posts I’m going to get up, so if you’re wondering why there isn’t the usual obsessive amount of output today and tomorrow, that’s why.

I should have known though that the second I wasn’t in front of a computer the site would crash. Big thrill sending “my shit is broken” emails to the hosting company from my phone, believe you me. Really nails down that whole “getting away from it all” thing. At least it’s back up now, though it always seems as soon as I say that, it implodes again. Ugh.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the Blue Cheer video above, taped at the soundcheck of a show I later attended at the old Knitting Factory in Manhattan. That was a good night. In case I don’t get to post again before the weekend, thanks everyone for checking in this week, and next week I’ll have an interview with artist Sean “Skillit” McEleny and a Six Dumb Questions with the recently-reviewed Threefold Law, as well as reviews of The Re-Stoned and hopefully the Clutch show that I’m going to in Flint on Saturday. Good stuff to come, and in the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the forum, it’s like YOB-city in there. Lots of fun.

It’s kind of a bittersweet Frydee this week. On the one hand, The Obelisk has over 100,000 page views for the month of December so far. 106,818 by Yahoo‘s current count. And that’s amazing. Four times more than any previous month, in just 10 days. There are nearly 300 people registered for the forums, and well over 3,000 posts in the sundry message boards. To put it mildly, it has been an incredible week.

On the other hand, tonight my band Maegashira plays our last show, opening for Kings Destroy and The Brought Low at Cake Shop in Manhattan. Nearly six years in, it’s hard to think of that as being over, but there you go. We put out a killer album, a couple splits, and had some great times. I chose to end the week with Blue Cheer in tribute to listening to Outsideinside while sitting in the van and drinking beer the last year or so before rehearsal. I’ll miss that.

So yeah, bit of an emotional roller coaster. Whichever way the mood swings, thank you for checking out the forums if you’ve done that, and thanks for reading the blog proper if you’ve done that. Both are much appreciated on my end, I assure you. Next week we’ll continue the top 20 of 2010 countdown and get back on track with some On the Radar and Buried Treasure-type stuff. I’ll have a writeup of the Kings Destroy set and I’m trying to sort out an interview with Victor Griffin, so here’s hoping that can happen too.

In the meantime, enjoy “Sun Cycle,” remember the forums are up all weekend (we never close), and please, have fun and be safe. We’ll pick up right where we left off on Monday.

Blue Cheer more or less speaks for itself, but I was listening to Vincebus Eruptum earlier this week and thinking about Dickie Peterson (blessings and peace be upon him), and I figured for this Frydee afternoon, they were probably the way to go. Their cover of Albert King‘s “The Hunter” originally appeared on 1968′s Outsideinside. This performance is from Virginia Beach in 2007, and anyone interested in tracking down the rest of the show can do so here.

The press release pretty much says it all. If there was a chance any of us was going to turn out immortal, it would have been him.

Los Angeles, CA ? Friends, fans and heavy metal rock and rollers around the world are mourning the death of Blue Cheer bassist and lead singer Richard Allan ?Dickie? Peterson (b. September 12, 1946), after a long fight against cancer.? Peterson, age 63, died in Erkelenz, Germany, where he lived, on the morning of October 12, 2009.? He is survived by wife Ilka Peterson, ex-wife Marilyn (Peterson) Stephens with whom he had a daughter, CorrinaPeterson-Kaltenrieder, and a grandson.? He was a founding member and leader of the San Francisco band Blue Cheer; a band known to heavy metal fans for being louder and heavier than any band before them and for laying the blueprint for much of what would come after.? The band debuted with a ground shaking cover of Eddie Cochran?s ?Summertime Blues? on their 1968 album Vincebus Eruptum.? In the early days, the Cheer regularly played shows with their San Francisco peers including such era luminaries as The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother & the Holding Company and Cream.

The band?s last US tour (members Peterson, founding drummer Paul Whaley, and guitarist Andrew ?Duck? MacDonald) was in support of their 2007 release What Doesn?t Kill You? and had the band playing shows with the fourth generation of bands to follow in their path.? ?He loved the younger musicians,? said MacDonald of his bandmate, ?he thought of all of them as his children.?? Zach Gabbard of the band Buffalo Killers, one of Dickie?s favorite new generation rock bands, said, ?You never know what it is going to be like to play with your heroes, but we walked into the club and Dickie stopped and said, ?Buffalo Killers, cool name.?? We played and hung out with Dickie and the rest of the band all night.? It was a gift.? Dickie was worthy of his hero status and will be missed by many.?

Plans were underway for the band to tour in support of the 2009 Rainman Records DVD release of Blue Cheer Rocks Europe when Dickie?s cancer was found.? Tour plans were put on hold, but the first full-length concert DVD in the band?s more than 40 year history was released without delay.? The DVD includes not only the concert footage with 5.1 audio, but also included a Peterson voiceover commentary and a complete interview with the late leader of the band.

Dickie and Blue Cheer cherished their fans, the 1%ers as they were called, and considered them the fourth member of their band.? ?Without you, what we do is completely pointless? Peterson said to an audience in 2006, continuing ?you?ve got to take care of each other, you?re all you?ve got.?? MacDonald says that Dickie believed in the best of people. ?The people loved him and he loved them right back. It was the best relationship he had in his life.?

Even if Blue Cheer weren’t gods widely credited with being the first true stoner rock band, their new DVD, Rocks Europe (Rainman Records) would still be worth checking out just for frontman/bassist Dickie Peterson‘s commentary and bonus interview segment. Between the two, he spills his guts about the trio’s long, long history — they formed in 1966! — and what it was like being the loudest band in the San Francisco hippie scene, his lack of a tone knob, the blues, his motivations, songs that take 20 years to write, how he wants to die on stage, etc. It’s a 90-minute show and the commentary runs through the whole thing. He’s got a lot of time to fill.

The concert taped for the DVD took place in Bonn, Germany in April 2008, so it’s not so much all of Europe being rocked as just one city in it, but as someone who saw them on the American leg of this tour supporting their first album in 16 years, What Doesn’t Kill You, the safe bet is that the rest of the shows fell in line accordingly. The set list in Bonn crosses the decades, opening with “Babylon” from 1968′s Outsideinside, going back to their seminal release, (earlier) 1968′s Vincebus Eruptum with “Parchman Farm,” “Out of Focus,” “Summertime Blues” and “Doctor Please” spread throughout with What Doesn’t Kill You cuts “I’m Gonna Get to You,” (the High Times Award-winning) “Rollin’ Dem Bones,” “Just a Little Bit” and “Maladjusted Child” before returning to Outsideinside to close the night with their famous cover of Booker T. Jones‘ “The Hunter.” Sure, there are seven other studio records untouched, but Blue Cheer hasn’t lasted 43 years by indulging themselves in the deep cuts. They know what fans want and they know how to deliver. Loudly.

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Because it’s absolutely gorgeous out in the valley despite some clouds rolling in, I’m feeling like summer time and summer time means Blue Cheer. As such, here’s a video of the original stoner rock band, live from Virginia Beach, VA on the local show Up all Night, doing “Rollin’ Dem Bones” from 2007′s What Doesn’t Kill You — their first album since 1991. Classic stoner pace. If you’d like to check out the whole show, all you need to do is make a wish and click these words. Enjoy and have a great weekend.