Chicago’s heading into a cold snap again, so I was at Trader Joe’s a night early stocking up on enough beer and peanut butter cups that I won’t have to leave my apartment all weekend (they say Thursday is the new Friday). And what genteel strains did I hear floating over the mountain ridges of Green Juice and Pumpkin Spice Instant Oatmeal? “There ain’t no cure for the Summertime Blues…” Someone up there must have a sick sense of humor. The parking lot is covered in ice and the high temperature tomorrow will be almost twenty degrees below zero, and here some hipster music algorithm is playing a summer hit from the 1960s.
Or so I thought. Imagine my surprise when I got home and realized that “Summertime Blues” was released in the middle of the winter, on January 16, 1968. ((Well, one could argue that it wasn’t really winter, since Blue Cheer lived in San Francisco and it never really gets below 55F there, even in mid-January. Maybe they wouldn’t have appreciated the irony.)) They released a cover of a summer song in winter, and here I was listening to it in winter, too. That’s enough of a dumb coincidence that I kept thinking about it.
Then I remembered that I’ve got this blog that I theoretically still write, and I’ve been looking for something to write about to kick off a series about the 50th anniversary of the birth of heavy metal. Somewhere in the dusty corners of my mind I dimly recalled that Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum came out in 1968, and fifty years ago is 1969. I can’t do that one, I thought. I would’ve had to write that piece last year. But then I thought what the hell, 50 years is a nice round number but it doesn’t really mean anything. So here it is, time to celebrate Half a Century (Plus One) of Heavy Metal with a post about the genesis of heavy metal, “Summertime Blues” by Blue Cheer.
What’s that, you say? Blue Cheer isn’t really metal? Metal really began with Black Sabbath or Deep Purple? I respectfully disagree.