In 1965, I lived on "Oxford Circle," a 19 year old aspiring psychedelic artist. Some other guys I knew formed a band "Oxford Circle" who we enjoyed. Then early in 1967 some of them reformed with Dickie Peterson, and played at a party outside our home on Putah Creek, perhaps the first time they played under the name BLUE CHEER, and were received enthusiastically.
Soon I drew an ad for them to play at the Avalon Ballroom (published in the Berkeley Barb, where my cartoons and psychedelic covers appeared frequently), when their first songs amazed listeners on Radio KSAN in SF. My cyclopic panels of surrealistic art became the first non-humorous Underground Comic, and shortly after that my friend Robert Crumb had 500 copies of his 25 cent ZAP comic printed. Then Bob and I sold our books on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, to passerby's, and then on Haight Street in SF, earning compliments from a group named: Blue Cheer.
In Crumb's 1999 biography "The Life And Times Of R. Crumb" I was invited to write about my adventures with Bob, and the beginning of underground comix in 1968. The following is from page 66 of that book:
"Later that month my 19 year old girlfriend Robin and I {who were sleeping occasionally on Crumb's living room floor in the Haight"} took Bob to a performance by BLUE CHEER at the Avalon Ballroom. Bob didn't like loud, blaring "acid rock." and this group, whose name originated from a brand of especially potent LSD, turned their amps up as loud as they could.The group featured long haired Leigh Stevens on lead guitar. I knew the bassist: short, wiry Dickie Peterson, who now yelled out the lyrics to "Summertime Blues" with vibrant conviction. Drummer Paul Whaley pounded his rhythms so vehemently that his hands bled from the impact, and a couple of times his bloodstained sticks shot out of his hands. The roar of their cacophony at times sounded almost like punk music, drenched in psychedelic angst.
"This concert was being filmed by a group that was making a proposal for a weekly television program called Live From The Avalon. The video cameraman photographed Bob dancing, although I'm sure they weren't aware of who he was, and also photographed Robin and me dancing to the strobe light in "Doctor Please." This was one of the rare times I had seen, what would later be called, "rock videos" being made in San Francisco.
Earlier I had known Dr. Richard Peddicord, a PhD in advanced mathematics, who worried his adoring wife and baby by taking Blue Cheer and playing relentlessly on his guitar. Not long after that he joined Blue Cheer, a lysergic math wizard writing songs about Universal Consciousness (see University of Virginia Physics Department/UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS) that he observed and referenced by the odd sounding name "God" in a song the group recorded. To some his friendship with Dickie, and other band members seemed surreal, but back then every day seemed a surreal adventure.
After the group fell apart in the Seventies, some members swept up in the epidemic of drugs and alcohol that swept the counterculture, Dickie seemed dazed when talking to old friends like my girl friend Lin who had lived communally with the band in Marin County in those daze. Recently I heard that after a respected career as a Math Professor in Southern Oregon, Richard moved his family to Mt Shasta, and I tried to locate him to ask whatever happened to that video film from July 1968 that Chet Helms helped produce.
Sigh. I never have reached him, but we would all love to see that film of DICKIE at his psychedelic peak, singing out to us today both from that session in 68 and from the grave in 09 simultaneously.
{Written by psycedelic poster/comix artist: John Thompson}
In 1965 in The Haight Ashbury/Berkeley John was one of the first psychedelic poster/comix artists ("history Of The Haight Ashbury" book and 22 posters in the CDROM, "Art Of Rock", Abrams Art Books "Concise History Of The Poster")
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