Blue Cheer box set

Hmm, well you should definitely get the second one, and New! Improved! is worth it as well. Stephens is gone by that point but it's still good and heavy, just not in a wild and dissonant way. Less Ornette Coleman, more Black Sabbath. But still a good one.

Then you would probably like the recent "Live in Japan" recording. It has the advantage of being done recently, is not of atrocious quality and makes the most of the technological advances that have allowed good levels and recording of total greasechain guitar. It's probably a better performance, too, than Blue Cheer was capable of in the Leigh Stephens days.

The songs are on it, the angry tatooed ex-con woman-hating burned chrome vibe, still in the mire of Vincebus Eruptum. The only thing really missing is the vinyl crackle and Abe Kesh. As far as real loud hard rock performances, it's a keeper although you won't be coming back to it a lot.

broheems - i've heard (but don't own) the second capt. trip blue cheer thing and it sounded like ass. ass recorded from the parking lot, at that.

JUst found some talk about the 6 piece line up or at least a poster thereof.
So wondering if they sounded similar to the 3 piece they stripped down to shortly afterwards.
Heavy bluesy stuff. & wondered what did pass as heavy in 66. Thinking about it I guess there are bits of heaviness in British stuff from teh time Small Faces, Who , a few others and then Cream though not sure even they had explored a direction consciously thought of as heavy at that point or if they actually did(seems like influence may have been not the direction they intended, more side effects of what their actual exploration was etc) & Hendrix was just getting to England and not established in any way . & I don't think heavy was focus with teh Brits acts who touched on it.
Stones weren't looking for heaviness in their Blues I don't think, more a refracted authenticity or something.
I did hear tehre are some pretty raucous recordings of a late 50s Muddy Waters Band that really rock but not sure about heavy. & a few people like Link Wray laying down some grungey chordage

From a show preview featurette I wrote in '07(?):

Born Under a LOUD Sign
...The main problem, beyond their best early albums, was that, although volume and emphasis could make a lot of other stuff irrelevant, they could also get to be as predictable as anything else. Plus, what happens when you don’t die young, or at all? Bassist Dickie Petersen’s voice has gotten rougher (maybe), but has also lasted for forty years of touring, born to push its way through outlandish inspirations, b-plus boogie, and basic bar-band lineups alike (original guitarist Stephens left pretty quickly; original drummer Paul Whaley has come and gone).
Blue Cheer’s current guitarist-vocalist-producer, Andrew “Duck” MacDonald, does right by Whaley and Petersen on their new set, “What Doesn’t Kill You…” (Whaley’s back for half of it, but the drums of Pentagram’s Joe Hasselvander fill and fit in.) Almost all the songs are MacDonald/Peterson collaborations, or written by Petersen alone. “Rollin’Dem Bones” isn’t a good opener, and B.C.’s cover of Albert King’s “Born Under A Bad Sign” isn’t that great, but several other tracks use “Sign” ‘s kind of bump and grind, its bounce and stomp, as one heavy point of timely arrival and departure. Overdubbed guitar harmonies get a little fancy at times, but everybody on board (singing as well as playing) still knows when to stretch and otherwise torture notes, and when to curve and carve slabs of sound. And “ Young Lions In Paradise” is soulful, rueful country, in the sense that a lot of today’s country (like Van Zant) is actually rootsy rock. The stated idea for this album is “Z Z Top meets Black Sabbath,” and it’s fun like that, but things don’t get supernatural unless they have to. Mainly, we get a scorched and fried community, so look out for “Gypsy Rider,” and especially that “Maladjusted Child” (“She just ain’t right, I tells ya!”). You’ll hear them coming.
Blue Cheer will play at the Thirsty Ear this Friday night.

Weird fact I never knew about the original line-up is that the keyboard player was Vale Hamanaka, later head honcho of RE/Search Publications (publisher of Modern Primitives, Angry Women etc) under the name V. Vale.

I saw the band had an Asian American member in the photo on the poster. I thought that was rare for a mid 60s band.