The year: 1968. The place: San Francisco, home to the blues-rock hybrid that came to be known as psychedelic or acid rock. The band: Blue Cheer, named for one of Owsley Stanley’s LSD recipes.
The song: “Summertime Blues,” the biggest hit (Billboard No. 8, 1958) for rockabilly pioneer Eddie Cochran, who had a knack for capturing the frustrations of ’50s teenagers — getting a dull summer job that prevents you from having fun, having to ask Dad for the car — and setting them to the new rock ‘n’ roll beat. (As is comically common among songs that become classics, its first release was as a B-side.)
By 10 years later, the song was a much-covered standard, the rare ’50s rock track that didn’t sound dated. The Beach Boys used it as an album track in 1962, one of dozens of bands that recorded it in the style of Cochran’s original.
Blue Cheer wasn’t interested in that. Dickie Peterson, who sang and played bass, had formed the group in 1966 and stripped the band down to a power trio lineup the next year. Their debut album, “Vincebus Eruptus,” just missed the Top 10 on the strength of their reconstruction of Cochran’s signature tune; the single only reached No. 14 on the singles chart but got heavy airplay all summer.
At about the same time Blue Cheer’s single was climbing the charts, The Who was playing a rocked-up version in concert, captured on the band’s classic “Live at Leeds” LP. They were playing it earlier than that, though, as in this video from the 1967’s Monterrey Pop Festival.
This twin updating of the rockabilly original made “Summertime Blues” a concert standard for thousands of bands, from T. Rex to Bruce Springsteen. While the music still sounds fresh, the lyrics are the throwback — summer jobs for teenagers are mostly a relic of the 20th century.
Canadian prog-rockers Rush, another band with a bass-playing lead singer, covered the song for a 1994 EP, producing a version based on the Blue Cheer arrangement. They have better chops, and Geddy Lee’s voice stays in the troposphere, but the result sounds like rock rather than heavy metal. (And I still think Tom Hanks is the obvious choice for the Neil Peart biopic.)
Further affirmation of the song’s enduring appeal came in 2009, when Alan Jackson took a rather staid cover to No. 1 on the country charts, but the less said about that version the better.
The Beach Boys’ cover would be unremarkable except that the lead vocal is by David Marks, the teenage friend of Carl Wilson who was 14 when he began playing with the Wilson brothers (that’s him playing guitar on the left in the group shots). He’s known as “the forgotten Beach Boy” because, while he played on their first four albums, he quit the band because of Murry Wilson’s overbearing personality. He and Carl are credited with establishing the band’s basic sound when they brought their electric guitars into the mix at the Wilson family hootenannies. This was his only lead vocal performance.
