Alpha Men

SHIVER - San Francisco's Shiver

If you thought that Blue Cheer's Neanderthal Stomp didn't begin to wrap its big, furry arms around popular culture until the mid-70's, here's an artifact worthy of your attention: Texas freak & skins-basher Don Peck (a protégé of Spirit's Ed Cassidy, fyi) packed up his drums in the late 60's & headed to Haight-Ashbury with the intent to live out his Cave Rock fantasies. He was joined by Neil Peron (bass), Frank Twist (guitar, vocals) and for a time, demonic frontman Terry "Hook" Saluga, so monikered due to his hook for a hand-- which came in every bit as (ahem) "handy" for mindless violence as it did for playing makeshift slide guitar (he doesn't appear on this recording unfortunately). As adept at entertaining blissed-out hippies as they were, their true forte was providing a soundtrack for bikers to down red wine & Seconal-- the perfect diet for indiscriminately stomping anyone unfortunate enough to be "in the way."

Recorded in 1972, this here LP is "live in the studio" transcribed to tape on a 2-track machine-- no overdubs, no fucking around. As a result, the sound quality dips into the oh-so-lame-to-say "lo-fi" category on occasion, but I like to think of it as "period charm." Truth be told, with music this brutish & unruly, a shoddy audience boot would suffice-- nothin' but nothin' could diminish this fiendish caterwauling. Right from the git-go, Thee Cheer's Ghost raises its sloped forehead with the barbaric bashing of the six-minute, sub-Jimi-fried jam of "Tough as Nails"-- which lives up to its name with brawn to spare. Before you can recover from such a merciless pummeling, "Fixer" begins, introducing Twist's untrained bellow along with his unrelenting torture of a Cry Baby Wah pedal (I swear, he's tryin' to stomp on it as hard as Sonny Barger's cronies did on HST). The pièce de résistance, however, is the 14-minute, unabashedly macho "Alpha Man." Built on a riff that sounds suspiciously like the outro of Jimi's adaptation of "Hey Joe," the simple vamp provides the perfect launching pad for this ramshackle power-trio to ply their trade as Purveyors of Music as Bludgeoning Accessory.

Buy it ya cheap bastards!

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