Rainman Records News

Los Angeles, CA – Friends, fans and heavy metal rock and rollers around the world are mourning the death of Blue Cheer bassist and lead singer Richard Allan “Dickie” Peterson (b. September 12, 1946), after a long fight against cancer. Peterson, age 63, died in Erkelenz, Germany, where he lived, on the morning of October 12, 2009. He is survived by wife Ilka Peterson, ex-wife Marilyn (Peterson) Stephens with whom he had a daughter, Corrina Peterson-Kaltenrieder, and a grandson. He was a founding member and leader of the San Francisco band Blue Cheer; a band known to heavy metal fans for being louder and heavier than any band before them and for laying the blueprint for much of what would come after. The band debuted with a ground shaking cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” on their 1968 album Vincebus Eruptum. In the early days, the Cheer regularly played shows with their San Francisco peers including such era luminaries as The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother & the Holding company and Cream.

The band’s last US tour (members Peterson, founding drummer Paul Whaley, and guitarist Andrew “Duck” MacDonald) was in support of their 2007 release What Doesn’t Kill You… and had the band playing shows with the fourth generation of bands to follow in their path. “He loved the younger musicians,” said MacDonald of his bandmate, “he thought of all of them as his children.” Zach Gabbard of the band Buffalo Killers, one of Dickie’s favorite new generation rock bands, said “You never know what it is going to be like to play with your heroes, but we walked into the club and Dickie stopped and said, ‘Buffalo Killers, cool name.’ We played and hung out with Dickie and the rest of the band all night. It was a gift. Dickie was worthy of his hero status and will be missed by many.”

Plans were underway for the band to tour in support of the 2009 Rainman Records DVD release of Blue Cheer Rocks Europe when Dickie’s cancer was found. Tour plans were put on hold, but the first full length concert DVD in the band’s more than forty year history was released without delay. The DVD includes not only the concert footage with 5.1 audio, but also included a Peterson voiceover commentary and a complete interview with the late leader of the band.

Dickie and Blue Cheer cherished their fans, the 1%ers as they were called, and considered them the fourth member of their band. “Without you, what we do is completely pointless” Peterson said to an audience in 2006, continuing “you’ve got to take care of each other, you’re all you’ve got.” MacDonald says that Dickie believed in the best of people “the people loved him and he loved them right back. It was the best relationship he had in his life.”

During a time of social and political unrest, when the hippies and the "man" were locked in mortal combat and profound changes were taking pop music to places nobody had dreamed of before, Steppenwolf was not only there, it was spearheading the revolution.

The pack leader of the late-'60s counterculture, Steppenwolf's fire-breathing biker anthem "Born To Be Wild" laid rubber and spewed exhaust as the band, led by John Kay, he of the primal growl you hear on the song, drove down the highways and byways of America and took magic carpet rides. On its journey, the band found itself at the epicenter of explosive cultural movements, and on the 1969 album Monster, Steppenwolf addressed head on some of the hot-button political issues of the time.

Now comes a career-spanning DVD titled "John Kay & Steppenwolf, A Rock & Roll Odyssey," due out Sept. 30, that tells the incredible story of this iconic band and what was happening around them when Steppenwolf was as big as anybody in the land.

Recently interviewed for a story that will appear in the Oct. 24 issue of Goldmine, Kay relates the tale of how the project came about.

"It was something that had been on my list of projects to hopefully get to one day for several years, and an old friend of mine, who passed away a couple of years ago, Morgan Cavett — who, in fact, co-wrote one of the songs on our very first Steppenwolf album... Morgan and I were talking about doing, basically, a video biography, and he had, over the years, gotten involved in all sorts of other pursuits, and the last one was video shooting, directing and production and the like. So, he would come out during some of the Steppenwolf engagements, he would fly out with some of his gear, and he would shoot some talking heads and performance clips and other things, and amassed a backlog of video footage, but we were always too busy to completely follow through on this. And unfortunately, he then developed a serious illness and died a couple of years ago."

Then, along came a Nashville videographer by the name of Mark Hall to save the day.

"[He's] a Canadian fellow who's been in Nashville for a long time, and has done numerous video biographies on Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and The Band and on and on and on," says Kay. "He had also done a project with me for the Bravo Canada channel, and so he and I had a good working relationship. I liked the quality of his work, and so, he also had known Morgan, and he was willing to take on this project and to finish it basically."

The idea behind the project was to tell Steppenwolf's story the way it should be told.

"The whole premise of doing this project was really the idea that we would get to tell our story, our way, without any concerns where we would have to satisfy someone else's expectations — meaning, when you create something for cable channels, or VH-1 or whoever, they have their take on what it is they want to focus on in any of these stories," says Kay. "After all, it's about ratings, and in the end about ad dollars, and we knew that would definitely interfere with what we had in mind, because we had already done a 'Behind the Music,' which turned out to be what it turned out to be (laughs). And so, consequently, I decided that this would be a self-financed and directed project, because we, as a band, in our history, don't really fit any particular mold 100 percent. While people tend to think of us as being either a biker band or, because of the Monster album, a social-political oriented band, or if it's 'Magic Carpet Ride,' you know, it's kind of a pop hit... we were a lot of things, but perhaps not enough of one particular thing to fit any particular sort of pigeonhole. And the same thing was the case with respect to this DVD because it is something quite separate and apart from the typical 'here are five guys, who were in a garage and made some music and they got lucky and they had some hits, and the trials and tribulations of being a rock band, and the infighting and you know, eventually half of them go face down in the gutter with drug addiction, you know'... That sort of thing we've seen plenty of and done to death, and it doesn't actually fit our situation to a T in any case."

In Kay's eyes, there was more important stuff to address.

"Far more importantly, from our perspective, is the fact that we had much more of a bigger story to tell," says Kay. "It's because of my individual background, having been born in what was then East Prussia and growing up behind the Iron Curtain, and escaping to West Germany, discovering rock 'n' roll on the Armed Forces Radio Network, you know, coming to Canada, etc. etc. That all leads into my joining The Sparrow, the Canadian band which later migrated to the West Coast, broke up then in L.A., from the ashes of which Steppenwolf was formed in '67, and from there forward. But, during the course of both The Sparrow as well as Steppenwolf's life span thereafter, we were in certain cultural meccas at certain times that were pivotal times."

Such as?
"We were in Yorkville Village in Toronto when Neil Young blew in there and Joni Mitchell passed through, you know," remembers Kay, "and we were on the Sunset Strip when the hippie riots shut down Pandora's Box and Steve Stills wrote "For What It's Worth" about that. We were in the Bay Area playing the Avalon Ballroom and others when the first 'Human Be-In' was at Golden Gate Park took place, and those kinds of things. And also, once we launched our first album in '68 and went out on the road, my God, that year we had assassinations, riots in the streets, the Democratic Convention... on and on. So, a lot of what was going on is part of this bigger picture, and when we first showed a rough cut to someone, just as sort of a trial balloon to get a reaction — this was a person not entirely keen on rock 'n' roll to begin with and was like, 'Yeah, Steppenwolf, "Born to be Wild," that's all I know about them' — but what he commented [on] was very telling, because he said, 'Well, the story of the band is pretty interesting, but it's really sort of a train that takes you through the time tunnel of all these different decades in all these different places you guys were in were either culturally or artistically or because of the times you were in, politically and socially, there were major events that are part of this bigger picture."

Kay isn't sure if there's a particular television channel that'd be willing to show this film, but he's all right with that.

"Unfortunately, because of that diversity of ingredients, it again doesn't really fit on any particular cable channel's focus," says Kay. "Because there's not enough history for the History Channel. There's not enough debauchery and God knows what for VH-1, and so, we basically said, 'Don't worry about that. This is really us telling our story and there are those that have supported us for many, many years, who will be interested —  up to a certain number of them — in this somewhat different, somewhat less typical story of a rock 'n' roll band, and its life and its times that it lived in.'"

For ordering information and all things Steppenwolf related, visit www.steppenwolf.com. Order through Wolf Wares and you can get a copy autographed by Kay himself. Also, visit www.rainmanrecords.com to find more Steppenwolf and John Kay related merchandise.