RIP Dickie Peterson

I remember walking away from the 31st Street Pub on the cold winter night wondering how far I would have to get down the street before I couldn't hear Blue Cheer blasting through the concrete walls. It must have been about a block and a half.

The band, one of the great sonic forces in the history of rock, has gone quiet with the death of frontman Dickie Peterson on Oct. 12. He died of cancer at the age of 61 in Germany.

The late '60s San Francisco band was an icon to punk, stoner and metal bands that followed, but was very scarce for many years. The Pub show in 2007 was the band's first in Pittsburgh in decades.

"We were in a large part ignored by a lot of the rock upper echelons at the time," Peterson told the PG at the time. "We were pretty wild, so we scared a lot of people. We hung out with bikers, smoked dope and did stuff, and we got in a lot of trouble for that. There were a lot of people in the music scene that had a problem with us. A lot of people dug what we were doing; otherwise we would have never done what we did. They saw what we were doing. We were angry young men. Now, we're angry old men."