Dickie Peterson was a founder member of one of the loudest, heaviest and most cacophonous rock bands of the 1960s. When Eric Clapton was asked in an interview in 2005 if his band Cream had invented heavy metal, he answered: “No, that was Blue Cheer.”

Peterson’s screaming vocals and his relentlessly pounding bass-playing once led a reviewer to describe Blue Cheer’s brain-boiling noise as “louder than God”. The quote was later borrowed to provide the title for a compilation of the band’s work.

The Blue Cheer sound as captured on such surprisingly durable late 1960s albums as Vincebus Eruptum and Outsideinside was deliberately crude, turbulent and excessive. But its joyous simple-mindedness has exerted an influence ever since and been cited not only as forerunner of heavy metal but also of punk, grunge and so-called “stoner rock”, with bands such as Black Sabbath, Motörhead, Nirvana and Queens of the Stone Age all tracing their lineage back to Peterson’s ear-splitting template.

Richard Alan Peterson was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1948 into a musical family. He grew up in Davis, California. His first instrument was the drums before he switched to the bass at the age of 13. After playing in a group called Oxford Circle, he moved to San Francisco in 1966 and put together Blue Cheer, taking the name from a notoriously potent strand of LSD.

Originally a six-piece band, the group slimmed down to the trio of Peterson, drummer Paul Whaley and guitarist Leigh Stephens after Peterson had been impressed by the sheer noise that the Jimi Hendrix Experience generated as a threesome at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.

Peterson and his band-mates could not match the musical skill of Hendrix and so decided the only way to go was to make the sound louder, heavier and grungier. Their mission, he later explained, was to make music a physical as well as an aural experience. With hardly any songs of their own, their 1968 debut Vincebus Eruptum featured strident, fuzzed-up versions of Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues and blues songs by the likes of B. B. King and Mose Allison, which hit the listener like a psychedelic sledgehammer. The record appeared in a drug-inspired embossed cover. “We were stoned on acid and thought, wouldn’t it be great if you could feel the album cover’,” Petersen said.

A second album, Outsideinside, followed later the same year and, according to legend, its recording had to be completed in the open air after the trio’s high volume had destroyed the studio monitors. After the departure of Leigh Stephens, new guitarists Randy Holden and Bruce Stephens appeared on the 1969 album New! Improved! (1969). By the band’s fourth, self-titled, album in 1970, Peterson was the only original member remaining, his band-mates reportedly unable to keep up with his prodigious appetite for hard drugs.

Blue Cheer made two further albums, The Original Human Being (1970) and Oh! Pleasant Hope (1971), which attempted to expand their proto-metal style into other areas before the group broke up in 1972.

Petersen subsequently organised a number of Blue Cheer reunions, often with the original drummer Whaley, and spent much of the past two decades living and playing in Germany. He recorded two solo albums in the late 1990s, Child of the Darkness and Tramp, which were released only in Japan. His most recent project was the release in 2007 of a new Blue Cheer album titled What Doesn’t Kill You . . .

Dickie Peterson, musician, was born on September 12, 1948. He died of liver cancer on October 12, 2009, aged 61