keyboards, piano Lennart Hegland – bass guitar Blue Cheer version The American rock band Blue Cheer recorded their version of "Summertime Blues" in 1967 and included it on their 1968 release entitled Vincebus Eruptum. The single peaked at #14 on the Billboard Hot 100, pushing the sales of the album even higher to #11. It topped the Dutch charts for one week in 1968. While not as widely played or recognized as The Who's version, it certainly is more distorted. This version was ranked #73 on the list of "The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time" of Rolling Stone. This version omits the responses and instead has each band member do a quick "solo". A portion of Blue Cheer's version appears in the movie Troll. Rush did a cover of this version for their Feedback EP. The main riff from Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady" has been inserted in various parts of this version. Chart performance The Who version The Who played "Summertime Blues" as a staple of their concerts from their early days up to 1976, with intermittent appearances thereafter. It has not been played since the death of bassist John Entwistle in 2002. It was performed during the 1967 US tour, from which the first known Who recordings of the song were made, including a June 1967 date at the Monterey Pop Festival. The first version to be released by The Who appeared on the 1970 album Live at Leeds. The single from this album peaked at number 38 in the UK and number 27 in the US. "I'm a big fan of 'Summertime Blues' on that album," remarked Rush bassist Geddy Lee, "which we covered [see below] to a large degree because of their version." This version by The Who differed from the original in both the sense of aggression and volume. As lead singer Roger Daltrey noted, "We'd taken the song from being in kind of a swing rhythm on the off-beat to a rock rhythm on the one." Entwistle would sing the bass parts on the song, but the band struggled to capture the same energy of it in the studio. The live version recorded at the Leeds show managed to capture this fully. Studio version The Who recorded at least two studio versions of this track in 1967. They went unreleased until 1998 and 2009, when they appeared on the remastered CD of Odds