Thank you. Matter of fact: that’s not really by the Byrds, that’s by us.
–Eric Bloom, “Highway Song” (1971)
Sandy Pearlman once wrote blue was the color of the fundamental energy of the universe.
Blue Öyster Cult (1972) was the result of a series of wonderful chance encounters that often inspired Pealman to quote intellectuals as fringe as William Reich. The texture of Blue Öyster Cult (1972) was true, blue kismet. “Kismet” was another word the band was particularly fond of and all its New York, sunglasses shop mysticism. The band drew that power from their varied predecessor groups that would incestuously amalgamate into Blue Öyster Cult by 1971: Travesty, Soft White Underbelly, Stalk-Forrest Group, alongside more exotic identities like the Oaxaca, Santos Sisters, and, supposedly, the Los Maniacos Busboys. These identities were a series of interchangeable masks that the design of Blue Öyster Cult arose out of—it arose squirming. It was chance, a complicated criss-crossing, the product of a New York scene that only those rare individuals like professor Norm Prusslin can remember and critic Martin Popoff record. The greatest burden of that burned-over age of music (or was it a golden age of leather?) was the name ‘Blue Öyster Cult,’ kept as a leftover relic simply because the band could never come to consensus on a name that better suited everyone’s tastes.
…
…
Blue Öyster Cult is an album that reflected the burned-over, American music culture of the early 1972. Here were the lost boys who seemed to foreshadow the Son of Sam: Donald Roeser (“Buck Dharma”) on lead guitar, Eric Bloom on rhythm guitar and keyboards, Joe Bouchard on bass, Albert Bouchard on drums, and Allen Lanier on keyboards. This was a lauded boy’s choir of the damned, they all sang after a few outings. This company was branded with a cultic symbol so mysterious, so obscure, so mythological that nobody can even remember what it is called—fact checking suggests a connection to lead. These ingrates were the white-faced, blue-blooded sons of Americana who had been left orphaned since The Day The Music Died and John Coltrane perished on Long Island. They had since turned, in want of food, to hit-and-run raids on the folk bandstands of the United States where the last of summer’s wine was being served up after Bob Dylan had self-immolated to rid himself of the legacy of Greenwich Village. Dylan was from Bard College so Blue Öyster Cult did not care as they belonged to an insurgent faction partial to the opposing Stony Brook College. The Cult knew that Summer of Love was out and that the Manson Family was in. That was the image anyways. In truth: Blue Öyster Cult has only a few spasmodic twitches of anything that sounds like the metallic horror which would later compose Secret Treaties (1974), or the stoner memento mori rock of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” off Agents of Fortune (1976). Blue Öyster Cult is a psychedelic trip through a mural of subway gossip about an American culture struggling to be born, so it goes on twitching anyways.
The genealogy of Blue Öyster Cult (1972) is as tangled as the ancestry of a nameless protagonist confused to find themselves in a Lovecraft short story. The technical origin of Blue Öyster Cult as a functional band was in a college group (termed a mere dorm band; a Blues Project tribute band) named “Travesty” that existed between Donald Roeser (not yet christened “Buck Dharma”) and Albert Bouchard (not yet rejected the title of “Prince Omega”). It was a fleeting moment in the night that the two, later conspirators, could later look back on as the start of a plot that would, for good or bad, dominate their respective lives. Roeser then, like any good American Gothic, came into the companionship of a strange boy from New York-New England who would often impress (in the original naval terms) Bouchard in long conversations about strangely titled books such as Giles Goat-Boy (1966). Rock critic Sandy Pearlman then was the godfather of Blue Öyster Cult, but he would perhaps claim that the Altamont Free Concert (1969) and Easy Rider (1969) were the Cult’s intellectual godfathers. While the music press (Sonny Barger included here) spent 1970 crucifying Mick Jagger, Pearlman was still shell-shocked from the British Invasion and was convinced music was the most dangerous ever put into the hands of men. Pearlman, alongside fellow Rock critic Richard Meltzer, acted on this revelation with the young Roeser and Bouchard by recruiting their associates: guitarist John Wiesenthal, Wiesenthal’s friend keyboardist Allen Lanier, and Roeser’s old chum bassist Andrew Winters into a flophouse at Great Neck, New York—near their intellectual home base of Stony Brook College—where they could work out their evil plans. This was Blue Öyster Cult? This was actually “Soft White Underbelly” in 1969.
“Soft White Underbelly” was merely the prototype. New York notable (due to a writing credit from Peter, Paul & Mary) Les Braunstein was brought on to provide a voice to the band—both Pearlman and Meltzer attempted and were found wanting in that department. The Elektra demos from this late 1960s period form the earliest stratum of what would later compose Blue Öyster Cult: droning post-Dylan folk rock that had spent too much time out in the San Francisco sun with Jim Morrison in an attempt to (poorly) out-smoke Jerry Garcia and the Dead. It is often difficult to discern because much of it has been papered over with an expansive studio career spanning decades, but Soft White Underbelly is still foundational in Blue Öyster Cult’s genetics. It was not simply another link in the chain of passing names like the other titles would be for the band. Soft White Underbelly were the jams that Blue Öyster Cult songs were erected on. “Buddha’s Knee” is a gangly, psychedelic forget-me-not of a song which Albert Bouchard still has a profound fondness for as a white elephant keepsake. The breakdown at the end is a spasm of the Cult’s first birth pains. “Queen’s Boulevard”, foreshadowing Blue Öyster Cult’s literary side, is an incredibly wordy ode Pearlman and Lanier wrote to Americana New York motorcycles. “Queen’s Boulevard” was cooked up (or souped up) from the same lyrical catch that would produce later workmen songs like “Workshop of the Telescopes”. One famous Blue Öyster Cult song (“Godzilla”) even has a long lost sibling from this Jurassic jukebox era: “Mothra”, a tribute to the giant Japanese moth. Braunstein’s voice with its softer eccentricities make these songs sound like lullabies served up by the Lizard King in an opium haze rather than in the cold companionship of gin and whiskey. Pearlman and Meltzer’s obtuse rock critic lyrics are there, Buck’s guitar chops have yet to need shaving, and Lanier plays the keyboard like a church mouse (see Les Braunstein’s “Jay Jay”), but the whole affair is covered with peach fuzz. It is appropriate that the common image that decorates the cover of these partial Elektra demos is a Lizard’s belly pierced through, bloody, by the metallic crook of a culture totally alien to the 1960s.
…
…
As the 1970s dawned, the stratagem behind Soft White Underbelly was not made to survive 1969. Once Braunstein dropped out of the lead vocal role, Pearlman and the band decided to shift up the scene like a Shakespeare play. “Jesse Python” (a Pearlman nickname) then was brought in as the mysterious ringer from upstate New York due a passing musical relationship with Les Braunstein from Hobart College. According to Braunstein, Hobart College, by 1967, was one of first cultural milieus where the freaks (read: “cultural misfits”), that would define the 1970s, had taken control as rational, passional taste makers. This ringer was of course Eric Bloom who traveled down from the Finger Lakes in (already) sunglasses incognito with his van. He was often mistaken as an actual fixer though because he started merely as Soft White Underbelly’s van and sound guy. Once John Wiesenthal vanished into the wings, the band was patched up for another shot at fame with psychedelic nicknames courtesy of Pearlman: Eric Bloom as “Jesse Python”, Andrew Winters as “Andy Panda” (never spoken aloud), Albert Bouchard as “Prince Omega” (Bouchard has since used it as a nostalgic pen name), and Allen Lanier as “La Verne”. Those never caught on. Pearlman though gave one member his name: “Buck Dharma”, formerly known as Donald Roeser. Bloom then slithered into the leading vocal role with a much more New York voice that was unfamiliar to the sun-kissed culture of The Doors or The Byrds. This was Blue Öyster Cult then? This was actually “Stalk-Forrest Group” in 1969.
St. Cecilia: The Elektra Recordings (recorded 1970, released 2001) serves as the closest prototype to Blue Öyster Cult. It is a menagerie of recycled New York and California psychedelic demos, a few college tries at prehistoric Blue Öyster Cult songs, and unfinished material from the three seconds when the motley group called themselves “Oaxaca”. Functionally, Stalk-Forrest Group was largely a cover band that played late 1960s hits for pay in clubs and bars. Their original material had to be sneaked in as contraband between New York radio hits. Here, Eric Bloom has kicked any attempt at a Jim Morrison impression and the band goes Grateful Dead on a laced joint. St. Cecilia: The Elektra Recordings then is the messy backwash of late 1960s psychedelic pouring into methadone-spiked motor oil of the 1970s. The Stalk-Forrest Group original material is full of bubblegum stoner lyrics which would later make the Cult blush. “Ragamuffin Dumplin’ is a treat to hardcore Blue Öyster Cult fans for being akin to the Cult’s awkward, lovable high school phase with a lot of gummy wordplay credited to lyricist Richard Meltzer. St. Cecilia showcases the Cult’s long held lyrical with Americana and United States esoterica goes back to the foundations: shoeshine boys are honored in the jamming “A Fact About Sneakers”, Killer Kowalski (Meltzer’s favorite wrestler) is name-dropped in “Donovan’s Monkey”, then the bizarrely titled “Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy” is a tribute to an actual candy once sold on Coney Island. The jaunty “What Is Quicksand” even sounds like a New York version of The Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil”, with lyrics such as: “But right back in Tokyo with a tough encircled hand / Thousand vultures smokyo / Cigareet with a seegar band.” Bloom would be singing about Tokyo again a mere seven years later in honor of the archipelago’s favorite lizard.
Buried beneath the jokey psychedelic exterior, Blue Öyster Cult was already conceptually present on St. Cecilia once the skunk cabbage weeds were cleared away. “I’m on the Lamb”, a nightmare parable about Vietnam draft dodging by dogsled, first appears on St. Cecilia in a form not too dissimilar than the one it would take a few years later on Blue Öyster Cult as “I’m on the Lamb but I Ain’t No Sheep”. It would see another turn on the Wheel of (Buck) Dharma as the Pearlman-revised “The Red & the Black” on Tyranny and Mutation (1973), and is another deep cut favored by Albert Bouchard (Buddha-chard?). Similar songs like Pearlman’s pseudo-country “Gil Blanco County” would be revived again, and again, and again as they became an intrinsic link to the band’s sordid history and murky-fishy mythos. Several segments of “Gil Blanco County” have been cannibalized several times over by the Cult: one can tell by the overwhelmingly fishy smell on certain tracks (see even the conclusion of “Reaper” here). In the end, the Stalk-Forrest Group was only the psychedelic seed to the oyster bed that would sprout up. What was with the name “Stalk-Forrest Group” anyways? Pearlman had apparently thought it up in less than five minutes while eating Chinese food. He gave credit to the mushrooms (non-psychedelic) in his meal. Unlike every other mystical instance of deep-rooted wordplay and historical deep cuts by the Cult, the name “Stalk-Forrest Group” itself was a mere reference to Chinese food.
As the psychedelic fumes of the 1960s bottomed out, the crisis that would produce Blue Öyster Cult hit. Business complexities with Elektra Records soon felled any hope of the Stalk-Forrest Group (or Oaxaca) demos seeing the light of day. Andrew Winters was ejected from the band due to lack of dedication. The nameless group (or group with too many names) was left on the edge of poverty due to the failure of the Elektra affair. The last piece only fell into play when a mysterious fifth member was called in from Ithaca College (a neutral territory) as a pinch hitter by Albert Bouchard. He touched down in New York wearing leather shoes, Albert Bouchard’s brother, trumpeter and bassist, Joe Bouchard. Though often relegated as the little brother of the band, Joe Bouchard turned out to be kid dynamo necessary to put the band on the hot rails to success. Blue Öyster Cult’s own history credits Joe Bouchard with fine tuning the band’s business acumen and music fundamentals. His wheeling, alongside Pearlman’s connection with Murray Krugman at Columbia Records, ultimately resulted in a hearing before Columbia Records president Clive Davis. The ragamuffins formerly named the Stalk-Forrest Group (plus one Joe Bouchard) walked out of that meeting as the American answer to Black Sabbath: “Blue Öyster Cult”.
…
…
Cropped from his suitcase of rough drafts prospectively titled the Soft Doctrines of Immaginos, Pearlman’s “Blue Oyster Cult” was another true-blue poetical invention foisted on the group. Nobody liked it. Democracy among the members failed to find a better alternative. Allen Lanier is credited with the only addition everyone could actually agree upon for fixing up the image of the band: the umlaut. It was the diacritical cherry on top of the black-and-blue identity. Pearlman though had to make sure the entire music public knew it was “heavy metal” (in the alchemy sense) by pointing to the band’s influence from 1950s Horror movie soundtracks and Gustav Holst’s The Planets, especially “Mars, The Bringer of War”. That was the heavy material Pearlman and Meltzer had drilled the band on so they could storm the radio waves of the United States like the philosophical biker gangs and sleeper cells Pearlman babbled about. The album then was a rock and roll counterpoint to the sputtering counter-culture. The music was spliced through with heterogeneous doses of the Grateful Dead, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and John Coltrane due to the eclectic tastes of each member.
This was Blue Öyster Cult then? This is Blue Öyster Cult (1972).
On Columbia Records, Blue Öyster Cult finally stormed the scene in 1972. The image the album projected, a polar nightmare of endless repetition, promised a sound cut through with a darker edge. Pearlman had pulled the cover image from the expansive, architectural scrolls of the mysterious Bill Gawlik, another Stony Brook alumni. Gawlik was the type of persona Blue Öyster Cult’s songs embodied: an attic rat, starving artist, taxi driver who spent long hours designing bleak, futuristic structures on scrolls of butcher paper while kept eternally awake and wired by deafening music. Pearlman wanted to make him the Cult’s in-house artist as part of his grand plans for an overall rock and roll vertical integration: lyrics, music, and art. Pearlman was only able to wrangle two album covers (Blue Öyster Cult and Tyranny and Mutation) out of Gawlik before he broke and vanished into the pungent, oyster smelling mists of the Cult’s history. Gawlik never died in spirit though. The outsider artist’s philosophical innovation of design was a thunderclap that echoed down the history of the band. His inheritance to the band was the one chaos symbol that would forever brand every Blue Öyster Cult album cover: “The Hook and Cross”, otherwise known as the Blue Öyster Cult symbol.
“Transmaniacon MC” is a chaotic start to the album with baroque vocabulary and cultural navel-gazing about the ruins of the Summer of Love, an obvious Pearlman song. The motor oil stinking wordplay gives the game away right away: “With Satan’s hog, no pig at all, and weather’s getting dry / We’ll head south from Altamont in a cold-blood traveled trance.” The lyrics were the product of the Stalk-Forrest Group’s California days in 1970; set against the recent backdrop of the Hells Angels MC’s bloodshed at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival (Free Concert) on December 6, 1969. It might not be surprising to learn that the outlaw Mongols MC had also been founded merely one day earlier on December 5, 1969. The Transmaniacon MC was a touch more diabolical in Pearlman’s imagination. He published the unexpunged lyrics of “Transmaniacon MC” in Jonathan Eisen’s rock and roll literary anthology Twenty-minute Fandangos and Forever Changes; A Rock Bazaar as “Excerpts From The History of Los Angeles: 1965-1969”. Pearlman’s hyper-literary rock criticism essay—fragments of the much longer unfinished book The History of Los Angeles— is the monocaine to rival William Burroughs’s wet dreams. Beyond the spliced up musical history of Los Angeles and 1950s rock and roll trivia, Pearlman presents the Transmaniacon MC (once floated as an alternative name for BÖC) as the literal “plot of knives” mentioned in the song: “And they even had a song on the charts”. The Transmaniacon MC, decorated with their own insignia of a Babylonian vampire, being a radical splinter group/conspiracy within the Hells Angels dedicated to sowing global chaos—though, as this was Pearlman, there are so many layers it is hard to definitively say. The motorcycle club’s credo echoing through Laurel Canyon: “Dominion on the Strip today… / And then for California”. Honestly, “Transmaniacon MC” is a tasteful Americanized chasing of Black Sabbath’s devil tail.
…
…
“Transmaniacon MC” is the definitive start of Blue Öyster Cult’s association with biker rock. The opening of the song sounds like a guerrilla group of 1950s rock-eteers mounting up on the heavy, sludgy production style that would slowly pollute the 1970s. This is hard rock with all the trappings of country and folk removed. The marijuana and psilocybin kitsch of the Stalk-Forrest Group has been replaced by the 1970s acidic effluvia of unmarked, fly-by-night pills sold via parking lot. Albert Bouchard and Buck Dharma waste no time getting their licks in to show they were already well schooled in the post-counterculture. The only complaint here is Joe Bouchard on bass and Allen Lanier on keyboard often feel washed out of the song besides for a little background timekeeping. Bloom luckily had a few genre styles of vocal practice prior to “Transmaniacon MC” in 1972. His voice shifts between sneers, threats, and seduction as the band grinds through the California boot hill ballad. Bloom’s vocals define the opening of Blue Öyster Cult as a broadcast from nowhere. Here was a group that knew the old world, the old order, was falling and they were going to be making fun of its withdrawal tremors. Anything copacetic had been abandoned in favor of running raids on the rhetoric of “Establishment” and “Counterculture” that had dominated the 1960s. The listless working man—either lost in urban anonymity or etherized in suburban comfort—was being awoken by a restoration of American rock n roll through metal: “So the clear the road, my bully boys and let some thunder pass!”
The second song is appropriately enough the band’s second go at “I’m on the Lamb”, reincarnated here as the expanded: “I’m On the Lamb but I Ain’t No Sheep”. The song is the strongest and most developed holdover from the Soft White Underbelly and Stalk-Forrest Group days. Albert Bouchard had been inspired to write the song by a dream of a friend who died in Vietnam, and his own harrowing experience of narrowly dodging the draft. These two stressful scenarios for Bouchard had resulted in the dreamed image of himself as a draft-dodger fleeing the RCMP, on dogsled, across the empty arctic night. He originally titled it “I Saw You”, then just “You”, until, slowly digested during the Stalk-Forrest Group period, it resulted in the first Blue Öyster Cult incarnation: “I’m On the Lamb but I Ain’t No Sheep”. As to better integrate the song to a faster tempo, Pearlman had added his very philological touches to the revised lyrics: “Frontenac Chateau”, “Bel Punice”, and “Bungo Pony”. This too marks the first public instance of the Cult’s reoccurring fascination with the colors red and black. Here the twin colors of anarchy (or conspiracy!) incarnated as, of all things, the Canadian Mounted Police: “Red and Black, it’s their color scheme.”
The knowledge “I’m On the Lamb but I Ain’t No Sheep” predates Blue Öyster Cult as group adds a lot to the appreciation of the song’s construction. Most of the song structurally resembles the 1960s influence rather than the band’s later pronounced preference for the 1950s. Buck’s guitar here is not stylistically divorced from his loopy Jerry Garcia impression during the hazy daze of the Stalk-Forrest Group. Joe Bouchard too does his best Chris Hillman (The Byrds) impression on the song in want of anything more nutritious in the polar wasteland. “I’m On the Lamb but I Ain’t No Sheep” in composition then is a frozen over country where twangy strings have been replaced with howling, sterilized studio guitars. Blue Öyster Cult’s had a lot of interesting identity confusion in those early days. The speed up, Iditarod tempo and rhythm is only accentuated towards rock (and even touches on the fringes of proto-metal) due to Albert Bouchard’s relentless drumming and Eric Bloom’s amazingly cocky vocals. Bloom’s confidence is so great he is able to sneak a few Freudian entendres across the borderline with nobody none the wiser: “I cross the frontier at ten / Got a whip in my hand, baby / And a girl, or a husky, at leather’s end!”
What is a “Bungo Pony” then? A sled dog. Every other word is up for debate.
…
…
The environment shifts from clashing ice to silent sands with the macabre murder ballad “Then Came the Last Days of May”. “Then Came the Last Days of May” has a legitimate claim to being the darkest Blue Öyster Cult song on actuality of lyrical content alone. The tale originated directly from the headlines of three Stony Brook College students (who the Cult were vaguely acquainted with) that traveled down to Arizona to make summer cash off a bulk shipment of mescaline and marijuana coming up from Mexico. Dharma’s lyrics invoking the actual deaths of John G. Gast and William Ramsey Tait, two of the three Stony Brook students, who were shot dead in the botched deal, turned robbery, turned murder in the Tucson desert in 1970. A third student, David Knowles Anderson, who had accompanied Gast and Tait, survived and was able to inform police by crossing the desert, while wounded, to Tucson. At Stony Brook College, where the murders were reported in Newsday and the student newspaper, the killings became synonymous with the cultural death of the 1960s. The drug trade which had fueled the philosophy of peace and love was suddenly shorn of romanticism; rendered another exploitative enterprise corrupted by the pursuit of the almighty green. Dharma’s lyrics are based largely word-for-word on the headlines of those shocking murders.
“Then Came the Last Days of May” is undeniably the masterpiece of Blue Öyster Cult (1972). Incredibly, “Then Came the Last Days of May” originated as a Stalk-Forrest Group song which had occasionally surfaced in live performances in 1971. The early live version of the song (when decipherable) featured all of the strongest traits of the studio recording: a spaced out trance sound likely inspired by English progressive rock (perhaps King Crimson), Buck’s emotionless storyteller vocals backed up by Albert Bouchard and the band’s ghostly chorus of wails, and then the kick-up of energy which explodes near the end like a rainstorm opening upon the scorching desert. The only small modifications to the song for the album seem to have been tightening up the latter half with excellent ambiance on the drums and bass from the Bouchard brothers. “Then Came the Last Days of May” excels due to its minimalism which puts a taught strength in every element of the song. Buck’s guitar slices through the entire song like a peyote howl cutting through the sound of emptiness. The brassy rattlesnake nature of Albert Bouchard’s drums and Allen Lanier’s rhythm guitar here perfectly accentuate the Southwestern, mescaline licks that Joe Bouchard’s bass draw on for the murder ballad. The concluding solo should eternally solidify Buck Dharma as the esteemed undertaker of American guitar culture. The track concludes on a haunting invitation to the listener as if a distant call from the bloody sunset through the mesas: “Wouldn’t be interested in coming along, instead of staying here? / It’s said the West is nice this time of year, that’s what they say…”
Bizarrely, the hard rock “Stairway to the Stars”, a booming foil to the haunting “Then Came The Last Days of May”, originated as another late Stalk-Forrest Group tune with lyrics by Richard Meltzer. The song started out as a honky-tonk jam rather than the guttural electric riff it became on Blue Öyster Cult. Surprisingly, the deranged maniacal lyrics were changed little between versions. The song is a satire about a washed-out rocker, so burnt-out by the stage lights, they allow a groupie to borrow and crash their (insured) car through the audience simply to stir up cheap thrills from vehicular manslaughter: “Mow ’em down now”. “Stairway to the Stars” actually has a long lost sibling in the Blue Öyster Cult family tree through the much lesser known “Highway Song”; an ersatz Byrds tune the band often tried to pass off as real in-between Stalk-Forrest Group sets. “Highway Song” though was a warmed over piece of highway stoner rock that was too late to make the date in Laurel Canyon. Whereas “Highway Song” remained the red headed orphan, “Stairway to the Stars” was welcomed back into the fold, with leather seats, as a Blue Öyster Cult song. The lyrics of a braggadocious psychopath, matched with a strong riff, solidified a place for it on Blue Öyster Cult through shock factor alone.
…
…
The sizzling riff which opens “Stairway to the Stars” is still a holdover from the earlier honky-tonk version but modified with studio electricity. “Stairway to the Stars” is sardonically blunt. There’s no 1960s studio vegetarianism here, the Cult is throwing red meat to a crowd thirsty for a revival of big sounds. Buck Dharma and Joe Bouchard contribute a much more sizzling, electric sound here intended to take advantage of the age of amps. Eric Bloom’s vocals and cadence remain cool and detached though which keep the song from overheating. This is the first song on the album where Albert Bouchard largely remains in the background. Bouchard’s drum work in the background, underpinning the fundamentals of the song, compliments Allen Lanier whose keyboard cranks out a texture akin to a demented ragtime. “Stairway to the Stars” is overall a bouncy tune that bolsters the album without falling into the dreaded trap of being purely filler. This is one piece from Stalk-Forrest Group that deserved to be saved from the scrapheap with a reinvention.
“Before The Kiss, a Redcap” sits somewhere between “Transmaniacon MC” and “Stairway to the Stars”. The song is another excerpt from Pearlman which mixes biography and poetry in a rollicking pastiche of 1950s rock and roll. It plucks all the reoccurring strings Pearlman loved to tease: motorcycles, drugs, the color red, obscure mythological allusions, and a woman named “Suzy”. So where’s the fiction? The “Motif of the Rose” (red, one will notice) obliquely referenced in the song is another dangerous conspiracy group with sinister intentions sprung from the imagination of Sandy Pearlman. The “limping cat” (black, one will notice) is another Pearlman-ism, but, after more than fifty years, it is still debated what exactly he was scratching at with it—students of Pearlman-ism have though proposed a poetic connection to the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca. Pearlman songs always deliver a lot of imagery bereft of context. So where’s the reality then? Both Buck Dharma and Albert Bouchard have reported the song was inspired by a real incident, during a particularly wild night, at the actual Conroy’s Bar where a biker flashed a “redcap” (barbiturate bill) on his tongue, at the sober Pearlman, before tonguing a woman. Conroy’s Bar (actually Conroy’s West and possibly another location named Ken Conroy’s Bar) was a real place in Babylon, New York which served as a regular haunt for the Stalk-Forrest Group. Dharma though doubts the mythical, gin-swilling cradle of Blue Öyster Cult culture was ever much of a biker bar. He instead remembers it more as a Long Island greaser hangout where the patrons were charitable enough to tolerate the music.
“Before the Kiss, A Redcap” begins as a tribute to the rambunctious studio songs of the 1950s before shifting into a jazzy grind that invokes the purring of motorcycles. Structurally, there’s actually not a lot going on underneath the hood of “Before the Kiss, a Redcap”. Everyone in the band is given their respective segments on the song, all of which they basically play on loop. The second half of the song does hit deep with a few heavy rifts that foreshadow the Cult testing the waters of a more metallic engine. Buck Dharma’s oily guitar and pumping vocals provide the gears to shift the song into motion. “Before the Kiss, a Redcap” sounds more of greaser shoe polish and the ‘subversive’ panics of the 1950s rather than the outlaw clubs of the early 1970s. The tick-tock rhythm of the entire song emphasizes a connection to the purely studio affairs that dominated American music in the 1950s. Not surprising as Sandy Pearlman and Buck Dharma both professed adherence to the philosophy of rock n roll Americana. One of Blue Öyster Cult’s lesser known covers for example is Bobby Freeman’s “Betty Lou’s Got a New Pair of Shoes” (1958). Vocalists Dharma and Bloom have been known to take on the vocal cadence of malt shop bad boys.
“Screams” is Joe Bouchard’s main contribution to Blue Öyster Cult. The song’s odd atmosphere was inspired by Joe Bouchard’s whirlwind experience of getting caught up in the band. He had swapped for the scenic upstate Ithaca College for the Manhattan chaos of Stony Brook College. Bouchard found the entire experience rather disorienting as a near literal farm-boy dislocated to the big city. He did not have much experience with New York city which was an unfamiliar colossus of concrete, steel, and glass. The result of his excited angst was “Screams” which is the spookiest track off Blue Öyster Cult. The restless lyrics directly inspired by the sweltering city summer, Long Island Expressway, and the constant haunting ambiance of screams and sirens in the distance. It is an odd song inspired by the odd, directionless situation the band was in prior to Blue Öyster Cult.
…
…
In sound, “Screams” touches on all the strains of acid rock, hard rock, and heavy metal associated with the 1970s. The Cult’s trance-like work on it echoes the heavy metal preludes and interludes Black Sabbath had immortalized on their first three albums. Buck Dharma on guitar and Joe Bouchard on bass produce a wonderful drone which straddles the border between acid and metal. Eric Bloom and Allen Lanier in the background are able to produce enough dissonance which makes the song feel like a reflection of skyscraper vertigo glanced through a pane of frosted glass. The band at several points torturing their instruments to mimic the buzzing and yelping ambiance that colors the soundscape of the light polluted New York skyline. Joe Bouchard’s voice on the song is perhaps too boyish to be called haunting, but his vocals make the song ring true as the experiences of a fresh-faced pilgrim new to the debauched dens of the Big Apple. Albert Bouchard punctuates his brother’s work with an overwhelming drum sequence at the end which reminds the listener of anonymous gunshots in the summer night. “Screams” will always be an underrated cut from the days when Blue Öyster Cult were drenched in black and white. Ironically, “Screams” (alongside Joe Bouchard’s later songs like “Hot Rails to Hell”) could now be said to be dislocated from the band’s later, post-1972 sound.
“She’s as Beautiful as a Foot” is the first song where the Cult wryly tips their hat that it is not all beers and barracuda up on stage. It is another fetishistic holdover from the Soft White Underbelly days. The song was a Richard Meltzer and Allen Lanier affair with a few touches by Albert Bouchard on the music. The lyrics are reminiscent of a subway conversation that one should really not be overhearing: “Don’t believe it when he bit into her face / It tasted just like a fallen arch…” Intrepid Internet commentators have proposed Meltzer’s lyrics may have been inspired by the “Shoe Fetish Slayer”, Jerry Brudos, who was active during the formation of Soft White Underbelly in 1968-1969. According to Martin Popoff’s interviews with Meltzer though, recorded in Agents of Fortune: Blue Öyster Cult Story, Meltzer mainly penned the song to embarrass Les Braunstein on stage by befuddling him with the lyrical content. This, and “A Fact About Sneakers”, suggest Meltzer had a certain thing about shoes. “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot” is maliciously pointed in its morose silliness.
As it originated as a Soft White Underbelly song, the Doors influence can still be heard on “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot”. The song is a strung out psychosis episode echoing along a subway tunnel. The sound here is dominated by Albert Bouchard’s serpentine tapping on the drums and cymbals. Allen Lanier then compliments this with incredibly soft chimes and beeps on his keyboard that suggest the song is more for space cadets than psycho-killers. Eric Bloom attempts to ring implied malice out of the vocals, but the song is mechanically stunted. The heavy Doors influence here prevents Buck Dharma or Joe Bouchard from stepping in too much outside a few trills to staple the song together. The entire episode could have been made due with a third verse (or a cordwainer) where the band took it in a harsher direction. Overall, “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot” is the one song on Blue Öyster Cult that comes nearest to a bust. There’s interesting ideas present, but there’s a reason Blue Öyster Cult’s ode to foot fetishism is better known as a trivia factoid rather than one of their hits of the previous millennium. This one usually stays in the closet with all the old high heels.
“Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll” is the apocalyptic pole star of Blue Öyster Cult. While foreshadowing the boisterous sound of later albums, “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll” is the musician’s song off Blue Öyster Cult. The combined lyrical trinity of Sandy Pearlman, Albert Bouchard, and Buck Dharma able to serve up the tastiest lyrics of the entire album: “Gardens of nocturne, forbidden delight / Reins of steel and it’s alright”, “Marshall will buoy, but Fender control”, “Three thousand guitars, they seem to cry, / My ears will melt and then my eyes…” Though not as complicated as the following “Workshop of the Telescopes”, “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll” triggers that pyromaniac impulse in the brain to burn everything down until it is a sculpture of white ash and melted metal. The song indulges in Pearlman storytelling by imaging an Earth blown out in the style of an overcharged, faulty amp. Albert Bouchard’s vocals then are the hymn of a doomsday cultist who has dedicated himself to the ultimate pursuit of rock and roll annihilation. The Cult’s American answer to the Beatles’s “Helter Skelter”. The song was of course one of the first major hits of cultural adrenaline to the apocalypticism of the 1970s.
…
…
The guitar and drums speak on “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll” as much as the lyrics do. All the strings in the band are put on notice for these four minutes. Buck Dharma, Eric Bloom, and Joe Bouchard give the guitar war the song invokes the actual fleshing out. Allen Lanier’s allegro on the keyboard helps buttress up the stagecraft of a guitar ragnarök that takes up the centerpiece of the song. Dharma and Bloom spend the song toying with a few measures up and down the scale while Albert Bouchard snarls out theatrics that bring the stage back to bloody Shakespearean tragedy. The hellfire riffs of “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll” are fully able to give a crushing dimension of sound to the apocalyptic wonders which decorate the Cult’s imagery. One can of course pick up early tells of the wall of sound that the Cult will later employ on “Godzilla”. Albert Bouchard though has admitted the song perhaps leaned a little too heavily on MC5, Black Sabbath, and King Crimson influences that dominated the early songwriting of the band. “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll” originated as a much relaxed song, titled “Siren Sing Along”, so the reworking had to look at other models. The Cult was never hit for any plagiarism over it. Blue Öyster Cult would sail through blue waters into dark seas.
“Workshop of the Telescopes” is the first lightning flash of the storm which Pearlman’s long-envisioned Soft Doctrines of Immaginos (original title) would be for the band. “Workshop of the Telescopes” employs the same baroque and esoteric wordplay that would define Pearlman’s fragmented, contradictory rock opera Imaginos. Most of the cryptic wordplay in the song is a bubbling fusion of renaissance alchemy theory, the tangled biographies of mystic John Dee and scryer Edward Kelly, then Pearlman’s own scholarly interest in the history of technology. The mention of “Saturn” in the song for example is a self-contradictory Janus word: it means both ‘beginning’ and ‘end’, invokes ‘heavy metal’, and also is the literal planet Saturn as an astronomical keystone. Among the band, “Workshop of the Telescopes” was considered a major tongue-twister due to the fact the entire sequence relied upon listing off an entire crash course of obscure terminology: “Silverfish Imperatrix”, “Salamander Drake”, and “lens of quartz and refract spoke”. All the “double, double toil and trouble” intended to invoke unprecedented technological and musical transformation—perhaps of the murky character known merely as “Imaginos”, who would go on to haunt Blue Öyster Cult for decades.
“Workshop of the Telescopes” is a difficult song to bestow a precise description and opinion on. Bertolt Brecht’s discordant “Moon of Alabama” (or “Alabama Song”)—a peculiar ancestor of art rock with covers by both The Doors and later David Bowie—could be claimed as an inspiration for the sound here. The song is a menagerie that picks elements from metal style drums, psychedelic country strings, and even fleeting segments which remind of Hawaiian slide guitar. Every few seconds Buck Dharma and Joe Bouchard drop one or two echoing, dissonant notes to swell the constant shifting of the song. There’s not many face melting solos on “Workshop of the Telescopes”, but the entire song is fascinating for how unstable it is. One feels as if Albert Bouchard, Allen Lanier, or Eric Bloom could mess up at any minute and send the flux of a song into meltdown. Bloom infamously found singing the monologue an exhausting drag, but he powers through the crucible of lyrical tongue twisters. The song strikes an odd cord by truncating the conceptual structure of a longer Doors’s song (such as the “Not to Touch the Earth” section from the longer “Celebration of the Lizard”), then meshing that with late 1960s progressive rock guitar and early Black Sabbath drum progression. There are certain riffs lurking on “Workshop of the Telescopes” that would partially resurface on “Subhuman” off Secret Treaties (1974) and “Blue Öyster Cult” off Imaginos (1988). The song winks at the gestating forms of the Cult’s musical future which, eventually, would come to pass in strange shapes: “Yes, I know a thing or two…”
The pseudo-folk rock “Redeemed” is the confounding track that closes out Blue Öyster Cult like a gunshot heard in the countryside. The original lyrics were the work of one Harry Farcas (or Farkas), a folk guitarist, who drifted through the pre-Cult, Stony Brook social circle that occupied that band’s flophouse. The figure of “Sir Rastus Bear”, mentioned in song, is usually claimed, by those present at the time, to be Farcas’s pet Saint Bernard—or Farcas’s dog was named after “Sir Rastus Bear”. The song takes on a much funnier air if it is actually about a dog escaping from a kennel. Either way, Pearlman purchased the Christmas carol (“Upon the north forty / I’m sure it was Christmas day…”) from Farcas to close out the album. There was an indeterminate number of intervening edits to the song—suggesting Pearlman intended to place it alongside his Immaginos material; which Albert Bouchard believes was the case—but the song ended up the closer on Blue Öyster Cult with Farcas’s name attached in the credits. The song audibly sticks out like a sore, hill country thumb on the album (resembling not even “I’m On the Lamb but I Ain’t No Sheep”), but one can appreciate it as a very tangled in-joke about the Cult’s early identity crisis. One can only conclude that the Cult wanted one throwback to sincerely honor the hazy days of Soft White Underbelly and Stalk-Forrest Group.
…
…
Though, in all honesty, “Redeemed” could also be seen as an optimistic denouement to all the dark, hieroglyphic shades that colored Blue Öyster Cult: “Redeemed by the virtue of a country song”. There’s a crystalline twinkling sound that emerges in “Redeemed” like a northern star. Here is Blue Öyster Cult if they never ended up becoming the Cult. Much of the sinister guitar, wailing bass, and thunderous drums are absent from “Redeemed” which jingles and jangles. Allen Lanier’s name was attached to the credits of the song due to the heavy keyboard work that carries the song on an undercurrent of wind chime sounds. Babylonian leather jackets have been replaced by polar spurs for the final. The only implication of anything malicious in the country catharsis is the conclusion where the album evaporates into a fading echo of falling guitar chords and clattering cymbals. “Redeemed” is a pleasant oddity in the history of Blue Öyster Cult: a pure attempt to create an unencumbered, joyous jugband sound spangled with psychedelic rock.
Pleasant oddity is how Blue Öyster Cult (1972) can be summed up. Albert Bouchard reflected on Blue Öyster Cult in 2015: “It’s not a bad record and it certainly proves that we could work with that kind of darker Sabbath sound. But when we tried to tour on that record, it was a little weird cause we really didn’t know how to look or what to do.”
The album is retroactively odd for sounding like no other major album by Blue Öyster Cult. Much of that post-Stalk Forrest Group sound that was retained would dry up by 1973. That is not to say there was no experimentation—Secret Treaties would be an absolute Hammer Film’s laboratory of experimentation—Blue Öyster Cult was the last gasp of the 1960s. 1970-1971 had after all been defined by the death of the star: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. As an album defined by a cover of white, uncaring porphyry, Blue Öyster Cult was the unmarked tombstone for that generation of rockstars who wanted to change the world with music. The collapsed scaffolding of Woodstock and Altamont would be the staging grounds for a second ascension. Blue Öyster Cult’s disillusionment would soon be banished due to two new influences: Patti Smith and Alice Cooper.
The anarchic Tyranny and Mutation (1973) would be the heavy metal signal tower for those metallic terrors who wanted to burn down the world with music.
–William Pauper
…
Special thanks on this retrospective to Martin Popoff for his Agents of Fortune: The Blue Oyster Cult Story, the administrators at Hot Rails,, and the disparate BÖC archivists across the Internet keeping alive more than fifty years of band history.