“Blue Oyster Cult was the hardest band that D. Boon
and I could copy off records. They were at the top of
the one-eye pyramid. Their influence upon us was
indelible.”—Mike Watt (Reactionaries, Minutemen,
FIREHOSE)
Blue Oyster Cult
Workshop Of The Telescopes: The Best Of BOC
Liner notes by Arthur Levy
In the early 1970s, a burgeoning heavy metal scene
dominated by a British contingency including the likes
of the Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and
Deep Purple, found its purest voice on this side of the
Atlantic... BOC.
Eric Burdon pleaded in the Animals, “Please don’t let
me be misunderstood,” as if it is the destiny of rock’s
greatest to be just so misunderstood. Out in San
Pedro in the 1970s, Dennes Boon and Mike Watt
could identify with being on the outside looking in,
and Blue Oyster Cult was part of their world. In 1991,
six years after Boon’s untimely death in a van crash,
Watt’s trio fIREHOSE (recording for Columbia)
included BOC’s “The Red and the Black” on their
7-song Live Totem Pole EP, as much an homage to
Boon as to BOC itself.
In the spring 1995, as these words are being written
for the ultimate BOC anthology, Workshop of the
Telescopes, Watt is still keeping up his end of the
bargain, performing “The Red and the Black” at each
and every pit stop down the road. In the audience is
an alternative generation of rockers who appear to be
as misunderstood as every generation of rockers
before them, and every one that is likely to follow.
Primal Screams
Casting a glance back at the post-Altamont, pre-punk
early 1970s, the prospect of an American band
making a name for itself at the very top of the heavy
metal pantheon was slim indeed. Heavy metal—the
success-rock genre dominated and empowered by
the British whose pedigree boasted the Yardbirds
and Led Zeppelin at center stage, Black Sabbath and
Deep Purple orbiting nearby—was yet to find its
purest voice on this side of the Atlantic.
For that singular event to occur, the unlikeliest of
circumstances would have to converge in the
unlikeliest of places: New York, to be sure, but not
picturesque Manhattan with its mobile shooting
galleries and transcendental scenemakers. Instead,
the locale is some hours’ ride east to Long Island, the
State University at Stony Brook, a campus noted for
having traded support of its football team for concerts
by the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix.
There was a certain communal house. Every school
had one, a shelter for certain elements of artists and
musicians, social scientists and deviant lifestylers,
drop-outs and drop-ins. Albert Bouchard (who played
the drums), Allen Lanier (keyboards and guitar) and
Donald Roeser (lead guitar) occupied themselves
with advanced pursuits in the metaphysics of their
time and space, which included Zap Comix, “Star
Trek,” various experiments involving stimulation and
alteration of synaptic patterns by means of secret
potions and concoctions, and, of course, rock & roll.
The three pooled resources with two other legendary
Stony Brook characters named Andrew Winters (who
played some finger-style acoustic guitar and bass)
and Les Braunstein (a singer and songwriter who
wrote “Big Blue Frog” for Peter, Paul & Mary) to form
a band that could only be described as ‘experimental’
in nature. The band was christened the Soft White
Underbelly by its future co-manager (and fellow Stony
Brook denizen) Sandy Pearlman, whose broad range
of intellectual pursuits and scholarly obssessions
informed the band’s overall attitude and direction.
It is fair to say that Pearlman became an
indispensible member of the band and an integral
role-player in all its multi-farious schemes. This was
clearly an outgrowth of his position as one of the
acknowlegded founders of modern rock criticism,
along with Richard Meltzer, Paul Williams, Jon
Landau and a small handful of others. They were
responsible for Crawdaddy magazine, the first
publication to apply a Talmudic exegesis to the
analysis of the new rock & roll that evolved in the late
1960s. Reading every new stapled, mimeographed
issue of Crawdaddy was a true acid trip: You could
never think the same old way again about the Byrds,
or Motown, or Spyder Turner or Jefferson Airplane
once you read the Crawdaddy take. As a matter of
historical fact, Pearlman was the first to apply the
term ‘heavy metal’ to the music at hand.
It is crucial to make this connection in our saga, for it
was precisely the commitment to intellectual truth
even unto its innermost parts that separated the boys
and their music from the rest of the pack. That said,
Soft White Underbelly began to command the
attention of the college community, which eventually
led to a few select appearances in New York City and
a development deal with Elektra Records. A
considerable amount of time and money was spent
recording an album which, for reasons long since
forgotten, was never released.
With the Soft White Underbelly’s moniker neatly tied
up in red tape in the record company’s drawers, the
band went through its first (and last, for more than a
dozen years) personnel mutation. Donald ‘Buck
Dharma’ Roeser, Bouchard, and Lanier were joined
by Albert’s brother Joe Bouchard (replacing Winter on
bass); and Eric Bloom, “the Rock King of the Finger
Lakes,” who took Braunstein’s place on lead vocals
and rhythm guitar. Now known as the Stalk-Forrest
Group (and occasionally playing as Oaxaca,
pronounced wa-ha-ka), they began a rigorous routine
of hitting every East Coast bar, club and dive that
would hire them.
They slugged it out for a year and a half in something
less than the ideal creative environment. Still, they
were able to temper the top 40 sets that the clubs
demanded with their orignal material, much of it
co-written with Pearlman. With renewed enthusiasm
and the Elektra fiasco behind them, accepted a
friend’s offer to record a new demo album at his
studio. Pearlman took the demo to a Marketing
executive at Columbia Records, Murray Krugman.
Within weeks the band signed with Columbia and
took a new name, Blue Oyster Cult, originally the title
of a Pearlman composition (which surfaced on their
third album as “Subhuman”).
Hot Rail
BOC summoned all its resources for the aptly titled
debut album on Columbia, Blue Oyster Cult (released
January, 1972), an apocalyptic fusion of wit and
irony, pop culture and social psychology, science and
mythology, humor and madness, intellectual
calisthenics and gutter outrage within the context of
motorcycle gang riots, outer space exploration, folk
mythology, drug traffic murders—tactical directions
that remained consistent for nearly two decades. It
was a “perfect” album, inasmuch as every song
remains memorable (i.e. performable onstage,
programmable at radio), opening with the double-play
of “Transmaniacon MC” (Pearlman’s long overdue
elegy to Altamont) and “Cities On Flame With Rock ‘n
Roll” (BOC’s first official single).
The album was produced by Pearlman and Krugman,
who (with considerable help from NYC jungle
kingpin/engineer David Lucas, who first heard BOC
at a party for decadent New York hipsters at a
post-season closed Catskill resort) would stay
together through the band’s first seven years and as
many LPs. The songwriting pattern was also set:
Pearlman’s lyrical visions of Lovecraftian dementia
countered by fellow traveler Meltzer’s twisted,
perverse wordmongering (as in “Stairway to the
Stars”) -- all grounded by BOC’s acute musicality.
Their presentation onstage began to metamorphosize
on-tour with Alice Cooper that year. BOC’s growth
was immediate and overwhelming, as images
developed without the self-conscious posing that
characterized British heavy metal bands. Caped,
leather-clad Eric leered at audiences behind
silver-mirrored shades and led them in choruses of
“Lucifer, the light”; white-suited Buck attained major
pyrotechnic levels, earning him top 10 honors in
every rock guitar poll; menacingly frail-pale Allen
(longtime companion to poetess Patti Smith) lurked in
the shadows of BOC’s pulse, both musically and
visually; and Long Island’s deceptive brothers
Bouchard drifted effortlessly from piledriving
bottom-end work to more exotic rhythms with enviable
finesse. High above loomed the giant BOC banner,
ancient symbol of Kronos (Saturn) in white on a field
of black.
America embraced BOC feverishly, acceptance
previously reserved for the best of the U.K. bands. To
whet fans’ appetites (and take up slack until the
second album’s release), a limited-edition 12-inch
in-concert EP was issued to media, Live Bootleg
(October, 1972). It featured “The Red and the Black”
(advanced conceptual theme of the forthcoming
album) and “Buck’s Boogie” b/w “Workshop of the
Telescopes” and “Cities On Flame With Rock ‘n
Roll.” This white-sleeved vinyl slab retains its status
as the Maltese Falcon of heavy metal collectibles.
The album that followed, Tyranny and Mutation
(1973), extended BOC’s preoccupation with the
macabre. Sides were cryptically labeled The Red
(phantasmagorical id-teasers, supernatural wraiths by
Patti Smith, Meltzerian convulsions and vampires
attacking the subconscious) and The Black (physical,
sensual, aural assaults on the frontal lobes, as in “7
Screaming Diz Busters”). In retrospect, the album has
taken its place alongside BOC’s debut as a classic,
definitive heavy metal source.
It has been argued that the release of the next album,
Secret Treaties (1974) marked one of those moments
in rock when a band’s public image nearly
overpowered its existential reality. BOC had
ascended to headliner status in many U.S.
cities—without benefit of a top 40 hit or even a gold
album, just “Cult power!” (bolstered by rock critic
endorsements in the press and on the FM airwaves)
and sheer musical depth. The latter was evident on a
new single, “Career of Evil” (co-written with Patti
Smith) b/w “Dominance and Submission”; and such
tracks as “Flaming Telepaths” and the portentous
“Astronomy,” from the ever-delayed project known
only as Imaginos.
With BOC’s image as a rock & roll band only
hair-close to critical mass explosion at that point in
their lives, one can only imagine the personal
changes that each member was going through. They
negotiated some creative elbow room with On Your
Feet Or On Your Knees (1975), the first of their three
live albums, now regarded as a punctuation mark at
the end of the first phase of their career. In addition to
concert versions of non-album rarities (like
Steppenwolf’s elegy to Pearlman’s favorite summer of
love, “Born To Be Wild,” modulated by Buck and
Eric’s chainsaw guitar duel), the double-LP also
collected three songs apiece from the first three
albums, including Meltzer’s “Harvester Of Eyes,”
Pearlman’s phantom Messerschmidt “ME 262,” and
the BOC touchstone, “Subhuman,” all three from
Secret Treaties.
Phase Shift
The title of BOC’s next album, Agents of Fortune
(1976), their first new studio recording in two years,
alluded to the individual contributions that not only
resulted in an incredibly successful release but also
pointed the way for future projects. During BOC’s
longest hiatus to-date, each member invested in his
own 4-track machine, and worked up songs on their
own that were listened to and considered by the other
members.
Concensus cuts made it onto the album and, no
surprise, yielded an actual hit single: Buck’s
beautifully dreadful “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” was a
top 40 hit (#12 in Billboard) well into 1977. It was the
only music heard in the original Halloween film;
Stephen King quoted its lyrics in The Stand, and it
was released twice more in live versions. Also
destined to become a classic BOC track was
Pearlman-Roeser’s “E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial
Intelligence),” likewise issued in two subsequent live
versions. Meanwhile, the chart flash of “Reaper”
prompted a follow-up single: “This Ain’t the Summer
of Love” provided typical irony for that tenth
anniversary season.
“Reaper” catapulted Agents of Fortune past the RIAA
platinum million-selling mark and pushed the previous
live album past RIAA gold in the bargain. It also paved
the way for BOC to underscore their new recording
mode with a new stage show. They joined forces with
one of America’s most advanced optical physics
laboratories to develop rock’s most sophisticated and
controversial laser light show (“Don’t look straight at
it, Johnny!”), costing $100,000 (‘70s dollars!).
With the next album, Spectres (1977), came an even
more advanced laser show: twice the cost, twice the
firepower, with nifty tricks like criss-crossing the stage
in a spider web of beams, or encasing each member
in a cone of laser light. Buck’s second breakthrough
single, “Godzilla,” endeared BOC to Japanese
audiences who loved their techno-edge and laser
madness, and welcomed them as gods, as befit the
musical emissaries of their national hero, Godjira.
The album’s double-entendred [Phil]
Spectoral/spectral nature was broad enough to
encompass “Goin’ Through the Motions,” co-written
by Eric and ex-Mott the Hoople mainman Ian Hunter
(Bloom later guested on Hunter’s 1979 solo LP,
You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic). Buck’s
“Golden Age of Leather,” the story of the last
generation of renegade ‘bikers holed up against the
world in the Grand Canyon, became a Blue Oyster
Cult signature.
The rock press had provided a forum for BOC’s
members to express repugnance at On Your Feet’s
sins of omission/comission three years earlier. Their
second live album, Some Enchanted Evening (1978),
was intended to “make up for” its predecessor and
did just that, benefiting from having played more than
250 shows to a half-million people during the year
since Spectres’ release. In addition to five BOC
‘standards’, this live LP attained a place in history by
reprising the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and the
Animals’ “We Gotta Get Outta This Place.”
Just as before, the live album marked a turning point
in the BOC saga, time for a change, time to consider
their position in rock’s heirarchy as the last few
months of the 1970s slipped away. The biggest
change was inevitable, as BOC set about the
recording of their first album in California with a new
producer.
Into The Storm
Mere weeks prior to the release of Mirrors (1979),
BOC laid waste to sold-out audiences in Tokyo,
Nagoya and Osaka, as Eric sang nearly the entire set
in Japanese, including a lengthy intro to
“Godjira/Godzilla.” Back in the U.S., the new album
represented “Change with a Capital C,” according to
Bloom. Pearlman and Krugman had delegated its
production to staff producer Tom Werman, whose
credits included Cheap Trick and Ted Nugent, and
who went on to produce Motley Crue. The album’s
high points were many (R. Meltzer’s tongue-in-cheek
S&M fantasy “Dr. Music” comes to mind, with Ellen
Foley, Genya Ravan, and Willie Nelson’s harp player
Mickey Raphael), but it was Allen Lanier’s “In Thee”
that took the pole position as the first single release.
The decision to work again with an outside producer
proved to be monumental for BOC: Cultosaurus
Erectus (1980) brought them together with Martin
Birch, who had just produced Black Sabbath’s
comeback LP, Heaven and Hell. As it happened,
Pearlman had taken over the Sabs’ management and
booked them with BOC as “The Black and Blue
Tour,” chronicled a year later in a film of their Nassau
Coliseum concert, simply titled “Black and Blue.” In
November, Don Kirshner invited BOC for their
first-ever tv appearance on his “Rock Concert”; there
was a doubletake for those who’d caught Kirshner in
a rare ‘speaking role’ on “Here’s Johnny (The
Marshall Plan)” from Cultosaurus.
Blue Oyster Cult’s tenth album, Fire of Unknown
Origin (1981), marked a second (and final)
collaboration with producer Birch, and earned BOC
its first top 40 hit in five years with “Burnin’ For You,”
written by Buck and Meltzer. The album also included
the third (and final) songwriting foray between Bloom
and British fantasy/fiction novelist Michael Moorcock,
as they lamented Elric the Eternal Champion in
“Veteran of the Psychic Wars;” it was an appropriate
follow-up to their earlier “Black Blade” (opening track
of Cultosaurus), and “The Great Sun Jester” (from
Mirrors). The cut is also heard in the soundtrack to
the animated film, “Heavy Metal.”
BOC’s first live album in four years, Extraterrestial
Live (1982), was the product of a half-dozen shows
recorded coast-to-coast during a 4-month period
spanning 1980-81. The double-LP’s one dozen
‘greatest hits’ could not be disputed, and half of these
were ‘encore’ live versions. To no one’s surprise
then, it was the one new track that grabbed attention:
BOC’s take of the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues” (with
guest guitarist Robbie Krieger of the Doors), recorded
at the Country Club in Los Angeles the week before
Christmas ‘80.
The summer of ‘81, during the Euro metal festival
season highlighted by Castle Donnington in England,
attended by more than 100,000 people— longtime
tour manager and lighting designer Rick Downey
joined Blue Oyster Cult as drummer, in the wake of
Albert Bouchard’s departure. Downey’s only studio
recording with BOC was on The Revolution By Night
(1983), produced by Bruce Fairbairn (who had
produced Loverboy, and went on to produce Bon
Jovi). Coming after a live album, the new LP capped
a year of minimum performances and maximum
rehearsals and recording, but it was worth it: seven of
nine tracks were writing collaborations with outside
guests, including Eric with Aldo Nova on “Take Me
Away”; and Buck with Patti Smith (who had
previously written as a duo-only with Albert) on the
“Shooting Shark” single.
1984 and Beyond
After twelve albums in twelve years, it must have
taken gargantuan strength to gig straight through
Orwell’s year-of-years and release no new LP in
1984. Instead, energy was devoted to gathering
songs for the upcoming album, between sporadic
BOC and retro-Soft White Underbelly shows.
Downey left and drummer Tommy Price (ex-Billy Idol,
Scandal) took over for recording. Allen Lanier went
on-leave and was replaced by Tommy Zvonchek
(ex-Aldo Nova, Public Image Ltd.), but Lanier returned
to the band by the spring 1987.
BOC’s first new album in 27 months, Club Ninja
(1986) found them reunited with Pearlman, his first
LP as their producer in nine years (since Spectres),
although he had accumulated credits with the
Dictators, the Clash, and Dream Syndicate in the
interim. For the BOC sessions, Buck and Basketball
Diaries poet/novelist Jim Carroll co-wrote “Perfect
Water”; while “Dancing In the Ruins” was a lucky find
from two unknown songwriters who seemed to have
in mind a sequel to “Burnin’ For You.” BOC agreed,
and the song vaulted inside the top 10 on Billboard’s
Album Rock Tracks chart. Director Frank Dilea’s
video (he did “Shooting Shark”) was an MTV top 20
clip, focusing on a skateboarder in a post-apocalyptic
setting as BOC played amidst fiery ruins.
It would take another two and a half years for the
denouement of Blue Oyster Cult to work itself out, the
summer ‘88 release of Imaginos—more than twenty
years in its creation, more than six years in its
recording. Imaginos! “The nexus of the crisis and the
origin of storms.” One of rock’s densest and most
erudite concept albums, it could serve well as a
doctoral thesis—if the heavy metal origins of World
War I were a subject for dissertation.
As it stands, BOC’s legacy will be the stuff of legends
for every heavy metal generation to come. To
counterphrase Mike Watt, the kids of today don’t
have to protect themselves against Blue Oyster Cult.
Rock n World Update
B.O.C. continues to tour and has endeared itself to a
whole new generation of fans. Their 1998 studio
release of Heaven Forbid has received rave reviews,
and once more justified the position that B.O.C. is
one of the greatest Hard Rock Bands in History.
