Originally, Blue Oyster Cult have long been recognised as more than just the five guys who got up onstage every night to play the gig. They were more than just the sum of their parts. They were a collective.

There were the musicians - obviously - but then there were also the "family" of collaborators who all chipped in to add their 10 cents that helped augment the overall jigsaw that was BOC.

One of these collaborators has long been recognised to be Patti Smith, long-time girlfriend of Allen Lanier and lyrical contributor to a number of classic BOC tracks. She's also both sung on BOC records and appeared with them in concert.

However, the legend also goes that she was once in the running to be the lead singer for the band, but turned them down. This page will examine the evidence for this contention.

To understand the overall context, you can't really do better than to read Patti's autobiography, "Just Kids". This book examines Patti's early development as an artist in the context of her relationship with Robert Maplethorpe and the people she encountered when first coming to New York after leaving Chicago.

It's a fascinating read and gives you a bit of an insight into the New York scene of the late sixties/early seventies as seen through Patti's eyes.

My only criticism of the book - from my own point of view - is that Allen gets barely a mention - it's all about Robert Maplethorpe, Sam Shepherd, etc. My impression is that maybe she didn't want to give him much space because her relationship with him wasn't strictly relevant to the Smith-Maplethorpe axis, but possibly because of "other" circumstances that resulted in the ending of that relationship.

I don't know - all I can say for sure, is that I was looking for a bit more insight on her connection to Meltzer, Pearlman, Allen and BOC in general, and didn't get it. But I must say, the book is still a great read, regardless...

Anyway, this is a BOC site, so what I'll do is pull out some features from Patti's timeline that I think are of interest from a BOC point of view, and relevant to the idea that she was once offered the role of lead singer for BOC, and see where that takes me.

OK - first I'll examine all the known evidence and see if that stacks up. For example, Patti Smith's own wiki page says this:

Smith was briefly considered for the lead singer position in Blue Oyster Cult.

Other sources lay it on a bit stronger - for example, this "10 Musicians Who Almost Joined Other Bands" page has this:

"At one point she was even invited by Blue Oyster Cult to be the band's singer. But, thankfully, Patti declined the offer."

So according to them, Pearlman actually made the offer, but it was rebuffed. This page later goes on to contend she turned down Van Halen also, (clearly, the author can't differentiate between Patty and Patti), so this evidence has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

In Patti's autobiography, "Just Kids" she puts it a bit differently:

Sandy Pearlman, in particular, had a vision of what I should be doing. Although I wasn't ready to fulfill his particular take on my future, I was always interested in his perception of things, for Sandy's mind contained a repertoire of references from Pythagorean mathematics to St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music....

He saw me as fronting a rock and roll band, something that had not occurred to me, or that I had even thought possible. But after writing and performing songs with Sam (Shepherd) in Cowboy Mouth, I felt the desire to explore songwriting.

I went back to my writing, but singing found me.

Sandy Pearlman was convinced that's what I should be doing, and he introduced me to Allen Lanier, the keyboard player of the band he was managing. They had begun as the Soft White Underbelly, recording an album for Elektra that was never to be released. They were now known as the Stalk-Forrest Group, but would soon become Blue Oyster Cult.

He had two motivations for introducing us. He felt Allen might help frame the songs I was writing for myself, and that possibly I could write lyrics for the band...

While our musical collaboration progressed slowly, our friendship deepened, and soon we chose a romantic relationship over a working one.

It seems Pearlman saw himself as somewhat of a Svengali figure who might shape and guide Patti Smith in her fledgeling musical career.

If you read "Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story" by Dave Thompson, he deals with it in a rather "wooly" manner:

Three years earlier, Sandy Pearlman had been a writer for Crawdaddy when he had the idea of putting a band together to perform a series of musical poems he had written, Imaginos. Since that time, the band he created, Soft White Underbelly, had morphed into the Stalk-Forrest Group, but it was about to change its name again, to the Blue Oyster Cult, and set out on a career pioneering a seismic brand of militaristically mystical metal. Pearlman would remain their manager, and looking to expand his stable of clients, he was pushing Patti to delve deeper into rock 'n' roll as well.

His dream of pairing her with a keyboard player and composer named Lee Crabtree collapsed when Crabtree committed suicide following a row with his parents over an inheritance from his grandfather.

So Pearlman suggested Patti join the Blue Oyster Cult instead, as a behind-the-scenes writer if not a performer. Patti never took him up on the offer, but she did start dating the band's keyboard and rhythm guitar player, igniting what would become the most permanent relationship she had ever known. She and Lanier would remain partners until 1978.

So - Pearlman suggested Patti join the Blue Oyster Cult instead, as a "behind-the-scenes writer if not a performer"...? WTF does join the band as a "non-performer" mean? What, like Bez? Basically, he's saying BOC wanted to use some of her lyrics. And they did that anyway...

But the whole "Patti nearly joined BOC" thing was never about that...

John Swartz's BOCFAQ says this:

In early 1969, Soft White Underbelly recorded material for an album for Elektra that was never released. Due to differences with the rest of the band, Les Braunstein left the band after recording the album (or possibly before it was completed). Braunstein's departure was probably a factor in Elektra's decision not to release it.

Albert Bouchard, Sandy Pearlman, and Richard Meltzer all tried to sing. According to Albert Bouchard, he and Pearlman wanted Patti Smith (who had met the band around that time, and later formed a personal relationship with Allen Lanier) to sing, but the rest of the band out-voted them. As it turned out, the best sounding was Eric Bloom.

The massive BOC Goldmine special [#414 - 7 June 1996] had this to say:

With Braunstein gone, the band's record contract with Elektra was now in serious jeopardy. But they had come too close to having something great happen for all of them, they felt, and to allow the band to break up was unthinkable. Around this time, an important aspect of BOC's history began filtering in, the female aspect. It came in the person of a young writer named Patti Smith.

"Then we went through the whole thing again! We had Sandy tryin' to sing, Meltzer tryin' to sing, me tryin' to sing," Albert recalled of the crisis precipitated by the situation with Braunstein. Considered at that time, according to Albert, as the band's answer to the problem of being left once again without anyone out front, was the 22-year old Smith.

"I'd heard about her from Sandy Pearlman for over a year," the drummer recalled. "As a matter of fact, her name was brought up when Les split. In the summer of '68 [Pearlman] had been telling me, 'You gotta check out Patti Smith. She's a great singer, she's a fantastic poet.' He had some of her poetry and we were looking at it. And I was like, 'Yeah, great - let's get a girl lead singer!' It seemed like some of the other people were not into it, as I remember it. So, we got Eric instead."

So this account more or less corresponds with the BOCFAQ version, except they got the date wrong it wasn't the summer of '68, it was actually around mid-May 1969 when Les departed.

Now, if you read what Albert says in that Goldmine article, you'd assume that they merely discussed the idea of having Patti try out as singer, but references do seem to persist that she actually auditioned for the band.

Probably the most confusing of these comes from Albert himself. On Albert's site, he has a reviews page containing various reviews from a number of different sources detailing with his various endeavours down the years.

Midway down the page at the end of a piece from the "Democrat and Chronicle" entitled "Shucking with the Brain Surgeons" (by Jeff Spevak) was this:

Blue Oyster Cult also very nearly had a female lead singer.

"One of the guys met her at a poetry reading,' Bouchard recalls. "He said, 'Well, I've never heard her sing, but she's pretty cool.' She came over and I said, 'Wow, we gotta get this person in this band. She's awesome, with this great poetry.'

The rest of the band was not as enthusiastic as I was. Certain people did not want to have a girl in the band at that time.'

Ah, the road not taken. The cowbell not rung. How would you like to have been the guy who turned down Patti Smith for a job in your rock band?

So here Albert is saying something rather different. He's saying "she came over" which implies an actual audition at the band house - or if not a fully-fledged audition, at least a meeting between the band and Patti to maybe look at the idea...

However, all other indications I've read suggest that the band didn't meet her for at least a year and a half later, maybe a bit more.

So to get to the bottom of this, I need to try and find out just when did the band first meet Patti...

My assumption had always been that Sandy Pearlman would have come across Patti at some stage of his dealings - maybe in relation to his Crawdaddy role, or maybe just his general hob-nobbing and schmoozing amongst the NYC in-crowd, but Richard Meltzer cleared up the situation in the Popoff book, as well as providing a rather baser explanation of why Pearlman wanted to try and help Patti develop a musical dimension to her career:

Okay, basically, I was the one who brought her to the band,' recounts Meltzer. 'She was my friend.

In the summer of 1970, my dentist was around the corner from the bookstore where she worked, Scribner's Books on 5th Avenue in the 40s. And I stopped in there and we became great friends.

And somewhere down the line I brought her to the band.

Pearlman wanted to fuck her and that was his interest. And I don't know if he did or didn't, but once it was clear that she was with Allen, it got to be that there was a lot of tension between Pearlman and Allen.

Charming! Anyway, that helpfully clears up the timescale a bit - Meltzer was the one who introduced her to Pearlman and the band, "somewhere down the line" after the summer of 1970.

Therefore, when Sandy suggested Patti as a contender for SWU vocalist back in May 1969, it seems clear that he couldn't have actually met her at that point. Otherwise Meltzer couldn't have introduced her to him sometime after the summer of 1970...

So when then did the band actually get to meet her? And when did her relationship with Allen start?

It's a matter of record that Pearlman, Meltzer, Roni Hoffman, Lillian Roxon, Lisa Robinson and the rest of that crowd all turned up for Patti's inaugural St Mark's poetry reading on 12 Feb 1971 - I don't know if any of the actual band turned out for this event.

Could this have been Pearlman's first meeting with Patti...?

Regarding band members meeting her, Albert has said this in the Popoff book:

"Patti Smith was loft-sitting for Johnny Winter. I don't know ifshe had anything going on with him or just taking care of his loft. Anyways,she was there, and that was the first time I met her. And I think that was thefirst time for all of us, and we rehearsed there in Johnny Winter's loft. And thatfirst day, we wrote Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll."

It would be interesting to know when this took place. Patti doesn't mention this in her book. - but when did it take place?

Famously - yet seemingly oddly - Patti Smith was on the panel at the Clive Davis audition at Columbia. My current best guess for this is early July 1971, as the contracts for BOC to sign (sent out by the lawyers) was dated "28 July 1971", and the audition was said to have been a couple of weeks earlier.

I've read Patti's book and worked out her own time-line, but I can't see how she'd worked up enough credibility with someone like Clive Davis to be trusted to pass a musical judgement on the merits of a band hoping to be signed to his label. Did she sit in on any other auditions or just SFG? And was she already going out with Allen at this point - and, if so, had she declared "an interest", as they say in legal circles...?

She just written - and starred in "Cowboy Mouth", an autobiographical play with Sam Shepard that opened - and closed - at the end of April after Shepherd fled NYC to return to his family and band, The Holy Modal Rounders.

Patti does hint that her musical credibility had started to rise after that reading:

Everything accelerated after Lenny Kaye and I performed at St. Mark's. My ties with the rock community strengthened.

Many notable writers, such as Dave Marsh, Tony Glover, Danny Goldberg, and Sandy Pearlman had attended, and I was offered more writing assignments.

The poems in Creem would mark the first major publication of my poetry.

However, I think the following offers a bigger clue:

I was bombarded with offers stemming from my poetry reading. Creem magazine agreed to publish a suite of my poems; there were proposed readings in London and Philadelphia; a chapbook of poems for Middle Earth Books; and a possible record contract with Steve Paul's Blue Sky Records.

I turned down the record contract but left Scribner's to work for Steve Paul as his girl Friday.

So, the only sense I can make of Patti being on that panel is that maybe Steve Paul had sent her along as his stand-in - or maybe she volunteered for the task? On top of his club and musical entrepreneurship credentials, he was also the manager of Johnny Winter at that point, and would seem to be a much more relevant person to be on there...