Now it's SF hard rock

The name of the band is the Blue Oyster Cult. A year ago it was called Stalk Forrest and a year before that the Soft White Underbelly.

It started off many years ago in Long Island's famous way-out Stonybrook University, but though the group was enormously popular it flatly refused to sign any record contracts until what its members referred to as the "right" moment came along.

Finally, a contract WAS signed with Columbia, and this week the much awaited album came out.

Now just what can you say about a band that sings songs like, "I'm on The Lamb, But I Ain't No Sheep," or "She's As Beautiful As a Foot," or "Workshop of The Telescopes."

As the titles suggest, the group is bringing to heavy or so-called progressive rock a kind of science fiction approach.

Fans of heavy music will love the wailing guitar solos, but the usual heavy-handed handling of the instrumental is missing.

Strange as it may seem, the music, though loud and strong, is still very refined, with much better playing than you hear with Grand Funk Railroad or Led Zeppelin.

Rock has had tasteful playing before, but not on this kind of music, so it has come as quite a revelation.

Vocals, too, are both fierce and harmonious.

Lillian Roxon || Sydney Morning Herald

Blue Oyster Cult Rock is Hard to Pinpoint

Bored with the monotony of daily life? Well, here is a remedy. Try to describe the music of Blue Oyster Cult.

Road manager Butch Krowe starts off, "It's heavy." Everyone seems to agree on that, but the sound goes beyond just heaviness into something much more harder to pinpoint.

Some listeners have described it as "cosmic." Others use terms like "powerful," "sadistic" and "downright mean."

In any case, it is this element that adds dimension to the Blue Oyster Cult's music and gives it quality.

Blue Oyster Cult originated one and a half years ago in New York. Buck Dharma (lead guitar) and Albert Bouchard (drums) had been playing together three years when they joined Eric Bloom (vocalist), Allen Lanier (organist), and Albert's little brother Joe (bass) to form the band.

The name was supplied by Sandy Pearlman, lyricist and manager. "'Blue Oyster Cult' is one of a series of songs and lyrics I wrote called 'Soft Doctrines of Imaginos'," he explained, grinning from behind wire-rimmed sun glasses. "It's the story of a kid who learns the powers of transformation - a combination horror story and fairy tale."

Swaying rhythmically from side to side, he continued. "Blue Oyster Cult was formed under the influence of groups like Moby Grape, Doors and The Who."

"Blue Oyster Cult," the group's first album (recorded at the Warehouse in October 1971), is an outstanding example of their music. It is heavy, but not monotone, and both the cosmic and mean theories fit in nicely. It is the kind of album that you want to listen to more than once.

Likewise, the live performance of Blue Oyster Cult is diverse and fascinating. Three or four psychedelic numbers are interspersed with 13 original tunes (including a fantastic drum solo for people who don't like drum solos"). There is even a tidbit by Alice Cooper used as an encore - "something we picked up while on tour with them," smiled Joe.

In striking contrast to their music, the personalities of Blue Oyster Cult members are far from harsh.

"We don't sing from the diaphragm, we sing right from the nose," joked Albert.

Steve Munro, equipment manager, shrugged off Buck's crack about having to drive all the way to New York the next day and commented, "The work is exhausting, but I wouldn't be doing anything else."

"Do you know what we do to relax? We work crossword puzzles," Joe interjected. "We also love to swim - someday we are going to have a synchronized swim show," Joe laughed, his blue eyes sparkling.

It is hard to comprehend how such amiable fellows offstage can become musical villains while performing. One thing is certain, Imaginos isn't the only one who has discovered the secret of transformation.

Dorcas O'Rourke || New Orleans Times Picayune

Will the Blue Oyster Cult Make It?

That's the key question, now that this Long Island-based semi-famous rock band has gone legit

The five members of the Blue Oyster Cult are working in Eatons Neck on a song by drummer Albert Bouchard called "My Love Can Burn," and as usual Donald Roeser wants to play his guitar good.

"No Danny Kalb moves" admonishes Sandy Pearlman, the critic-turned-manager. "Just think of this solo as if you were playing six-string bass on ‘Wichita Lineman.' The first time you just played the melody with fuzz, remember? Just do it like the first time, when you didn't know what we were doing."

"You got a chance to play a beautiful solo..." Bouchard says, hesitating in mid-thought. "Y' know what I mean? Not ego."

Roeser shrugs "That's just as much ego as anything else."

"Just forget Danny Kalb ever lived," says keyboard player Allen Lanier.

Pearlman moans, "I shouldn't have mentioned his name."

Variations on this exchange are common, symbol and substance of the question facing the Blue Oyster Cult, which is: Can an impecunious rock band from the psychedelic wilds of Stony Brook find security and artistic fulfillment as the heavy-metal darlings of a million zonked teenagers? And not only that — will they get the chance to find out? When their manager was the most abstruse critic on the first and most esoteric rock magazine? When their first LP ranks third in a 1972 critics poll, gets raves from AM radio maven Kal Rudman, sells 100,000 copies and barely dents the trade charts?

Most Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with no recording or performance scheduled, the Blue Oyster Cult convenes in a subleased one-story ranch house in Eatons Neck. Lead singer Eric Bloom, the group's only bachelor, occupies the headquarters. Guitarist Donald Roeser (aka Buck Dharma) lives in Melville and bassist Joe Bouchard (Albert's brother) in Centerport. Pearlman lives with his parents in Smithtown. Albert Bouchard has a longer trip from Glen Oaks in Queens. And Lanier does a reverse commute all the way from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he lives with poet Patti Smith.

You may recognize Patti Smith's name if you keep tabs on Esquire's Heavy 100. She made it this year and so did the Blue Oyster Cult: "The last underground band, but signed with Columbia so have probably gone legit. Bizarre critic R Meltzer writes lyrics." But if anybody in Eatons Neck is aware of the semi-famous neighbors, the semi-famous neighbors don't want to know about it. The few inquisitive kids are not encouraged to come around, and the band protects surrounding ears and sensibilities by never practicing past 7 PM. In their pre-legit days, they knew everyone near the house in Great Neck where they lived and practiced. They also spent crumby weeks touring late into the night. Now they're family men, with salaried positions. It's a business. The business is taxing and not especially lucrative as yet, although they love it. But it is a business.

Like most middle-aged (they are all in their mid-20s) rock bands — the core of the group, Roeser, Albert Bouchard and Lanier, has been together for more than five years — the history of the Blue Oyster Cult is complicated and familiar-sounding. The group formed as the Soft White Underbelly in 1967 when the principals were hanging around the State University at Stony Brook, which was sort of the Berkeley of Suffolk County. The scene was avant-gardish and psychedelic, and while (except for Lanier) none of the musicians were more than vaguely intellectual, they did qualify as pop-and-dope esthetes, into the stretched-out heady improvisations then floating in from San Francisco. This was post-folk rock, heavy on the artist and short on the audience — no material, you just jam. Pearlman, an early contributor to Paul William's Crawdaddy!, functioned as manager; his critical ally, R. Meltzer, had a brief turn as lead singer. Eventually, Jac Holzman of Elektra Records, who was fairly close to the Crawdaddy! crowd, gave the band a contract.

Despite this, the group didn't really feel it was going anywhere. It wanted an audience, for feedback, and money, for food. The vocalist, Les Bronstein, had different ideas and in May, 1969, he quit or was thrown out. His replacement, Eric Bloom, was originally an acquaintance of Albert Bouchard and Roeser, who had met at an upstate college near where Bloom himself was a kingfish on the frat-and-bar copy-band circuit. Away from his small pond, however, he found himself the Underbelly's unofficial roadie, mostly because he owned a truck. But when Bronstein left, Bloom was ready to replace his nouveau-jug meandering with some rock and roll, and the band was ready for just such a charge. Unfortunately, the evolution was still very much in progress when the Elektra album was being cut. That's probably why it was never released.

For a deeper understanding of the problems of this evolution, however, we should flash forward to the late fall of 1972. The recording of "Tyranny and Mutation," an album that will be released, is under way. This time the principals are Murray Krugman, a young A&Rman at Columbia Records who got the group on the label, and Donald Roeser again. The song they are working on is called "O.D.'d on Life Itself and all 16 tape tracks are full. Krugman and Pearlman, who are co-producing, don't like a couple of medium-length guitar breaks, so they decide that Roeser would record over a dispensable guitar part on track 10. He stands in the studio, alone, and the rest of the tracks are played to him. At two designated points, he takes brief solos. They're not going well. After seven tries Roeser is called back into the control room.

"Originally this song was supposed to be disgusting, Donald," Krugman reminds him. "You keep trying to make it good. Don't make it good, make it disgusting." Roeser resists this advice in his quiet way, but the rest of the band pipes in, and someone makes a Danny Kalb joke. Kalb is the founder of the Blues Project. He inspired what Roeser calls his "first quantum technique move," from surf-style rhythm guitarist to lightning soloist. Roeser has since made a second quantum technique move. Not only does he have a lot more chops than Danny Kalb and his epigones — Roeser knows how to contain solo ideas within highly charged time fields of a minute or two — but he understands a basic fact of musical structure which most talented soloists never understand, namely that sometimes the whole band sounds better if the lead guitar part is vulgar or derivative. But he does like to play good, so sometimes he has to be coaxed or kidded.

Roeser goes back in and on the next two takes tears off a couple of searing little solos that are almost disgusting, but not quite. Maybe he should rest. But no, he wants to keep going, and the 10th take is astonishing. It's not a choice of good or disgusting any more — this solo is both. People are jumping up and down and looking at each other wide-eyed. At the time it looks like the AM breakthrough of their dreams. Later they even try a little Doobie Brothers back-up, but after an hour of that they're so embarrassed they won't even talk to each other and the new stuff is erased. They want to be disgusting but not trans-repulsive.

According to Albert Bouchard, the first cause of this strange ambition was his 16-year-old brother-in-law in Hicks-ville, who used to get them all wacked and then play the groups he was into — Led Zeppelin, Ten Years After and on down. Arty musicians used to disdain such music as crude and flashy, but the Soft White Underbelly — or Oaxaca, or Stark Forest, or whatever they were called at the time — came to feel that just because it was crude and flashy it was the real rock and roll of the '70s. Albert Bouchard says, "It's not lame, it's powerful, and rock and roll is basically not lame music. Kids identify with it a lot. And we just got into doing it."

This music may have been simple, but doing it was not — not for five ex-psychedelic esthetes. The people who make and listen to what is called heavy music, lumped by outsiders into the vague subspecies "greasers," don't have much in common with the San Francisco generation. Greasers are generally very young and are lower rather than upper middle-class. They are into downers, not psychedelics. And (at least in myth) they are very, well, direct. As Albert Bouchard says: "Greasers have a healthy essential outlook, not peace and love, but saying and doing what you really feel. I really like them, but I doubt if I could ever be one."

So now the question facing the Blue Oyster Cult can be restated: How do you play greaser music if you're not a greaser? A lot of people, especially critics, are anxious for an answer to this one. By now, there is a good deal of agreement that disgusting music, heavy music is the rock and roll of the '70s, but most of those who agree are hard-pressed to actually like Black Sabbath or Grand Funk Railroad or whoever else those incomprehensible kids have latched onto. But they do like the Blue Oyster Cult.

Like all those significant but trans-repulsive bands, the Blue Oyster Cult is loud and features a lot of repetitive ominous-sounding guitar riffs. Its lyrics flirt with occultism and teen nihilism and sexism. Its stage show, for those few cognoscenti lucky enough to catch it — the group has appeared only rarely in New York and never on the West Coast — is suitably melodramatic. But the group scrupulously avoids all the heavy excesses.

It does this in two ways — by maintaining distance and stressing conciseness. The group really likes flashy stage clothes, it really likes the literal sparks that sometimes fly when Bloom and Roeser cross guitar necks in their show's blistering climax, but there is a sense in which this artifice is deliberate and obviously so. If you're into it, you'll dig it at face value but if you feel detached, like some weary post-psychedelic explorer, then you can appreciate how well-done it is.

You can appreciate, as well, the way the boring drum solo which doses most heavy concerts is transformed into multi-percussive give-and-take between Albert Bouchard and whoever picks up some sticks, usually Bloom. Even if you don't know that the group calls its publishing company B O'Cult Songs, you may sense something in Bloom's leather and shades, or his exaggerated psuedo-black vocals that makes you think he knows everything that name is implying. And you will, of course, go nuts over Roeser's solos.

All good rock groups function as units which are greater than the sum of their parts, and so does this one. The band balances Bloom's studied pseudoflash against Albert Bouchard's irrepressible involvement, Joe Bouchard's relative simplicity and innocence against Lanier's subdued detachment. But like most groups, the Blue Oyster Cult also centers on one individual, and he is Donald Roeser. Roeser may very well be the best hard-rock guitarist in America. He is facile and almost effortlessly witty but he never surrenders rhythmic drive, and his solos are so concise that their idea density is about six times as high as those of guitarists who play four times as long. His approach epitomizes the control which the Blue Oyster Cult tries to exert over the heavy music they play. Most heavy musicians are, in a sense, the creatures of their amplifiers. The Blue Oyster Cult controls its technology.

So now the question facing the Blue Oyster Cult can again be restated: Will they make it? That is hard to judge. Like many first albums, their debut LP sold slowly because it broke slowly — one month Atlanta, two months later Iowa. This was probably a matter of exposure. Record sales normally pick up after a personal appearance, or when an FM disc jockey discovers a record and gives it some airplay. And second albums go faster because everyone who got hip to the first one over perhaps a year wants to buy it more or less at once. Columbia has shipped 50,000 copies of "Tyranny and Mutation," which means it will almost certainly make the trade charts, which means more bookings and airplay.

As Krugman admits, that's doing it the hard way, but the easy way — an AM hit or a major pre-packaged tour — is not available. Columbia shows even less aptitude than the average record company for promoting the kind of hard rock the Blue Oyster Cult plays, and without a heavy information push the chance of even "O.D.'d on Life Itself" becoming a hit is small. Its booking agent is not strong enough to insure the kind of massive exposure that has brought some groups over the top. So far the group has inspired only isolated outbreaks of star fever, mostly in the South.

And despite their esthetic expertise, it is conceivable that this is partly their fault. The group does have built-in problems. Perhaps the silliest is that all of them tend to be quite short — Bloom the tallest isn't much over five feet 10 in heels, and Roeser is under five feet six — which means they may not be able to create the kind of illusion the power freaks in their audience need.

A more serious problem is that they don't seem to have very much to say beyond their music itself. Most successful groups project a simple idea: We love our brothers and sisters, or we are studs, or we are going to hell. The idea the Blue Oyster Cult projects is about music: Music should be concise, music should be dense, music should be kinetic.

That's another reason critics relate to them, but it doesn't necessarily reach the kids. What has to be admitted, though, is that a hard-touring band like the Blue Oyster Cult knows more about the kids than any critic, this one included.

And they do seem determined to wait it out, through the current album and the next and the one after that. It's really up to them — Columbia makes a profit on them now, and all they have to fear is frustration. For the whole reason this started was that people liked disgusting music, and ultimately, if people don't happen to like your disgusting music, you can get discouraged.

I saw a concert they gave in Bridgeport a few months ago. They have a following in Connecticut, mostly because one disc jockey gave his girlfriend a copy of the album and she advised him to play it, but the hall, which was small, wasn't full, and the show was below par. In the last 20 minutes it picked up, though and I overheard two stoned kids talking to each other. Actually one was raving and the other was listening.

"They're so amazing," he was saying. "They do everything better than everyone else, and they do it all at once. They don't waste a move."

He was right, and right to be excited about it. Multiply him by 500,000, and you have a really disgusting group.

Robert Christgau || Newsday

The Spectre That's Haunting Heavy Metal: Blue Oyster Cult

Chaos.

In these days of Heavy Metal, that's something that's just plain missing. Whatever happened to the crazy loud music that made you want to do strange things, just like the fundamentalist preachers said it did? Remember when the MC5 led mass hysteria from the stage? And groups like the Doors and the Velvet Underground created fantasies with their music that made the absurd seem normal? In fact, time was that thousands of kids from coast to coast found chaos an acceptable alter native to the saneness of society,

Unfortunately, cultural chaos, like revolutionary politics, is easily co-optable. The sales managers, corporate think tanks, and advertising agencies of America have been succesful in turning social upheaval into profits. The FCC and the Supreme Court have done their bit in a different vein by upholding the morality and dullness of yesteryear.

The rock and roll crazies of the late 1960's have faded from the scene. The MC5 were blacklisted. Jim Morrison of the Doors died from the pressures of superstardom (read "saleability"). And Velvet Underground singer Lou Reed spends his time trying to be the domestic version of David Bowie.

It's not that I don't like today's music. In fact, some of it is very nice to listen to. It's just that I can't get off on most of it.

All is not lost, however. A group from the streets of New York is haunting the Heavy Metal scene these days, and contrived acts like Alice Cooper and Deep Purple are just going to have to step aside. Because once you've remembered what the real thing can do to your body and soul, the glitter and theatrics of others just won't do. So sit back, turn up your stereo to ear screeching levels, and meet the Blue Oyster Cult.

The Early Days
The beginnings of the Cult can be traced back to the days when State University of New York at Stony Brook was sort of the Berkeley of the New York City area. Like their counterparts on the West Coast and other places, students at Stony Brook were heavily involved in political and cultural avant-gardism. Music was an important part of the scene, with the student government at Stony Brook allocating $100,000 per year to bring music to the campus.

The Blue Oyster Cult started out in 1967 at Stony Brook, calling themselves The Soft White Underbelly. Although the musical focus for the group was (and is) the incredible guitar playing of Don Roeser, the name (Soft White Underbel ly) and much of the group's inspiration comes from rock critic turned songwriter, Sandy Pearlman.

Pearlman described their coming together; "I met a few of the guys when they were, playing at this house near the (Stony Brook) campus, called the House on the Hill (Rock Critic) Meltzer used to live there, and these guys first got together there. I walked in and they were playing, and I had this name that was in my mind for a rock group, The Soft White Underbelly. So I said, I've got a name and I think you should use it.'"

Over the years Pearlman has served as songwriter, producer, manager, and mentor for the band. In addition, critic R. Meltzer has written lyrics for the band, and back in the early days, occasionally filled in as lead singer. The backing of Pearlman and Meltzer has many changes the band has gone through.

The Soft White Underbelly spent two years playing bars and college gigs around Stony Brook. Critic Robert Christgau calls the music of that period. as "post-folk rock, heavy on the artist and short on the audience..." Other sources close to the Stony Brook scene at the time called the Underbelly's music "acid-boogie."

Whatever their music was, it was loud, and it turned on the Long Island juicer crowds they played to. In fact the Underbellv became some sort of legend among those heavily into the rock music scene at the time. This legend, along with Meltzer's and Perlman's in fluence/guidance, led to a 1969 contract with Elektra Records.

Although they did make a record for Elektra, it was never released, probably due to the fact that the band was going through personnel, musical, and name changes during 1969. By the end of that year, the name of the group had been changed to Stalk Forrest Group, the vocalist had left the band, and had been replaced.

Despite the fact that Elektra didn't like the record, members of the band, and others who heard it were convinced of its validity. Pearlman recently described the record as being: "One of the best psychedelic records ever made. It's like the record that the Byrds would have made after The Notorious Byrd Brothers if they hadn't gone completely shitty." Group member Al Lanier describes the Elektra recording as "us doing a California record."

1970 found the band out on the treets again, playing the club circuit, and generally starving. Cult Bassist Joe Bouchard called that period: "It was a year of starvation. We played all kinds of clubs & dives and bars. The worst. Just the lowest stuff. Like the coal mines of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania backwoods towns, and upstate New York."

After "paying their dues," the Stalk Forrest Group came back to New York "to record some more. In the winter of 1971, the group delivered the fruits of their efforts to Elektra President lack Holtzman. Elektra rejected the tapes, and Holtzman reportedly said, "They'll never do anything.

So it was back to the Long Island bar circuit for the Stalk Forrest Group Perlman remembers this period as playing a lot of trash places on Long Island, which were very important, There was the audience right in front of your nose, and you learned what you had to do.

It was during this period of playing "trash" bars that the group began getting heavily into the Heavy Metal sound which now characterizes The Blue Oyster Cult's music. In May the group took some new recordings Columbia Record's Murray Krugman, who a year earlier had told Clive Davis that the group's music was "dumb, and would go nowhere in reverse." The Columbia demo tape was different than the group's earlier efforts, and Krugman, according to Pearlman, recognized on this album the spectre of Heavy Metal: that was soon to haunt America." Within three moths after hearing the tape, the group was signed to Columbia Records, and had changed their name to the Blue Oyster Cult.

The Spectre of Heavy Metal
Now that this story has gotten almost up to the present, it's probably appropriate that you should be introduced to the group.

*****

Donald Roeser (aka Buck Darma "cause it looks better on the marquee") plays lead guitar. And, oh, does he ever! Roeser has (thus far) been compared to Alvin Lee (Ten Years After), Eric Clapton, and Peter Townshend. The com parisons aren't really valid, but the fact Eric Bloom does most of the lead singing for the Cult, while playing guitar in opposition to Don Roeser. His black leather clothing and chains create an almost evil air about him on stage. But if you had to handle lyrics like "Seven screaming diz busters who lurked behind a rose had iron in their bloodstream and ice behind their eyes. you'd be weird too.

*****

Al Lanier plays the keyboards and fills in on rhythm guitar. He's the "quiet" member of the group on stage, but reportedly is the one who karmically holds things together. And he's pretty talented, too.

*****

Albert and Joe Bouchard provide the all-important heavy metal rhythm for the cult. Albert is one of the few drummers who can actually pull off a non-boring drum solo in concert. Meanwhile, Joe does a creative job of thumping away at bass.

*****

While the Cult's band members are blowing minds with their stage performances and records there are three people behind the scenes worth mentioning. Sandy Pearlman and Robert Melter collaborate in writing truly bizarro lyrics for the group. The fact that both of them are involved as critics gives them a natural "in" with the rock press. And Columbia's Murray Krugman is involved with the group, producing their albums, and wielding whatever influence he has on a corporate level.

The "Bootleg"

The rise of the Blue Oyster Cult today began with an incredible live record released just about a year ago, that was sent to members of the rock press and radio stations only. The record was made from a recording of a Blue Oyster Cult concert in Rochester, New York, on a home tape recorder. This record, according to Murray Krugman, was the loudest record ever made. The record was mastered at an audio level of plus nine, which is illegal, since anything above plus four will skip on all but the most expensive turntables.

I'm fortunate enough to have a copy of the Cult's live recording, and tend to agree with Phonograph Record Magazine's claim that it was among the best LP's of 1972. You'll probably never find out unless one of the local radio stations resurrects the album and starts playing it. The Cult "live" album consists of only four cuts; "Workshop of the Telescopes," "Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll," "The Red and The Black" and "Buck's Boogie." Of particular note-worthiness are "Cities on Flame," a killer rocker, and the Beckish "Buck's Boogie." "The Red and The Black" was re-released as a part of the Cult's first public effort, Tyranny and Mutation, which I'll get into in a bit. And, oh yea! I blew up the amp on my stereo playing "Buck's Boogie."

At any rate, with the release of the "for promotion only" Blue Oyster Cult LP. the group began to become somewhat of a legend. The press and the radio-philes (or noids, depending on how you look at it) were primed. But was the public ready?

Tyranny and Mutation
On February 14, 1973, the Cult LP Tyranny and Mutation was released. Contrary to some critics' desired/fantasies, the record-buying public didn't storm into record stores "armed with filed down Silvertone guitars" looking for the album. But despite the allegation that R. Meltzer wrote reviews of the album in a half-dozen publications, using different pseudonyms, the good reviews did pile in. Top 40 radio didn't pick up on the record, but progressive stations all over the country did respond to an ever-growing demand of hard core fans to get the record aired. (In San Diego, KPRI and KGB am/fm gave it ample airplay). According to unofficial sources, the LP has already topped the 100,000 mark in sales - not bad for a first effort by anybody's standards. And the group says they are satisfied in every respect with the first album - except for the fact that it didn't make it big on the charts.

Tyranny and Mutation is about violence and murder. In fact, seventeen murders occurred within twelve blocks of the studio while the album was being produced. Wierd. Asked about this violence, several band members were quick to answer; "It's part of life. It's part of the dialectic... Part of the thing with the Blue Oyster Cult is that it's gotta be heavy. That seems to be a commercial motif."

Even if you buy Tyranny and Mutation it may well be a long time before you're able to decifer the lyrics, since some yo-yo didn't bother to stick in a lyrics sheet. But for those of you that care, a free computer print out of the lyrics is available simply by dropping Murray Krugman a line at Columbia Records, 51 W. 52nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.

In Heavy Metal music, the lyries aren't supposed to be important anyhow. What counts is the combination of the players and their technology. And the players in Blue Oyster Cult are firmly in control of their technology, rather than being a product of it. At least it gets all the right things going in me.

The Future OR, The Spectre That's Haunting America
The Blue Oyster Cult have at long last begun touring around the United States. The mythology that has existed record and in the rock press is coming true to thousands of (sometimes) un suspecting concert goers as the Cult are playing second and third bill to more "established" groups. In New York City, their Concert drew more fans than loe Walsh and Wishbone Ash combined. Concert goers in the South are absolute ly getting rabid about the Cult. At a recent show in Los Angeles - third billed behind Mott The Hoople and Joe Walsh - the Cult literally blew minds. Take it from one who was there. They'll be appearing in San Diego sometime in the near future - they say they hope to play a show this fall. Then you can see for yourself what I'm ranting and raving about.

The next Cult album is scheduled for release on February 14, 1974. Members of the group say that this album will be broader than Tyranny and Mutation. But the hard rock, blood and guts sound wil stay, In addition, group mentor Sandy Pearlman is predicting a two record, live album for release in the fall of 1974. That one should be a killer.

The Blue Oyster Cult have a future in rock and roll/heavy metal because the personalities in the group have taken a back seat to the music. There probably won't be any rip-off "solo" albums by band members. In sum, the Cult is successful precisely because the sum total of the band is greater than all of its members and mentors.

Heavy Metal music is the illegitimate off-spring of psychedelic music. But most heavy metal represents no more than what its name implies - the sounds of industrial production lines. Add a little chaos, and the mindlessness of it all changes into something that causes you to lose your mind. You might even tear all the Carol King/James Taylor/ Cat Stevens posters off your walls.

In the, meantime, as the Cult says, "Lucifer's the light!"

Doug Porter || Door

Blue Oyster Cult

Way back in 1970 before a bucket of blood or a gallon of glitter were determining factors for a group's success, there was a band called the Soft White Underbelly breathing its fire at The House on the Hill in Stony Brook, New York.

The name was a product of one of the era's better known writers, Sandy Pearlman who today can practically be considered a member of the group. The product was a kind of basic strain of rock 'n' roll utilizing repetitive licks backed by a veritable onslaught of whirling musical torrents of hell.

Pearlman, who was then a writer for Crawdaddy, humorously recalls "R. Meltzer lived there and I hung out there, but these guys, some nameless, faceless band, practiced there. These guys first got together there and I happened to walk in one night they were practicing. This guy, who taught Jackson Browne how to both surf and play guitar was living there and sitting in on drums, our old bass player and some other guys, and they were all jamming it when I walked in and I told them I got a name and you oughta use it if you want to be rich. And they believed me.

During the following year the Soft White Underbelly garnered a reputation which was reserved with respect and devotion only comparable to the early Doors audience of '68 in L.A. I've always seen the Blue Oyster Cult or whatever their name was at the time, meaning to New York City in the '70s what the Doors were to L.A. in the mid-sixties," bassist Joe Bouchard said.

The Soft White Underbelly made an album for Elektra Records. "You wouldn't believe it was the same group. Soft White Underbelly was pre-Stalk Forrest Group. These days our attitude has changed because we used to think we could get away with everything because in Stony Brook our audience was so loyal and open-minded. Anyway," Pearlman was saying of an accent made of pure punkdom and arrogance only the way New York could breed it, "Holdman [sic] (president then of Elektra Records) dumped us apparently for being so off the wall which got us real frustrated. We bombed in the big shows because we weren't commercial enough so we had this question facing us: Commercial Biz vs Success. Even though people might think what we're doing now isn't commercial, in comparison to the head we as a band used to have, it is."

Nineteen-seventy was a year of starvation for the band, and the year Joe Bouchard joined. It was a year of playing dives, bars and "the worst coal mines in Pennsylvania." After a bit of thought, they decided their best bet would be to cut another demo. Pearlman barked. "We were really desperate and we didn't know what to do, so we sent them to Elektra. We enclosed a note reading 'Here it is! Ya got one more chance.' It was the Blue Oyster Cult's California album. Geffen (new head of Elektra) will probably put it out if he thinks he can make a buck."

"The time in the mines was good, though," lead singer Eric Bloom picked up, dangling a beer between his hands "the time we spent in dives taught survival. We were directly confronted with the audience and this just wasn't any audience. If you didn't keep these guys happy, they'd kill ya. So we learned a lot during that time.

Pearlman picks up the conversation: "We made another demo about this time, I think it was May of '71, and we took it to Murray who was the main reason for the group not being signed to Columbia the year before 'cause John McClure, the vice president of the company, was really hot to sign the group and Murray told him and Clive we were really dumb and going nowhere in reverse.

Anyway, we got another demo, another really killer hard rock one which had a few songs we included on our first LP. Murray decided this stuff was hot because he recognized the great force in the coming year would be heavy metal. Murray called me up at 3 a.m. and told me Clive wanted to sign the group and I had to negotiate for them. They made me go which I didn't want to do at all. And I also made a deal with Warners which we managed to get out of.

With a new contract, the time came for a new name so the Stalk Forrest Group became The Blue Oyster Cult, an excerpt from a song Pearlman had composed. To date they've had two albums under the title and a steadily increasing reputation. Columbia signed the band for $175,000 and haven't gone past 175 on the record charts, a soft spot with the band.

"It's very interesting, how come a record which sells 20,000 a month doesn't get on the charts. We're a very clean group, no drug-ola or pay-ola, and I'm willing to bet we've sold every bit as many albums as Joe Walsh has. Columbia apparently just does not know how to manipulate the charts - they're not competing in that respect. Promoters survey the charts before they book gigs. It's been hurting us."

Their last album took a schizo/paranoia/political stance everybody was hoping the group would lay to wax. "We've always been known for being a bit forthright. We came up with the Tyranny & Mutation concept ourselves in a strange way. The original title for the album was The Red & The Black. Pearlman was writing a lot of songs featuring songs about the black and the red. Meth as the black and seconal as the red." "I've never seen black meth" Bouchard retorted. "I did," Pearlman snapped. "They were diet pills. Helen Reddy takes 'em."

"Yeah, anyway," Bloom continued, "Tyranny & Mutation is a record conceived as an injection and I don't think anyone has ever done that before."

"Our next record is a move in a broader sense," Bouchard moved. "This one was a bit narrow and the first was... it tried to accomplish too much. This one is narrow harmonically. The next will have far more harmonies - but it won't be no Crosby, Stills & Nash."

The titles for their up-coming double LP read like the score to a science fiction conglomerate drama/thriller: "'Mommy' is by R. Meltzer and we're thinking of which Australian girl to dedicate it to, 'Harvester of Eyes' comes next followed by 'Cagey Creaton' [sic], 'Dominance and Submission' by Sandy, 'Shot While Trying to Escape', which is our first blues number and was influenced by Humphrey Bogart, 'Flaming Telepaths', 'ME-262', 'Career of Evil' by Patti Smith, 'Come Ladies Fish and Gentlemen', about the Blue Oyster Cult, 'After the Kiss' which runs into 'Blackcap' and then 'Captain's Tongue'.

The BOC were in L.A. for their West Coast debut which they performed at the Hollywood Palladium as opening group for Mott the Hoople and Joe Walsh. Although before their performance they were not sure of their reputation or popularity in L.A., "It was great," Pearlman told me after the show. For their encore they performed, very fittingly, "Borne to be Wild" [sic] the first rock song (by Steppenwolf) to include the phrase "heavy metal thunder."

Yes, the Blue Oyster Cult are without any doubt heavy metal and, moreover, the best example of the art there is. However, their metal mania doers not compare with the mindless grind so queerly perpetuated by the likes of Black Sabbath or Slade.

"We don't go no writing no love songs," the leather-bound lead guitarist, Buck Dharma said. "There's too many of 'em. Everybody is doing love songs. I sing 'em to my girlfriend, but they've been done so much, unless you come up with something just totally unique it would be a waste. Like we did "She's as Beautiful as a Big Foot" [sic] and thought that was unique enough to carry off.

We did one about an experimental scientist who induces his girl to take a drug with him and she never returned from her land of imagination and fantasy. It's a real, love-sick tragedy.

But we like to go beyond realms, almost take into the stage of space age shock, ya know? Some of the real sickies might take our songs to heart, I mean, there is paranoia in the air and we're aware of it and we may reflect it in our work. But I mean, The Rolling Stones act like degenerates... ya know? And they sell more records than anyone else around today. Where does that leave rock and roll except maybe to retch on itself. If you can't count on the Stones... man, forget it. The Blue Oyster Cult are real. They're as real as the street."

Danny Sugerman || LA Free Press

Cult Heroes

NEW YORK: They say that heavy rock is on the decline and it's become fashionable to put down bands whose music is based on a series of riffs and repetitive time signatures.

But they're wrong. This particular brand of basic rock is not in a decline but maintaining a high and steady popularity, and is only unfashionable in the "holier than thou" circles within the rock business.

Black Sabbath, the archetypal perpetraters of heavy metal music, are as strong as ever; Grand Funk, mellowed slightly with the departure of Terry Knight, are still selling albums at the phenomenal rate they did when they sold out Shea Stadium, and Deep Purple's absence from the concert circuit in America add mystery quality to the group rather than diminishing their popularity.

Also - and possibly more significantly - there's a new wave of heavy metal bands on the way up, and the one most likely to wear the solid iron crown of heavy metal magnificence is a New York outfit called Blue Oyster Cult, who combine raw, riffy rock with a style and image that flirts loosely with the evils of the occult.

It seems significant, then, that on meeting their manager the other day he was carrying under his arm an album of Nazi war hymns which contained several tracks of hysterical cheering as crowds listened to the oration of Adolf.

Stuff, explained the manager, to be used on the group's third album, which will be released in May.

Blue Oyster Cult's manager and guiding light is Sandy Pearlman, who was a well-known rock critic in New York until he discovered Blue Oyster and fashioned their image. He also writes most of their lyrics and produces their albums.

Pearlman is a great believer in heavy metal. He says he actually invented the term when he was a writer and his favourite band in the world is Black Sabbath, BOC excepting of course.

He's an eloquent spokesman, and as the musicians were out of town it seemed that the best way to dig into BOC was to talk to Pearlman himself.

Cult are Donald Roeser (guitar), Eric Bloom (vocals), Allan Lanier (keyboard and rhythm guitar) and brothers Albert (drums) and Joe (bass) Bouchard. They used to be called Soft White Underbelly.

"One day in 1967 I was driving down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and I thought of the name Soft White Underbelly and decided it would make a great name for a group, so I went out and found one.

"I'll pause here for a moment to consider. Most, if not all, groups get together and then think of a name. Here we had the name first and no band, an interesting switch around but one which lends itself to the assumption that the group was formed with a specific purpose in mind. Rather like the Monkees, but on a totally different musical level.

"Three members of what is now Blue Oyster Cult were in the Soft White Underbelly," continued Pearlman. "That is, Donald, Albert and Allan, and we signed a contract with Elektra and made an album which never came out.

"After that the then lead singer left because he wasn't good enough, and we made a new record which again was never put out. Elektra own that record and I think maybe they'll stick it out now as David Geffen is not likely to sit on anything that can make money."

In 1970 the band left Elektra after what appears to have been an unsatisfactory relationship. About the same time Eric Bloom joined along with Allan's brother Joe and a year later they signed with CBS, changing their name to Blue Oyster Cult.

"At the time I had written a song called 'Blue Oyster Cult' and it seemed like a better name for a group than for a song, says Pearlman, (that particular song, incidentally, was never recorded at the time but it appears on their new album, re-titled 'Sub Human').

Since then Blue Oyster Cult have trod the boards all around the USA, gradually building a reputation as hard, leather-clad rockers whose sets never let up from, the grinding riffs of song after song.

They've put out a couple of albums, neither of which they appear to be overjoyed with, but this third release, recorded, almost "live" in the studio is their best so far, according to Pearlman.

Both their albums have sold around 200,000 each, and are still selling, but these figures go over a long period, which is why they've never figured in the charts to any great extent. They're also very careful about studio costs. Pearlman estimates that the three albums have cost only 50,000 dollars to make - chicken feed by most rock standards.

And the group has had a helping hand from some of the bigger American outfits, who have used them as a support act on tours of the large venues in the states. "They did a tour with Alice Cooper who, at that time, was into music rather than a show and I considered them to be the leading heavy metal band in the world then," says Pearlman. "Then we went out with the Allman Brothers and Black Sabbath. We are very grateful to both these groups for helping us.

"I consider Black Sabbath to be the most original group of the seventies, providing music for an audience that I would call the anarchistic teens. Grand Funk did it, too, but that was an example of management handling rather than music.

"Blue Oyster Cult," says Pearlman with a certain degree of honesty, "are like an accessory to their equipment. A lot of kids come to see us not because of the music but because of the high energy level of the show. I would say we're just halfway between Alice and the Allman Brothers.

"And," he maintains, "Blue Oyster Cult are unique as they are the only heavy metal band whose lyrics can be discussed. Most of the lyrics, apart from those I do myself, are written by Richard Meltzer and Patti Smith."

Meltzer is another rock critic and Smith is a poet who appears at New York rock clubs.

"I would say that the groups which have had the most influence on Blue Oyster Cult are the Yardbirds, Doors and Black Sabbath. A lot of the basics were derived from Sabbath. But many people have compared us to the Doors too." They used to include the Yardbirds' 'I Ain't Got You' in the set, although they've dropped it now.

Blue Oyster Cult had wanted to come over to England this month but various circumstances have prevented it.

"We won't be able to come to England until much later this year because Columbia want us to be here to promote the new album when its released. Maybe in the fall or late summer we'll be there."

Chris Charlesworth || Melody Maker

Blue Oyster Cult/Black Oak Arkansas

THIRD TIME down 52nd and 6th, and this guy from The Process is still trying to accost you with his pamphlets and spectre-of-doom rap.

Of course he's an absolute rank amateur at it, even though he's wearing the regulation uniform - blue serge jacket, jackboots and appropriate emblem (these days they leave the cowls and wolfhounds back at the mission-hall) and looks just the sort of character they'd use on the Perry Mason show or the Mod Squad to represent just such a potentially dangerous imp - but it's still an inconvenience, particularly when you're just looking around to get hold of a new copy of Rolling Stone .

First time down you try and ignore his spluttered bilge, second time you mutter some incoherencies, third time he starts up with his "Do you believe in the extent of your doom within the pattern of mankind's... " and you snap back with an appropriately malevolent "Ah screw off!" which thrills him no end, seeing as all these religioso perverts must get off on the proverbial negative recharge.

Hey, I always thought all these nuts by-passed the Big Apple completely in favour of a truly fertile stamping ground like the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, but it appears that there are markets everywhere in the States - even in the Mid-west, where everyone just used to take downers and fall over.

Maybe it's all to do with the new Quaalude paucity which appears to have hit the States, but then again the roots have always been there when you consider how America was the only place to take the whole moronic Black Sabbath "Mancunian bricklayers turned prophets of paranoid liquidation" number way beyond its idiot dancing implications into the heady realms of serious cosmic visionary phenomena.

Folk like Detroit punk-sage Lester Bangs are still biting their lip after prophesying all manner of apocalyptic destruction that would follow in the wake of the Sabbath's media crunching tactics of a year or so back. The audiences simply concurred by symbolically passing out and laying rigid thoughout every show.

"I remember seeing one Sabbath show on Staten Island where the entire audience was asleep, they were so sodden with downs. You could, y'know, smell the decay."

Hmm. interesting, that, specially when it comes from the parched lips of one Sandy Pearlman, the first metaphysical (sic) rock critic ever and the eminence grise of America's currently heaviest-boogie beasts - the cataclysmic Blue Oyster Cull from Long Island. N.Y.

"The thing about The Blue Oyster Cult that - y'know - set them apart from y'know - the rest is that the spectre of the group superceded everything else - the material or the potential virtuosity or whatever. We started off with a vision which incorporated a - y'know... uh... feverish, demented sound, coupled with very outre lyrics.

"Y'see, my thing about rock has always been set in the belief that there should be complete correlation in the way you affect consciousness and the way you intend to affect consciousness in the first place... i.e. y'know - that form should succeed in expressing function. Thai's why The Doors are the best rock group there has ever been.

"Morrison's preoccupations - y'know, and Sabbath's - I'd say The Doors and Black Sabbath are the two bands that have inspired and actively influenced The Blue Oyster Cult.

"The Sabbath - yeah. I know they're naive but - y'know - no one has been able to impart that 'spectre of doom' thing as well as them, like on a song such as 'War Pigs' - I mean - y'know - what could be a more naive precept? - It's like 'Eve of Destruction', except more of a realistic desperation thing.

"The Black Sabbath - uh - oeuvre - works -... y'know." WHATEVER YOU SAY bub.

Actually the story of how there came to be such a band as The Blue Oyster Cult in the first place is set within many strange twists and turns, starting with the academic lunacy perpetrated by Pearlman and legend-in-his-own-time writer and profesional alcoholic R. Meltzer at The House On The Hill in Stoneybrook College - "the Berkeley of the East."

"Meltzer and I started this little game back in '63 - the Spectoroid era, y'know - where we would pick up on something like 'My Boyfriend's Back' and say, Well, 'My Boyfriend's Back' – now that is a restatement of Aeschylus's 'Elektra'... "

And from such humble roots the stately tradition of rock criticism was started. More or less.

Pearlman's metaphysical retchings on such as The Byrds and Love, printed in Crawdaddy, are quaint artifacts of an era, if nothing else, and the tradition was broken only when he and Meltzer met up with some random musicians whom he immediately transformed into The Soft While Underbelly.

The S.W.U. ended up making two albums for Elektra which were never released and slunk away to return as the morosely machoid Blue Oyster Cult in 1971. Most of the band fall into the S/M greaser category with midget guitarist Buck Dharma the virtuoso musician and only third guitarist Alan Lanier possessing any kind of physical aestheticism.

The band don't talk too much, preferring to allow Pearlman to verbalise on their behalf, if only to outline the collective at work on the B.O.C. heavy-metal vision. There are, for example, no less than four lyricists at hand supplying the band with all manner of crazed verse - bassist Joe Bouchard, the remarkable N.Y. poetess Patti Smith, the ubiquitous R. Meltzer (the only time I ever encountered Meltzer was at a Little Feat press reception upstairs in Max's Kansas City where he held the floor urinating into his wine-glass and osmozing the worst stench of body-odour imaginable) - and of course Pearlman, who comes on like the archetypal Babylon academic/speed-freak complete with shades and manic raps.

"Hey, I invented the term "Heavy metal' - did you know that? I was the first writer to use it. I was a scientist at college - graduated with tons of awards - and I used the terminology in my articles. I first used the phrase in a Byrds review in '67. That was before the 'Heavy metal thunder' line in 'Born to Be Wild', even."

Yeah, but - uh - what about a certain William Burroughs who used the term a few years prior to that in one of his crazed sprawling epics? But Pearlman has no time for Burroughs - "He doesn't have the transcendental concern of someone like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky" - and he goes on to pour forth the names of masses of esoteric Rusian novelists who have inspired him even spreading out into realms of transparently trivial detail to document his influences:

"I'll tell you one writer who - uh - I think had some great bursts of creativity and that was Pynchon. Like that statement uh - y'know - "There is no such thing as coincidence'. Man, what a statement! What a concept!"

THE CONCEPT crops up in the mental process of one Desdenova whom Pearlman has appointed the hero and narrator or the B.O.C.'s next album Secret Treaties .

All the lyrics appear in the first person and even though Messieurdames Smith, Meltzer and Bouchard have all been involved in the words, a linear concept has been constructed to fall in line with Pearlman's preoccupations.

"Desdenova possesses starry wisdom. That's from Lovecraft, y'know - I just liked the term and he's made a secret treaty with the ambassadors of Plutonia... "

Within this plot are worked such gems as Patti Smith's 'Career of Evil', Meltzer's 'Cagey Cretans' (formerly 'Bark in the Sun'), and 'Harvester of Eyes'/'Mystic Stump'. - plus Pearlman's 'Astronomy', 'Subhuman', 'A Concentration Camp for Dogs Was Recently Located In New Jersey' and 'ME 262' a paean to the Nazi jet fighter plane.

"Yeah, we've cut out the old Yardbirds' 'Aint Got No-one' onstage and now we finish off with 'Buck's Boogie', 'Cities On Flame With Rock & Roll' and ME 262'. No one can stand it! Devastating!

"Oh yeah, we still do 'Born To Be Wild' - we're thinking of working up 'Venus' y'know, the old Shocking Blue song. Boy, what a great metaphysical number!

"I mean, our premise for creating is to reach the most feverish point of expression possible. Like, I think of us in a way as a crazed, amphetamized... y'know... heavy-metal. demonic... y'know... possessed, preoccupied... y'know... version of Yes!

"Like, Tyranny and Mutation is the inverse or obverse of Close to the Edge Y'know'?"

SORT OF Sandy, but anyway now's as good a time as any to skip the murk pit meanderings and zoom in a while on the whiter than white macrobiotic landscapes frequented by Yes, who sold out lavish, bulbous Madison Square Gardens for two solid nights without any difficulty whatsoever.

And rightly so, one would think, seeing as the band appear to be winning every pop poll on the board at the moment - which comes as no real surprise when one realises that Yes fans would automatically be the kind of folk who'd spend their entire lives filling out such forms.

It's so easy to tear down Yes at the moment, what with that diabolical double album just released and Rick Wakeman's ulcers, that one almost feels inclined to jump to their defence.

Still, they stalked onstage in front of what must have been the cleanest bunch of kids ever grouped together for a rock concert so far in the '70s (no downers in this audience, even though the guy sitting behind me suffered from chronic halitosis and the outer circle smelt of a mixture of booze and vomit). Steve Howe looks like a hip camel-trader: Chris Squire, painfully thin and lanky, is dressed like one of Mott the Hoople; Rick Wakeman apppears like one of The Ugly Sisters in a third rate pantomime; and of course there's Jon Anderson who stands like a puppet in Mahavishnoid white, singing like Wee Georgie Wood gone spiritual.

And naturally they're superb musically - Howe makes most other guitarists sound like they have stumps for arms while rhythm section Squire and Alan White make all the right noises. Even Wakeman is kept in check throughout, but it's somehow all too precious to be stomached in one sitting but to mention the fact that two hours of Topographic Oceans must rate as one of the most stiflingly tedious musical exercises ever to be perpetrated on an audience.

Yes could take a lesson or two on how to project their own brand of cosmic oatmeal by studying the tactics of Arkansas hillbilly degenerates, Black Oak Arkansas, the last truly great bad rock band who believe in throwing in some grits with their metaphysics.

Take their first album where, on one track the lead singer Jim "Dandy" Mangrum growls in a voice not unreminiscent of Tommy Brace's, about existentialism and the Kharmic forces pulling him asunder - climaxing with the sound of one of the boys in the band pissing into a bucket recorded in stereo .

After such an auspicious opening the only way for this band was to go down, which they did with a series of albums so quintessentially tasteless and downright unlistenable that they have even surpassed previous gross-outs perpetrated by such stalwarts as Sam The Sham And The Pharoahs and Hot Poop.

To start with, the Black Oak Arkansas history is an epic unto itself - but let Jim Dandy (all shaggy blond hair and a face that looks like the Ozark Ploughing Community have held a furrowing contest over it every year since his birth) tell it in his own inimitable way:

"Ten hard years it's bin since we broke out. An it's bin hard for a country boy t' git out, y'know. We wuz suppressed - everybody wuz savin": "Git yo' hair cut and wipe that smile off yo' face' - an' that's why ah think suppressed folk kin relate t' our music. Bureaucracy don't allow fo' no change, whole world's crazy y'know - yo' gonna find yo' self on a dead end if you start thinkin' about logic."

Yo' durn tootin', Jim. But listen here, boy, climb off a the crackerbarrel a second and tell us folk the facts. Like how did you get all that equipment back then? Huh?

"We robbed a bunch o' schools an got busted fo' grand larceny. Dey called us hoodlums - they reckoned we wuz ransackin' the country, and we jes' laughed 'cos that weren't nuttin' but a crock o' shit, y'know. We wuz jes' hell raisin'. Grew up together, drinkin' beer.

"We're good-time boys, y'know. Anyway ah got an eight year suspended sentence and that's why us boys ain't bin able to get out to all you folk in Europe."

MEANWHILE BACK in the States, Black Oak set up in Los Angeles playing at a club in Topanga Canyon called The Corrall, which attracted all kinds of low-life including ex-surfers who came to throw beer-cans at each other and spill cheap Chablis all over themselves, and Kim Fowley who'd come down every Friday to check out the jail-bait.

Jim Dandy and the boys went down a treat there as one could well imagine what with the band playing in a constant amphetamized, shrieking treble underpinning Mangrum's gross raps about cosmic awareness and screwing chicks on mountain-tops and such-like.

Eventually Ahmet Ertegun signed them up and the band started heavy touring - ten months out of every year, the two other months being set aside for recording. After countless years on the road and five albums for Atlantic, they are starting to break big - the first real break-through coming via a fairly dire hit single re-working of LaVerne Baker's old 'Jim Dandy' number.

Meanwhile they've set up their own community in the hills of Arkansas.

"We got that land up there. We're high on the hawg, right enough - sheeit - and we got this here teepee that's kind of a lodge meetin' place so's we can go in an' get ripped out of our heads, talk about whatever we lahk to talk about. It's lahk a dream t' us."

Jim Dandy never misses a chance to pull out a quick piece of homespun philosophizing from any given subject or situation you care to bring up.

"We believe in life an' pro-life an' we believe that logic has done taken over its master and become un-logical. We are simple Nature Boys and that's the way of life. Shouldn't have ta rape Mother Nature an' yo, shouldn't have to rape a woman. Luh-ove should come easy."

Great. Jim, but...

"An we're an example of it. Yo' got to know what yo' want to be and what yo' want to do 'cos folk'll turn you every way 'cept loose. Ah knew what ah wanted to be and that's why ah'm livin' on the hill. That's why mah raps are important 'cos ah aim to inspire.

"We don't want no dead air in our sets - we want folks to know that they're not alone - whether they're preacher, teacher or outlaw. Everyone feels so insecure and ah'm sayin' 'Hey take it lightheartedly fellas'... "

Jeezus, doesn't he go on?

"... And ah can't help but take it light-heartedly when people's throwin' bras up onstage."

So how do you equate all this metaphysical muck-spreading with the horny stunts you pull on-stage, huh. Jim?

"Huh - well, you'll have to point that one out to me, bro'."

Y'know, the horny stuff like beating a tambourine against your crotch and jacking off with a washboard.

"Oh horny! Sheeit ah thought yo' said 'corny'. Well, there's a spiritual side t' things and there's sex and bro' that's the common dee nominator! There's sex and perversion and 'dem perverts is jes' confused folk and dey should be allowed to do what they lahk with folk who wan' ta do it with 'em"

JUST AT THAT moment two other members of Black Oak stalk in - guitarist "Goober" and "Burley" and drummer Tommy "Dork" (really) Aldridge.

"Hey, Jim," states Goober, a dour-faced soul with snot moustache, "d'ya see that chick flashing her all at the show las' night?"

"Sheeit, boys, ah was dee-ranged! There's this place where the spot-light blinds mah vision an' that's where she done it. An' ah heard tell she had the healthy bosom an' ah missed 'er."

"Sheeit, Jim, that's first time ah've had a naked go-go dancer standin' right there in front o' me."

"Wheew, I could tell Goober you wuz cookin', boy! Cookin' and a-stompin'!... Y'see, fella we wan' to show folk that they've no need to hold back on flashin' an that chick they're flashin' on, an there's no need to hold back what comes nat'ral.

And yet again Jim Dandy spirals off into the realms of pure Elmer Gantry cracker-barrel philosphizing.

The rest of the band sit around politely and listen. When he has to go to the toilet, one of the boys speaks up: "Sure is good we've got Jim t' explain all these complicated things for us."

THAT NIGHT at the Academy of Music on 14th Avenue, Jim Dandy isn't rapping too much. Just the token one for the wondrous cosmic 'Mutants of the Monster' and the dirty one for 'Hot Rod' - "This a here's called 'Hot Rod' an' ah'll give y'all a hint - it ain't abaht cars."

He staggers around the stage grimacing obscenely, rubbing his genital contours over skintight white satin pants, for the climax smashing up his washboard and handling out the splinters to the audience.

After the show he's more wired than ever:

"Folks listen ta me 'cos they reckon they knows me. Ah. talks to 'em man t' man."

Yessiree bob - you a Trickey Dicky. Jim Dandy for President of the United States, y'all!

Nick Kent || NME

That's Right, Another Bunch Of Neo-Fascist Heavies

"We're pain, we're steel, we're a plot of knives... we're obsessed with the technology of matter... our symbol is a swastika substitute... "

TO UNDERSTAND Blue Öyster Cult you've first got to know about Sandy Pearlman, who, together with Murray Krugman, manages the group. Pearlman wasn't always a manager. Before he carved a name for himself writing for Crawdaddy (add gook and all that) he'd been in a group called The Fount. Nothing too hot and he knew it. So, seeing as how management grabbed his fancy more, he signed a squad of local brats, fresh from college, and christened them The Cows, a name they weren't that in love, with:

"It was in summer '67 and I walked into Stoneybrook University. Some of the, uh, weirder students were jamming and wow, they were incredible."

They were also right about The Cows so he changed it to Soft White Underbelly ("I thought of that in the car, and everyone was happier"). Everyone happened to be Donald Roeser, Albert Bouchard, Andrew Winters and Allan 'Dutch' Lanier. They peddled whatever they were up to in places as lucrative as the Cafe A Go Go and one day R. Meltzer (another journalist) was allowed to come on stage and scream obscenities at the audience, whether they'd paid or not.

That was the beginning of another beautiful relationship.

On keyboards the S.W.U. had a guy called John Wiesenthal who'd taught Jackson Browne how to play guitar. No one held that against him but they didn't like his, organ-playing much and turned off his amp to prove it.

As they'd played some Crawdaddy gigs alongside C. J. Fish, it was decided that-a singer wouldn't be a bad idea. Choice fell on Les Braunstein.

"A complete dork whose big advantage lay in owning a van," claims Pearlman. "When we got into the studios he couldn't sing 'cos he was too scared." He did have a van though.

Meanwhile Lanier was doing time in the U.S. army. He couldn't queer out and eventually had to overdose to persuade the medics he was a sick man. Of course he wasn't. The only thing wrong with Dutch was a slight fondness for the women but usually none of the group did too much of anything illegal. Ordinary folk really, and small.

Braunstein was rapidly getting on everybody's nerves, lording it over the rest. His ego boosted several bonus points when Jac Holzman (then head of Elektra) came to see them play at The Electric Circus and The Hotel Diplomat. Seems like terminal psychosis had set in because he actually thought Les was the new Morrison. "At that time The Doors were the biggest American band and Elektra was the most avant-garde label. But they were getting worried cos The Doors weren't writing enough songs. Holzman thought Braunstein was a quasi Jim Morrison."

Braunstein fancied he could write cosmo poetry and yelled out some nonsense about poking his eyes out at the end of every set. It was all drivel of course. Not that that was much excuse, who needed another Jim when Elektra were furious the old one hadn't snuffed it yet?

"First time they tried to cut an album," claims Pearlman, "Braunstein cocked up the deal by adding miscellaneous instruments that he figured would jolt along the proceedings." Producer Pete Siegel despaired and they called it off for a time. "The album was absolutely unreleasable so that was it."

Ironically, things looked up when Les introduced his old high school buddy Eric "Manny" Bloom to them. "Bloom became the road manager. He was called the 'Rock King Of The Finger Lakes', which is upstate New York." He ran illicit pills and stills for the Long Island mob and thus had proper punk credentials. One night while onion-head was asleep they auditioned Eric and that was curtains for Holzman's prodigal.

THE BEST regular gig around this time for this bunch was at the House On The Hill, where they maintained a staunch following. In '69 they played the 4th July date at the Fillmore, bottom to Jethro Tull and Jeff Beck. Not too much applause. Due to the atrocious reviews Circus and others graced them with, Pearlman decided it might be name-changing time again, so he pulled on his sleeping cap and went into a daze. After a week they'd come up with dozens of goodies like: The Santos Sisters, The Knife-wielding Scumbag and, best of all, Eric's 1-2-3 Black Light. In a moment of extreme dumbness they decided on Oaxaca, after the town in Mexico, which nobody could spell let alone pronounce. "That was no good but eventually I decided on Stalk-Forrest, after a plate of mushrooms I saw in a Chinese restaurant."

Andrew Winters, the bassist left in disgust but lived up to the derogation by shuffling back when they got to do the second album. Jay Lee produced not too successfully but the band were dynamite and the session was superb by all accounts.

"Yeah, that second album is an absolute highlight of the whole psychedelic era but Holzman was still sulking about Les, therefore no release." Only a single came out, 'What Is Quicksand?'/'Arthur Comics' – and a mere 200 copies at that.

BY NOW Eric didn't answer to "Manny" anymore and Donald Roeser preferred Buck Dharma, or Donald Buck on account of his protruding teeth. Winter's 'Green' had become extended to 'St. Cecilia'.

Meltzer says: "It's sort of like Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead, and all that acid, touches of the 'fifties too, really good. Should have been the new national anthem but it's still in the vaults."

Pearlman finally decided that maybe he ought to put his rock mentor reputation to work. He was getting fed up, what with most of the musicians stuffing themselves stupid on all manner of psychedelic sweeties and boring the pants off their audiences to boot. So guess what he does? Changes the name and the group. Winters got the bullet and Joe Bouchard (Albert's brother) was brought in to hump bass, sing, whatever gets him off. Sandy hit on The Blue Oyster Cult after a song he'd written. "They didn't like it much but it stuck."

So the Cult was born and they are looking for a kind company. Columbia hummed and ha'd about signing them before staff member Murray "the K" Krugman insisted. Actually Murray is quite a character and he'd just brought out a bootleg of their third live concert.

Pearlman had worked a new image on them, tough 'n' nasty, and had branded them the original heavy metal group (which is true). The first album got released and critics creamed with delight. The thrills and frills were in the right place and there wasn't a track that didn't send your Dansette haywire (C.B.S., in their infinite wisdom contrived to get a few names and titles wrong – but no matter).

Pearlman says of the first album: "It's better than Killer but not as good as Master Of Reality." His own writing obsessions, they show fixations with dogs and roses (as motifs of death or brooding sexuality), sea-creatures with anthropomorphic tendencies and a space populated by unnatural zombies. These elements are mixed in with characters who act as catalysts. Predominant amongst these is Susy who starts off getting gangbanged in 'Before The Kiss A Redcap' and never looks back.

No lyric sheet and there never will be: "I'm fascinated by the accidental discovery Black Sabbath have made of their audience's consciousness. We're more self-conscious. Our literary influences couldn't be much less naive. Rimbaud, Dada, H. P. Lovecraft and yer standard assortment of doomo writers i.e. turn-of-the-century Russian and German. Our songs are a Fantasy Distillation Of Reality."

He's pretty pleased with this phrase and repeats it several times.

"Our next studio album is built around a song cycle. It's about a child who grew up in New Hampshire and discovers he has the ability to reconcile the imagined with reality. There's no gap between his imagination and his ability to realise it. He can accomplish what he imagines and imagine what he's going to accomplish.

"Secret Treaties began the concept with the Desdanova theme. The new thing is called 'The Soft Doctrines Of Imaginos'. See, I like to use naive, densely stupid terms. It's a trick of some Russia literature to totally obliterate metaphors. Anyway, Desdanova is a student at Braun University in Providence who lives there to be close to Lovecraft. He's a Frankenstein figure who achieves through research what Imaginos understood instinctively, he forms the axiom. Desdanova appears in 'Astronomy' and some of the songs yet to come out."

That last mentioned track is the stunningly beautiful number that closes Secret Treaties . Sandy explains the story and some of those already mentioned symbols: "It's New Year's Eve and Desdanova walks into the Four Winds Bar" (an actual joint on Atlantic Beach). "He plays this game with two girls which has to be completed in the six hours from midnight to dawn cos he can't stand the light.

"It's so sort of... corrosive.

"There's a parallel with the rose which is similarly over-fulfilled, a symbol of over-ripeness and decadence. The dog is Susy's familiar and the carrier of starry wisdom from the actual dogstar. Lovecraft had this term 'starry wisdom cult' which was so apt I had to use it."

On 'Dominance and Submission' some of these inter-related themes resurface: "In 1963 I was being driven back from a New Year's Eve party when The Beatles came over the airwaves for the first time. It seemed so revolutionary in terms of consciousness that what is represented was a new factor in mass culture and '63 was the watershed. The song reflects the parallelism between revolutionary consciousness in the mass and how it affects the individual. The sublimated heat of rock 'n' roll, so, long suppressed, and driven underground, was being revealed and no one could stop it."

The offspring of this rising phenomenon were traced by Pearlman's intimate knowledge of the Altamont scene in which he grafted the lowdown on the local bike boys. Hells Angels, y'know. The Forbidden Chapter. Bloom fits the part perfectly, so it's "Clear the road m'bully boys and let some thunder pass" – all into leather togs with great shots of them posing (slouching) in their gear, flexing chains and peering thru' satanic shades. The first properly-recorded testament to that is 'Transmaniacon M.C.' – the motor cycle club that crosses the threshold of sanity. It's the nearest any song could get to a stab in the back:

"We're pain, we're steel, a plot of knives, we're Transmaniacon M.C."

Certain sensitive souls started taking exception to their stage act and accusations of fascist overtones and Nazi deification were bandied around like flies on a cow pat. Sandy was secretly delighted but the group weren't too thrilled.

Eric Bloom: "Well I gotta admit we don't write no love songs. There's too many of them. Everybody is doing love songs. I mean we like 'em, I sing them to my girlfriend! But they've been overdone. We like to go beyond emotional realms. Almost into the state of space-age shock, ya know? Some of the real sickies may take them to heart, I suppose they should. I mean there's a primal paranoia in the air and we're aware of it so we do and can't help but reflect it in our work." He means it too.

Their pet sign isn't to do with fylfots or swastikas, which are lucky symbols of eternity. No. Their logo is the Greek symbol for chaos and their colours are stark and stripped of all extraneous sentiment. "Nazism is a style of art that just happened to flower in Germany after the Weimar Republic. Of course we're appealing to that as a source of imagery but it existed before. People see what they want to see.

"We mine the vein created by Nazi artists. The Doors did that, The Velvet Underground certainly did and it'll be done again. We're more obsessed with the technology of the matter. We utilise the symbols in alchemy like lead, the most debased metal. Saturn and the Greek symbol also have the same chaotic associations. It's become a swastika substitute, not as old but old enough to have a venerable history.

"Heh heh.

"We're just come up with successful visual summations of the concept. Too successful for some people."

IN AMERICA right now The Oyster Cult are on the verge of becoming the monster band they ought to be. "We're not that big in New York. Nothing new happens here cos they're overkilled. We're huge everywhere else, particularly California where we get most airplay."

After pulling out of two European tours it now looks like they have pulled out of their third, yet reaction to their live shows is beyond compare. A Blue Oyster Cult audience is like no other: "Hysteria. Never fails. It is the most foolproof show I've ever seen. It's incredible to contemplate. The albums are nothing compared to the shows."

To correlate the two a live double album is soon to be released. Tying in with their sado-masochistic aura it's entitled On Yer Feet Or On Yer Knees .

"We wanted to outdo Live At Leeds and we did. It makes that look like weak tea. It includes The Yardbirds' 'Ain't Got You' which we call 'Maserati G.T.', a nine minute version. Also 'Born To Be Wild' and 'M.E.262' with the five guitars. That's twice as loud as anything ever put on record. It's as loud as you can get without losing trackability. Each member of the group has a rebuilt guitar. Like Eric's Stun Guitar has literally a ton of gadgets."

People trying to denigrate them tend to point to their all being on the physically short side. Most of them clock in at around five six and one of them (I won't tell you who) is a mere five two. When you're that small you have to be hard, or a good talker. A rival described them as "gremlin rock" but he'll be out of hospital soon.

Buck Dharma is the guitarist, his white suit standing out in direct contrast to the others' studied and studded greaser flash. As axeman he's unique, master of any style from soft shoe 'Redeemed' to the dripping venom of 'Cagey Cretins' or 'Harvester Of Eyes'. Sometimes he shows off his speed fingering but when you're that good who cares?

You don't have to accept Pearlman's interpretations as blueprints for action. They are fascinating, crazed and intellectual but in a spectacular sense. Quite an effective marriage of SE paperback mythology and obscurist Eastern European metaphysics. Maybe it is reactionary but I wouldn't let that give you too many sleepless nights.

At their best, the Blue Oyster Cult define the meaning of rock 'n' roll better than any other band in the ring. On your feet or on your knees?

Max Bell || NME

BOC - Tyrannize the Mutants with On Your Feet or on Your Knees
with a special introduction by Dr Richie Benway

The way I produce the Blue Oyster Cult is to ask a series of questions about the performance. Then, if the answers I get aren't the ones I expect, the musicians are punished." Thus spake Murray Krugman, on how he, in partnership with Sandy Pearlman, produces the B.0.C., leatheroid idols to a generation.

The Blue Oyster Cult were originally formed in the late 60's as the Soft White Underbelly. "I walked into this room at Stonybrook," recounts Pearlman, "and this band with Allen [Lanier], Albert [Bouchard] and Buck Dharma were playing mystagogic music. If they'd been playing Grateful Dead country swill or the blues, I would have walked out of the room and never come back."

The Underbelly managed to wangle a contract with Elektra in 1969 after a memorable gig at the Electric Circus. Jac Holzman at the time thought the group, which then included Les Bronstein on vocals, would become the next Doors. But Bronstein couldn't sing other people's songs, only his own. So that album was never finished.

A year later, after Bronstein had been replaced with Eric Bloom, they made a second album for Elektra, "A good psychedelic record," says Pearlman, "but the company didn't want to waste the vinyl on pressing it." Two-hundred copies (mostly tests and demos) were made, and highly prized by those fortunate enough to get one.

"After that," says Albert Bouchard, the shortest guy in the group and the only one with a drooping moustache, "we went to the mattresses, playing Beatles and Stones numbers in Pennsylvania coal towns. We got the contract with Columbia just in time. We were going to break up because we were always running in the red."

"Artists," says Pearlman, popping Vitamin C pills, "provide models for history. If art can inspire transcendental activities, can encourage people to go beyond themselves, be it through violence, music, or whatever, that's its job. The purpose of art and artists is to provide transcendental models for history, to inspire people to go beyond themselves. Even if you're bashing your head against a wall trying to get through it, you're still trying, and that's what's important."

The Cult themselves don't worry too much about the purposes their rock 'n roll mania is being put to. Or as Allen Lanier puts it at the end of an interview in the Cult's white house in Great Neck, which looks out onto a drydock yard full of luxury yachts, "Let's go downstairs and boogie."

The first Blue Oyster Cult album, still regarded by many aficionados as their supreme achievement, included one cut from their demo session for Columbia.

"We couldn't improve on our demo version of "Then Came The Last Days Of May," says Pearlman, who played the touch of harmonica that fills out the song's horrific conclusion about the death of two big time dope dealers in the Mexican desert.

"Cities On Flame With Rock 'n Roll," one of the Cult's most enduring live showpieces was designed as a "sleazy teenage epic," according to Pearlman, a former rock critic who in addition to managing and co-producing the Cult, writes many of their lyrics. "I wanted to write a teenage anthem using real tawdry language, and my words, with the music Albert Bouchard wrote, really works exactly as I intended it to."

Tyranny And Mutation, the Cult's much-anticipated second album, was the first to really make an impression on the record-buying public, selling nearly 100,000 copies in less than six months.

"For a long time," says Pearlman, wearing his ever-present dark glasses although the sun had long since gone down, "we couldn't get a gig in New York, which is our home turf, because the promoters won't put you on if you don't have an album in the Top 50. We've done a lot of playing in the South. They love us, which is great, because you've got to be a really good musician to make it down there. If the kids don't like you or think you're jiving, they don't just boo. They take you out to the parking lot and vamp on you."

Tyranny And Mutation is the Cult's most produced album, incorporating synthesizers (played by Eric 'Manny' Bloom) and studio phasing effects into the transitions between songs. Although Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman now regard the album as more of a learning experience than a complete suc- cess, Tyranny And Mutation contains a number of the Cult's most vicious, all-out blasts of heavy metal rock. "The Red And The Black," a revamped version of the first album's "I'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep," starts the album's first, (The Red) side with a searing explosion of raw power, Bloom and Buck Dharma's roaring twin guitar leads leading a band so hot and heavy that their legendary live recording of the song literally blew out radio speakers from coast to coast. "O.D.'d On Life Itself" follows, transmuting archetypal T. Rex and Chuck Berry riffs into an international heavy metal anthem. "Hot Rails To Hell," which should have been, and wasn't, the theme song for "The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three," was the Cult's first attempt at a single.

The Cult's third studio LP, Secret Treaties, contains in addition to the usual intergalactic epics like, "ME 262," and "Flaming Telepaths," poetess Patti Smith's chilling "Career Of Evil," a couple of songs written by the master of the monstrous nonsequiteur, Richard Meltzer, the long-time rock critic who has been thrown out of more press parties than any other man alive. His "Harvester Of Eyes" and "Cagey Cretins" are cannily nondirectional views of a world where fantasy and reality meet and kiss with redcaps on their tongues, tying the molecular chain together with a knot, off which even a plutonium meat cleaver would bounce like a plastic butter knife.

On Your Feet, Or On Your Knees (Columbia), the Cult's newest live album, is a stunning souvenir for those of their ever-growing audience too busy grinding their teeth to stumps in a drug-induced sleep to notice what's going on up on stage. If the studio albums have captured the natural cries of beasts from the Andromedean jungles in cages on Mars, Knees allows them to roam free in their native terrain. Favorite cuts include hours and hours of quintessential mindless boogie, welded into molten doses of "Subhuman," "ME 262," "Cities In Flames," "Harvester Of Eyes," and an orgasmic "Hot Rails To Hell." Introduced by the 12-octaved profundity of Carol Dodds and her yapping hell-hounds, there's no telling where the album ends.

The Cult's Eric Bloom met Circus Raves interviewer under a street lamp. The conversation began with New York's garment center.

Raves: Have you been to the garment center in San Francisco?

Bloom: I don't know. I had never been there before, which is kinda odd. Just never got out there. Bill Graham runs the town and sort of kept us from coming in there for a long time, because we're hardly flower-power people. I'm not putting him down. I'm just saying he's the promoter in charge and he'd rather have stuff like the Airplane.

Raves: Aren't there any heavy metal bands there?

Bloom: The town's just discovering hard rock. Here it is, three-and-a-half years after the inception of the group and we just played Frisco for the first time and we've played L.A. about five times. I like the weather in L.A. I sort of like the people, that Hollywood mystique. The glitter is not like trashy glitter like in New York. It was like warm weather glitter.

Raves: I didn't see any glitter.

Bloom: Where did you stay?

Raves: At a Holiday Inn in Hollywood.

Bloom: We stayed at the Continental Hyatt House. That's where all the groups stay. It's handy because the last time we were there I got calls from girls I had met five years ago, who had moved out to the coast and knew I was in a band and knew that that's where I'd be staying. If you're staying there they put it up: "Welcome Blue Oyster Cult," right on the marquee.

Raves: And there would be girls waiting for you in the lobby?

Bloom: Maybe, if Jimmy Page were there there would be lots of girls. But for us a couple of honies would show up. Chicks like that we avoid. It's a well known fact that if a big group is staying there there will be girls hanging out in the lobby. The last time we were in L.A., actually it was Long Beach, we stayed on the Queen Mary. We were playing just across the street, at the Long Beach Arena, which, by the way, was the biggest show we've played. It was like a Hollywood premiere with our logo flashing and spotlights and we sold out 15,000 seats.

Raves: I guess you're more psychologically up for a show that you're headlining, especially in or around Hollywood.

Bloom: Yeah, definitely. First of all, when we're headlining, we're the boss. Nobody's gonna tell us we can't use this or that. There's a lot of politics backstage. Like if there's a group after you they can say you can't use the mirror ball because they're gonna use the mirror ball. You can't use a smoke generator because they have a smoke generator.

Raves: I wanted to ask you something about your logo...

Bloom: Like, where is it coming from? The logo was actually laid on us by the guy who did the first two album covers. His name is Bill Gawlik, and it's always been in his art work. He's a crazed genius-artist.

Bloom: I was in the group at the tail end of the Underbelly years. The original singer of the Underbelly went on his way and I came in. After the Underbelly we had no real name because we had no jobs. Then we were Oaxaca. We made an album, sort of an avant garde album for Elektra, but Jac Holtzman didn't like it and it never got re- leased. So we stayed around for another year, staying alive by playing clubs and stuff like that, in Youngstown, Pa. and Scranton, Pa. under the name of the Stalk-Forrest Group.

Then we got on CBS by dint of some demos we did for a guy named David Lucas who saw us at a party. We actually got on the label by doing a live audition in a CBS conference room. The audition consisted of a room that was no longer than twenty feet long and ten feet across. We set up all our equipment in the back and we just played five songs. I guess we did good, because we were signed.

Raves: Did you change your name again for Clive Davis?

Bloom: Obviously Clive had to know who he was going to be listening to. He knew that some of us had been in Soft White Underbelly. He had heard of them, but we didn't want him to know that we had once been called Stalk-Forrest, because we had been rejected as Stalk-Forrest already.

Raves: You should've called selves the Clive Davis Cult.

Bloom: Actually, the name came up from Sandy Pearlman. He wrote what I guess you would call an epic poem called "Imaginos" and it was always Sandy's idea to make a conceptual album around "Tmaginos," using that idea as a lyric. One of the stanzas of poetry was called "Blue Oyster Cult," and we needed a name for the band fast. We had all kinds of other names for the band, but no one could agree so we told Sandy and Murray to go into a room by themselves and whatever they said it would be then that was what it would be. So they said, "We got it. Blue Oyster Cult." And we all said "ugh." started puking but we stuck by it.

Raves: How exactly did you get into the group?

Bloom: In the mid-sixties I was at Hobart College. At the same time, Albert Bouchard and Buck Dharma were at Clarkson College. They were engineering students, and Joe Bouchard, who's like a couple of years younger, was just starting at the Ithaca School of Music. Alan Lanier was at the Uni- versity of North Carolina. I kept playing up there for a number of years, until '68, in a group called Lost and Found, which was a bar band, and Albert and Buck Dharma moved down to Long Island and were sorta jamming around Stonybrook University where Buck Dharma lived, and Alan had dropped out of school also. So there was a whole bunch of people getting together to jam and one night Sandy Pearlman walked into this place called "The Place On The Hill," and heard Dharma and the guys playing and thought that this guy was amazing and wanted to get them together with Alan and some other guys who are no longer current.

Meanwhile, I was still playing in bars and booking other groups and doing all that stuff. So in '68 I decided to make my move from being the "Rock King" of the Finger Lakes and move down to New York and live a real life. So I moved down to Long Island and got a job at a booking agency that fell through. I went to work temporarily at Sam Ash Music Store in Hempstead and the Underbelly walked in, but I didn't recognize them, to buy amps. They saw a picture of my old group on the wall that they had heard about, The Lost and Found, and they got into talking about my old band. So I walked over to them and said, "You know some- thing about Lost and Found?" And they said they used to back up our lead singer. I asked them who their lead singer was and they said Les Bronstein and I said "I never backed up Les Bronstein." You see, Les had taken this attitude that he had moved out into the big time and my band was just an old bar band that backed him up, which was never true.

The other part of a fate that stepped in here was me and my ex-old lady were having Thanksgiving dinner together at a borrowed apartment and nobody knew where we were except my friend Jerry Wolf and he was like the only person in the world who knew where I was and about two hours later Les called to say his band needed a P.A., could I come down right away with my P.A.? He had just happened to talk to Wolf who was a mutual friend, and I said okay. So I came down with my P.A. and my truck and they were happy with the way I did the P.A. and everything and they made me the road manager the next week. That's when the whole band lived together at Great Neck. Richard Meltzer and his old lady and the whole band and their old ladies and about eight cats.

About four months later, May of '69, they fired Les and made me the lead singer. I went from the Holiday Inn Bar and Grill in Geneva, New York to the Fillmore East in less than a few months. The first gig I played with the band was a private party, some rich girl's coming out party, and they want- ed an underground band at the party so they could be very chic, so they called Elektra and asked them who the most underground happening band they had was. So they liked us and we played the gig.

Raves: Why did some people think you used Nazi emblems?

Bloom: I will categorically deny that anyone in the Blue Oyster Cult or anyone associated with B.O.C. are Nazis, have ever been Nazis or will ever be Nazis. We do not espouse any racial things, ethnic things or anything like that. It's sorta like a hoax. Supposedly someone at CBS, and I've never seen it, got a letter from the JDL objecting to our flags, which have our logo on it, saying how it's suggestive of the Nazi flag. So someone in publicity at CBS thought how cute this was and got it into the press how JDL protested Blue Oyster Cult. It got a positive reaction in certain places, but sort of backfired on us. But we had nothing to do with publicizing it in the first place. We didn't even know anything about the original letter until we read about it. It's a total hoax, JDL never protested any of our shows, never picketted our shows. It's just all false. We do not wear armbands or anything like that.

Raves: But you are into shock tactics though, ya?

Bloom: I mean we're very technologically oriented. That's why the first jet plane is on our album cover. Not because it has anything to do with Naziism, but because it was the first jet plane ever. We like to think of that cover as being mystical and weird and eerie rather than like, "these guys are Nazis."

Raves: Does what you're doing shock your parents?

Bloom: My mother finds it very hard to believe that I'm in a rock 'n roll band. You know the thing, "my son, the singer," she really doesn't get it. She doesn't believe I can make a living doing it.

Raves: Did you major in science when you were in school?

Bloom: I was a romance language major.

Raves: What was junior high school like?

Bloom: I went to Junior High School 216. George J. Ryan Junior High in Queens where I spent my early rock and roll formative years, just being into Peter Tripp...

Raves: The curly haired kid in the third row?

Bloom: Yeah, that's what I was into. And Alan Freed. When I was going to 216 Chuck Berry was what was happening and kids used to mock me out because I was listening to it. I used to get a load of shit because I was into rock 'n roll.

Raves: What were they into?

Bloom: Sports. Who knows? You see, I was a little guy, I couldn't play basketball and stuff like that. I was a little shrimp. For my thirteenth birthday I got a hi-fi. It came in a console, which I took apart and made it look like components, so it would lodk like stereo, which had just started to come in. Like, I took the speakers apart and put 'em on opposite ends of the room, even though it was mono. I didn't have a real good sound system until I was in this band. In college I had a Webcor or something, because I never had much money. I had money for cars and stuff, but not music.

Raves: What's this stun guitar that you play?

Bloom: Originally, I got stun guitar from Star Trek. I was a very big Treky. Years ago, when Star Trek first came on, there was just this one color TV on the college campus, in the basement, and every freak in the whole area, which was a small group in those days, maybe 20 or 30, would all drop acid and go watch Star Trek at 10:00. "Star Trek's on, let's drop." So, if you recall the line "set your phasers on stun," that's where I got stun guitar from. I was really into the Star Trek technology.

Raves: Living in Great Neck, you probably spend a lot of time driving.

Bloom: Into the city, sure. I usually take my motorcycle. I have a BMW 750. I've had about five bikes. I've had trucks, hot rods. I've had about eleven cars. Now I have an Audi. I used to like muscle cars. Greasers.

Raves: Why Great Neck?

Bloom: Because it's quiet, it's close to the city and I can walk to town and I'm still in a residential neighborhood. It's just a half-hour drive into Chinatown.

Raves: Oh, which restaurant?

Bloom: I go to Wo Hop a lot. I'm very big into ethnic food. I've been all over the country touring and very few towns can touch the ability of New York to get a good meal.

Raves: Do you like oysters?

Bloom: No. I don't like sea food at all.

Raves: The only time I ever go to Madison Square Garden is to see hockey games, but I was there the other night to see the Beach Boys and it occurred to me how wonderful it would be if they had a hockey game and a rock concert happening simultaneously.

Bloom: There's nothing wrong with it. It's a great idea. We used to do it. Whenever we played any of those small places there was always a coal miner who'd pick a fight with somebody and we never stopped playing. We played throughout the fight.

Raves: Is that how the band got its image?

Bloom: We used to play this bar in Long Island - this is in our formative years of how we got the aesthetics of the Blue Oyster Cult. The formative years was playing these terrible bars. By terrible I mean there would be fights every night. There wouldn't be any long hairs, just garage mechanics, guys with GTO's and stuff like that. We played this one bar, Conray's, and after a week, long hairs would start coming. After awhile it was half hitters and half hippies and there were fights constantly. We would always play the fights. You know, like someone would grab another guy and shove his head into the bass drum and start beating the pulp out of him and we would start playing tunes like "Street Fighting Man" and all the hard-edge tunes we could think of. It seemed like this is where we were going, like this is what we wanted to do.

Raves: What would you say was the most off-the-wall description of yourself?

Bloom: Some people would like to think that I'm some sort of raunchy, semi-biker character with a college education. It just amazes me that there are people who think I'd beat them up just as soon as look at them. I hear people say, that guy Bloom, I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley." That just cracks me up.

Scott Cohen || Circus Raves

The Art Of Trashy Rock

"Seepage from deep, black, brittle experiments which failed and transformations too hard to find.

'I was oversome and turned to red'. Duster's dust became the sale. Lucifer the Light.

A restless motion came to move and then the door - it's time. Tyranny and mutation. Tyranny and mutation".

"Dominance - Submission"

"On Your Feet or On Your Knees."

Quoting from publicity material - "...the boys do dabble in a rather unusual substance called 'Monocaine', which, according to Alan Lanier,' 'was what the Invisible Man took to retain his image. We not only like it, but it really does wonders to relieve fan pressure". And - "Seventeen murders occurred within twelve blocks of the studio during the production of 'The Blue Oyster Cult' ".

It seems pretty obvious that a group of people have gotten together to project a certain image in the lucrative field of pop music. In fact, one begins to question when the image-producing begins to supersede the music-making. Reading over this material and looking at their album covers tells you an awful lot about the group before the record has been played. Blue Oyster Cult album covers exude a surrealistic darkness that soon begins to become funny because they are so heavy handed. And the photo of the group inside Tyranny and Mutation is revealing, too. They are posed with guitars majestically flailing, until you notice that the drummer, Albert Bouchard, has a wimpy smile on his face. So on the one hand there's a carefully packaged and produced evil image being sold, yet on the other there are subtle clues that make the Blue Oyster Cult a very funny group (the repetitiveness and obtuseness of Tyranny and Mutation, Monocaine, the smile).

This soon becomes much more intriguing than their music which is essentially approximated by a belching manatee amplified a couple of thosand times. We decided to try to ask the Blue Oyster Cult questions along these philosophical and intellectual lines in the hopes of finding the balance between hip and hype.

The interview proceeding in the Cult's dressing room backstage at the [Providence] Civic Center, following their concert on February 25.

In this transcription, BOC refers to the Cult, whose members were usually speaking simultaneously. It also includes their manager Sandy Pearlman, the resident intellectual manager and p.r. man who did most of the talking.

FF: How did you think tonight's concert went?

BOC: Well, technically, not so well - a lot of mistakes. But the crowd responded well; they showed a lot of energy. Here, you wanna meet our guitars?

FF: Sure. Gimme a low E.

BOC: Hey, that's pretty funny. (Joe Bouchard, bass player, plucks a low E string.)

FF: Let's start off by excerpting a few lines from your albums and promo material. What does this mean:"Seepage from deep, black, brittle..."

BOC: (Sustained laughter) How the hell can you ask a question like that, the home of HP. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe? It's self-evident. It means what it says. (More laughter). Wanna joint?

FF: No thanks, we're on assignment. How about "Dominance and Submission"? Who is submitting to what, who's dominant over whom, and what about the line "radiation fear"?

BOC: Well, first off, the line's "Radios appear, "not" Radiation Fear" And it means just what it says. What's wrong with you guys: cant you take anything at face value?

FF: How about monocaine? What's that?

BOC: (Sustained laughter) That's what the invisible man took. As a matter of fact, that's what Al's on. He's standing right over there but you can't see him. (Sustained laughter)

FF: Oh. Um. What's a disbuster?

BOC: (Sustained laughter) Don't you know what a diz is? It's the slit at the head of the penis. You guys go to college, don't you? It's a scientific term. A diz. (A later perusal of Gray's Anatomy indicates that the orifice of the urethra is called the meatus urinarius. The closest thing to a "diz"is the corona glandis, the projecting border of the glans penis.)

FF: And I guess a dizbuster is self-explanatory,too. (Sustained laughter) Seriously, what's it like coming to Providence? I mean, a lot of people think that Providence is a pit.

BOC: A what?

FF: A pit. A lot of people think Providence is a pit. You know, how does it compare with going to New York or Boston? Isn't it something of a let down coming into Providence? How do you psyche yourselves?

BOC: What, are you crazy? Providence, the home of H P. Lovecraft. Federal Hill is here. Wasn't Lovecraft's book about Providence? Jesus, he writes all about this place. I don't remember. I mean, I do, but I just can't - jeez, what was it? But how can you call it a pit? Lovecraft lived here!

FF: But he's been dead for 100 years. (Sustained laughter on all parts.)

BOC: No, really. We love Providence. The kids here get Really excited - The Faces played 'Maggie May' in New York and the kids just sat there. I mean, 'Maggie May' is the archetype of the Faces, one of the great-truly great rock and roll bands. Even though things didn't go so well technically here, all the kids were up on their feet screaming. They were releasing a lot of tension, so we were successful. That's what the whole thing's about - releasing tension.

FF: What about the art in music?

BOC: I mean, who cares about art? The kids just come here to rock and roll. A couple years ago they would all yell "BOOOGIE, BOOOOGIE" Now they scream "Get Down". That's what it is, man That's all they come to concerts for, is to release tension.

FF: Now hold it. What about a quiet love song, or the lyric sensitivity of Dylan of...

BOC: It's all the same thing. Release of tension. The facade is different, but the theme's the same.

Listening to their new live album, "On Your Feet or On Your Knees, releasing megawatts and releasing screams seems to be the most important element. Composed of all old material with the exception of "Born to Be Wild", "I Ain't Got You" and a Cult cut called "Buck's Boogie", the album succeeds best in disturbing your parents or hurting your speakers or mutilating your eardrums or shaping your little sister into a psychopath. The songs are much looser than they are on the studio LPs and the production is much muddier. Without a doubt, the best thing about the album is the packaging, with wild, blurry color photographs of the Cult in knee-high silver boots with wicked scowls and flying hair and shiny leather pants, sticking their phallic-symbol guitars at the audience. Again the image of teen-age decadence is blasted at ya.

Backstage, the Cult was relaxing in Levis and tee-shirts, looking like ordinary twenty-year olds off the streets.

FF: What's it like being on the road all the time? Do you enjoy it? Have some of the frills been cut down by the recession?

BOC: It gets pretty dull sometimes. Did you know that in all these years, Columbia never threw us a party until a couple of nights ago in Boston? I mean, they never gave a party for us. It sure was nice, lots of people and things. It kinds of helps, you know, fulfill our fantasy.

FF: What's your fantasy?

BOC: Oh, you know, to be really famous, make a lot of money. Like The Faces, really. We want to be known. It's important that the kids in the audience get up and scream for us, that they want us..

When listening to the live album you get the impression that the old high school band who used to practice twice a week in your friend's garage recorded themselves in the gym one Friday night.

One would imagine that when the Blue Oyster Cult took time out in between songs to howl "On your feet or on your knees" at the audience, some basso profundo from the Russian Army choir would blast people our of their seats and into Submission. Instead it sounds like me.

It is true that the audience lets out a big cheer as they all simultaneously release their tensions. But Beatle-mania it ain't. What is it? Exactly what the Cult says it is - kids yelling their heads off at Bick Dharma instead of their mother or boy/girl friend or themselves. Primal scream therapy in a very rudimentary sense, perhaps.

But from the interview it became clear that the Cult really crave all of that energy directed at them. They seem to know that the audience is actually working out their own problems instead of lusting for Eric Bloom's bod, but they prefer to conceive of it as a combination of that and hero worship. In this sense they do fill a limited purpose for a certain type of person (of which, if we infer correctly there are a lot of in Providence).

But, what the hell, there's no use being an elitist about it. If you happen to be in the mood for gut-smashing, brain-deadening raunch and electricity and lots and lots of hype (with a cynical smile), you might enjoy the Cult's fantasy.

After the interview we spoke with Sandy Pearlman alone. He was a bit more candid than he was with the group.

Sandy: I wrote the lyrics to Dominance and Submission'. In fact, I write the lyrics to 70 or 80% of the songs. It's not really just what it says. You see, on New Year's Eve of 1963 some friends and I were riding around listening to the radio. I grew up in Brooklyn, you know. And we heard the Beatles over the radio. And I had this incredible feeling of an unleashed and mysterious power that was going to take over and affect our generation. That's what 'Dominance and Submission' is about - it's about this force, that's why there's the line, 'radios appear'.

Sandy, who has been a critic for Rolling Stone, then excused himself and asked directions to a good place to eat. The last we saw of him, was as he drove off into the night, chasing his dream of so many years ago, in his Porsche.

Tiberius Gracchus and Buffalo Bill || Brown Daily Herald

'Aggression is a universal quality' - Intellectualizing with BOC mastermind Sandy Pearlman
by David Einstein

Tyranny and mutation. Cities on flame with rock and roll. Career of evil. Dominance and submission. This is all part of the image surrounding the Blue Oyster Cult, a powerful and vivid mystique constructed around album and song titles, album cover art and symbols, advertisements, and production techniques. The mastermind behind much of this science fiction/totalitarian/technologized fantasy is Sandy Pearlman, the Cult's producer, manager and sometimes lyricist. Pearlman is accompanying BOC on their current tour, and THE SCENE talked to him during the Cult's recent stop in Cleveland.

Despite the fact that the term is originally a chemical one, and that William Burroughs used it in his novel NAKED LUNCH, Pearlman claims to be the first to have actually used "heavy metal" in a musical context. And it was around this concept of music characterized by heavy, midrange, distorted chords that Pearlman and the rest of the band first conceived the sound that would become Blue Oyster Cult. Pearlman feels that "Even though we're all from the New York City area, I wouldn't call the Cult primarily a New York band. Musically, BOC is a distillate of what was most influential in the 1968-1971 era: The Doors, Yardbirds, and Black Sabbath, to name just a few."

It is onto this framework of heavy metal-mania that Pearlman adds his lyrics. He was educated at Stoneybrook College, and his background in philosophy and literature are clearly evident in many of his lyrics. "But a lot of those songs are personal fantasies, written about my early days on Long Island, a sort of crazed metamorphosis of normalcy," he said. "A lot of my summer hangouts and experiences, early TV shows, and things of that sort just developed in my mind into the imagery of the songs. A good example of this is a character named Susie who appears in many of my stories, an old friend of mine who is sort of a perpetual victim."

Aside from writing the lyrics, Pearlman plays a main creative force in the shaping of Blue Oyster Cult's sound. They're a very different band live than they are on the studio albums, and the new live album, ON YOUR FEET OR ON YOUR KNEES, is an accurate representation of the ultimate power of BOC on stage. "We're going to do another studio record in the fall," Pearlman said, "but we wanted to get a live record out first. It's a really vast, hysterical panorama, ultra-aggressive, and it's very hard to make a record like that in the studio. We've been wanting to do a live album ever since the group first went on the road.

"Both the studio albums and the live album are fantasy trips, but the studio records are acidic, much more colorful and filled with implications, more distant and menacing, while the live album is more of an ultra-aggressive biker fantasy. This type of record is really impossible to do in the studio; in fact, we started out trying to do it with Secret Treaties, but as it was recorded and mixed, it became more and more elegant and elaborate and convoluted.

In the studio, you get tempted to use all the complex instruments and the technological weapons that you have in your command," he continued, "and the technology ends up creating its own sound. So by depriving ourselves of all these opportunities and making a live record, we can convey a completely different orientation on the band, which was the idea behind On Your Feet."

The studio album which most closely approximates their live sound is Tyranny and Mutation. "That record came as a shock to a lot of our followers, coming after the clear, sharp production of our first album. We set out to make a hard-edged, techno-sounding, jarring record. It was deliberately produced to sound this way, and in many ways the material was subordinated to the production."

Deciding to leave the more mundane topics of lyrics and production techniques, I wanted to find out how a nice Jewish by from Long Island got mixed up in a band with all the neo-Nazi trappings and overtones of evil that surround Blue Oyster Cult. Pearlman, the creator of much of this imagery, said that the Cult are indeed far from the Nazi punks that they're reputed by many to be.

"All symbols tend to originate from common sources. It was my opinion that we were just recreating, or resurrecting, or creating new archetypes which would serve a certain function. The symbolic and musical archetypes are not totally original because there are a limited number of sources for symbols and forms. It just so happens that we are tapping the same sources that were tapped by the artist and technologists who were employed to create the forms and symbols of Nazi Germany.

"There was a whole system of elaborate symbology developed by the Germans to express certain ideas, and to impress these ideas on people and compel them to move in a certain direction, to instill in them certain states of mind. That system was created by certain people sympathetic to the ideals of Naziism. But those icons were not original; for example, the swastika appears in many early South American and Eastern cultures.

"In creating some of the imagery surrounding BOC, we're just mining the same well of symbols that the Nazi artists mined. It just happens that the same sources are being tapped, and so similar symbols were evolved, but not necessarily for the same purpose.

"Naziism was just one elaboration of resentment and aggression;" he continued, "and the symbols they used and some of ours may be similar because aggressiveness, is a universal quality which has never been l expunged from the human personality, and a lot of what BOC is based on is aggression. All that the Cult have in common with the German Nazi Movement is this elaboration, in different ways, of a set of symbols that come from a common source."

The Blue Oyster Cult symbol, which has adorned all their albums and appears on a large backdrop for their live show, has been accused by many of being a surrogate swastika.

"The symbol is from the drawings of Bill Gawlik, a NYC taxi-driver who designed the graphics on the first two BOC albums. After the symbol had been accepted as a Cult icon, I came across it quite by accident while reading a book on alchemy. It was the symbol for lead, the most chaotic, base, and degenerate of the metals. It is also an astrological symbol for Saturn, the planet that exercises the most chaotic influences on the Earth."

But Pearlman is not content with the fury and chaos he's uncorked in Blue Oyster Cult. There are two new bands he's developed to follow in the Cult's footsteps, two new attacks on the sensibilities of the rock world - Pavlov's Dog and the Dictators. Pavlov's Dog indeed come across with a tremendous impact, due mostly to the vocalist's rather unique sound, a highpitched, wailing warble. Pearlman commented that "When I brought the demo around, no one believed that it was a real human voice; I was accused of doing it with machines. But that voice is absolutely reproducible on stage with no gimmicks or technology. Musically, the band has created a sound which I'd describe as early King Crimson crossed with the Bee Gees. But since I recorded them, I've heard that they've become considerably louder and heavier."

Pearlman soon dropped the subject of Pavlov's Dog and enthusiastically began describing the Dictators, a band he obviously takes great delight in. "The Dictators are a completely unique band. In fact, they're so strange that it may be hard for some people to swallow them, although I think they'll probably happen very big in Cleveland, owing to the particular chemistry of this city," he said. "When they played with the Cult in New Jersey, they didn't go over well at all. People hated them, literally wanted to kill them. One guy in the audience ripped apart the seats and tried throwing them at the lead singer, and another snuck up on stage to try to pull the plug."

But why the difficulty in getting the public to accept this, band? "It's not because of the record, it probably has at least, five hit singles on it, including fantastic heavy metal versions of "Stop In The Name Of Love" and "I Got You Babe," Pearlman said. "Most of the trouble will stem from the group's stage conduct."

With a moniker like the Dictators, warnings of bizarre stage actions conjure up demented visions of cruelty and malicious crimes against mankind. But Pearlman reassured, "They're not like that at all. The four instrumentalists dress like average greaser kids, real high school dropout stuff. But Handsome Dick Manitoba, the lead singer, is the main show. He first comes out dressed in a black suit, black shirt, and white tie - ultra-gangster clothes. Later on in the show he runs off and changes into a wrestling outfit, with black tights, speckled jacket, and big monogrammed boots. His onstage persona is thus a combination of a mafia don and a professional wrestler."

Is the world ready for such madness? Sandy Pearlman thinks so, as he continues to convey his unique world vision as seen in BOC's theme song, "Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll":

"My heart is black
And my lips are cold
Cities on flame with rock and roll
3000 guitars
They seem to cry
My ears will melt, and then my eyes."

David Einstein || Scene Entertainment Weekly

Oyster Cult's Image Problem

Can a nice Jewish boy from Eaton's Neck, Long Island, find happiness as a satanic pop star decked out in full leather regalia? Can your better-than-average American rock band pawn itself off as an outfit of outlandish perverts, on the make for kinky sex and violence? Especially when four of the five bandmembers are sedate and married introverts?

Make no mistake about it: this band wants to come on menacing. After all, they have an image to live up to. Ever since rock-critic-turned-producer Sandy Pearlman cast the band as America's answer to Black Sabbath, the Cult have tread a thin line between no-nonsense hard rock and an ambiguously campy brand of heavy metal, pegged around mysterioso graphics and incendiary lyrics.

Yet their albums have never included a cover photo of the group, because the reality of this band belies the image. In the concerts I've seen, that discrepancy hasn't mattered much, because the Cult can outplay such prototypical heavy metal bands as Deep Purple. Moreover, they're not afraid to show their roots in person, by resurrecting such hoary classics as "Born to Be Wild" and "I Ain't Got You."

In truth, Blue Oyster Cult descends directly from such great psychedelic bands of the '60s as Moby Grape and the Yardbirds. They excel at bristling, guitar-heavy ensembles, spearheaded by Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser, a circumspect soloist who ranks with the hard rock greats. After several years as Long Island's favorite local band, they attempted to land a national label, with no success. Finally, they met Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, who concocted the band's present personality; and on one memorable album, their first Blue Oyster Cult, the persona effectively galvanized the music.

Subsequent efforts have not been so successful, however, as the producers have slowly run the Cultish conceit into the ground. While On Your Feet breaks the pattern by including such previously unrecorded Blue Oyster staples as "Born to Be Wild" and "Buck's Boogie," Roeser's instrumental showcase, the record also shrilly reasserts the band's public identity. "On your feet or "on your knees," an MC booms at several points during the two-record set; and, as if to remind you of their dark essence, the back cover and label depict an open book, presumably of occult secrets, held in leather gloves. On the older songs lead singer Eric Bloom tries desperately to sound convincing as he hurries through the lyrics. He fails. (Singing has never been their strength in any case.)

While rock'n'roll thrives on contrived personas, the best of it also partakes of a vital relation between artist and audience. And that is precisely what's missing on these live sides. Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band is no more a street-wise hustler than Eric Bloom is a devil-worshipper; but Wolf's pose resonates with his own fantasies and those of his audience.

The lack of such resonance helps to explain why Blue Oyster Cult has remained a stillborn critic's band, not flamboyant enough to travel the Kiss route of prefab theatricality, not credible enough to match the impact of a J. Geils. Still, they're damn good rockers, as On Your Feet proves repeatedly. But when you can rock'n' roll, who needs leather gloves?

Jim Miller || Rolling Stone

Stanley Kissed Off At Cult

THE FLAMING ROCK 'n' holocaust that Kiss brings to the stage has caused many intimidated headlining groups to ban the New York nitro-rockers from appearing on the same stage with them. Now Kiss has started their own blacklist, topped by their one-time cohorts in chordal calamity, Blue Oyster Cult, who Paul Stanley believes may have ripped off Kiss' explosive effects for their own show.

"Reports that I've heard is that a lot of our show is turning up in their show. What happened was: about a couple of months ago when we were still gigging with them, they took a week off the road to get a stage show together. That's the truth," as Stanley tells it.

"I later read a review of their concert, and it said, 'And the grand finale where bombs went off and strobe lights flashed' and I'm thinking 'It's a review of us,' and it's Blue Oyster Cult. Most of that could have been stolen," accused the string strangler. "Everybody I know who's seen it says 'Hey, they're doing your show'."

The friendly rivalry between the two bands began on New Year's Eve of 1973, when Kiss, making their professional concert debut, opened for the Cult on their home turf. "When I saw Blue Oyster Cult the first time they played with us, they had a mirror ball, and maybe a smoke machine. Maybe. And all of a sudden, it's like Kiss' big brothers or something."

"If I thought we were on shaky ground, it would worry me that they were doing our show. But we'd go on stage with them anytime. It's just not that kind of situation where someone can steal your show and do it better than you can. Nobody can do anything better than the originators."

Sensing a feud brewing in the leather underground, bloodthirsty promoters are offering to arrange a battle of the bands between Kiss and the Cult, throwing in a group like Foghat for an appetizer. But the Kiss people believe there are few, if any, bands who would agree to a frenzied rock showdown with the red, white, and silver-faced guitar slingers. And besides, says Stanley, Kiss has nothing to prove. The heavy metal minions already know who the kings of rabid raunch are.

"We prove it every night," Stanley claimed. "We want everybody to enjoy themselves, and you're not gonna enjoy yourself if you're rooting for somebody or booing somebody else. A battle of the bands is so negative. It sounds ugly. I don't like to get involved in cutting other people's throats."

Neither does Cult production mastermind Murray Krugman, who was amazed to hear that Stanley was making such odious comparisons.

"I love Kiss," Krugman hastened to tell Circus Magazine. "But Kiss have borrowed their entire show from Alice Cooper, although Kiss are more astounding than Alice Cooper. They are the most theatrical group ever, but the Cult is a band with lyric content and song structure, which makes them something entirely different from Kiss. If Kiss learned how to write songs they'd be the biggest thing since sliced bread."

Ron Ross || Circus

A Pearl in Oyster's Clothing
Sandy Pearlman, Blue Oyster Cult's manager, talks to Geoff Barton about the band

"AAAOOOOH!" HOWLS the voice, coyote-like. "On your feet, or on your knees," it rasps, the crowd responding with a mighty cheer. "Here they are - the amazing Blue Oyster CULT!"

The ultimate encore, the frenzied finale, the 'Metal anthem 'Born To Be Wild' begins. The energy level is intense, the vocals are battered into submission by. Buck Dharma's sizzling guitar. Steppenwolf never had it so good. The Cult roll almost every decent heavy band you can think of into one brash, gross combination and spit out the music viciously. Manic, thunderous, crunching, it's the last track on the band's live double album 'On Your Feet Or On Your Knees'.

It's hardly surprising that this set has outsold all the Cult's previous studio product. Released this Spring, it's a fiery 'greatest hits' collection, akin to the MC5's 'Kick Out The Jams' live recording in terms of doubleplus heaviness and similar to The Doors' Absolutely Live' by way of tangible, rock concert in your own living-room atmosphere.

The Blue Oyster Cult - comprising Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser, lead guitar; Eric Bloom, vocals, 'stun' guitar, synthesiser; Allan Lanier, keyboards, rhythm guitar; and the Boucher (sic) bros., Joe, bass and Albert, drums - have three other albums, three other lessons in rock and roll excess in their CBS catalogue. The first, 'Blue Oyster Cult', straight and simple, was released in 1971.

But the band as a whole was cultivated a good while earlier in the guises of both the conventionally-titled Stalk Forest Group and - in the other extreme - the Soft White Underbelly - something to do with a plate of mushrooms, I believe.

The band's manager, Sandy Pearlman, reminisces freely about the formative days, maybe with a hint of affection, it's hard to say. A phone call to CBS's New York offices secured his ear for half an hour or so. The line was crisp and clear, Pearlman was co-operative and, superficially, easy going. But he really sounds like a very shrewd, very heavy American businessman, his feet bolted hard on to the ground, his head way above most of the music biz's thick and billowing clouds.

The mastermind behind the Cult, Pearlman has been with the band since their inception. He uses words like 'per se', 'conceptualisation' and 'mechanistical' a lot. He's a fast talker.

Interviews with Dharma, Bloom, or any other member of BOC are rare things indeed, perhaps because Pearlman's manufactured, even conjured, a certain mystique around the band and he's loath to see it broken. Then again, maybe members of the band aren't the most lucid of talkers, or possibly there are other reasons unguessed or unknown.

But certainly Pearlman's got his finger stuck securely in every pie and dominates the band.

Be that as it may, he tells the Blue Oyster Cult story graphically and it's worth recounting here. "The Stalk Forest Group, Soft White Underbelly, yes, they're our previous names," Pearlman stresses our as if to draw attention to his close association with the band. "One was formed at the end of the Sixties, the other at the beginning of the Seventies.

"Most of the guys currently in Blue Oyster Cult were in those groups - the lead guitarist, drummer, keyboard player and rhythm guitarist." Impersonal. He neglects to mention them by name.

"I first came across them as the Stalk Forest Group in Stoneybrook University, New York, at a concert where the - uh - avant garde student element gathered. I was writing for the American music magazine Crawdaddy at the time and I was very impressed by the band, I went for their brand of music in a wondrous way. I went up to them and suggested that they turn professional. That was the kernel, the genesis if you like, of Blue Oyster Cult."

A contract with, at that time, pace-setting Elektra Records followed, and Jac Holzman, who signed many of the company's now classic bands, apparently hoped that the Stalk-Forest Group would be the next Doors. He was afraid that Jim Morrison would soon falter and dry up, be no longer able to write quality material for his band. He hoped that the Foresters would step in and occupy this 'soon to be vacated' top position but the Doors held.

But while the Doors did indeed slip from the ladder's top rung (for the wrong reasons, though) the Stalk Forest Group never realised its potential.

"At that time we had a lead singer who sounded incredibly like Morrison," Pearlman recalls, "and Holzman was pinning his hopes on him. But when he came to record in the studio it was disaster, he sounded terrible. With about half an album completed, he had to leave the group."

With the departure of the singer, the focus of the group changed, its conception altered - it became less Doors, frontman-orientated and more of a unit. So a change of name was in order.

"As Soft White Underbelly we completed one album for Elektra. It was never released, although it was very good," Pearlman claims.

I wondered if the music of the SFG/SWU was appreciably different from the stuff we hear today from the Cult. "Not really," he continues, "there was more emphasis on virtuosity than on long jams, though that was characteristic of music at that time. The basic elements of the Cult's music - surreal lyrics, the harmonic nature of it all, were indeed present in those days."

In late 1971 a CBS contract was secured and, simultaneously, the band became Blue Oyster Cult. "The name was derived from a series of songs I wrote some time ago, several of which - including 'Subhuman' - have been recorded by the band. The songs had a continuing, H. P. Lovecraft influenced storyline and dealt with the concept of attaining immortality in exchange for striking an allegiance with the Devil. A devil cult was featured strongly in the series, called the Blue Oyster Cult.

"With the CBS signing, the band - at that time still Soft White Underbelly - wanted to obliterate all associations with the past and I suggested that they call themselves the Blue Oyster Cult. No one liked it very much, in fact most found it rather amusing. But we couldn't think of anything else. It stuck."

Response to the first CBS album, Pearlman assures, was "fantastic". Apparently Rolling Stone ("Who normally hate our sort of music") gave the album a fine review. It also got a lot of airplay.

Since '71, Cult albums - including 'Tyranny And Mutation' and 'Secret 'Treaties' - have sold steadily. "The band could have had more spectacular success," Pearlman admits; "but all of our albums will go gold eventually, within the history of mankind."

Currently, with the release of 'On Your Feet Or On Your Knees', the band are at an all-time peak. In America, they are enjoying some reasonable popularity: "About half that of Bachman-Turner Overdrive and a lot more than Roxy Music."

The live set, as I've said, knocked all the band's previous album sales for six. Everywhere. "I've been told that it's selling very well in France and Scandinavia as well as in the States," Pearlman says, "but, strangely, the markets where we expected to be most successful - Britain and Germany - have been the most disappointing."

For what reason, do you think?

"I really don't know, perhaps they're not ready for us yet. But certainly, I can account for our popularity in France and Scandinavia. You generally find that, in France, a particular genre of music sells well - decadence and violence seems to appeal to them. The Stooges could have been big there, the New York Dolls were actually a great commercial success. The Scandinavian people seem to enjoy surrealism, some bizarre whimsy perhaps. There's plenty in our music."

When asked about influences, Pearlman names three bands in as many seconds - Black Sabbath, the Doors and the Yardbirds.

"First things first, Black Sabbath, well, we were originally attracted to the idea of texture per se, as an element of overwhelming attitude. Also, the preoccupation with certain lyrical themes.

"The Cult admires Sabbath because of their inspirational devotion, their devotion to a single theme, and because of their breakthrough in demonstrating texture as an element."

Make of that what you will. Pearlman cites the Doors "obviously, for inspiration". And the Yardbirds?

"For the same reason. Also, they, for the first time ever in rock, provided a working relationship between texture and arrangement. The Yardbirds used their instruments as machines, not as electric / acoustic instruments. Their sound was technically-orientated, they used their instruments as mechanistical sources. Admirable."

From the rather cryptic area of influences, we moved to the more down-to-earth concept of touring. The band have never played outside of the US, except Canada - "but there is a tour of Britain and the Continent in the Fall".

A visit long overdue. The Cult were supposed to visit Europe last Spring, but the tour was cancelled for two reasons: an insufficient amount of dates in this country; its clashing with the Stateside release of 'OYFOOYK'.

"The Spring tour was by no means perfect," Pearlman reveals, "it was very weak in Britain in particular - only two dates were set up, and we didn't feel that was enough. We decided to wait until a more comprehensive concert series could be drawn up.

"We've received a number of offers to play British festivals in the Summer, but we have commitments. All being well, we should be over in middle or late October. Britain will be the last place where we'll play material featured on the live double set."

A new Blue Oyster Cult studio album isn't due until 1976, after which the band will visit Australia, New Zealand and Europe again.

"We're not too sure what will be on the next album," Pearlman says. "There are a lot of directions we could go in, but I really don't know.

"In the past we've known almost track by track what we were going to do. Now, well, we've got a lot more material to record, a lot more time and money to spend. I can't specify what it'll be like, it may be considerably different."

Geoff Barton || Sounds

The Triumph of Insanity

It seemed like something was rotten in the State of Georgia. Something that needed checking out. But relax, it's OK. Violence, rock'n'roll and schizophrenia are reassuringly alive and well. And here's Max Bell's report from Klu Klux Klan Kuntry on the BLUE OYSTER CULT on the eve of their long-awaited British visit.

The last time I saw Sandy Pearlman he was sitting on the floor of an Atlanta hotel room having just guzzled several bags of takeaway ribs from Ma Hall's Southern Fried porched diner. Maybe he ate himself to death, I don't know, but he certainly wasn't there in the morning; just a heap of charred and chewed bones plus a few fragments of tomato-stained meat smeared over the counterpane.

Pearlman likes eating. Buck Dharma says he likes it even more than the Blue Oyster Cult, which is where we come in.

Atlanta, Georgia is adopted Blue Oyster Cult territory, the home of Coca Cola, the city with the highest cancer rate in the U.S.; it's also Ku Klux Klan Kuntry which fits in neatly with BOC's underskin of Colonial influence nurtured from the dusty archives on Providence, Rhode Island and Lovecraft's rotting manuscripts in Brown University.

The exclusively white, "snob", end of Atlanta's famed Peachtree Street boasts some of the finest English settlement buildings in the world on Colony Square. But despite this Anglo ambience, the standard conversation still consists of three questions: "How ya doin' today? Take care d'ya hear? Have a nice day y'all, okay?"

Such mechanical good manners make it tempting to answer with the inanities: "Rotten. Shan't. Get lost." But since a lot of people wear guns next to their smile badges, it's easier to settle for a deft grunt.

However, enough of this. What we're here for is to witness the heaviest band in the States (in terms of subject matter if not sound) at a time when it seems increasingly important to see them vindicate the championship belt of twilight insanity.

The Blue Oyster Cult have already cancelled three British tours (although now they're due here in a few days' time) for no other apparent reason than that their live album was selling like hot cakes in the U.S. – 20 with a missile on Billboard and Pearlman predicts that the next album will break seven nationally.

Why should it be necessary to see them vindicate the championship belt? Because that live album was almost universally panned in America, often by their staunchest supporters. Someone, somewhere along the line had to be wrong and I wasn't keen on the idea that it was me.

Critics who should know, Cognoscenti, Mike Saunders and Lester Bangs, both self-elected doyens of the heavy metal afterworld, were getting the knives nice and hot. The Cult had blown their bolt,, become stagnant tools in the hands of power-crazed Oberfüehrer Pearlman, and yes we would let these guys carry our girlfriends' satchels.

Too bad for a band with an umlaut and a reputation for coming on like a concrete fix in the afterglow of Hiroshima. It may be fine administering clever albums, but only cutting it live up there on stage gives the mystique any real credibility.

So I was worried. Georgia is a long bus ride if you're gonna see your favourites go under in disgrace. On the eve of the BOC's major European tour I was hoping for at least a sliver of solace, just so the folks back home wouldn't end up thinking they'd wasted October's beer money on reckless pursuits.

Well, someone was holding out. But it wasn't the Cult. Because I saw with my very own eyes the most positive rebuke possible to any number of snide untruths.

Yes, the Cult won.

Yes, this is one of the most infallible live shows ever devised for getting an audience off by the shortest sensible route... in through the ears and out the soles of the feet.

Outside the Stones Who league, a particularly English syndrome anyhow, I cannot imagine any other band promoting such a spontaneous response as the one I saw at the end of aforesaid bus ride. Moreover, the above mentioned are forefathers of a movement that won't last for ever, whereas BOC are aimed at a different generation.

The Cult's formula works in the heat of the moment; there's none of the expectancy that you get waiting for "My Generation" or "Brown Sugar" to come up because they don't have hits as such. There are preferences, obviously, but the show is balanced destruction.

The proof was in the auditorium where 15,000 teen archers were blitzed, digested, devastated and all the other things BOC are presumed to inflict via their base metallic arsenal. Not since the arrival of General Sherman had the Peach State been so effectively turned over.

Forget all the cliches about cooking, boogie and "This is a track off our last album." The Cult are simply dirty, explosive urban league operators out to dazzle and by the time they've finished everyone is on his feet, no-one is on his knees.

As a venue the Omni Sports Theatre is horrible, fine for baseball acoustics and not much else. At first the sound problems nullify any enjoyment in what's going down on stage.

"Stairway To The Stars" implodes, a slow motion replay with the volume off. Sandy Pearlman paces around the console muttering blue murder while mixers mix furiously for a reasonable balance and the rest of us twiddle our thumbs.

During "Harvester Of Eyes" it's apparent that the synthesiser opening fails to get much past Eric Bloom's fingertips. Allan Lanier spits out his fag in disgust and gives the equipment a good boot. Wham. Must have worked, 'cos the audience rise as one at the wave of aggression channelled off that stage.

Bloom, resplendent in jet black hari kari costume straps on his stun guitar... "Just last week I took a ride. So high on eyes I almost lost my way"... and Dharma escalates the solo into open mouths. The crowd are drained and elated, and this is the second number.

Pearlman stomps time on his right foot and smirks through the compulsory shades. His whole attention is fixed on watching the 24-hour adrenalin flow seeping off the platform and making sure it stays that way.

Now the juice is on and "Dominance And Submission" gets into some real Cult fantasy. Bloom strikes a neon leather Rodin pose and sings about that unfortunate car ride. The Bouchard brothers, Albert and Joe, notch onto a neat, sullen beat, buzzing the song to death throes with all the vicious love of a gang war chainfight in a Brooklyn car lot.

Of course the aura is a joke, no-one but an imbecile would build a lifestyle round this kind of sickness, but then only an imbecile could fail to respond to the invention.

A poisonous "Flaming Telepaths" manufactures equal overkill but half the kick is laughing with the Cult. They are tactless, no argument, but they are also extremely funny in a nasty kind of way. When Bloom reaches the line "And the joke's on you" the stage darkens. A hideous answering chuckle reverberates through the entire hall and sparks cartwheel from his fingers.

The effects used throughout are surprisingly few; sparse but effective.

If you think you know what to expect from a rock 'n' roll concert, think again. That was just the chaser. During "Cities On Flame" Bouchard takes lead vocal at an agonisingly slow melting pace, his voice resembling a berserk buzz-saw eating dinner.

The pocket version white-suited Dharma steps out for their re-tuned Yardbirds tribute, "Maserati GT," once known as "I Ain't Got You" and then slots straight into ten minutes of unbearable riff magic – "Buck's Boogie" – which is all right by me because he may well be the best hard rock guitarist functioning today. He has none of Townshend's athleticism or Jimmy Page's flash frisson but he burns the hell out of every precise lick and he's only five foot two.

Just as the audience is at breaking point the Cult all file off stage, leaving one spotlit Bouchard storming his kit for the original amusing drum solo. Albert laughs his head off as well he might because he looks ridiculous; leather hot pants, top hat, striped socks like a perverted Hamburg Scoutmaster indulging the dumbest stately battle on throbbing skins.

Once the Mutron synthesiser is turned on he really fools about, skimming rolls off the wall in some gruesome imitation of a sheet metal worker banging rivets into your head.

Just when the crescendo is at the level where the band left off they race back and kick into "ME 262″... "Hitler's on the phone from Berlin, says I'm gonna make you a star." The audience is delirious and the riot cops are nervous. Off goes the bomber warning, Lanier switches from keyboards to rhythm, and suddenly all five of them are in a line playing guitar. Five screaming dizbusters switched into the ultimate rock fantasy and the new definition of heavy metal.

Bloom slides over the piano Minnelli style, smoke engulfing the stage and flames jut into the pit setting fire to the lap of some unfortunate in the 20th row. The fire marshal races towards the exit but he can't get there because Bloom is growling "See these English planes go burn" and they won't let him through.

There's more murky excitement generated in this one moment than we in Britain have seen from a visiting band in a long time. It makes "On Your Feet" look insipid. It's irresistible.

Off stage, the Cult are the very antithesis of their projected heavy duty image. For starters there's their height, or lack of it. Eric Bloom is potentially the toughest, punk stare and grounded air ace junk jacket. Actually, even he is friendly and small: "I often have to apologise to fans for not fulfilling my reputation. Sometimes I think we ought to bust a few heads and rape the chicks who hang around."

It becomes obvious during the next two days that constant touring is wearing down the band considerably. After one publicity visit to a local record store where they have to sneer to order and autograph records menacingly, Bloom corners me on the way out to the car: "See how mundane all this bullshit is, doing the same thing day in, day out."

Albert Bouchard is even more emphatic: "You just wouldn't believe how bored I get playing the same songs every night. I want it to change all the time."

All this puts my impressions badly out of synch. On the Sunday Cult share the bill with Uriah Heep in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a smaller crowd of 3,000 and it's possible to ascertain traces of a group going through the motions.

After that gig we hold an interview in the hotel with a cavalcade of groupies frothing outside the door. Eric Bloom slumps down crossly:

"Got any Machiavellian questions? Would you guys like to kill your mother? The apocalypse is coming huh! That Lester Bangs is an asshole. He won't talk to us anymore but if I ever see him again he's gonna get outta my sight. Asshole."

What's eating Eric?

"Those critics who say we're a tool of Pearlman and Murray Krugman. OK, they got us off the ground..." Cut to Albert Bouchard on the window sill "... and they channelled us towards heavy metal but we still come up with the ideas. We've never been their gimmick."

But if Pearlman walked out now would the Cult continue, bearing in mind that he writes a fair percentage of the lyrics?

Joe Bouchard pours out his Christian Brothers brandy into a tooth mug and takes a stiff snort: "The opposite is Sandy's big worry. A lot of our popularity has to do with the way we play live. He's not as necessary as he was."

Allan Lanier pitches in thoughtfully: "He was a useful exposure to influences, he had this energy... he found us when we were so poor we couldn't afford to go to the beach. He opened certain doors and he was in the band. Then we didn't say he was our manager. Now he's definitely our manager but he's not in the band. He works in an office and he just isn't as exposed as before."

The description of a bureaucratic Pearlman is pretty hard to take and only partially true. In addition to being their manager he also handles Handsome Dick Manitoba's Dictators and is constantly looking for other creative outlets to vent his madness on.

If Murray Krugman hadn't said no to The Tubes their names instead of Al Kooper's would be on the credits. He's very pissed off about that, I can tell you, though as far as Lanier's concerned he can do what he likes: "More power to him. His riff is to walk in on raw potential and say 'I can give you this, get you that.' Sure it's a gimmick but so is everything else in rock."

What's the gimmick?

"That it's a business. That we didn't get to England because of the money... a lot of politics. Columbia wanted their own agency handling us to underwrite expenses."

And then the Cult are doing so well in America that coming to Europe wasn't a wise move until now. They have other reasons for wanting to do well here though. Lanier's Henry James story of the yank who needs to put one over the culture superior renaissance elders over the pond is a real emotion to many thinking Americans:

"On a personal level it is very important to go and do great in England and France. The typical American ego of going back to the roots and impressing. Also it will be such a relief to play for an audience with a different programme of responses. We're all agreed on that."

And they are, even Joe Bouchard who so far has been the only one prepared to find some satisfaction in their Stateside mission.

Bloom has the strongest anti-viewpoint: "If we look bored that's 'cos we are bored. I often sleepwalk through a show, I know I'm gonna be good anyway."

Joe interjects on cue: "I dunno, I kinda enjoyed Atlanta." "Well, that was different. We hadn't played there for two years. But Knoxville... what are we doing here? The place is dead, man." Bouchard hastily: "But the kids are never disappointed. They can't afford to be."

Much of the enervation lies in not having produced a studio work since "Secret Treaties" from which to mould an act, hence the fact that there's nothing new in the equation. They're not too thrilled with the live album either, despite Pearlman's assertion that it made "Live At Leeds" look like "weak tea."

They say they're fifty per cent satisfied with it, though Albert rates it less: "I'm really pissed off with it... didn't even want to do it, but they committed us too early. After the last night I was so fed up with the engineers that I threw my guitar into the amp after "ME 262," which is immature but that's the way I felt."

The violent atmosphere they're supposed to promote is getting them down as well. Ask Eric:

"We all have our chains and mirrored ceiling of course, and swings in the living room."

Albert: "Well, I do have an extensive comic collection."

Lanier has the coherent answer: "Being on the road it's hard to pull through with the image psycholitically (he hates flying for instance). I want calm homely surroundings, like watching Johnny Carson or playing Beach Boys' records. We're all schizophrenic. I compare it with Brian Wilson. He couldn't swim and was a lousy hot rod driver but it's all a hallucination of repressions. America is so redolent with violent images."

Bloom has another version: "Growing up in New York in '58 there were real hitters at school and I was a little guy. If I wore a leather jacket I got stepped on, now I can do all that without my mother stopping me."

"Yeah, you're a cheap snot."

"OK, but I enjoy it, it's fun."

One of the reasons why they have to live up to something false is to do with their own refusal to give out lyric sheets, hence people often fail to understand the acute tongue in cheek content. The Cult don't believe in the kamikaze Avengers trip themselves and certainly don't foster it off the boards:

"How can we be our size and be serious about it? What do people get attached to about us? We're not so into impaling the audience as Black Sabbath so you have to be funny unless you feel possessed by strange spirits. If you were serious you'd just become a massive ego out there."

Lanier seems anxious to keep the star allure absent from his life:

"Do they think we're all barbarians over there? Do those stories about Patty Hearst and Manson fascinate people in England?"

Bloom, who is Jewish, sticks his neck out and cuts in with a remark of his own which has nothing to do with the conversation:

"One of the problems is that so many rock writers are Jewish. We were banned from Circus magazine 'cos the editor's Jewish and thinks we're all Nazis. Then Lester puts that we are all Jewish which is crap."

Albert slides onto the floor with a loud guffaw:

"I'll bet Abraham Lincoln was Jewish, he liked negroes and stuff. Yeah, Abe Lincoln."

Two Southern Belles walk in and plonk themselves at Eric's feet. I wonder how much the group can grow in terms of popularity? An unfortunate question:

"Well, we're all past puberty." Funny guy, eh, Dharma? "Sure I'm planning on it, but the business gets more disgusting the further you go into it. So many rock stars are divorced from real life."

Lanier agrees that there is a particularly English class syndrome which involves rich rock stars buying mansions in the country and then giving reality the two fingers. He bats around the proposition that the biz is sleazy and in the grip of a definite middle class stranglehold:

"There's no charm or inspiration left. When you begin you're naive, y'know. The long haul is just, 'Great, will my mum give me some cookies to take on the road?' But then I don't agree with the people who say rock'n'roll is arrested adolescence and that one day you'll grow up.

"There aren't many live phenomena that people go out of their houses to see. Rock is one of the few, and also theatre 'cos TV is so awful. But even so the old concept of downtown as a place for meeting in clubs is dead. We're all stuck in front of television."

On to new material, of which the Cult have plenty. At present there are two separate plans. I heard snippets from both. One is the new band album yet to be recorded but which should be mixed in England and released in February. This has the working title "Fire Of Unknown Origin" and includes three or four Patti Smith songs which were written with boyfriend Lanier.

The rough cuts I listened to were the title track, "True Confessions" (Patti singing harmonies), and a very heavy Dharma song, "Don't Fear The Reaper." They all sounded like something of a departure from usual Oysteroid style and they were all goodies without any softening up on subject matter:

"It'll be bold, brave, sexy, very sensual, a lot more human than we've been before. 'Secret Treaties' was a political dissertation but we won't do any more pamphlets or broadsides. There's still going to be a lot of good old death songs, though, 'cos we like 'em and there aren't many things you can write interesting songs about. It's hard to get politically involved with Ford in the White House.

"The album will have jagged edges and be like us, evolutionary of course. We will all lose two incisors and one toe."

Pearlman and Albert Bouchard are working independently on another scheme called "The Soft Doctrines Of Imaginos" which continues in the vein of "Astronomy" and keeps the Lovecraft character Desdanova alive.

Numbers include: "Immaginos," "I Am The One You Warned Me Of," "When The Party's Over," "Siege And Investiture" and "Del Rio Song." From initial hearing it sounds like it could be the first important concept album, a new horizon altogether.

"When The Party's Over (Magna Of Illusion)" is wipeout. A song about a mirror endowed with destructive qualities and the influence to set countries at war, a tyranny and mutation magnum opus that ends with the advent of 1914. Originally the Cult weren't prepared to tackle the idea. Bloom particularly because he has to cope with Pearlman's lyrics which are all straight non-rhyming prose, but they're being won over.

Maybe the biggest compliment you can pay this band is that they're totally unlike anyone else when it comes to the execution of interesting themes: Lanier's theory for that is highly tenable:

"We don't want to be so much ominous as radically different. See, rock is getting very traditional. The 70's are crazy. In the 60's poverty was noble until people realised what they were paying for gasoline. Suddenly it isn't romantic at all to be poor so the music is very conservative.

"You can't be static though, that's why we like the polarisation of those who like us or hate us, or just like one album and not the rest. We'd never put out a record similar to the others. We never have done, and we have presentation ideas that lead up to making the stage show appear to be a hallucination, as much like cinema as possible.

"How are we going to do in Europe though? I imagine there'll be such a big push people will be sick of all the hype."

Unlikely. There are enough of us over here who've waited too long for that to be true. Besides, any band who employs the touring legend "Blue Oyster Cult – On Tour For Ever" and has Nuremberg on the date list must be worth checking out. Then there's such a hiatus in excitement that we need all the BOCs and Springsteens we can get.

Even as I write the tarmacs are being prepared for the arrival of the 1277 express so go and see for yourselves and let no-one tell you you should have been there. Because you should.

Max Bell || NME

Buck Dharma

DONALD "BUCK Dharma" Roeser is the lead guitar player in the New York based band, Blue Oyster Cult, a driving and loud outfit which has been making some interesting sounds with the use of three guitars (other guitarists in the group include Eric Bloom and Alan Lanier).

We Copped A Lot From Sabbath

EVEN THE hardest of hearts must soften sometime, and so it is with Blue Oyster Cult, whose fifth album Agents of Fortune offers a degree of subtlety lacking in their previous records. Of all the self-confessed and uncompromising hard-rockers - with the possible exception of those indecent imposters, the Ramones - the BOC seemed the least likely ever to vary from the unwavering heavy metal formula.

They've stated publicly often enough that Black Sabbath are their favourite band and original inspiration, and - as if to enforce the power of the riff - the band persist in climaxing their acts with each member of the band, including drummer Albert Bouchard, strapping on fretboards and pounding out a repetitive bar or two until it reaches saturation level.

And then, of course, there's been this slightly sinister aura that has attached itself to the band. Like the very name Black Sabbath, which carries overtones of ungodly sects, BOC also conjured up some kind of satanic weirdness, and a brief fixation with Nazism (an unwise move as a subsequent visit to Germany demonstrated) did nothing to alter the mystique.

All in all, then, the members of the Blue Oyster Cult never seemed like the kind of guys to invite home to tea with mum and dad. But, as is so often the case, they turned out to be fairly normal guys when we met at their agents office in Manhattan last week.

Sloped around a large table, sipping Cokes and escaping the oppressive summer heat, the band display no more sinister overtones than, say, the average garage mechanic. Only Allen Lanier, hidden behind shades, whose close relationship with Patti Smith brought her on to their last album, exudes any deeper traits.

The Cult have been around a long time, starting as the Soft White Underbelly (who recorded an album for Elektra which was never released) and metamorphising into BOC with the arrival of manager Sandy Pearlman, a former rock critic, and producer Murray Krugman, a staff producer on Columbia.

While they haven't enjoyed the commercial success of, say, Kiss (later arrivals on the US heavy metal circuit) their following has been growing at a steady, if less spectacular, rate to the point where they can command audiences of up to 10,000 without much trouble. Last week they were taking a break from an exhausting tour that will be followed, later in the year, by their first visit to Japan and, hopefully, their second to Europe.

They have fond memories of their first European trip, which included concerts in England, and the subject cropped up in conversation. But I joined them first during a general discussion of British influences. "And we're not ashamed to admit them either," said guitarist Donald Roeser, also known as Buck Dharma, who epitomised the electrified heavy metal guitar by describing it as "stun guitar" on sleeve credits.

"The second wave of heavy English bands, the ones that came at the time of Vanilla Fudge, were the main ones," he continued. "The remnants of the Yardbirds, Beck, Page, Clapton and those guys and also Ritchie Blackmore... we just liked anybody who was any good. Most of the heavy music models were English rather than American."

"Especially when we started, we copped a lot from Black Sabbath," interrupted Lanier. "I don't think our band sounds anything at all like Black Sabbath, though, but we used to like them a lot because Ozzie Osborne used to work in a slaughterhouse and that had a kind of poetic symbolity for us."

The slightly sinister image appealed to you then?... "Yes, it's an easy image to take in rock and roll," said Lanier. "It's an easy image to grab on to. These days I think we're a little mellower, and you learn as you go along that if you want to stay alive you have to control your temper."

And this atttiude is reflected in the relatively mellow approach to the fifth album?... "Well," said Lanier, "I still think it's going to expand, but the music itself is expanding melodically, which is what we tried to do on this last album.

"But there ain't no way we're going to abandon heavy rock and roll. Little Richard invented it and he hasn't quit yet, so neither are we. There's no way we could mellow down on stage when there's 8,000 people out there screaming. We're just duty-bound to exercise our rights to rock out."

Mention of Kiss's sudden elevation - 18 months ago they were supporting BOC - brought a mixed reaction. "It's a kind of artificial commerciality and pretty predictable," said Joe Bouchard. "They took off on the Alice Cooper thing and took it to its logical extreme. They had a good concept with all that make-up they use, but they were well financed, too. They carried at a loss in order to build up a show and reach some momentum. Their musical horizons are too limited, though."

Lanier: "They're trying to expand their ideas too, though. They were supporting us... and so were Aerosmith, who are now one of the biggest acts in the country."

Bouchard: "I'm surprised with Aerosmith because they have improved so much on stage compared to their earlier show."

Lanier: "I think Aerosmith play good rock and roll music, but Kiss, well I hate to criticise, but that's a lowest appeal thing. I was watching the Midnight Special the other night out of boredom and the most exciting thing on the programme was an ad for Aerosmith. After six bars of 'Dream On', I realised that rock and roll still lives."

The band cite natural evolution as the reason for the move towards more sophistication on Agents of Fortune . "It was an attempt to take the reins off and do as much as we could do," said Lanier. "Obviously, this is a business and you can calculate the limitations on what you can do successfully.

"You can stick to a formula, doing simple stuff because you know that is what people want to buy, or you can move forward somehow if you don't want to be that calculated about it."

Bouchard: "The material on this record was just ideas we wanted to get out of our heads. We just decided we wanted to take our ideas a bit further than usual and I think we've succeeded. But our act is still hard... we come out with four rockers, then maybe cool things down a bit until we build up at the end. Once you're headlining you're obligated to do 90 minutes and you've got to pace it right.

"In situations where we support acts bigger than us we do 50 minutes and then, out of necessity, it's 50 minutes of hard material to make an impact. A lot of times the short set has a bigger impact, just hitting them hard all the way. We discovered that we have the capacity to just totally drain anybody if we want to do."

Lanier: "I think that, as a band, we're getting much better at playing. It's much harder to play a longer set and pace it properly than it is to hit all the way through with rock stuff. It used to be that we weren't capable of doing the subtler stuff, but now we can and we're enjoying it, too."

They're still retaining the grand climax with each member playing guitar. "That's an old idea," said Bouchard. "That was Eric (Bloom's) idea when we were playing clubs, but it took us about four years before we actually got it together. There are timing problems when you don't have a drummer... .it has to be timed just right. It's good... it's a challenge and we like a challenge."

At one time there were plans for the band to come to England this month to appear at the aborted Rod Stewart Wembley concert. Then there was talk that they might support the Stones, but they've finally decided to remain in the US during the summer for obvious economic reasons. Every member of the band took to England on their first visit, so a second won't be far behind. It did enable the band to discover some of their roots.

"There was this great stage manager at a hall up in Newcastle," said Lanier. "He knew everybody and he had the greatest stories about the days that Hendrix was opening to the Walker Brothers. According to him he was the bouncer at the A-Go-Go in Newcastle when the Animals first started. There were great stories about Eric Burdon.

"But what I did like about England was that older people seemed very, very attuned to rock and roll. Even cab drivers seemed interested to talk to us because we were a group from America, even if they'd never heard of us.

"It gave us a buzz to be walking out on stages and thinking that they were the same stages that the Beatles had done their early tours on. Strangely enough, we're very big in Sweden and when we got there, it was like we were the Bay City Rollers in England. We had people hanging out outside the hotels and we had to do press conferences with all the straight papers."

In Germany, though, things came unstuck. "They didn't want to know because of all the Nazi stuff. They didn't rack the Secret Treaties album because of the cover so I guess they're very sensitive about it still."

Bouchard: "I guess the reason they're so sensitive about it is because they lost, but most of the people we played to in Germany were GIs anyway."

Spain, too, posed problems for the band for their concerts in the country almost coincided with the death of Franco. "We were frightened we'd have to cancel the shows because of the national mourning," said Bouchard. "He died just after we left, which was a relief. We were hoping he'd just hang on a few days."

Chris Charlesworth || Melody Maker

BLUE OYSTER CULT: Drawing On Rock's Past, Present And Future by Cliff Michalski

Listening to a Blue Oyster Cult record or viewing their stage show, one can easily acquire a feeling of viewing the past, present and future of rock at one moment. The past comes from the band's influences and guiding lights; there've always been traces of the likes of Steppenwolf, MC5 / Stooges Detroit muscle and (especially) the Doors in the Cult's material.

The present results from the final form these sources take-full-throttle, gut-churning metal rock which can be appreciated by the hardest-core, blue-jeaned boogie freak of today. This point was well-taken at their recent area appearance with ZZ Top and Bob Seger, where the obvious image discrepancies seemed not to make much of a difference in audience response. At the same time, BOC's music exhibits numerous subtleties and sophisticated structures for more discriminating fans to appreciate.

The future aspect of BOC's veneer manifests itself most clearly in their live show, which ranks possibly as the most technologically advanced in rock. Their newly acquired laser light system is clearly the most expensive and elaborate ever seen in a rock concert setting. And on vinyl, slick and smooth group sound rests a step or two ahead of the power rock pack, with its lyrical content usually referring to places and things one would imagine finding in upcoming days, surrealistic and even visionary.

An effort to extract further information from one of their members about this often extra-ordinary outfit unfortunately clashed somewhat with the extremely ordinary problem of on-the-road fatigue. Over a Keg And Quarter dinner, I talked to lead guitarist Buck Dharma (aka Don Roeser), who projected the impression that he would have preferred to dine alone, who was a bit cross with yours truly for slamming one of his songs in a review of their latest LP, and who committed that most ghastly of sins against us paupers of the rock writing brotherhood-refusing to spring for the meal tab. In any event, a few observations and stories were related by Dharma which should prove interesting to Cult fanatics and casual followers of the band as well.

To commence with a bit of background info, guitarist Roeser, keyboardist Allen Lanier and drummer Al Bouchard met in 1970 at Long Island's Stony Brook University and formed a band called Soft White Underbelly. In succeeding months, the band garnered a number of Fillmore East and other New York area gigs, but were never able to follow-through on a recording contract. Changing their name to Stalk Forrest and adding Manny (now Eric) Bloom and a second Bouchard, Joe, to the lineup, a lengthy round of bars and clubs was endured until aspiring rock manager and image-maker Sandy Pearlman befriended them, introduced them to producer Murray Krugman, and bestowed them with a new name.

Blue Oyster Cult's tone was set with their debut record tight, uncompromising music with the emphasis on Dharma's riveting, lightning-fast stylings, and images of intellectual sleaze and twisted visions offered-up via Krugman and Pearlman's lyrics. BOC quickly became critical darlings, and the near-universal good press was a useful springboard for gradually growing success from four succeeding LP's and heavy touring. The Cult today have placed themselves at the threshold of that first division of coliseum-filling, gold record-earning rock elite, and are presently engaged in putting themselves over that final, bump. Dharma talked about what he feels is the first major deviation in the group's style since their inception, manifesting itself on their most recent album, AGENTS OF FORTUNE.

"Last year, we all got four-channel recorders and started making up our own demos," Buck said. "I think it's the main reason our new material sounds so varied; the guys who wrote the tunes brought them in as almost completed arrangements. On earlier Cult records, they were hammered-out on the spot. The way we used to write the tunes was getting the lyrics together and then arguing about the music and the result of the argument was how the song came out-more of a common denominator thing. Whereas now, if you had an idea about a song, you could articulate more to the group by recording it. The members of the Cult all have different musical tastes, quite divergent, actually."

He responded in the affirmative when asked if Krugman and Pearlman had taken a less dominant role in the structure of the new LP.

"Yeah, it's more of our own doing. The band had a clearer idea of what they wanted to do this time. We had a backlog of material for the first time, a lot of songs to choose from. Some of the earlier records got to be a scramble to get that last cut together."

A few of AGENTS' songs list another rock act, Patti Smith, in their credits. Smith is keyboardist Lanier's girlfriend, and although she's helped pen lyrics for BOC in the past, she made her first recorded appearance with the band on "The Revenge of Vera Gemini." When tours of the two acts once coincided in Seattle, she even did the tune on-stage with the Cult, but any more permanent fusion of the talents seems unlikely, according to Dharma.

"I don't think it's gonna happen right now," he said. "Patti prefers to headline small clubs and halls rather than open for a big act in big places."

Any interview with a BOC member would have to touch upon the group's spectacular live show, in particular their use of laser lights. Dharma called their current set-up "an evolution of what we've been trying to do right along. We've wanted to use lasers for about a year and a half, but one, we didn't have the money, and two, they didn't have the technology worked out when we first investigated them."

Despite a digital computer system programming many of their effects and an optical physicist retained by the Cult to look after them on the road, the $100,000 lights are still far from reliable during concerts.

"It's still new technology and we have a lot of trouble with them," Buck explained. "They're not as fool-proof as our amps or something like that; they break down every day. We have two of them and so far both have only worked on one date. They're not really rock'n'roll-ized. Sooner or later, we hope to get them down regular enough so they can be transported without constantly doing maintenance on them. I think it's worth the trouble, though; they're great."

Dharma was eager to relate a couple of stories stemming from the Cult's first European tour earlier this year. Among the countries covered were England ("We rode those same trains the Beatles rode in HARD DAYS NIGHT, saw the same railroad stations, right out of the movie. That was a real up to me"), France ("Eric and Allen visited Jim Morrison's grave in Paris. There was a lot of vandalism and destruction at every grave but his. No one ever touches it"), and numerous stops in-between.

The band found themselves sweating-out unexpected political developments when they appeared in Spain. As Dharma recalled it:

"Genesis and ELP had been the only other bands to play there in the lost few years. Franco [the late Spanish dictator] didn't let any others in. He died a few days after we left. We were sweating it out, because if he'd died before we got there, it would have been cancelled. And if he'd died while we were there, there were rumors of a lot of trouble and political unrest, and we might have had trouble getting out. The promoters kept saying, 'Don't worry, he's not gonna die,' and they knew he was going fast. Maybe they were keeping him alive until we went through."

For a group whose music was once described by their manager as "1939 German marching music," the reactions BOC drew from promoters and record company men in Germany shouldn't have been surprising.

"When we got there," Dharma remembered, "we found out that the company there hadn't been doing a thing for us, and we came to find out it was because of our image. They were really sensitive about it. After they met us, came to know a little more about us, it cooled out."

The ultimate irony of this story, of course, is the fact that the Germans were upset with a neo-Nazi image perpetrated by this, a group of predominantly jewish New Yorkers.

After the tape recorder was popped off, Dharma confessed to being weary of touring at this moment and told - in a well-this-is-the-shit-that-puts-me-in-these-moods kind of tone - of how it can sap of the music. I would imagine, however, that continued heavy metal thunder and innovative stage spectaculars from Blue Oyster Cult will force me and others of my vocation to forgive such occasional lapses in their dispositions.

Cliff Michalski || Scene Entertainment Weekly

True Confessions - Weird Tales From The Early Days Of the BOC

O.K. The B.O.C.'s have just come offstage at the San Francisco Day on the Green, and they're tired.

The scene is, we're all sitting round in a trailer, tastefully adorned with a pokerwork plaque saying 'Blue Oyster Cult' on the door, and a big plastic garbage pail packed with ice and Heineken.

There's a little string dangling down into the pail which has a bottle opener on it, and that string has seen sterling service. Up and down it goes, up and down, and each time there's one beer less. By the time the interview is over, there ain't much left for the string to rattle about against. Know what I mean?

On stage, the Cult had had to perform a difficult task. First off, there they were in broad DAYLIGHT. SUNSHINE, even.

That's like when John Cale opened that Crystal Palace concert, in the glittering spring sunshine. How incongruous can you get. Cale projecting his Cambridge Rapist image like crazy, amidst all this lush foliage and dimpling waters.

Allen Lanier is a happy man. Sitting with his legs folded in an elaborate pattern in an armchair in the corner of the trailer, he's smoking his untipped cigarettes and hitting that ol' garbage pail with a vengeance.

He's happy because in front of a big, big audience, he's had an opportunity to showcase the new Cult album, Agents of Fortune . 'This Ain't The Summer of Love', 'The Reaper', 'The Revenge of Vera Gemini', and 'Sinful Love', had all been greeted ecstastically by untold hordes of blue-jeaned Californian youth.

The frenzy that the band succeeded in whipping up (sharing a bill with bods like Jeff Beck and the J. Geils Band i.e. stiff competition) authoritatively belied the impression that the Cult like to give, of the band that only come out, or at least only come into their own, at night.

First of all, Allen Lanier is one of the wittiest people I've ever interviewed. Slightly wired, on account of just having left the stage, his mind hops hither and yon, and the tape is full of sparkling digressions that wouldn't make much sense in terms of this interview but would have made you laugh hysterically had you been around at the time.

The result is that the interview is kinda free-form. It flows, shaped by a natural law unto itself. I should mention at this point that we have very important company.

Sitting in this trailer with us is Richard Meltzer, former Cult lyricist and mainman; co-founder of the band's image, he nursed it through its earliest days, and is one of Allen's closest buddies. Now he's a writer for Crawdaddy magazine, that he also helped found. A seminal American figure. With Richard is his girlfriend Ronnie, who's also very nice.

Allen and Richard feed off one another, they bounce ideas back and forth with exhilarating agility and savoir-faire. It's the kind of dynamic duo interaction that's shaped the development of the band in the most fundamental sense. Richards's contribution to that flow is crucial.

Anyway, to business, if such a thing were possible.

*

ALLEN IS, ESSENTIALLY, relieved at the success of the set they've just concluded so successfully.

"We threw out a lot of things that we do that can only be served up at night, that's what was nice about it. 'Cos we do the kind of show that's like a night-time show, we use all these flashes and lights and lasers and that sort of thing. The show is like a real mixture of visual and musical, and when we have to do it in the daytime, it's like, oh-oh, it's scarey. But now we know," he concludes triumphantly, "that we can still go out and do it!"

The general air of satisfaction was definitely enhanced by the situation as a whole - Richard, Ronnie and Allen being reunited after quite some time gave a pleasingly roots feeling to the whole affair. Idle banter was being freely bantered.

I was asking about that whole mock-Nazi image the Cult used to cultivate, and provoked quite a little flurry of repartee - Allen ribbed Sandy Pearlman, their manager/mentor, affectionately: "Sandy's an archetypal Jew, which is to say he's antisemitic," and was about to ramble drily on in this vein when Richard interrupted: "He likes Israel 'cos it reminds him of the Third Reich... " The flippancy roves on, building to ever greater heights of ludicrousness.

Allen concludes with another swig of Heineken, "That stuff was a lot of bullshit. But," with a mischievous sidelong glance, "it was GOOD FOR PUBLICITY!"

"I remember when Secret Treaties came out," Allen reminisces, "every record shop in Germany refused to rack it because of the airplane on the cover."

Refresh our memories.

"It was a Messerschmidt 262."

"Which just HAPPENED to be invented by the Third Reich... "

"... and it was used to bomb England. 'Must these Englishmen live so we might die?' " Richard's hamming ferociously. "It was built so late that it was just a question of trying to keep the limey bombers out."

So how come you picked on it?

Allen's bland. "We liked those planes."

Figures.

By another convoluted twist of the conversation, too detailed to chronicle, our thoughts turn to the early days of the Cult. From whence springeth this imaginative, almost intellectual, mutation of genus 'Rock Band'? Who better to enlighten us than Allen and Richard, who we happen to have sitting here with us?

"This band goes back a long ways," declares Richard authoritatively, settling back on the settee.

"There was a period round 1968 or 69 when on any given night, the Blue Oyster Cult could sound like any famous band in the world. They could be the Grateful Dead one week, and... I remember when the Stones came into town, and they hadn't played live in New York for three years, and everybody wanted to know - What will the Stones be like? Well," with a flourish, "that night they sounded just like the BLUE OYSTER CULT! So the idea that this band is like, just a statutory heavy metal band is like, omitting 75 other stages."

*

TURNS OUT THAT the crucial figure in the coming together of the Cult is a chappie by the name of John Wiesenthal, one of whose main claims to fame is that he taught Jackson Browne to play guitar, in exchange for Jackson teaching him how to surf. In addition, for the fax 'n' info freaks amongst us, the guitar that Jackson plays on Nico's Chelsea Girl album, is, in fact JOHN WIESENTHAL's guitar. Howzabouthat.

Wiesenthal was doing animation work in the film studio where the young Allen Lanier was an apprentice film editor, somewhere in New York City. The animator invited Lanier out to Long Island one fateful weekend, where A.L. met Donald ('Buck Dharma') Roeser. The jam that ensued, one might fancifully suggest, continues to this day.

"That's how this band started, with me (Allen) and Donald. But it was Sandy (Pearlman) who came up and said, 'you guys oughta get a band together'."

"Yeah," pipes up Richard, "he had a name for a band that he would one day manage - Soft White Underbelly. All he needed was a band."

The saga of the band from that point on deteriorates into an impossible tangle of names and brief encounters, liberally peppered with amazing anecdotes, along the lines of Richard burbling cheerfully:

"I was the singer for one night, that was the best... this was at the Bluesbag Café A Go Go in New York. They used to have people like Howlin' Wolf, James Cotton, people like that on there, and for some unknown reason this band was booked on it. We're speaking of '68. So anyway, we decided Rich was gonna be the singer that night, he stood up onstage and went 'PISS! PISS! SHIT!' So then I stood up, I took my shirt off, I stuck my head inside the drums, I pulled plugs out... "

Allen intones solemnly from his corner, "It was really the blues, man." To me, that vivid little evocation is a strong reminder of performance art, or some similar 'art statement' theatrical form.

That's quite a valid line of reasoning, too, since in a twisted of way (extremely twisted), the Blue Oyster Cult, for a hard-driving rock 'n' roll band, are quite artsy-fartsy. They deal in image, in visual style and presentation in a way that could almost be construed as a minor-key version of Roxy Music's perennial obsession with packaging.

Without missing out an any ballsiness or raunch, the Cult always suggest the most daring and inspired of heavy metal art student bands. Leaving their pictures off the first two album sleeves, for example: that's daring, alright.

*

RICHARD IS SPARKLING as he recounts a tale of "Les Bronstein, he was our singer then. His entire American career before that consisted of the summer stock version of Brigadoon ... " He couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag, but he had a VAN and they needed a van.

"Anyway, Jac Holzman (head of Elektra Records) sees this guy Les who can't sing, and he says, 'I've found the new Jim Morrison!" Allen takes up the saga. "Every set Les would go into this 25-minute monologue that would end with his eyes being pulled out (ghoulish glee).

"The thing about it that was so good was that it has a lot of similarity to a song Morrison eventually wrote called 'Peace Frogs' - you remember, 'blood in the streets of the town in New Haven'? It was the same thing, about kids in the street, prevention, police beating up heads... in one of those songs, Les said, 'You might not know it, but out in the streets right now, REVOLUTION is taking place.'

"He does this 25-minute thing, then at the end, he says, 'I can't SEE it! I can't bear to LOOK at it! I take these two pins, and I go AAAGGGGG! I cry out!'

"And then the band comes back in, y'know... "

Sounds real colourful. The band, with their Elektra contract, moved on to a gig at the exotic Electric Circus in New York.

"The place was a drag," recalls Allen disgustedly, "a bunch of psychedelic lightshows and whacked-out acid head idiots jumpin' around, like a bad scene from Blow-Up or somethin'."

The mind flashes to the classic track, 'This Ain't The Summer of Love', on the new album. Plus ca change ...

With typical prankish wit, the lads made the dj play the pressings of their forthcoming Elektra album while they enrolled the services of various ladies in the audience into playing their instruments for them.

Wonderingly, Allen continues, "The audience of course, being so whacked out, didn't know shit... and these stupid chicks are playing, and the record's still going, and they're saying, 'Hey, we're playing real good!'... "

The next night, the band reacted with even more of a conscious art statement - "It was all like psychedelic 60's, and we said, that's a DRAG, man, let's go as if we were the most hicks in the world.

"So we put on the most obnoxious old herring-bone jackets, old ties, shirts, greased our hair all the way down, and the audience is STILL out there going (imitates rather moronic ape) hugga hugga hugga."

Well, the Cult were kicked off Elektra before the release of the album ever took place, largely because of the bass player saying to Elektra's Art Director, "And whatever we do, don't let's have one of those normal Elektra Records covers."

Before too long, however, the band were blissfully united with Columbia Records, in whose protective bosom they still nestle today.

*

THE HAPPY RESULT of this union is the Agents Of Fortune album, which has done a lot to boost the Cult's reputation.

Deservedly so, because it's great. Something for every taste, a touch of Byrds soundalike here, a soupcon of vintage Alice Cooper there, and yet - bring on the dancing persons! - all distinctive Blue Oyster Cult, chock-a-block full of that impishly hard-rocking Cult personality.

For an interesting light on this new release, let's turn to Patti Smith. In case you're wondering why, it's because not only is she Allen Lanier's lady friend, but also she's been involved with the band for six of their 8 years. And as if that weren't enough, she also plays a major role on the album, with astounding vocals on 'The Revenge of Vera Gemini'.

And also, I happened to be talking to her at the Record Plant in New York on this very subject.

Don't you agree that there's a more open, European feel to the new waxing?

"Yes, and that's because a lot of confidence came with their last European tour. It's a retreat from your own experience, y'see - in America you get bogged down with business, but in a foreign country, there's none of that self-image.

"I know it gave the band a new sense of pride when they came to record, finding out that the kids in Europe were so interested in what they were doing.

"It was a really heavy experience anyway, their first time ever in Europe." How about that title and the pic of them playing roulette on the inside of the sleeve? How do they consider themselves agents of fortune?

"After six years together, they finally decided to let each guy emerge personally. They wanted to gamble, like the cover shot, to take risks, shoot for the stars. They want the next record to be even less trapped in their image."

There's a noticeable difference in the vocals on this record, for example you can actually hear all the words.

"That's because Allen did a lot of the mixing personally, and he's very vocal-oriented, he loves people like Lou Rawls and Wilson Pickett.

"Also, there was a guy called David Lucas who helped. He's really an engineer rather than a producer, he's worked with people like Yoko. He's got his own studio in New York - basically, he's a vocal expert, just helps people with their vocals."

Patti went on to make the very valid point that the Cult are probably the biggest underground band in history, despite their millions of fans. We're talking about how this album has a more commercial sound. Patti hastens to reassure me that it doesn't mean selling-out, not that that had actually crossed my mind.

"When you really believe in what you're doing, you've got to reach more people. And besides," her surprisingly sweet little voice reasonable, "when you've committed yourself to a band for eight years you might as well reach out, you might as well - have a hit.

"You know something," Patti is earnest here, "doing those overdubs on 'Vera Gemini' was the most inspirational thing I've ever done in my life. It was just fantastic hearing the music in the headphones.

"This band has done a lot to inspire confidence in me, I'd do anything to help them. I just love their music - it's got a neat, celestial feel.

"Right now, I'm just cutting a song that I co-wrote with Allen, called 'Distant Fingers'. There's a nice circle there."

Vivien Goldman || Sounds

Nectar of strychnine!

Seminal psychedelic trip-wire rock'n'roll! Geometric chaos! Neo-nuclear Pearl Harbour precision! Flash-pod explosion! Blood-on-snow controlled fury! Boot-heeling dangerous!

What sort of band is this that causes MAX BELL to hurl his English textbooks out of the dormitory window and haul ass and hell-fire into Gonzo-land? Could just be BLUE OYSTER CULT, whose mathematical biker scientific blueprint (Max, Max – Ed) is coming right at ya. For real.

The dice are out! The stakes are high! Blue Oyster Cult ends here!

FINALLY, BLUE Oyster Cult have combined the accolades of critical acceptance with a commercial success to match their status as the only heavy metal band capable of leading an audience over the killing floor and putting their brains through some kind of intellectual fitness programme.

While in the past it was clear they were the only exponents of cerebral hard rock worthy of a second listen, the natural carriers of The Doors mantle, convincing the public that they were also musically unique proved to be a difficult task.

Cult codas are designed to be mathematical, but a combination of black science and biker riffs was too much of an incongruity for the casual viewer. Result? The most deadly blueprint in rock 'n 'roll for six years has been fended off with deep suspicion, bitter jealousy and an asinine refusal to admit to the humour permeating the experiment.

Wit is a commodity sorely lacking in assault course outfits;and if you couldn't wade through the gargantuan density of their lyrical morse then the Cult trip got lost layers of precision-honed surface noise. The finest cerebral DBX reduction system money could buy wouldn't have convinced most people that the Cult were anything other than amazingly proficient. Such backhanded compliments were the sum reward for three studio records whose attributes lay mostly in a highest common denominator of rock aesthetic, so unusual that even members of the control crew had difficulty deciphering the implications.

Eventually the group tired of satisfying only the last part of their title, wanted to stamp their music indelibly into the super-structure and elevate themselves to the upper class of rock stardom.

SIMPLY, AGENTS OF Fortune is the first Blue Oyster Cult album to reach a wide audience. Yet while this makes it their most popular album, it doesn't make it any better than its predecessors.

At least two instrumental voices integrally sewn into the fabric of mission staff are pretty miffed with both the band and their new album. To aficionados, it won't come as much surprise to learn that mentor and founding father Sandy Pearlman, producer, manager, lyricist extraordinaire, is plain hurt to have been excluded from the celebrations.

In Los Angeles, Richard Meltzer, probably the finest rock critic on the finest '60s magazine of its ilk, Crawdaddy, also in at the beginning as poetic manufacturer-cum-inspirational madcap and original BOC avant garde vocalist, thinks Agents sucks.

Moreover, Meltzer reckons the group are stale, lazy and too locked into the concept of audience satisfaction to deliver their killer punch.

"The best record they ever made was in '68, as the Stalk Forrest Group. It was never released by Elektra and they've outplayed all that original inspiration."

To me, meeting that kind of disillusion in the heart of the BOC camp was about as exciting as diving off the top board to find some joker just drained the pool.

It is more of a disappointment to have to admit that most of it is probably justified.

Maybe Meltzer was miffed because he didn't get any songs on Agents. They toyed with doing his 'Tale Of Hansel And Gretel' but ditched it before they reached the studio. He thinks that by keeping composition credits within the group they hope to stash more of the royalties, which is both true and understandable. The fracture between Pearlman and his once loyal troops is, however, of more importance.

It all boils down to dominance and submission. Having agreed in theory to the obsessions of one man outside the playing confines of base, the group now wants to loosen the chain. Tired of being credited as the most sophisticated computer bank in rock by numbskulls unable to appreciate real vision when it drops on their head, they have decided instead to go it alone and present the human face of the band. If you cut them, do they not bleed etc?

In the games of compromise which have led to every member of the ensemble threatening to quit at least once, Pearlman's influence is now subjugated to the business level. In short there will be no compromise.

The biggest personality split derives from a fundamental disagreement between Pearlman and keyboards virtuoso Allen Lanier over the future of the Cult image, but it was drummer Albert Bouchard, spiritually closer to the ober-meister than the others, and the one who puts the music to Pearlman's complex prose creations, who broke the news that they would no longer accept Pearlman and Murray Krugman as total producing influence, and drafted David Lucas (who worked on the first album) back to the box. Tyranny but no more mutation.

They won their point when the new album proceeded to outsell the others, dazzled every writer who reviewed it and spawned a potential hit single in 'Reaper' – achievements which hitherto were as unlikely as McCarthy securing the black vote. In the end the band didn't really relate to Lucas after all – his significance was minimal.

MY ORIGINAL schedule had me catch the Cult live in Fayetville, North Carolina, where they played pretty much their standard set, interlaced with Agents cuts. If you didn't get off on them last year in Europe this wouldn't have made much more sense. Although the performance now bites harder, it doesn't differ overall in pacing or approach. The band were delayed on their way to the gig and arrived too late for a sound check or a lengthy pre-concert tune-up. The resultant show was just another Cult evening, nothing too thrilling.

What was interesting was the new barrage of laser effects, easily the most powerfully suitable electronic weaponry a rock group has used. Usually I distrust gimmicks of any sort, but would you believe that this is a natural extension of psychedelic light shows? Prismatic waves of super-hero imagination fold into concave and convex tunnels, and time-warp dimensions.

No wonder that at better live shows, spaced out followers tried to walk down the beams. The hallucination is strong enough to make you believe the corridor confounds gravitational laws. A pretty neat way of committing suicide.

The second concert necessitated a journey to Alabama, and Montgomery's Garrett Coliseum, a huge sawdust-covered barn of a venue with a lovers' leap echo and an approximate one-third attendance. Support band Mott couldn't even get the kids to tap their feet, though they worked harder for a response than is humanly explicable, a state of affairs which later led to the normally genteel Morgan Fisher getting gloriously drunk, and having to escape a night in Alabama clink by outwitting the fuzz in a last minute dash up the Emergency stairs.

The concert had all the makings of the ultimate bad trip, an audience that was lamer than the inhabitants of the average geriatric ward, insufficient power to fuel the laser-physics and a reverb so loud that the Cult could hardly hear if they were in tune. And yet despite that, despite the fact that the flight from New York was delayed by several hours so that the band had to go from the airport to the hall without the opportunity to even brush teeth, the Cult delivered one of the most devastating definitions of heavy metal imaginable.

That night I saw two manifestations of one group. Firstly, in the dressing room, they jammed for over an hour for nobody's benefit other than the two or three people who happened to be assembled there. Blue Oyster Cult reverted to the Stalk Forrest Group and played material from the rejected second Elektra album, including such masterpieces as 'Mummy', 'Howdown On Your Pelt' and 'Ragamuffin Dumpling'. They didn't even get to 'Curse Of The Hidden Mirror', 'St. Cecelia' or 'What Is Quicksand?' and I have to say that this material, on first hearing, was the most essential acid-blues into Styx H.M. improvisation (Come again, Max? – Ed) I'd ever heard in the flesh.

It equalled anything the Cult do either live or on record, and musically it was as great a mindstorm as the finest distillations of all-time boss rock literateurs The Doors.

I kid you not, Stalk Forrest Group would have been the most immeasurably important release Jac Holzman had since Strange Days – in fact still would.

It beats the hell out of any East meets West concoction since the heady days of Morrison, seminal psychedelic trip wire rock'n'roll, and its absence as a recorded testimony is as unforgiveable as, say, Elektra refusing to submit the first City of Angels group effort on the ground that 'The End' or 'Light My Fire' were too way out for public taste

And so, Meltzer's complaint that Blue Oyster Cult have diffused their original power is partially correct. The current manifesto is too rigorously defined to allow them enough time or space to experiment. In their stringent application of the standard rock metier (i.e. to present a balanced perspective of available product), BOC have chosen not to assume the responsibility of defining their own rules. If they defied the dictum that says give the people what the people bought, then their live act would settle any dispute as to just who is the finest performing act on the planet. Ironically it was both a privilege to hear music of this magnitude, and a taste of what might be.

IN THE HALL, the pre-Cult tapes, Michael Wonein's 'Times Echominium', provide the kind of adrenalin build up that Bowie had in 1973 with the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. Pearlman, intense as ever was rapping about classical music on the console: "I like Bach better than Mozart now. I've discovered a lot of weak passages in 'Don Giovanni' and 'I Figaro'."

Behind him the random electronic computer programmed sounds that drifted mesmerically into the entire cavern. The Coliseum had an unearthly ambience, a tension which tightened your stomach muscles and told you tonight something special would happen.

And it did. The same show as North Carolina, except the audience was so dead they never got to hear the 'Hot Rails To Hell' second encore, with the difference that BOC were more ferocious in their blood-on-snow controlled fury than I've ever seen them, and they still weren't playing with the apparent mastery of previous twilight encounters. The new 'Harvester Of Eyes' went right inside your head and checked you off as numb, far superior to the crushing thunder of its Secret Treaties ancestor.

The crescendo of all instruments phased to destroy on "Just last week I took a ride, so high on eyes I almost lost my way" was simultaneously titillating and boot-heeling dangerous – nectar of strychnine.

THE CULT as a live unit remain an unexplored phenomenon, in that beyond the trappings of their image, lights and stage gear (which needs changing) is a playing unit as subtle, as cohesive and as harmonically perfect in terms of layers of sound as The Beach Boys or The Byrds – one of their primary lines of descent.

The discipline of melodic form at the heart of 'Flaming Telepaths' is frighteningly exact – musicians of such classical brilliance simply aren't found operating in the coming straight-at-ya school of molten metal whose prime exponents are patently bogus volume saturators like Led Zeppelin. There are larger groups than Blue Oyster Cult, louder groups too, but there aren't any comparably defined conceptual regimes. Heaviness lies in the core of the design, not the peripheral trapping.

Having said that, the Cult aren't giving the best indication of just how different they are. 'This Ain't The Summer Of Love', 'ETI' and 'Don't Fear The Reaper' are the only Agents songs featured normally; aside from 'Last Days Of May', 'Hot Rails' and 'Stairway To The Stars', they ignore their first and second albums. Admittedly there is a wealth of ace material to select from, but 'Stairway To The Stars' and 'M.E. 262' have outlived their credibility as staging elements. The crux of the act continues to be in their On Your Feet period.

The real plusses now are the new songs, immeasurably stronger live than on vinyl. With their rows of amps glowing ghostly blue from Albert Bouchard's drum lasers, Donald Roeser's immaculate delivery of 'Last Days' (a true story of three kids set up and murdered in a phoney drug rendezvous – somewhat similar to the denouement of Easy Rider but with a starker twist), and the second half of the new 'M.E.262'/'Dominance' sequence, the Lowriders of the Purple Metal Flake induce a genuinely hostile, paranoid sensation in the listener.

The improvement in BOC's tough-ass menace achieves a neo-nuclear Pearl Harbour incision. Primarily – Lanier's keyboards and guitar are more vitally confident than before. Who else has a drummer who also happens to possess the most manic black-lipped vocal thrust, writes astounding songs and can come on and play mean guitar in the quintet of axes which closes 'This Ain't The Summer Of Love'?

The new experience of a four-lead break and Joe Bouchard's smokin' bass solo is such a gas, particularly Albert's munchkin Hendrix teeth-picking, you can even forgive the flash pod explosion that prefaces 'Born To Be Wild' and concentrate on the level of geometric chaos and the violence of Eric Bloom's hammed up vocal. It becomes difficult to single out what makes the Cult tick over like a sensitive A-Bomb (I bet it does! – Ed). When they've really got the heat on there is no predominant ego to fix on. No studied guitar posing or freak out from Roeser, no grating screams from Bloom, who is the most consonant of all H.M. singers. Instead they revolve the pieces formally; only Lanier's improvised organ solos or Buck's torn-off moments of big band boogie deviate from the original idea. The answer is that the Cult have their playing problems solved on the board, each performance becomes a set of examples. Room to experiment really comes with the last three numbers, particularly 'Buck's Boogie' and 'Maserati G.T.' where the psychedelic, Californian taste meets the New York subway in a fearsome combination of acid and cocaine, heavy metal for mind and body.

AFTER NUMEROUS false starts due to exhaustion, post-gig depression and delayed flights, I finally interviewed the two smallest Cultoids, Albert and D.B.D. Roeser, on the return plane to New York at just after 9 a.m. And you thought being a rock 'n' roll writer was glamorous – you should try it.

Conversation necessarily centred around the new album, but we spent much of the time discussing the partial divorce from Pearlman and the Cult's position per se. Albert began by explaining how they make a record: "Each of us presents our own material in total demo form, not making any assumptions except that they'll change a little. There's a unification in the band which cuts out the variety and makes the songs cohesive. But every guy has his own instrumental style. This time the album is more hi-fi, vocals are definitely clearer; they were all arranged and now the vocal parts are as important as the tunes."

Roeser agrees they all wanted to concentrate on the singing this time, Allen Lanier getting to perform his first vocal in five albums with 'True Confessions'. ("Him and Patti – what a coupla flirts".)

He also thinks the songs went in better than they came out: "'E.T.I.' was much heavier on my four-track, one of the guitar phrases was erased in the final mix."

Still, there seems to be a general concensus that Agents Of Fortune is the best thing they've done to date. Bouchard: "Our recordings were anarchy before, whoever had the drive to suggest something... that's how it came out. We are more internal now, so we represent the Cult as a balance. Like The Dead, it's a deficient democracy, but it survives. Some people have called it our new first album."

Roeser thinks the band is better as an entity than at any time in their history. "We have yet to make our best records – if it ever got stale I'd bale out."

Talk moves onto BOC vis a vis their relationship with the idiosyncratic rock genius of Pearlman, the rock critic who came to visualise his conception of what the medium could become but who, unlike Patti Smith, doesn't seem to possess the cool nerve to execute his dream in a playing context. Pearlman is one of rock's most fascinating characters, a natural speed freak who survives on working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year in his dedication to see the Cult gain the acceptance that has been denied to him.

Potentially he could have been another Jim Morrison. He's an extremely learned man with a staggering store of arcane and mystic knowledge, an avaricious scholar and catalyst with a catalogue of song credits for the band that until recently provided the fascination behind the cloak and a strongly Doorsish ambiguity. Pearlman's only relaxation outside of involvement with BOC, Pavlov's Dog and The Dictators (a collection of the strangest sounds imaginable) are food – he's something of a gourmet – and reading. When I last saw, him he was clutching volume ten of Jung's Civilisation In Transition. Neither is he a dilletante or intellectual bull-shitter, being a genuine authority on subjects as dark and far ranging as UFO's and H.P. Lovecraft.

Albert: "Everyone in the band is aware of Sandy's potential as far as heaviness goes, some people are intimidated by his knowledge and think he's evil, or would be dangerous if he had power. But he's not malevolent, he has morals. He'd puke if I said religion, but he has a purpose and he wants people to like him. He was very influential at Stoneybrook (the college where he and Meltzer met and first discovered Albert, Roeser and Lanier jamming); he was president of the students' board with a tremendous budget. I never saw him use his position for anything other than the good of the people.

"Two key words I'd use to describe him are quandary and sublime, that agitation and ecstasy. He writes the same song on those themes all the time. Meltzer can be pretty blunt... he's extemely animated, talks with his hands.

"First time lever saw him and Sandy they were introducing The Doors at Stoneybrook – Meltzer was dressed in a black leather jacket and he kept slicing a meathook through the air. I've never really seen him clean, but I've seen him different stages of grubby."

Albert splutters into a 7-Up with one of his usual displays of mischievous good humour. Don't think I've ever seen anyone grin quite as much, even his false poker face is infectiously silly.

Ever diplomatic with regard to the strained friendship now existing between them, Bouchard cites Pearlman's lack of new material, only two songs since Treaties ('74) one of which, 'Punishment Park', they turned down due to its overt S&M sexuality. He puts it down to interest in other fields. Probably the reason for that was a pretty heavy atmosphere whenever Pearlman showed up at meetings, particularly with the strong-willed and ambitious Lanier.

It seems as if in the aftermath of bruised egos Pearlman chose to get inwardly indignant, as in "OK boys, if that's the way you want it, I'll stick to production". But his talent should not be consigned to organising rock business for Chrissakes. Helen Robbins, a tough looking biker chick, the kind of girl your mother warned you about and you always hoped you'd meet, who wrote the lyrics to 'Sinful Love' and 'Tattoo Vampire' (and hangs around with the Noo Yawk chapter of the Hells Angels), says Sandy was devastated when told that Lucas was to be brought back.

For some time now he and Albert have worked on a project called The Soft Doctrines Of Imaginos, which includes all the Desdanova material and such enigmatic peculiarities as 'Del Rio Song', 'Magna Of Illusion', 'I Am The One You Warned Me Of', 'Curse Of The Hidden Mirror' and the autobiographical 'Fort Jefferson'.

So far Albert has had no luck in persuading the band to tackle the concept: "I won't make too much of a scene but I wouldn't be working on it if I didn't have faith in it. 'Imaginos' is about a minstrel who is also a vulture in the desert. His riff is the power to control his own destiny. 'Del Rio' is another Desdanova manifestation which takes place in Blindman's Buff, there's a lot of geography. Basically, it's Sandy's UFO rap, like 'ETI'. He sees them as hallucinations of the mass mind-stretching technology. Like before there were dirigibles there were UFO's that looked like 'em – they're always one step ahead of technology.

"He explained it to me very succinctly once and then we discovered the tape had broken, as if the universal mind didn't want us to know it was an hallucination. 'Del Rio' features the sight of hidden things, X-Ray references. He writes about hidden knowledge. It's not totally clear, but how could it be? He can only put out glimpses of what he knows. It takes time before you can see what he's teaching you. Him and Patti are infinite, they could create forever."

THE ALBUM title came from a friend of Murray Krugman's, co-producer and lyricist, integral part of the dynamic tag team, who had a friend at college who was a compulsive gambler and referred to the deck as the 52 Agents of Fortune. Hevvyy. The tarot cards on the album cover were taken from an actual reading performed on the collective Cult, a cosmic gamble that threw up Death, the Queen (sex – most of the songs are about women, unusual for BOC), the King (strength) and the Sun (change). It fits.

Roeser explains why the band aren't rushing to record Imaginos: "Cult politics are such that we won't do songs by one author, unless we could budget for two albums a year and that's impossible."

Unfortunately their current touring schedule of seven months solid a year won't stop until they've achieved the level of success whereby they can afford to spend more hours in the studio. It's a vicious circle; they have a more lavish stage act than they can finance at present which has to be transported even when, as at Alabama, returns will only cover costs.

Then again one can understand their reluctance to give Pearlman sole writing privilege. After all, they all contribute immaculate songs. The advent of Lanier as composer with the rough and boozy, sexually ambivalent 'True Confessions' (the sort of thing Jagger and Richard used to write) and his account of the "Tenderloin" red light district of San Francisco, an incredibly adventurous melodic venture borrowing cleverly from Miles Davis' 'Seven Steps To Heaven' and Kurt Weill's 'My Ship Has Sails', have established him as another blockade to the fruition of Imaginos.

Pearlman wants the band to do it but until that money rolls in, or unless its done as an Albert Bouchard project, it won't be. Having seen Stalk Forrest consigned to unheard vaults, and having heard the tapes of this too, I'd say that was a disastrous mistake.

At present they have another 20 band songs in the can, most of which are good and include Patti Smith's 'Sally' and 'Fire Of Unknown Origin'. Again they are anxious to keep their new public.

Albert: "We tend to be too monolithic: the humour is lost. The joke's-on-you point in 'Flaming Telepaths' is often missed, so we have to ham it up. I love to do John Densmore drum rolls; he was only good in the context of what he was doing in The Doors. Their approach was always more commercial. They began with the beefcake like 'Light My Fire' and then sold the heavy stuff – we've had to do it the other way round."

The continuation of an otherwise lost tradition is one reason why the Cult are to me the most interesting and important group extant, why they are as psychedelically romantic as they are East Coast hard.

In 'Reaper' they've produced at least one song which people not previously enamoured with them can relate to (how come you missed 'Astronomy' or 'Last Days Of May'?), though it's doubtful if anyone understands the new material any more than the old. One thing they don't do is write road songs.

Donald: "I wrote 'Reaper' when I thought I was gonna croak. I have a heart condition. Basically it's a great love song with the dead boy coming back for his girl and finding she's waited for him. I crank out a lot of songs but they're mostly too sloppy for the Cult.

"See I don't want to be part of a clique group, none of us do, we want to be rich and successful. I do want to be a superstar. Sandy's songs are hard to interpret (it's no secret that Bloom for one was getting increasingly perturbed at having to sing numbers with no obvious hooks to lean on). Albert is the best interpreter of Sandy's words. I think we've blown it a lot recently. Secret Treaties was an attempt to make Agents that failed."

And they all hate On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, insisting with contemptuous vitriol that it is the worst possible representation of how good they can be live. I don't think it's too bad myself, although it is the most obnoxiously heavy of their records. That was one of the first signs of erosion amongst manager and players; there's a feeling that it encouraged a bogus hype which was too crude for them to realise, much less want to solidify.

Albert is aware that with success might come a weakening of the original aura that separates the band from pedestrian competition: "Some people think this album was a fluke but we are definitely better than any other hard rock band. A lot of people don't realise that three of us have been together since 1966."

It was never an easy ride to the top and even now lighting cigars with ten dollar bills is but a speck on the horizon. He continues: "We've got into trouble with our image, in Germany, and once when the Jewish Defence League picketed a concert. Obviously our critics don't have a sense of humour. The image is more serious now; everyone took it so heavy we decided to ham it, so if they took it for real they wouldn't be offended by it. It's only unpleasant if you miss the fun, at its worst it is still funny."

THE CONTINUING rewards from Agents and the future of the next album are crucial both to the band and their ability to maintain a creative working unit with Pearlman. Soon they will play their largest gig ever, at Anaheim, near Disneyland, an outdoor event with the horrendously popular Z.Z. Top and the Winter Bros. Payroll? 50,000 dollars. Such performances are what establish careers of evil.

Aware of the need to turn casual support into a concrete following, at their last similar venue in the Oakland Coliseum (not surprisingly, California is their biggest market) they psyched themselves into blowing J. Geils and Jeff Beck clean off stage by turning on their jazziest, meanest brand of heavy metal.

It paid dividends, but it's possibly a problem that they need that kind of motivation to tear an audience apart.

Among the band, general feeling is that Pearlman and Krugman will stay as part of the team – in how vital a role is not so clear. Next year will be make or break for Blue Oyster Cult whatever the outcome.

Now is the time to take stock of the original concept – they have already manifested the lacquered proof of their ability to out-heavy anyone in the devastation arena. Their hard core following has no doubts as to who is the most important metal band on this heat zone. With such a profound understanding of the overall rock ball game and an up-to-the-minute mind-boggling surfeit of talent, they could be even better.

If they ever strike the medium which collates every facet of their career then watch out, brother.

This band is more than the sum of its parts, the only genuinely heavy group with a melodic pop sensibility that isn't going soft. If they are willing to take a few more chances, success will be accompanied by overwhelming credibility outside of the cognoscenti. They need it, we need it. The dice are out, the stakes are high and the price of failure doesn't bear thinking about. Like the girl spinning the roulette wheel told you – there is so very much at stake.

Max Bell || New Musical Express

Dharma Bums

NEW YORK — The Record Plant studio is hidden inside an office building in the ratty Times Square area. Here, sinister ol' Blue Oyster Cult is putting the finishing touches on their new album, Spectres. No band members are present, but it's muttered that Alan Lanier and Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser can be found at a nearby Spanish-American restaurant. Upon en- tering the eatery, one is immediately assaulted by a jukebox blaring "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing." Loud disco music; bad for interviews. Lanier and Roeser are easy to find; they're white.

They're also soft-spoken, not to say reticent. Between the noisy music and the quiet musicians, this is gonna be like pulling teeth — not a bad idea, as Lanier has poor canines. The Cult's keyboard man (and guitarist; everybody plays guitar in this band) also has an angular and skeletal face accentuated by round, tinted wire-rims. By contrast, lead guitarist Roeser is innocently clear-eyed — he has to cultivate a mustache as proof of age.

Lanier, who lists murder and bank robbery among his non-musical interests, is reluctant to give clues to the new BOC album they're still working on (studio sessions began back in April but were interrupted by tours; the lp is due out this month). He does hint that the word "night" crops up in most song titles.

Roeser decides to clarify. "The common theme of the songs, I would say, is the soul on the other side of the earth." Silence (except for a pounding disco "Rhapsody in Blue" in the foreground). My gaze wanders out the restaurant window to where an elderly woman is being roughed up by a prostitute.

Change the subject. Was the band surprised by the success last year of the morbid "(Don't Fear) the Reaper"? "I'm not surprised by anything," Lanier retorts. "Neither was I surprised by the total failure of the next single we put out. If it happens it's great; if it doesn't happen, well..." His voice trails off.

"We have an orientation for hit singles for obvious reasons," Alan continues. "It's part of the game."

"We can't afford to be a strictly cult group," adds Buck, unaware of any irony. "We have such a big show — the lasers and everything — that we can't make a living as an underground band. We have to have a large, rabid following."

"We like being the monstrous focal point of a following," Lanier comments. Shades of the Cult's infamous neo-Nazi past. "It's all entertainment, basically," Roeser counters.

Entertainment, but business as well. Between recording and heavy touring BOC is real lucky to get one month off a year. As Lanier notes, "There's no such thing as a weekend."

"There are maybe five cities in the United States that are really nice to play," Buck observes. "The rest of ‘em are just — where people live."

"Just—live," Alan repeats meditatively. "Merely live." Is that sarcasm or malice in his voice? A knife fight erupts at the bar. I lift my legs off the floor as a puddle of blood comes trickling under me.

Suddenly Lanier decides to open up. "One of the great things, in terms of style, I always thought the Cult was involved in — one of the big things we've already won — is that we were the first band to prove you could be a big-city New York East Coast band and be successful. | guess the Eagles are sstill selling records, but | think we made a place for that whole kind of Anxiety City depression, as opposed to the Eagles. I'm really proud of that."

I noticed our waiter is a Wookie and decide to leave the boys to their tamales. Later, one statement of Alan's recurs: "I still believe that through rock ‘n roll you can run the world."

But most of the time it's... merely a living?

Scott Isler || Crawdaddy

John Denver is God; Bruce Springsteen is God; Blue Oyster Cult is God!

I HATE TO be the one to bring it all up again, but goddamnit, the '70s have to be dealt with. An ugly affair, to be sure, this decade leaves us stranded long past its midpoint at a bewildering crossroads.

On the one hand, we have the punks; on the other, we have the Eagles; and, in between, we have all the groups we really like (need I make altogether hideous and unnecessary reference to that band with the puckering name... ?). The fact of the matter is that the choices for the rock 'n' roll fan at this very significant juncture are narrow and completely discrete, with no satisfactory middle ground among Richard Hell, Kiss (sorry), and those puddinhead birds from South California. End of story. Turn off the typewriter. Brush my teeth. Go to bed. Goodbye.

Not quite. First of all, this magazine would never let me get away with a feature this short (Try us! Try us! - Ed.) and secondly, I really think I may have uncovered the '70s' sonic Shangri-La, the place where the decade's perverse and opposing rock 'n' roll needs may just be able to co-exist blissfully. Here, look at the Spectres in my little crystal ball.

Cleverly enough, that is the title of the new Blue Oyster Cult album. More cleverly, that is the state of being the band has finally achieved. Spectres. Which is not to imply any inadvertent lack of definition. To the contrary, in the context of the Cult, Spectres represents an acutely conscious and sharply rendered phantom substance. A paradox? Almost. But what better way to reconcile the diametrical crosscurrents of the Seventies? Indeed, the Blue Oyster Cult may just be the band of the decade, hovering over the era at once symbolic and completely functional.

Or, as CREEM's punditory publisher would have it: In the '70s, maybe you can have your cake and eat it, too!

But let me explain. The Cult arrived in the swirly rainbow dawn of the '70s packing just about every riff in the book, including many that the so-called New Wave claims to have lately discovered. Primarily a heavy metal band, with traces of their lately famous balladeering style ('Then Came The Last Days Of May'), the Cult could match cosmos for cosmos with Pink Floyd and demagoguery for demagoguery with Black Sabbath and mph for mph with Zep and they did all that with an intelligence and sense of humor that most assuredly set them above and apart from all of the above. They were eclectic and hip and if you think the punks originated chains and other assorted S & M trappings, you don't know that the Cult gave special thanks to New York's infamous Leather Man boutique on the second album. Wow. Needless to say, the radio and records marketplace of 1972 were having none of this cool genius - they wanted their Floyd or their Sabs or their Zep neat, or not at all; but mostly they wanted the Carpenters.

The years saw the BOC relinquish none of their humor, intelligence, or metallic atomic weight, and the years saw a lot of BOC albums go down the tubes, relatively speaking - and that includes 1975's live LP, which was surefire... or so everyone thought. Though after four albums, the Cult had their own respectable cult, Columbia certainly had to be looking askance at their contract. And then, in the spring of 1976, with commercialism nipping ever fiercer at their jackboot heels, the BOC turned out an album called Agents Of Fortune. Most importantly, the LP contained a song called '(Don't Fear) The Reaper', penned by Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser.

'The Reaper' combined longstanding BOC obsessions (death, apocalypse) with a hummable melody, vocal harmonies, and a slick yet subtly sizzling guitar hook. It was a punkish heavy metal easy listening love song, if you can believe it. A perfectly odd synthesis - and perfect. Like feeding the dog his pill wrapped in hamburger, the long-elusive mass audience ate it up. At long last, the Cult had a radio hit and a gold album and, so it seemed to many, the inmates had indeed inherited the asylum.

The Blue Oyster Cult??? Hadn't they always been just a little too hip? A little too eclectic? Too heavy in their metal and too punky in their punk? The Blue Oyster Cult??? How can those guys ever have gotten a hit?

Well, of course, it was for all the reasons they never had had a hit before. All those things that had been too much before were just right now and, miraculously compressed into one three minute single, revealed the Blue Oyster Cult as the quintessential Seventies hybrid. Which is more evil than anything they ever pretended to be - and sells a helluva lot more records.

Naturally, the Big Question now is: Can they maintain it? Will the BOC fall? In order to answer this and other inquiries, we were compelled to travel uptown in Manhattan - in the dark - to the Record Plant where Spectres is taking shape.

The pimp black August night near Times Square where the Record Plant is located is teeming with evil portents as I arrive - and Albert Bouchard is bright and sunny and genial as ever. Allen Lanier, Eric Bloom and Joe Bouchard have departed for the evening. Albert and Donald Roeser, who is a good guy but something of sobersides, are entrenched behind a console with producer Murray Krugman listening to the latest mix of Albert's vocal on a song called 'Death Valley Nights'. Having just listened to the rough mix of another cut, 'Fireworks', in a studio upstairs and having just pronounced it the "obvious" follow-up to 'The Reaper', I am surprised to find that I like this other one even better and am forced to now declare 'Death Valley Nights' the "obvious" single. Everybody else seems well-pleased, too, Albert hunching over in his chair, listening intently to his own screaming, and seeming on the verge of laughter (as he frequently is). After a brief discussion about adding echo to the track, Donald and Albert agree to take their evening break and head around the corner with me to Joe Allen's, a show folks hangout with good fish and chili. There they will tell me about the real hit on the record.

When we get to the restaurant we're talking about neighbors and Albert tells me his latest crazy New York story. "In our apartment," he says "the neighbors are like twelve-feet across an air shaft from us at the same level, and there's this guy who likes to take off his clothes and beat off right in front of the open window. A lot of the time he'll turn the light on during the day for better visibility and do it. Caryn [Albert's wife, recently delivered of their first child, Jacob Dylan] will shout to me, 'He's at it again!' And sure enough, there he goes. Anyway, this guy has his girlfriend over every once in a while and I thought of doing the same thing to her, but I just couldn't. So he's still at it and I try to stare him down, but he keeps on 'til I have to pull the drapes... " Albert is laughing outright now. "We have this maid who comes in once a week and he especially likes her. She just says, 'That man's as bare as the day he was born,' and goes on doing her work."

Donald, always the most efficient member of the band, has overheard the story and suggests the following macabre, yet plausible, solution: "Next time he does it, go over to the window with a carrot and a knife and stare at him and start cutting away at the carrot real slow." ("Don't fear the Reaper," indeed.) Which causes Albert to fall into mild hysterics again, shouting, "I'm dangerous! I'm dangerous! That's great!" That's Albert, always smiling, nothing fazes him - goofy, a little, but wonderful.

After we order (Albert gets a Molson's ale, Donald, a vodka martini; both want lemon sole for the main course), the interview gets down to the oh-so-serious business of the new record. Donald explains: "This is the Blue Oyster Cult's annual album. And it's the first studio record we've done right after another studio record in two years, since Secret Treaties - because of the live album - and I think there's going to be a parallel between this one and Treaties. We had two years to do Agents Of Fortune, so I don't think this'll be like that one."

Albert takes a broader tack. "What we're trying to do is please everybody all of the time," he says grinning at his turn of phrase. "We're trying to keep a balance between having enough smooth pop stuff so that people will buy the album and enough heavy stuff we can do in our live show."

Pop tunes don't work live? I ask, having at various concerts heard stunning renditions of 'The Reaper'.

"Nah," says Albert, obviously a diehard heavy metallite. "What works live is still too heavy for the mass public [on radio, in other words]. But we'll see," he continues, venturing the following unsolicited (I swear) testimonial. "Maybe Kiss will do it. But if they do, it won't be because of the music. In a way, I think what they're doing is real good. They're trying to take the heavy sound to the mass public. I don't know if the public will buy it, but even if they do, it's because here's these guys who paint their faces." At which point, Donald chimes in with some startling revelations: "I think most people who buy Kiss like the music, too. I don't think it's just because of the paint. I like a lot of Kiss music. I don't like all of it."

And then, in his inimitably obscure way (I still haven't figured out who he means here), Albert sums it up for us: "The public is not ready for the sound of buzzing insects, the sound of insects being tortured to death." He chuckles. Did I say goofy?

My most inevitable question, the one that touches on another very important spectre which I presume must haunt the Spectres sessions, gets the most abbreviated answers, a fact which may bely the true terror of recording again after your first hit. Do you think about 'The Reaper' a lot while you're recording this LP? I ask.

Albert: "Nah."

Donald: "Nah... If there's anything I hate it's a follow-up single that sounds like the first one. That's what I liked about the Beatles when they first came out. 'Please, Please Me', 'She Loves You', and 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' - none of them sounded alike."

Albert: "My only reason for not liking the name Spectres is that it sounds like some sort of follow-up to 'Reaper'." (Earlier, they had toyed with the idea of calling this record The Big Hurt.)

But later on, Albert returns to the subject to place it in a serious perspective. It's about the most solemn he gets the whole evening. "We're not trying to deny 'The Reaper'," he assures me. "We got a bigger budget and the record company's more excited about us, and we did pretty well this year financially. Everything is because of 'The Reaper'. But this is not a follow-up."

What will be the first single from Spectres?

"Right now we're thinking about 'Going Through The Motions'," says Albert, "which sounds sort of like P.J. Proby. It's the story of a relationship not built on love - but merely on the physical." He lowers his voice for the last word, bugs his eyes in mock horror, and then, once again, laughs. "Real heavy. It was written by Eric with Ian Hunter."

Which is not to say anything about odd couples... So how did that pair happen?

"We did a lot of gigs with Mott - they were headlining - and we got to know 'em," he explains. "Then Ian moved to Connecticut near where Eric lives and they ran into each other at a party. Eric got Ian's address and started hanging out with him. We had started rehearsing for this album at the time, and Eric didn't have any songs and he felt real bad. So he called up Ian and said 'Hey, let's write a song,' and they got together and knocked it out in an afternoon."

Then I asked Albert to tell me how the album in general (which they are still keeping almost completely under wraps) came together. "What happened," he describes, "is we came in with ten songs totally unrelated, and then we dropped four of them. And when we came back from being on the road several weeks in July, the stuff we came back with was definitely with the knowledge of what else we had going on the album. I think that the four new songs fill in the gaps. Also, in the original six, there is no killer, fast rock 'n' roll and we needed some of that, which is part of what we added. One of the songs we added is what you might expect from Steve Miller and another is what you might expect from Queen... "

Donald wakes up at this reference. "Queen?" he inquires. "Yeah," says Albert, naming the tune in question: "'Golden Age'." Donald: "A Queen song???" Albert: "Listen to it." Donald: "I'd be very surprised if I heard that from Queen." Albert goes on to justify the characterization. "You hear all those high harmonies... and it's sort of like an opera, a mini-opera... " Seeking to nail the Queen culprit, I query the two of them: Who wrote it? And it's Albert who responds: "Donald," he says guilelessly. "It has a lot of harmonies on it... The album as a whole has a lot of harmonies on it, a lot more than we've ever done."

Big Question: Can they do it? Can the Blue Oyster Cult snag their second all-important mass hit? Is that what they have in mind in these sessions?

"I think this album is more commercial just because we're getting better," opines Donald. "That's a part of the Cult's maturation process that we become more integrated into the mainstream of pop music. The longer we go on, we're not getting farther out. The fact is, we're getting closer to the mainstream."

Yes, the BOC is closer to the mainstream. Yes, I think they will have their follow-up hit. On the other hand: no, I don't think Donald sees the process correctly. As far as I can tell, it's not really that the BOC is changing their jagged course, more that the Seventies mainstream has somehow turned into the Crooked River.

Robert Duncan || Creem

Blue Oyster Cult: R.U. ready 2 rock?

BOC's ALLEN LANIER talks to Ian Birch in New York

IT HAS to be admitted that, virtually from Blue Oyster Cult's inception, when they were variously billed as the Soft White Underbelly and the Stalk Forrest Group, they were tantamount to a critic's fantasy come true.

In their first four albums, and particularly the criminally unreleased material they delivered to Elektra (their first record company) during '68/'69 (they contained tantalising titles like 'Hoedown On Your Pelt', 'Curse Of The Hidden Mirror' and 'Ragamuffin Dumpling'), the Cult managed to combine the kind of exemplary molten metal that Led Zeppelin could only dream of with a fearsome conception.

Crucial to this regime was the now fabled Sandy Pearlman, the group's manager and (perhaps erstwhile) theoretician.

He contributed seminally to the band's often self-satirising blend of biker-controlled fury and the black art/all things arcane and eclectic, devising lyrics of mammoth complexity.

They both borrowed self-consciously from rock 'n' roll's history and made these references immediate and as chilling as a poised jack-knife.

Effectively they were a devastatingly powerful and original hard-rock outfit with an intuitive grasp of pop sensibility in direct descent from the Byrds and the Beach Boys, incidentally two of keyboardist/guitarist Allen Lanier's favourite groups alongside the Doors.

But why do I say WERE? Their last two albums, Agents Of Fortune and Spectres, just highlight this mixture of the romance of late Sixties psychedelia and the unrelenting rabbit punch of our contemporary urban lifestyle.

You see their first phase; their red-and-black blitzkrieg image was laid to rest with album number four, the live double On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, which none of the Cult are especially pleased with.

It was a scrappy affair and simply didn't capture the precision dynamism of their stage show.

Their follow-up, Agents Of Fortune, seemed to herald a new phase — re-coup and re-consider. It was their most commercial offering to date, and distressed hard-core Cultists.

This fact also showed through on the sales register, giving them their first-ever chart single in the glorious '(Don't Fear) The Reaper'.

Understandably, the band want to appeal to a larger audience rather than a fanatical minority and so moved away from the influence of Sandy Pearlman towards a more in-house, democratic set-up where the onus fell more on the band.

They even re-recruited David Lucas, who had worked on the first album, to share production credits with the former cartel of Pearlman and Murray Krugman. On Spectres the production credits became further diversified with the Cult itself being included beside the three master technicians...

IT WAS holiday-time for the Blue Oyster Cult last week, as the band quit New York's freezing winter.

Allen Lanier, however, with his lady Patti Smith — perhaps that name rings a bell? — stayed behind for a day to talk to the MM.

So has there been a conscious change in the Blue Oyster Cult's approach?

"I think mostly the reason it seems that way is because it was a long time between studio albums. It was two years between Secret Treaties and Agents. So in some ways our songwriting styles had changed somewhat, our playing styles had progressed and certainly our studio technique was much improved."

Did that mean there were new studio techniques? "Well, new to us — the biggest ones were called time and money. The time we took on Agents was much more than we'd ever taken on a studio album before.

"Normally, we'd come off the road for around a month, do an album in Columbia's studios, then go back on the road while someone mixed it.

"We didn't see it as a radical shift. I've said this again and again. We have always, when it's time to do an album, simply looked at each other and said, 'What have you got?' and we see what we have, and see what lyrics Sandy has, and throw the lot together. It was no different, basically, from Agents.

"Yet it was more commercial, and presumably more accessible maybe, because by that time we were a bit tired of dealing with some of the past subjects in our songwriting.

"I think we had stated our case. Tyranny And Mutation and Secret Treaties were put together in terms of the metaphor of politics and rock 'n' roll, the image of illusion and delusion, and that's a subject you can't dwell on.

"We were writing too much about rock 'n' roll rather than simply rock 'n' roll as just another part of the normal experience of living.

"That realisation has partly motivated the way we have written since. The more you work on the process of being a songwriter, the more you want to write the type of song that most people will relate to.

"Good songs deal with common phenomena; writing a song doesn't make much sense unless there's you and an audience. So it's a natural temptation to move in that direction."

STILL, THERE were people who felt cheated when the band broadened its objectives.

"That's a critic's disease. They feel that they have an exclusive understanding of a rare thing. There's a lot of cultural one-upmanship in critical writing.

"Look at the yards and yards of garbage written about bad rock; it seems like a lot of critics want to prove that they can understand the most obscure event.

"Also, rock 'n' roll is infused with the whole fallout from the Dada sensibility, where bad is good and all that kind of s-.

"To me, rock 'n' roll is one of the strongest arts ever, and it is a stark, radical experience. But at the same time it's funny because it is so common. It can work on a very minimal amount of technique and historical reference.

"Its power seems to exist on such a simple level and yet it's so strong. It's constantly magical and amazing to me."

Lanier was once quoted as saying that art couldn't work in isolation, an idea that surfaces more and more with each successive Cult album.

Fantasy
"It can't. I'm just talking about rock 'n' roll here. The parameters, the medium of rock 'n' roll, depend on people.

"When there's a great painting you can certainly stay in a room alone and appreciate it. For some reason it seems to be a process to keep away from crowds.

"But with rock 'n' roll you just can't stay in your room and create a masterpiece in the deep dark recesses of your basement.

"Some people do do it by themselves. Stevie Wonder does it a lot, but it doesn't have the sense that I have of great rock 'n' roll. I wouldn't want to work that way."

The cornerstone of the Cult has always been their stunning ability to harness technology in a way that creates a multi-layered and perfectly synchronised sandwich of noise. Not a dependence on the tools of electronics, but an overall manipulation of them. Hence they are primarily a live act.

"Yeah, technology has certainly been our history. The technology of our show at the moment is just overwhelming. Lasers, huge sound systems and all that sort of thing.

"And it can be frustrating to keep it all in harness, to try to make it look right, to try to utilise it, to twist a lot of knobs, crank up a lot of diodes, transistors and wires to make them do what you want to do.

"People used to ask what's been the biggest influences on our sound as a band but everybody's influences are the same.

"Everyone listened to Elvis and the Beatles and Motown. The influences are so prevalent that nobody can escape them all, because it's popular music. It's not a matter of discovering some obscure deviation to form the basis of what you've done.

"We're no exception from any other band, in the sense that we have stolen as many licks from other bands as other bands have stolen from us. That's inherent in the form.

"No, you know what our biggest influence is? It's a bigger amplifier. It's a hard balance to swing between getting those seductive sounds and putting some life into the thing, because you can get trapped so easily.

"People come to concerts and they want to see the elements that they're used to but they're also waiting for an overwhelming barrage of sound, that phenomenon of being in a coliseum full of earthshaking sound. That in itself is an experience that they're coming for."

AND AT A Cult concert that is exactly what is delivered: a complete event that both relates to our motor city environment and transfers it to a gigantic fantasy land.

"The sounds we live in are loud. We're so conditioned to it. Like that line, 'I think I've never seen a thing so lovely as a tree.'

"That's okay if you're taking an environment which is just wood and trees, but the world isn't like that anymore. People go home and crank up their stereos.

"It's the sense of what comes out of it as part of the environment that elicits a response. Some people's blood never runs faster than when they hear the hum of a big car.

"All these inputs and stimuli are related. It's funny; it can get real depressing because it can have a sad aftermath.

"It's like more, more, more and you still feel unsatisfied. It's all the more imperative then that you use it for some good purpose, that some magical reason somehow communicates itself through what you're doing — instead of mereness.

"That word, 'mere' — forget it. People used to put that word in front of everything. Mere television, mere rock 'n' roll, mere this, mere that, which it'd possible to do in an artificial situation.

"It's a word that denotes artificiality in the sense that we did it and God didn't. A belittling term, because it's a belittling world.

"I find it that way and that's one of the reasons that rock 'n' roll is so popular, because it seems to be such an extravagant celebration."

Rock, then, has an internecine connection with politics, not in the Jim Callaghan sense but in the whole mechanics of the modern struggle.

War
"Yeah, it's the politics of living. There is a war to be won, which is to say just to look is to arrive somewhere. All these middle-class, middle-aged parents can't understand coming to a rock 'n' roll concert: 'Ooooh, it's so obnoxious, it's beating you over the head' they say.

"My reaction is, yeah, it's terrifying because it's like a great horror movie because it's so monstrous. But it takes that kind of kick to break through that barrier of numbness and that's probably why people take drugs. Same sort of thing.

"I put drugs into two categories. There are the flamboyant ones and then there are the Zen ones. The Zen ones are those when you stare at a paperweight and it looks just great.

"I don't do drugs now, but I do have fond memories. It's funny that whenever you talk about rock 'n' roll it always goes off on these tangents because it seems like they are all part and parcel of the environment."

THE TWO latest Cult albums also point to a movement away from ideas to evoking emotions. The early image, with its war-zones, S&M, neo-fascist (never underestimate the underlying humour contained therein) pyrotechnics has been largely replaced by a fervent desire for diversity.

"The early image was just too restrictive, too overwhelming after a while. It was a joke.

"We've always been susceptible to images, but then I've always seen the band as people in a group. It took us a long time to become what I consider good songwriters, to know what the hell we were doing.

"And I think we were hiding behind that early image to a large degree, hiding the fact that we were limited in communicating ourselves. We are perfectionists.

"Maybe there were other ideas, but we just couldn't seem to put them together, so we banded together more. Now I think the band has broken up into individuals, but it took a lot of effort and years on the road.

"Our early image got us a lot of press, but it was mainly a gimmick. Think of how absurdly related the idea of a Hitler and a Mick Jagger are in the sense of power, control, and decadence, and knowing it only through the media."

Unified
Thus the last two albums have seen them ranging over a new variety of topics and sound experimentation.

"Spectres, especially is a collection of isolated vignettes and somehow the style we played them in brought them all together.

"Also, I think there's a very nocturnal feeling. Most of the subjects, through no particular design, referred to the night. One of the album titles we considered using was 'Unfinished Nights'."

AND THIS leads to another aspect of the Cult. Every package, conscious or otherwise, is a unified entity.

The cover mirrors the title, which mirrors the atmosphere, which mirrors the content which mirrors the production.

"We try very much to do that. We do everything and just deliver the package to CBS, who shrinkwrap it. We've always aimed to make each album a co-ordinated thing."

The cover of Agents Of Fortune was originally suggested by a friend of Murray Krugman's, a gambler who dubbed a deck of cards "the agents of fortune."

"With Agents we realised in the studio that we had an album that had more sales potential than any previous one. So we wanted to put a title on it that had a reference on it to the idea of taking a risk and coming through.

"We found this artist (Lynn Curlee) who was like a super-realist painter. He had a fixation with dirigibles and zeppelins, but we couldn't use them because of the obvious reference to Led Zeppelin.

"So we commissioned him to do it with the tarot cards and reference to the fortune idea. We had someone cast a reading on the cards for us and it was an incredible reading for overcoming obstacles and having great success!"

The actual cards on the cover were abstracted from this divine lottery and show Death (favourite cult obsession), the Queen (the songs on Agents had particular bias towards the femme fatale trap), the King (undisputed authority) and the Sun (echoing the new direction/change of the format).

The inside gatefold features the band, dinner-jacketed, with a flaxen-haired croupier in front of a kind of cosmic roulette wheel resting on a NASA surface.

"I worked out that design. I guess we've never completely got away from the alchemical/mystical/scientific/technological connections. It's a NASA space probe, a shot of the earth taken from the moon. That was like a nostalgic deference to all the sensibilities that we had."

So what about Spectres?
"That was simply a question of trying to take pictures with lasers, to see if we couldn't capture lasers through photography. It's the age of the laser, after all.

Influences
"Also, I thought it would be nice to make time references. That's why we specifically picked the clothing — which I suppose is turn-of-the-century — but it's also a movie reference.

"It comes from my influences, like Fritz Lang and the film M. You know, spectres in the night and a mysterious atmosphere.

"And you have the cut 'Nosferatu' (legendary horror movie) on the album.

"I get a kick out of historical references like that. In a way that could hurt us, because there are so many different references to grasp. It ain't Fleetwood Mac.

"But you can't really help what you do. I admit on Spectres that we tried to be as commercial as we could, in the sense of good, clean arrangements, straightforward songs, played well, strong harmonies and so forth. No matter what we decide to do, we always come out doing what we do, if you get what I mean."

SPECTRES WAS done in two stages. The band went into the studio and did roughly half before setting out for a month-long tour of Canada. Allen sees a marked difference in the two sections.

"The second time we got better sounds out of the studio. There seemed to be more energy coming right out of the road and back into the studio. It's too bad that we're not good writers on the road. It would be a great way to use the time, but we're people who germinate the ideas best at home."

Writing
The Cult reject what might be called a collective anonymity. But with the diminished influence of Sandy Pearlman, who nevertheless will continue to be a major catalyst for the band (he was there right from the start), the responsibility of songwriting, and particularly lyric writing, has developed on the band. Has this posed problems?

"On Agents there was a sense of 'this is Donald's (Buck Dharma Roser) song,' 'this is Albert's (Bouchard) song,' 'this is my song' and I wondered if we would come up with five short little solo albums.

"But it didn't turn out like that because we have been together so long that our styles are very much influenced by one another. We steal from each other more than anyone.

"People put as much, if not more, effort into someone else's song if they have a certain feeling about it. It all trades off that way.

"Donald is a narrative writer; he likes to tell stories. I'm not such a great narrative writer, I tend to go purely for mood. Atmosphere is so important, making the song sound like what it's about."

Allen wrote a lot in the early days of the Underbelly and Forrest collaborations, but until the last two albums (notably on 'Tenderloin', 'True Confessions' and 'Searchin' For Celine') has taken a stalls seat. How come?

"I stopped writing because I got self-conscious about my abilities as a musician, so I sat down and concentrated on them for several years. I co-wrote with people, but I didn't spend a lot of time on songwriting.

"And I just came back to it, I don't know why. I would have to say that my material isn't as applicable to BOC as perhaps some of the others. I really don't know why.

Satisfying
"Also, I'm terribly lazy! I tend to get bored easily. I get three-quarters through something and then give it up."

'Tenderloin', Lanier's account of the Red Light district in San Francisco (it borrows from Kurt Weill and Miles Davis), is one of the few numbers he has written that actually satisfies his high requirements.

Ironically it is as descriptive (like Donald's work) as it is atmospheric.

"Yeah. It was one of those instances when I had a picture in my mind and when I was writing it I felt as if I was there. I'm not going to tell you the details of where it exactly came from.

"That's the way I like to write. Put down the clues and let other people fill in the spaces, as opposed to taking care of all the details. I don't like to be too detailed because songs tend to end up being soundtracks to your own life."

And the future? Well, another studio album is tentatively, planned for this summer and the band are coming over in March to lay waste to our green and occasionally pleasant lands.

The album may be part live, part studio, though the band aren't happy with the live album format.

Versions
"They are versions of other songs. You can't really capture all the nuances of a song on stage and I think the nuances and the details are at the heart of the matter sometimes.

"Live albums are exclusive in the sense that they have that taint of the fact that it was done on a particular night with a particular audience somewhere and you listen to it and you know you weren't there for the majority of people.

"Whereas a studio album is pure. It's just as much yours as anybody else's. On a live album there is THERE as opposed to a HERE, whereas on a studio album its right HERE."

When they hit our shores, on no event miss them. R U Ready 2 Rock? Fireworks lie beyond those death valley nights as you board the hot rails to hell. I love the night. I also love the Blue Oyster Cult.

Ian Birch || Melody Maker

Cult Figure Cuts Clash To Suit American Dream Machine

SANDY PEARLMAN IS A BRISK and lively talker. He can probably offer an animated dissertation of any number of irregular topics, ranging from advancements in the field of archeological exploration to the state of play with those past masters of base metal transmutation the Blue Oyster Cult, for whom he is co-producer, lyricist and creative consultant.

But right now he's talking about The Clash. Because, in a development that's bound to add further armour to the Clash sell-out partisans, Sandy Pearlman is producing the second Clash album.

Pearlman's credentials, to those familiar with the rarefied strata of cerebral hard rock in which he works, are above doubt. He excels at combining guitar maelstroms with sublime wide-screen atmospherics, most readily found on the nearest BOC album, but available in more experimental permutations with The Dictators and Pavlov's Dog - the latter taking a deliberately extreme, lushly romantic avenue, and the former being the first professional garage record ever made, as Pearlman puts it.

Objectively, though, Sandy Pearlman's reputation is that of an accomplished (record company speak for someone who has made records that get in the charts) American hard rock producer. His involvement with The Clash raises some interesting questions.

Like, for starters, who's so bored with the USA now?

And to follow: with The Sex Pistols defunct, has it escaped CBS' notice there is probably a large American market, fostered by the media barrage for punk in the past year, that is ready and waiting for the first bona-fide ambassadors to come up wit a readily palatable sound?

Pearlman can't answer those questions, of course. But, to put it bluntly, does he think he was asked to do it in order to bring The Clash sound more in line with what's acceptable to American ears?

"Yes. That' exactly why I was asked to do it," he declares with admirable honesty. "What The Clash are going to have is a record that sounds better than they've ever sounded live.

"When I see them play here and do so well they're being accepted on the basis of stage presence, their material, and their performance, but not on the basis of what they sound like. Their sound, not the way they play or execute their material, but just their sound-the-consequence of what they're playing out of is not good enough to succeed in the States."

Surely that thick, gruff, and to some impenetrable Clash sound is essential to the make-up of the band? If you can't relate to it, then you were never meant to relate it.

"The first time I heard The Clash album I couldn't hear anything." he admits. "By the third time I'd gotten past my high technology prejudice and realised the sound was just right for what they're doing. In fact it's almost faultless, it's the best punk record ever made - and I've made two of them with The Dictators.

"But in America there are a lot of people who will not listen to lyrics at all. I know this will disappoint Joe, but al they listen to is patterns; rhythm patterns and so on. Unfortunately, you can sing about any sort of moronic thing and it will not be noticed.

"Giving them a chance to sound good, though, doesn't mean they're going to compromise. This record will not sound like The Bee Gees...

"I don't think The Clash is a particular thing," he adds enigmatically. "I wouldn't care if they made two million dollars a year - which they won't - because that would have nothing to do with the fact that at this moment there is a real revolutionary, anti-authoritarian, subversive consciousness in those songs.

"All I care about is the effect - that you generate an effect and an impression to the audience. I don't care how that's done. So... I think The Clash will be able to make their point.

To set the record straight, the connection came about through CBS A&R man Dan Loggins sending a short-list of their recent signings to see if Pearlman would be interested in producing any of them. His interest kindled by the album, he opted straightaway for a crack at The Clash.

Pearlman reassures us that The Clash album won't sound like the sine qua non of high technology production, unlike the two recent Blue Oyster Cult albums. Which brings us round to the subject of Cult operations.

He says that the reason for his reduced contribution to the Cult song pool on Agents Of Fortune and Spectres was merely a matter of him being too busy with other projects and not, as was rumoured, Eric Bloom's refusal to sing Pearlman lyrics because of their near total lack of standard rhyme and meter construction.

Talk of Cult disenchantment with the Pearlman/Krugman tag team production style is also unfounded. The venture into areas of aural foreplay on the above albums was, like all Cult matters, a case of communal decision.

"With Spectres " he admits, "there was a deliberate attempt to make an album that would sell three million units, and beat Fleetwood Mac. I can honestly say I would like to sell three million units. I'm not sure I'd like the psychic burden of being Fleetwood Mac though."

Pearlman's involvement with BOC runs deep; right back to their inception at Stonybrook University. It was he who suggested the original name, Soft White Underbelly, and through his acquaintance with through his acquaintance with Elektra's Jac Holzman - Pearlman was then a part-time writer for Crawdaddy and was once asked to produce The Stooges' first album - got them their first record contract with Elektra.

He is also partly responsible for the hard-core mutant symbolism that pervaded and eventually plagued the Cult.

"In 1970 everyone in this band was walking around in leather and black boots. Whether they looked like axe murderers or not, that was the way they dressed.

"But, yes, I probably had most of the ideas of the presentation of the band to the public."

These ideas, and also his fascinating lyric conjuring, sprang largely from what he calls the enormous stock of outré knowledge that he carries about with him.

"I've always been interest in things like technology, science fiction, horror literature, obscure wars; junk information, romantic information."

As will be obvious to anyone who has deciphered his lyrics, he is also keen on arcane history.

"My single favourite year is 1905, because it was a watershed year. The first Russian urban revolution, the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war - which was the first time a European power had been defeated from outside - the radical spread of industrialisation all over the world... Einstein formulated the theory of relativity in 1905, and I could go on.

"I'm interested in change: how tow ears come upon each other, the old and the new, and there is then either a dynamic or a conflict generated. Or else defective interfaces, where they'd never mesh, and one culture or both cultures, or one tendency or both tendencies, are subsumed in conflict."

Like The Clash coming up against the established American rock order. Interface or defective interface?

Paul Rambali || NME

Blue a Fuse

Barry Cain gets his gums blown out by Blue Oyster Cult

BLOOO... Brooklyn lights through the smoke-stained windows of the

BLOOO... Cadillac limousine underfelt cruising and cuddling the waves of

BLOOO... FM music in and out swirling with

BLOOO... exhaust fumes left stranded in this

BLOOO... night.

BLEW... me right away.

BLUE... creases in the

BLUE... leather car chairs as BLUE... Oyster Cult drummer Albert Bouchard inhales the

BLUE... mindsteam breathes out so so slowly and talks about his wife, life and

BLUE... s

And 80 miles behind the glide in the Mid Hudson Civic Centre, Poughkeepsie, a solitary electrician twists in the dark to repair the Cult damage.

Yes, the band actually, really, no jiving, the truth now

BLOOO... a fuse.

And all the lights and all the heat and all the can openers went BANG in Poughkeepsie, New York State, on Wednesday, January 11, 1978.

The smokebomb had dissolved and the Cult had just begun to disseminate 'Born To Be Wild' when it happened.

A fitting finale cos like they'd pumped enough volts into that cool hall on that cold night to foster blow the minds of an army of Frankensteins encased in ice. Or maybe even revive a Kennedy.

Sucking energy dry sound and vision wise is a Cult copyright. Not that they're a cranked up really high Clockwork wind up. A concrete block of automation necromantics napalming the lax wax ears of hollow hips.

Nah. Blue Oyster Cult smile. A pearlie white grin behind the amp, a snigger in the solo, a muffled guffaw above the drum break. They have understanding.

(A quick metaphor).

Put it this way. In unenlightened days a VD victim had to be bombarded with what was then referred to as 'Heavy Metal' drugs. Unfortunately they were so heavy that they turned the poor sod's gums...

BLOOO. !

Then penicillin and all types of cunning device drugs came along and your gums didn't turn.

BLOOO... anymore. There's no way the Cult are gonna be the giveaway when you kiss your girlfriend. That's for sure.

Okay, they're loud. But it's a smoochy blast, a candlelit dinner devastation. As though Florence Nightingale is smashing you over the head with a hammer. Listen to the new album 'Spectres' and you'll know what I'm talking about. Wild, wooing and wonderful. Caressing not bombing.

And there's the lasers.

Of course. The lasers. Razor lasers carving main lattice work collaborations on walls, beaming onto roaring twenties' crystal balls suspended and revolving from the ceiling, reflected, and falling on the hypnotised masses below. Electric rainfalls, close encounters, raygun rock.

Lasers shooting out of the accusing finger of sinister Eric Bloom. Barbed wire lasers from which the shreds of a Donald Roeser galvanising guitar escape hang like ripped clothes.

Lasers that fill the hall and then scatter in a furious moment.

Yes. The lasers.

A Blue Oyster Cult concert cuts you open and bandages you up at the same time.

Blue Oyster Cult are an American heavy metal band.

Blue Oyster Cult are the best heavy metal band in the world.

How's your gums? ALLEN LANIER plays keyboards with the Cult. That's an understatement. Allen Lanier breathes keyboard life into the Cult.

He's sitting in the immense Black Rock CBS centre, New York City. Thirteenth floor. Turn

right out the lift past the sexy black chick at reception right again and second on the left.

The Sex Pistols are in San Antonio reliving the Alamo. Outside the snow falls like laser beams. Inside the wine is red and warm.

All's well with the world. The golden age of leather is upon us...

"People are always ready to come up to your expectations when they're dazzled. There's this great cathartic experience at rock shows. A very necessary explosion of inner sensibility and feeling. A chance for the inherent anarchic senses to be released. "There's got to be some phenomenon that gets a big crowd together and then sends the whole lot of 'em raving. The kids smoke, drink, get wiped out and explode the pressures. Religion has it's escapes too. Like revisionist meetings."

Lanier actually looks intelligent which is sometimes very difficult when you've got long hair. These days.

The Cult are currently making the US rounds (They've since completed the tour, their most successful ever and are crossing the sea next month). Interest has been rejuvenated thanks to their first hit-single in six years '(Don't Fear) The Reaper' which usually results in orgasmic press handouts with the "look to the future" spiel.

But young Lanier rather likes his record company: "Rock and roll is a very manipulated thing. Right here in this very building..." (He bangs his finger on the table. Dramatic) "there are ideas to perpetuate that fact.

"But we have an ideal set up with them. They don't have any say in what we do. Simple as that. We write, produce, design the albums and just hand them in. I suppose they might make some comment if we had a picture of an effigy of the director of the company with us sticking pins in.

"Hit songs buy you another chance to do another album."

Lanier intellectualises. It sounds impressive at the time but written transcriptions have the unfortunate tendency to make rock and roll theorising sound incredibly pretentious.

That doesn't mean I can't say Allen Lanier is a highly articulate man who likes to get drunk now and again. His lady also happens to be Patti Smith - but we can't all be perfect. Just kiddin' Allen. Honest.

Sex Pistols. "They won't make it here. For starters, no radio. Secondly, no hardships to play on. America is doing quite well thank you. We had the Vietnam war, we killed all the Indians. Hiroshima is our Dachau. We've had all that.

"Rock and roll was all about kids hating their mothers and fathers and getting wrecked. A frustrated generation. But those revolutions have been won and it now reflects in the music - Soft and radio playable."

So Allen - what's Blue Oyster Cult?

"Blue Oyster Cult are five very intelligently minded musicians trying to do the best they can. We don't feel part of any movement. When I sit down at the piano it's just a question of how is this piece of music going to help me in terms of living in this world."

Now that sounds very yucky. Well, it IS very yucky but also very sincere.

"You don't understand the temptations you face in this business. You can have a lot of ideals - but they can vanish in a champagne and caviar onslaught.

"I ain't a real extravagant guy - except in the sense that I spend all my money."

And what money. They lost 20 grand last time they toured Europe three years ago. Elektra lost 120 grand on them. "It didn't bother me losing that dough in Europe - cos I got to go."

He continues to talk of the Stones - "Jagger can still be the brash, decadent young fey. The greatest rock and roll records that I remember being raised on were flamboyant, youthful, energetic yet with the expertise of old musicians. One of the weaknesses of punk rock is the fact that they don't have a Charlie Watts."

Huh?

Lasers - "Lights change the atmosphere but lasers change the timbre. You can almost sculpt them. When you go on stage you satisfy your own fanciful sense of yourself. Everything has to seem more extreme."

'Spectres' - "It's sold more than the 'Agents Of Fortune' album but never attained half the chart position. Naturally the band's attitudes have changed. People say - 'How can you change your image - you are going to lose your audience. 'That's crap. The only thing that has changed is that the band can deal with things on a much more personal level."

Nazis - "We were often accused of being young Nazis because of our leather look and logo which bore some similarity to a swastika."

The Blue Oyster Cult show is coming. All 250 grand of It. All extravagant fuse blowing crane heaving diamond flashing method of it. The show is big, the band are physically small. Tiny even. Small people got more to prove. The Cult prove it.

We are in the enviable position of having the best of a dozen rock worlds. From the sawdust philosophies of real ale bands to Blue Oyster Cult. From the teentoon ditty dotties to Blue Oyster Cult. From the black interstellar overdrivers to Blue Oyster Cult. From the European spitoons to Blue Oyster Cult.

If Rush can sell tickets Blue Oyster Cult will sell halls. For they alone have put the heavy back into metal in the last few years.

And you can't say more than that. (How about crap? Ed)

Barry Cain || Record Mirror

The Cult Occult And The Disco Nightmare

ALLEN LANIER sits down for a pleasant chat about bikers, Burt Bacharach and band ideology.

BLUE OYSTER CULT invade the UK at the end of April for the first time since 1975, when they turned the audience on but got a critical thumbs down.

Since then they've dropped some of the old warhorses that were captured, kept and cherished for ever on the On Your Knees set, still the only tour de force metal record extant.

Perfectionist rascals that they are, the band are inclined to pour scorn on that disc - and when I spoke to Allen Lanier last week in London I discovered that they aren't so gone on the new Spectres album either.

Admittedly, Lanier - who along with Sandy Pearlman and Donald Roeser has been involved in finalising the last days of May assault (April, actually-Ed. ) was jet lagging and suffering from the effects of a hurried BBC confrontation. Still, his reasons for a very qualified satisfaction make sense in terms of the band's development.

BOC peaked their heavy lead and chaos routine on the double live and the studio tracts for forbidden knowledge, Tyranny And Mutation and the unsurpassed Secret Treaties . The transition, the lull before the storm, was Agents Of Fortune : a little less dominance, a little more submission.

Lanier's view is utterly objective.

"Spectres ," he observes, "is another attempt at the right thing, but I think it's a failure. We didn't get what we wanted. Every time we go in the studio wanting to capture some very heavy rock'n'roll and we walk out with a polished production which has a lot of charm and ambience but doesn't kick ."

The third phase is in fact the Cult's most approachable, in that the group have now established themselves as five individuals, albeit with a unified purpose, whereas previously they were a consummation of manager/producer Sandy Pearlman's pop art psycho-analytical genius.

The Phantom of the Paradise humour of such offerings as 'Don't Fear The Reaper', which should be obvious to anyone with an I.Q. of plus ten, nevertheless escaped the American press, who promptly accused them of selling out (Creem bracketed them with Barry Manilow and Frampton) and/or propagating some political death trip on the fans, as if rock and roll was ever going to change anything.

The change of heart can be accurately traced to the 'Reaper' hit. AM, FM and S&M - yes boys, you are accepted. It made for good Cult-sell-out copy, but created an uneasy alliance between commercial potential and their autonomous direction. Where do you go from there, boys? Then again, it also bought them some time.

"I liked the recording process more than the finished product," Lanier says now.

The BOC doctrine is that every man does his stuff at home and brings it in for approval, hence the variation in style and the overall coherence. In some places they broke through and some places they got stuck. Notes of dissension have arisen over the last single, a mistake to which even Eric Bloom, co-writer with Ian Hunter (Ian Hunter?) will attest.

"When Eric came in with 'Goin' Thru The Motions' we loved it because it seemed to come from the Spector (sic) genre - it was an exercise in style. In fact we recorded it in two takes first. Half before a Canadian tour, half afterwards. It sounded like a limpoid Beatles rip-off and we realised we'd failed entirely. So we did it again as raw as possible.

"It isn't an example of BOC ideology, because we tried for the evocation of something we all dug. I'm talking about early Philles and Burt Bacharach material like 'Baby It's You'. We don't normally do songs in that vein, and this doesn't carry a lot of substance.

"It's an athletic exercise."

Lanier's own contributions are rare - although he's writing more songs now than at any time since the Stalk Forrest days. His 'Searchin' For Celine' is one of Spectre 's definite successes.

"The song is about nightmares," Lanier explains. "I'd been reading on Celine and then dreaming I was going to talk to him. I transferred that idea to a theme of total bitterness, the fact that a relationship can be as destructive as it is constructive. Love is a wipe out.

"People have said what the hell is this, a disco song? But I like certain elements in disco. You can dance to it, for a start, and it was fun placing an obscure lyric against that backing. I cheated by changing the gender, but what the hell."

Disco in this instance is in the eye of the beholder. Note the two guitar solos, though. Lanier's is the first, manic, nervous and frustrated; Buck Dharma slips you the second, smooth ferocity on a slipstream of his own design, always was and will be the best guitarist in the league. Did Mozart ever win a music poll?

Dharma's contributions to Spectres are truly faultless, marked by that tasteful attention to tone and the man's personal trademark a penchant for messing around with time structures in a taut framework of key and melody. Even when BOC were bleeding ears they were still ten times more tuneful than the boozy, macho, pelvis-strutting fools who are tools of their own egos and who wear the sum total of their personality on their T-shirts. Buck can boogie them all offstage, but he can also hand over the goods in the shape of 'Golden Age Of Leather', 'Godzilla' and the gorgeous 'I Love The Night'.

Lanier construes on Dharma's behalf: "I prefer the music of 'Golden Age' to the lyric, which is a bit presumptuous (it was written by Bruce Abbott, an old buddy of Roeser's who also wrote a C&W song with him, so far unreleased). Bikerism is not that big any more - it's gotten to be a private not a public display. There are no more parades or Angels benefits, they died out with a lot of other '60s phenomena."

The Cult still draw large numbers of journeymen bikers to their Stateside shows though. Recently Bloom and Lanier found themselves riding backseat in the Bridgeport, Connecticut Chapter, breaking lights and stopping cars as the escort roared out to the clubhouse. That knot of honour remains sealed, although to Lanier...

"I find Donald's supernatural songs more compelling. He has this way of writing so that in 'I Love The Night' the occult angle is secondary to the love aspect. An archetypal, bizarre situation becomes universal. Recently we were in San Bernadino, California and we heard 'Riders On The Storm' followed by 'I Love The Night' on the radio. It was a real thrill to see how they measured up to each other. Both had comparable qualities."

Part of the new direction is revealed in the cover artwork for the last two albums, mostly the concepts of Lanier. The Spectres shots are inspired by the turn of the century photographer Jacob Rees, whose How The Other Half Lives album depicted the classier gang members of the period in their true colours - the dandified three button suits sported by the band echoing a time that is not quite traceable in history - somewhat in the manner of a Fritz Lang movie.

Finally Lanier puts in a plug for his best girl Patti Smith. Her Easter record, he says, "goes right at you. It has none of the idiosyncrasies which prevented people from deciding whether they really liked her or not. Her band is so improved that the ambivalence has gone." One track to watch out for will certainly be 'Because The Night (Belongs To Lovers)', co-penned with Bruce Springsteen and likely enough a hit single.

Lovers and legends aside, the most significant news is that BOC themselves are returning to Britain to prove that whatever Randy Newman says, small people make the best rock'n'roll. To paraphrase Eric Bloom's Japanese, Godzilla is approaching the city. Can you feel the new dance breaking?

Max Bell || NME

Blue Oyster Cult and Sandy Pearlman

ERIC BLOOM is adamant about the current position and status of the band he sings and plays for, the am-aaa-zing Blue Oyster Cult; they are 'evolutionary', and that's how they got where they are today.

Some critics wouldn't agree with that assessment of their transition from arcane/metal outfit to potential hit makers of the 1980s. Many are the pundits who revel too much in the mistique of lyrical wonderment and the knowledge that Blue Oyster Cult's moniker may or may not have been an anagram from some across-the-pond brew called Cully Stout Beer, or (even weirder) a reference to the gourmet's delight of blue point oysters, to get off to something like the transistorised joy of their latest single, the Mott The Hoople meets ? & The Mysterians melange of 'Goin' through The Motions' (which was, incidentally, co-authored by Mr Ian hunter Himself).

Tuff, BOC are hitting their peak, I'd say, and I doubt if anything's going to stop them from increasing their reputation as one of America's most tasteful and inventive rock exports of this decade. Eric explains the subtle shift of emphasis from obscurity to accessibility like this (even though he still tops off the face fuzz with his omnipresent mysterious shades... no pictures of the eyeballs allowed): "... We had Secret Treaties, the third album, then the fourth album was live, and the fifth album was Agents Of Fortune... people forget we had two years between studio records, they think we got to Agents and all of a sudden made a left turn and did pop material."

One of the more unusual things about BOC has been the role of producer and mentor Sandy Pearlman, who some people saw as being almost entirely responsible for the group's stance and image (more of him later). Hasn't he kind of been 'edged out' of late?

"Sandy has a lot less time, 'cos he has a lot of other things to do. And everyone feels a little more ambitious, that they can write lyrics themselves. I wrote 'Goin' Through The Motions' with Ian because working with the other guys, I've been doing it for ten years. I just wanted something fresh."

Eric's collaboration with Hunter is from the band's latest album, the dazzling Spectres , but the turning point was the previous record, Agents of Fortune. I wonder whether there was any real significance in a remark made in a Creem magazine interview awhile back, when Cult member Allen Lanier told Lester Bangs that it'd 'be nice to make a little money for a change'.

"Lets face it, financially speaking we weren't making a living up until Agents... what is it that made it sell? It was '(Don't Fear) The Reaper'. We were always sort of snowballing a little bit more every year... The live record did about 15-20 per cent better than the third, so we figured Agents was probably going to be our first gold album, probably gonna do alright, get us a little further down the road... Then "The Reaper' was a hit so we went 100 per cent further than the previous record.

'It was really 'The Reaper' that allowed us to do a lot of things... to buy recording equipment for our homes; we could take time off since we didn't have to tour so hard... All these things add up to being able to spend more time writing material, and I think it shows."

The Cult have always been a good draw live, but groups like Aerosmith who started off as support bands to BOC seem to have overtaken them. Does this bother them at all?

"I could name you about seven bands... Bob Seger opened all our shows last year; Aerosmith; Kiss played a whole tour opening for us; Kansas... I was talking to the guys in Angel the other day, I said 'You guys are probably gonna make it big 'cos you're opening for us!'... I'm not killing myself about it. There's never been a year where we didn't do better than the year before."

Somehow the New Wave creeps into the conversation, and I mention that Nico had some stuff thrown at her recently when sandwiched between The Adverts and The Killjoys at the Music Machine. Eric bares his fangs: "I think the New Wave is a crock of shit! None of 'em know how to play anything... I dislike 90 per cent of it.

"If any of this quote/unquote New Wave crap happens on our tour... the kids were great tonight. We expected kids with chains through their noses! I don't need any rowdyism at our concerts, 'cos the show would stop.

"Maybe some bands like getting spat at, but if any bottles hit the stage I'd find the guy and throw his head against the wall... "

Well, I agree about the violence, but weren't the Cult (like the New Wave) the critics' delight for a time?

"It was kind of self-generated, 'cos we knew all the critics like Richard Meltzer and Lester, Nick Tosches, but the first album didn't sell for shit. I still like to think of us as the world's largest underground band."

Two things which may have kept the band underground to some extent, are their macho rock image and their militaristic undercurrents.

Firstly, the Black Sabbath audience set-back: "It's the guitar trip. Guys just stand there and pretend to play guitar, y'know? And we are the ultimate guitar band, five in a row... count 'em! How many great girl lead guitar players are there? Not too many. It's a macho, masculine trip, maybe it's phallic... I have no idea...

"But ever since 'The Reaper' was a hit there are some ladies up front, which is nice. Nice to have some tits to look at once in awhile. Gotta focus on something interesting!

"We were a parody of the heavy metal beast and then turned into it... It was that we were sort of an inside joke to ourselves of what heavy metal really is, and yet we transcended the joke and became it... "

The Cult's famed logo (an ancient symbol for chaos, and representative in alchemy of lead, the heaviest of metals) bestowed on them by Bill Gawlik, their premier cover artist, has been mistaken by many cretins to be some kind of neo-Nazi swastika substitute, a symptom of the leather/stormtrooper aura that has dogged them for far too long. There was that famous ad of them in American flyers uniforms, with a picture of Hitler with a dart in his forehead, which ran in the American press ages ago, causing no end of trouble with the popular rockzine Circus.

"All of a sudden we hear that next month's Circus has an editorial by Jerry Rothenberg, who is the editor and I think owner of Circus magazine, apologising for the bad taste in running the ad. He was into, 'did the six million die for nothing?', and all that stuff.

"So I called him up and tried to explain the whole thing, that we were in American flyers outfits and so on... I said, 'You say anything more about us and hook up "Nazi" with it and I'm personally gonna be very angry'. Next issue has the 'Heavy 60 Personalities of the Rock Business', with my picture in it, and it says, 'Blue Oyster Cult, who have alienated as many as they have chilled with their neo-Nazi antics'."

Subsequently, Eric had lunch with Rothenberg to explain the finer points of the Cult's feelings and vision as regards their, er, motivations. He also took time out to show an outraged Rothenberg that the last two letters of the logo of Kiss (the most popular act featured in Circus) were more than a shade similar in design to the German S.S. insignia.

"I said, 'You've got to understand what Nazism is to people over 35 is one thing, but to kids it's motorcycle guys, somehow macho, not shaving, tough...' he said, 'then we've failed... ' I told him. I agree with you, but those are the facts...

"Then there was a CBS trade ad campaign for us two years ago. A picture of the inside of a church. You see the backs of a few people next to the pulpit, and there's a guy in a black leather mask with a zipper for a mouth, chains, studded boots, total S & M outfit, with a whip in his hand. When we saw that we went bananas. When we vetoed that ad it cost us six months promo... "

The band also nixed plans for the gatefold of the live double to show them using a black guy's head as a bowling ball, and in addition to all this they had to overcome record company generated hype that they were being hounded by the powerful Jewish Defence League (totally false, as it happens).

WITH THEIR new-found AM acceptance, and the fact that they've overcome their previously somewhat anonymous look by managing to get their faces on the front of an album cover at last with Spectres, it seems as though the Blue Oyster Cult may be finally heading for the stars and their just rewards. One thing's for sure: they aren't lacking in new ideas. They've ploughed money back into the phenomenal lasers and special effects which have become apart of the Cult's live show, a new live album is planned (including a version of the MC5s 'Kick Out The Jams'), and Eric hopes to work with Michael Moorcock.

And you're a part of all this too kids! Know why the Cult don't print lyrics with the albums (although you can send off for them if you so wish)?

"It's like looking at a painting where the artist hasn't explained to you what it is... I've had kids come up to me and say, 'Hey man, you know that song where you say, 'Get laid in the hay'?'... And I'll think about it and I know I never said that in any song, and I'll say, 'Yeah, yeah.'... They hear stuff that isn't there... like I saw an album of ours released in Japan, and they just listened to it and wrote out the lyrics the way they heard them, and it's totally different to anything we're saying...

"Sometimes, it's better than anything we ever could've thought of.

INVENTOR of the term 'heavy metal', record producer, lyricist, critic, rock genius. Sandy Pearlman is all these things and probably more. Apart from the Blue Oyster Cult he has worked with The Dictators, Pavlov's Dog and soon (hopefully) The Clash. He is not in a good mood. He has just been on the transatlantic phone trying to find somewhere to manufacture Cult discs during the current pressing plant strike in the USA. Casually dressed, thinning on top, he flops into a chair and steadfastly refuses to affect any requested pose for photographs

Firstly, is the Clash thing still happening?

"Sure... the studio is booked, engineer has pneumonia but we'll be here, so it's happening with as much certainty as there is in this world."

A lot of people think that the Clash are very street-level and that you might dilute them, though Patti Smith says she thinks you can give the record technical competence enough to appeal to the U.S. market...

"I guess so! Patti Smith knows what she's talking about, whatever she says goes, Ha-ha. Who knows... they don't sound the same way they sounded 6 months ago... they sound much heavier... more like a mainstream band.

A lot of people, Creem magazine and all those guys, seemed to think you had a master plan to take over the world with Blue Oyster Cult...

"A five year plan! Obviously we failed... Creem? They don't have any brains anyway, so what do they know?

Don't you like any of the magazines?

"No. they're terrible. The only one I like is Circus because it's total trash. I like the English ones 'cos they're loaded with irrelevant news, so at least it's data... raw data. The American ones don't even have any data.

How do you see that in relation to the fact that the early Cult records appealed to critics?

"We were able to exploit them... now they don't wanna be exploited; they think they were burned. We've reached a certain level of success, so maybe it's not fashionable to like the band any longer, I really wouldn't know. There's a certain amount of resentment over the fact that they were manipulated, but they're dumb enough... they deserve to get what they get... I'm being candid with you, I don't care... I'm not just saying this because we're here in the U.K., but I happen to like the stuff in the U.K. a lot better, honestly. It's so trival, I don't care."

Don't you think rock'n'roll is a trivial medium anyway?

"No. Definitely not. I think it's obviously the most important art form of the second half of the 20th century. Good statement!? Yeah, but it is! It obviously has the power to move the world, whether it will or not, I don't know. But these morons who have no idea of what's going on, their parasitic existence is of little interest to me... they should go away and stop wasting paper."

Do you think anyone in rock'n'roll ever changed anything really?

"Yeah, I think The Beatles did. I don't like The Beatles at all, but they unlocked a certain energy source which obviously had some effect upon the history of the world... may well be nothing more than too many American soldiers were smoking dope in Vietnam so were unable to effectively man their high-technology weapons, so the war which may have gone one way went another way. Or that too many possibilities occurred to people in late 60s America and they decided that, 'Oh, I am part of some amorphous quasi-revolutionary movement and I don't feel like becoming pate in Vietman', something like that. So The Beatles helped change the world, whether for good or bad I wouldn't know."

Can the Blue Oyster Cult do something like that?

"Depends on how popular it gets... it isn't popular enough at this point,'

Do you think it's a good move that the last two Cult albums are more commercial, then?

"No, because the more commercial they become the less power they have to change the world... they contain less revolutionary content, revolutionary in the most wide sense."

They're less subversive of the order of things as perceived, they're less dangerous. Are you unhappy with that?

"No... I really wouldn't say that I'm unhappy with it... they sell more, we make more money, they're technically more perfect, there's that satisfaction. Someday maybe they'll be subversive to the established order again... it would be nice to reach a larger audience for a lot of reasons, and there does seem to be some of this latent subversive content. That's more than anybody else is doing."

Do you think that it could only be in America that a band like the Cult could develop, with this whole mythology behind it? A country with all these leather bars and sex palaces, and huge discos... it's just that America seems so unreal...

ERIC: "Even people who live in New York City probably don't know what's really going on... the so-called 'trucks' area. You walk in and every kind of thing you could even think about is going on in these places... there's meat markets there under the West Side highway. Long semi-tractor trailers parked there that're emptied of their meat, and the so-called gay-blades go in there after it's night-time and perform upon each other all these various...

SANDY PEARLMAN: "Anonymous mass-sex acts!"

ERIC: "80-90-120 guys... "

SANDY PEARLMAN: "With their pants dropped! Waiting for somebody to insert an organ, an erect organ into 'em! But I'm sure lots of your Lords perform the same thing. In the United States so many people have extra leisure time... ."

WE DISCUSS Saturday Night Fever, discos and 'Environments'... the Cult are constantly evolving their technological side... .lasers, etc. By the summer this system will be totally computerised and able to generate concrete images, like 'Godzilla' for example. Holograms?

"No, a hologram is a bad avenue to pursue... . it's got too many problems. You can create holographic illusions with the equipment we have if it's properly controlled. The 3-dimesional effect comes from the fact that it's projected in a visible gaseous medium, smoke. You ever see a movie called Forbidden Planet ? The Id monster... we now have the technology to create the Id monster. That is without a doubt the best single concept in a science fiction movie."

Is it hard to maintain your inspiration?

"No, not at all... it's hard to generate enough time to act upon the inspiration. I'm always dreaming. If I didn't dream all the time it would be hard to take this stuff. Charles Ives was vice-president of the Hartford Indemnity Corporation, one of the biggest insurance comnpanies in the world... he used to write his music at his desk."

Even optimistic people, like Colin Wilson, had a breakdown.

"Well, he's a great writer... been writing the same thing though for 20 years. I think that The Philosopher's Stone is a really great book about optimism... one of the best books I know about human potentiality. But he has been saying the same thing, I would presume that after awhile that might prey upon you. And all he is is a writer, so he's saying the same thing and he's doing the same thing... I don't mean that as a criticism, just as an observation. That might become profoundly unsatisfying... He has all these things in his mind, all these potential events, all these imaginary conquests... he's only a writer, y'know? He reaches an audience maybe of... what did The Outsider sell to, 100,000 people, 200,000 people?... 50,000 people for his average book, that's probably optimistic. That could be a very trying thing to have on your mind, to know everything in the world and not be able to do much about it. But he's had a great influence upon me."

Is that why you like rock'n'roll? It's a more heroic field.

"YES!... it has leverage because it's popular."

Is there anyone in the field of rock'n'roll that you consider to be a genius?

"No... I used to like Ken Scott, but all these things are unsatisfying, what we do... which is good, I guess. I thought a couple of David Bowie records were amazing... Ziggy Stardust and a lot of The Man Who Sold The World and a lot of Hunky Dory were amazing. And then when he became John Travolta, when he entered his disco period, I was sick. I couldn't understand how somebody who idolised the idea of Bob Dylan and was able to express all the idealism and optimism inherent in that notion could write 'Yound Americans'."

I WAS THINKING more of behind the scenes megalomaniac type-guys like yourself, Phil Spector, Kim Fowley, those type of people...

ERIC: (laughter)

SANDY PEARLMAN: "Kim Fowley?"

Why do you laugh?

ERIC: "Cos we know him so well.

SANDY PEARLMAN: "Yeah, we know him, he never really did anything. He's a character who makes enough money to survive, that is his functional role at this point. That's been his role for a long time. Phil Spector? I don't know... he had his riff 15 years ago.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER: Bob Marley?

SANDY PEARLMAN: "What about him?

"I don't know that music... his music hasn't succeeded in America to any great extent, y'know, and it hasn't even succeeded in the U.K. to that great an extent. It's not as popular as Queen... something as thoroughly despicable as Queen. They're the worst species of... they've taken a certain kind of imagery and debased it, and in addition to that the relationship they have with their audience is an image of aristocratic patronisation which deserves immediate extermination. I mean, to see the man standing there with the champagne glass with his tou-tou on, with the champagne dripping from his glass in front of an audience of people who this year constitute the dancers at the 2001 discotheque in Saturday Night Fever was too much for this reporter to take! You could only hope for the lone madman with a gun, y'know?"

But things like Fleetwood Mac are the most popular...

"I think there were metaphysical heights of expression reached in 'Rhiannon', I'm not joking! I think that what that girl was doing at that moment in time was amazing! It sends chills down my spine. I think that Fleetwood mac is not trying to manipulate an image of which it is not the master."

Wouldn't you like to work with someone in that area, be subversive to a bigger audience?

"Ah, who knows... I just drift along. The Clash is interesting, because the Clash possesses to me a really anti-authoritarian tendency. I don't know if it'll survive, but it certainly exists right now, and existed on the last record they made.

"That's what I admire in the Clash... I could be naive... I know that all art is a lie, but it's also the truth at the same time. It's the lie which is the truth. And to me the Clash is a lie which contains an enormous amount of truth in it, and Queen is a lie which contains no truth... obviously it has no content at all to alter the condition of consciousness, while the Clash does, to a certain extent, possess that ability. The Rolling Stones possessed that ability until 1967."

Do you think you're a genius?

"No... I might have the brains, but lack the willpower."

Are you just like Brian Wilson then, "A hard working guy"?

"No... I think he's a sap. It's like some sort of Joan Of Arc where they spoke to her for 10 munutes, and then they stopped speaking to her. They had two years of inspiration and a year of preparation before. So from 1964 through 1967 the Beach Boys were on top of the world.

"I was riding down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston when I heard 'Good Vibrations' and I knew at that point they'd reached the absolute apex of what they could do. Then they brought in Van Dyke Parks because they just didn't understand what lyrics were any longer. What have they done? They're popular in this country and they're popular in the United States and they're wonderful and they're entertaining, but they no longer have contact with great sources of inspiration."

Do you think that humans have the ability to ultimately transcend death?

"Probably within in very short period of years. Pessimistic 50 years, maybe 25 years."

Just think, you could make 100 Blue Oyster Cult albums...

"Hopefully, the time could be put to better uses."

THEN THE TAPE ran out. Before I'd reached the door Pearlman jumped from Elvis ('a real porker') to Albert Camus ('he died right on schedule') to Johnny Mathis ('I'd like to record him doing the Arthur Lee songbook'), among other subjects, all within the space of about three minutes.

Obviously, his inspiration will keep him busy, and us fascinated, for a long time to come... .

Sandy Robertson || Sounds

Blue Oyster Cult's Bivalve Personality

BLUE OYSTER Cult's lead singer Eric Bloom was never comfortable with the band's original image — a tongue-in-cheek, leather-bound melange of macabre, tough guy and, some thought, fascist strains.

"It was sort of laid on us by our management," he said. "It was handy for getting us on the map at the beginning, but we got turned off by the way the record company and certain people were catering to it."

A few minutes later, discussing the current BOC's monumental sound, light and laser setup — which has inspired numerous press releases proudly trumpeting the system's tonnage and cost — Bloom found himself on the same ground: "That's all overemphasized in the press because our management wants it to be. People think it's impressive."

If Bloom himself sounds less than impressed, it may be because such matters have fogged the public's perceptions of Blue Oyster Cult, which will be at the Inglewood Forum Thursday.

Even at the start, the heavy-metal quintet led a confusing double life: The "critics band," praised in the press as brilliant conceptualists and humorously sinister image-mongerers; and the "people's band," breaking initially in the South and then climbing the ladder on the strength of its high-energy stage show. Bloom, who just wants to "entertain the kids," clarified the point during a phone conversation from his Long Island home:

"We've always been a people's band. I'm not a great musician or writer, but I think we're one of the great live rock 'n' roll bands. My main concern in the band is the live performance.

"With the lasers and stuff, it's important to keep it all tasty. The way we do things, the visual effects are punctuation to the music, unlike certain bands who do it the other way around — not to denigrate the painted-face boys. They're wealthy, so I guess they're doing something right."

Bloom's dig at Kiss, a rival on BOC's hard-rock turf, is understandable, considering that after 10 years BOC has yet to advance beyond the status of moderate record-seller and arena headlines.

"We're not over the top," said Bloom. "It's better than it used to be, but we're not in the Eagles or the Stones league. We're in between a group that has to tour all the time and a group that only tours when they think they ought to."

The Cult came together in 1968 in Long Island, the members converging from bar-band backgrounds and a college setting — a combination prophetic of the group's split personality. The present lineup — Bloom, Alan Lanier, Albert Bouchard, Joe Bouchard and Donald Roeser — congealed in 71. The band's CBS contract came a year later.

Bloom: "It's tough when you're starting because you don't get much of a push from the record company. So we had to take whatever we could get in the way of generated image. But we were backing away from it for years, even while we were doing it. The paramilitary trappings got out of hand, and people thought we were insinuating stuff that we really weren't. Things like the German plane on the cover of Secret Treaties made people think we weren't kidding.

"The only thing we were catering to was the raised-fist kind of thing you get at concerts, some sort of semi-biker machismo that we were trying to cultivate tongue-in-cheek. But people took it wrong. We forced CBS to cancel several ads. There was one showing a guy all in leather with a studded leather mask with a whip in his hand in the pulpit of a church. This was their idea of a cool ad. We said, 'We never want to see this crap again, ever.'"

The music took a similar course from the depraved to the relatively respectable, moving from the offbeat arcana of the early albums (lyric contributors included noted eccentrics Patti Smith and critic Richard Meltzer) to gold records and the Top 40 in 76 with the Agents of Fortune album and the hit single '(Don't Fear) The Reaper'.

That album marked the beginning of a second musical era for BOC. "Everyone thinks we made this big turnaround, but actually it was an evolutionary move over two years. We spent a lot of time and money on Agents . We were looking to be more successful, whatever it took."

An upcoming live album, featuring such outside material as the MC5's 'Kick Out the Jams' and the Animals' 'We Got to Get Out of This Place' will cap Phase II. "We're going to take a long time on the next studio album," said Bloom. "I think it will be a bit different from the last two."

Was there any element of compromise involved in the group's shift to a more refined, broad-appeal approach?

"Absolutely not. I'm very proud of these last two records. Besides, they weren't even that commercially successful when you look at Boston or Foreigner. Having a gold record is nice, but we still have to work very hard and tour very hard to make a living at this. I still like to think of us as being the world's largest underground band."

Richard Cromelin || LA Times

Cult-de-Sac

It's as plain as the mirrored shades Eric Bloom wears on his face every night Blue Oyster Cult takes the stage. The reason the Cult, for whom Bloom is the Mephistophelian frontman and singer, is releasing its second live album in three years is because they simply haven't the time to write any new songs.

"We've been on the road straight since last October and it will be a full year by the time we get back from our tour of Japan," explains Bloom during one of his few free moments on the Cult's current American offensive. As he takes a breather in a Los Angeles hotel just prior to the evening's work, Bloom dogmatically insists "we'll spend as much time as we have to on the road. It's the only way we can pay ourselves."

If this new live album is any indication, Blue Oyster Cult won't have to sweat out the bills this winter when they set up shop to record a studio encore to last year's "Spectres". "Some Enchanted Evening" (Columbia), as the single record set is called, has everything going for it-Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser's dentist's-drill guitar, auxiliary wizardry from Allen Lanier on guitar and keys, the big-beat brothers Joe and Al Bouchard on bass and drums, and the sinister vocal sneer of Bloom (who converses off-stage with considerably less venom than he sings). Add to that a handful of expanded epics from "Agents of Fortune" and "Spectres", including "Don't Fear The Reaper," and two ingenious '60s covers in "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" and the MC5's rabble-rousing "Kick Out The Jams."

A bearded New York City native who specializes in the lean-and-hungry look, Bloom is genuinely enthusiastic about the record. "I'm not honking my own horn, but it is a totally amazing album."

But he has something more immediate on his mind. Some of the mindbending effects in the Cult's $300,000 laser light show are about to be scuttled by the management of the Forum in L.A. where the band is playing that night to an SRO house.

According to Bloom, the band's state-of-the-art system-now up to four individual lasers with a programming computer in the works-was the subject last year of an exhaustive Federal Food and Drug Administration study of possible eye damage to audience and band members alike. There had been previous state and city resistance to the Cult show, including one Texas incident where state officials stationed a trooper on the equipment truck to make sure roadies didn't unload so much as a light bulb. But the group complied with the agency's findings and the show now carries the FDA seal of approval.

Tonight, however, they are up against a decision by Claire Rothman, booking agent for the Forum, that no refracted laser light from the Cult's giant mirrored ball can hit the audiences, thereby limiting the laser show effects (completely designed by the band itself) to light designs on the ceiling. Bloom is definitely not pleased. "They are the only hall in the country making us do this, even though the FDA has completely approved our system."

Rothman-who recently gave a paper on lasers and their use in rock shows to a national meeting of arena managers-calmly sticks by her decision. "Unfortunately," she adds, "Blue Oyster Cult have been hung with this bad publicity which makes it sound like they have a highly dangerous show and Uncle Sam made them tow the line."

But a Blue Oyster Cult show without lasers is still a Blue Oyster Cult show and always has been. Even in their late '60s days as Soft White Underbelly and Stalk Forrest Group, the band attracted an avid following on their Long Island, New York home base on the strength of their muscular hard-rock attack and cover versions of such seminal punk anthems as the Amboy Dukes' "Journey To The Center Of Your Mind."

Eric Bloom first joined the band as road manager after a post-collegiate spell demonstrating instruments in a Manhattan music store. "I had a truck and a p.a. and they needed both." He became second guitarist and singer after the group canned original vocalist Les Bronstein. At the time, Bloom adds, there were no gigs-"just rehearsals and scrambling for gigs."

Now the band is scrambling for a hit single to follow 1976's "Don't Fear The Reaper." Spectres yielded no such record, but Bloom insists it was a better album than Agents of Fortune and points to its gold record sales as conclusive proof.

"Who's to say why a hit is a hit? In my opinion, it was a couple of untapped songs on Spectres, like 'I Love The Night' which is similar to 'The Reaper' in tone. But then nobody asked me for my opinion."

If the live album offers a potential chart-maker of its own, it certainly won't be the Cult's re-make of "Be My Baby." They've been so starved for new original stage and record material as a result of the long touring spells that Bloom says they even considered including their version of the moldy Ronettes' oldie on Some Enchanted Evening. For reasons of space and time, the band decided against it only a week before the album's completion.

"We recorded it on a four-channel TEAC at SIR studios in New York during a rehearsal for the Spectres album. We've played the song live maybe twice, but now we have it on a tape with 'She's As Beautiful As A Foot' that we play over the p.a. as the audience leaves the hall after the show."

And the audience's reaction? Bloom smiles mischievously.

"You'd be surprised how many of them think it's really the Ronettes.

David Fricke || Circus

The Clashmen Meet The Pearlman

Ira Robbins, Trouser Press, February 1979

"It wasn't the easiest thing I've ever I done, that's for sure." I had Sandy Pearlman, Record Producer, on the phone from some unnamed restaurant on Long Island discussing Give 'Em Enough Rope, the Clash album that took several months to record in three cities. "It was certainly worth the trouble - there's no doubt about that. I saw the Clash play in Manchester and thought that they were the best rock'n'roll band in the world."

Well, I haven't seen them live, but I agree with Sandy. No other band (with the possible exception of Elvis) delivers such strength on vinyl. With two albums and five singles to judge by, the Clash's manic intensity is their greatest asset, followed closely in importance by Joe Strummer's painfully true vocals and Mick Jones' classic English rock guitar wrenching.

The Clash at their best present an uncompromisingly honest outpouring of anger and aggression. On the first LP, most of the songs were directed against the social and political stupidity of the worse aspects of London life. 'Career Opportunities' railed against the job situation, 'Deny' against a friend turned junkie waste, 'London's Burning' was about the boredom of London and the intent of 'Police and Thieves' (written by reggae singer Junior Murvin) should be obvious. The lyrics are astounding and the performances match them shout for shout.

The singles that followed the first album continued the Clash's march toward immortality, with 'Complete Control' and 'Jail Guitar Doors' standing above the others in total 45 rpm greatness. Their last single before beginning work on Give 'Em Enough Rope was 'White Man (in Hammersmith Palais)',a complex, reggae-styled piece that doesn't do it to me as it has done unto others. After a series of great singles, the excitement and anticipation that awaited the second album could not have been higher.

Which brings us back to Sandy Pearlman, owner of a varied reputation as a producer/ manager (with partner Murray Krugman) of the Blue Oyster Cult and the Dictators and the object of much discussion in the British press ever since the announcement that he would produce the Clash's second album. Since their first LP hadn't been released in the US for what their record company (Epic) felt were obvious technical reasons (it was produced in six days by their sound man) and since the Clash had long since established themselves in England and elsewhere as a very important and potentially money-making band, Epic did want to release this album and hoped that using a qualified producer capable of sticking to the project would make the difference. Despite spurious rumors that Pearlman was hired to make the Clash sound like the Blue Oyster Cult, the fact is that he was needed by both the band and their label to midwife a record that fully displayed the Clash.

"I announced very early in the project that I thought there was no way I was going to make any money," says Pearlman. "I could have done two other things in the same time but I did it for the art of it, to get this amazing revolutionary consciousness, which I really believe it has, onto vinyl and make it sound good enough that American radio wouldn't throw it in the toilet bowl, and that Americans would also listen to it. With a group like the Clash, I don't know what else you'd want to do except make them sound as powerful and aggressive as possible. To me, their first record was faultless material and great performances recorded as if it were a three-hour demo. The first object was to strip away all the technical problems, to remove all the veils and obstacles that were in their way."

One example of the obstacles Sandy perceived was their equipment. "The object was to make them sound as fiery and spirited as they do live, only better, in that in six or seven shows that I saw they played through a very poor system; they had bad equipment that was run down and poorly maintained. They just didn't sound that good. They couldn't make a good record with the equipment they were playing through."

Although as producer, the only obstacles Pearlman should have had to contend with were sonic, getting the LP recorded presented many problems not normally encountered under ordinary circumstances. But then the Clash are no ordinary band. "The problems were very rarely musical or technical. It was mostly stuff that I consider extraneous, like the band's problems with their manager, Bernard Rhodes (whom they recently fired and are currently engaged in legal battles with) that didn't speed the progress of the record any."

What should have taken several weeks ended up taking nearly six months from start to finish. Work on the album started last February in London when Pearlman "arrived to start rehearsals. Paul Simenon was in Moscow and it took two weeks to get him back. They actually worked for a week, learning the material which Paul hadn't been taught. Then Joe came down with hepatitis, which killed the rest of the month. Island studios (in London) sound good, though technically they were not up to snuff in terms of maintenance, but when the studio worked right it did sound great. I recorded part in San Francisco because it was very cheap and the Automatt is the best sounding studio that I knew of in the US. I felt it was the best studio to do the guitar overdubs. We mixed the record in New York at the Record Plant because at the time I believed it to be the best mixing studio I was familiar with. Also, at a certain point I wanted to get them out of England. I told them that if they didn't get out of England they would really have trouble finishing the record because of their constant fights with Bernard. It was down to where all sorts of silly stuff would happen. They would come in nine hours late because they'd gone to Paris to play and missed a plane or something. Or Bernard would come in and they'd argue for five hours and then no one would be able to play. They were literally unable to work. It was deemed a normal thing for them to have business meetings during recording sessions."

The problems with Bernard, Joe's illness and various other major and minor calamities are hardly new to the Clash. Or even particularly surprising. Joe reckons, "We've always had all kinds of hassles."

Ain't it the truth. Whether caused by the band's unwillingness to compromise either their integrity or their sense of what is and what ought to be, the saga of the Clash has always included fights, disagreements, troubles and bitterness. Ever since the group emerged on the London new wave circuit two-and-a-half years ago, playing support to the Pistols, they have been in constant battle with the forces with which they must contend. The mere fact of their continued existence comes as some sort of cosmic odds tampering.

The Clash have never had a smooth relationship with anyone. Their record company has been the object of bitter attacks by the band, starting in June 1977, when a single ('Remote Control') from their debut LP was released against their wishes, prompting their next single, a new song called 'Complete Control' which was accompanied by the Clash's statement to the press that the song "tells a story of conflict between two opposing camps. One side sees change as an opportunity to channel the enthusiasm of a raw and dangerous culture in a direction where energy is made safe and predictable. The other is dealing with change as a freedom to be experienced so as to understand one's true capabilities, allowing a creative social situation to emerge." The single is all about the company.

In recent weeks, the band and record company have been fighting over the band's refusal to appear on the British TV rock shows that mean guaranteed sales for their new British single 'Tommy Gun'. When informed that a film clip of the song might be sold to the show without the band's permission, a full scale showdown erupted, the repercussions of which have not yet been fully tabulated.

Pearlman had the chance to observe some of their scrapes with the company and describes the basis of the band's refusal to comply. "It's rare that you meet people in the business who aren't working for the business. To a very good extent, the Clash don't give a damn about the business. It's not just bullshit. They're very honest - they told me they'll spend any amount of money put in their hands, but on the other hand they don't care about it. That dichotomy, although seemingly unlikely, is an accurate self-description of where they're at. To a very great extent, at this point in their career, they are not working for money; rather they're working for self-expression. Because of that, what they do is determined not so much by the question 'will this be a hit and will we move another 100,000 records?,' but rather, 'does this express our viewpoint in terms of passion, in terms of hatred, in terms of ideology?' "

That sense of honesty, of duty to their fans and themselves, has led the Clash into all sorts of problems that a less committed band would find easy to sidestep. When it was suggested to them that the removal of a few rude words in a couple of songs might allow them the luxury (and convenience) of mucho American radio play, they held fast, and refused to change anything for the sake of airtime. On the other hand, they have, in the past, offered some excessive criticism of some people who did and others who probably didn't deserve it. (Sandy: "I was not the object of their abuse. There were other people around for them to abuse.") But while Strummer described Pearlman in the Melody Maker as "the only contender - we wanted someone who could put us on record, and he was the only one," Mick Jones told Sounds that making the album was "a fucking misery - 98 days in hell." For the record. Sandy sees it more Joe's way: 'The idea was to make an album that was viable commercially without destroying what they had, but maybe strengthening it. Not only do I believe that I succeeded in doing it, they believe it too. If they don't believe it, they'll say so - they're not loath to say anything about anybody, and they haven't said so, so I presume they are satisfied with what they got."

And they're not the only ones. As I stated in my LP review last ish, Give 'Em Enough Rope "explodes with both fury and venom," and in weeks of listening since then I've really grown to like it. A lot of the album is self-descriptive (not self-important), describing the band's formation, recent incidents and a bitter stab at clearing the English air of unfounded criticisms.

From the top, 'Safe European Home' opens the LP in scorching fashion, chronicling the two weeks Jones and Strummer spent in Jamaica at the end of 1977 in order to see some of their favorite reggae bands and producers (like Lee 'Scratch' Perry who later co-produced the 'Complete Control' 45) and to write songs for this album. Although the political attacks against the repression there are clear, Strummer's feelings towards the trip are lost on me, as I can't figure out whether he's singing "wanna go back there again" or "don't wanna go back there again." Either way, it's a truly powerful song and perfect opener. Pearlman remarked that it was one of a few songs considered for release as a single in England, but the unlikely choice of 'Tommy Gun' prevailed. As 'Safe European Home' ends with some bizarre scat vocalizing by Joe and Mick, it gives way to 'English Civil War', with striking lyrics about the recent rise of several fascist organizations in England set to the melody of 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home'. The lyrics are ominous and scary, made only more so by the juxtaposition of international musical exchange.

'Tommy Gun' hardly sounds like an obvious single, but then the English do have a strange way of hearing things sometimes. As it happens, a friend in London told me the other day that a not-very-hip-but-very-important deejay there had picked 'Tommy Gun' as his "single of the week" and is playing it regularly. Just shows to go you. The main focus of the song is Topper Headon's power drumming, playing percussion appropriate to the cadence of the song's title. Between the beat bursts, Mick Jones adds alternately melodic and jagged guitar figures, pushing the track into a high-energy level that seems to echo and linger a few seconds after the final coda. If anyone wants to believe that The Clash are a non-musical punk band with no sense of melody, harmony, or tempo, 'Tommy Gun' wipes all doubts away as to the depth of their abilities.

With 'Julie's Been Working For The Drug Squad' comes an abrupt change of tempo, slowing down the violent assault to a jovial ragtime affair, complete with anonymous piano that I gather was done by one of the Blue Oyster Cult. Although it initially seemed very awkward and out of place, 'Julie' grows into the album and the drug bust lyrics are much too clever to ignore: "Put her in a cell and they said you wait here/You got the time to count all of your hair." The side ends with 'Last Gang In Town', about the polarization and fragmentation of London youth into gangs. A sophisticated, tense arrangement of a rather plain song, it picks up steam in the middle but falls apart towards the end. Strummer, whose older brother committed suicide, offers a fraternal warning against misdirected malice - "It's all young blood flowing down the drain... "

I suppose lots of people will cite the 'Can't Explain' chords used in 'Guns On the Roof' to draw incorrect conclusions about the Clash's use of "riffs from our collective memory and the... Spirits of Rock Past" as one New York cognoscento put it in print recently. The interesting point worth noting is that while on the 'Clash City Rockers' single, they used a riff that could have been "Can't Explain" but wasn't, this time 'round they've gone perversely straight for the E-D-A jugular. The lyrics are superficially about the arrest of Paul Simonon and Nicky Headon for shooting at pigeons from the roof of the band's rehearsal studio, but the real message is much broader. Seething with disgust, Strummer lashes out at the judicial system and its hysterical response to non-conformity: "A system built by the sweat of the money/Creates assassins to kill off the few" carries none of the polemic hokiness that such political messages in song usually carry.

What I reckon is the only lame cut on the album, 'Drug Stabbing Time', comes up next. Although the uncredited saxophonist gets off some fiery salvos, the song flops in comparison to the other nine. Fortunately, the following track ranks at the other end of the quality spectrum and stands out as one of the most memorable rock performances (an instant classic) in ages. 'Stay Free', sung by Mick Jones in his thoroughly awful-yet-perfect voice (which, interestingly, sounds quite a bit like my all-time favorite non-singers: Pete Townshend, Keith Richards and Dave Davies) bears more than a passing resemblance to Mott the Hoople's 'Hymn for the Dudes' but avoids the fey posturing that Ian Hunter tended towards. With what sounds like honest emotion, Mick sings of a gang that he used to run with before the Clash. They ended up in prison, and he offers "When you lot get out/We're gonna raid the town/We'll burn it fucking down/To a cinder." The guitar solo is straight out of Mick Ralphs and the tune ends much too quickly. What a beautiful piece of from-the-gut music.

(Incidentally, while the Mott reference is fresh, kudos should be given to the world's greatest rock journalist, Nick Kent of the NME, who observed in a concert review dated March 19, 1977, that the "Clash take up exactly where Mott the Hoople left off." And they hadn't even made a record yet!)

Another amazing song, 'Cheapskates', maintains the emotional power of 'Stay Free' with lyrics about the way kids in England relate to the Clash. "Just because we're in a group you all think we're stinking rich/And we all got model girls shedding every stitch/And you think the cocaine's flowing like a river up our noses/And every sea will part for us like the Red one did for Moses." The chorus is catchy as hell, the drumming great, the guitars ideal and the Clash chalk up another near-perfect cut. With no break in intensity, yet with a turn back towards wistful memory, the thought continues through 'All the Young Punks', an avowedly anthemic update of an obscure (sic) Mott the Hoople song. Again taking on the mantle of wise uncle, Strummer offers some advice to kids following the Clash's footsteps amid a brief lyrical history of the band. "Face front you got the future shining like a piece of gold/But I swear as we get closer it looks more like a lump of coal." Another program note - the explanation offered last issue for the mistitling of this song on the US album sleeve was wrong. The real story, according to Sandy Pearlman, is that "The Clash did all the credits that appear on the album. Remember, they didn't have a manager at the time - usually managers look after this stuff - and they submitted a list to the record company that had the wrong title of the song and a few other things left off, and they forgot to send a corrected list. Somebody noticed the error on a proof and the record company said they'd fix it, which they did in the UK but not in the US. They corrected the labels, but not the sleeve."

America is the final frontier for the Clash, but they have no intentions of bending over backwards to titillate the American market. (I read a Jones quote somewhere about America being "syphilitic.") However, initial reports on the first few weeks of the album here are promising - maybe there's hope after all. According to an Epic spokesman, the LP is doing better than expected and is getting heavy airplay in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, D.C., and Houston. A US tour is tentatively scheduled for late January, and the plans are for them to play headline dates at large clubs in cities where they can draw. Unless every person I know who's ever seen The Clash is wrong, this should be a major event in American rock culture and should vindicate, to those willing to find out, all my ravings.

A final word by Sandy Pearlman on the subject of the American public regarding the Clash: "I don't understand every lyric on the album, I doubt that Mick or Topper or Paul understands what every single word is. But if you fail to understand the import of what's going on in the lyrics, then you are a turnip. It would take a turnip personality to not understand what the Clash is all about. It's not like they're trying to hide it - they're not guilty of oversubtlety... "

Ira Robbins || Trouser Press

Night Of The Locusts

THE GOLDEN AGE of hotrod and dragster racing is over but the USA is still littered with its mythology. One such relic is Lebanon Valley Speedway. Framed by the Catskill Mountains and serving the community of Albany (a billion dollar Government town and upstate New York capitol) the old horsepower mecca nowadays resounds to a different brand of mangled metallic thrill. In 1980, it's an ideal setting for heavy arena rock.

One unnaturally steamy night in August, 20,000 kids from Columbia and neighbouring counties flock to the Valley to take part in a black and blue ritual, a kind of aural Los Alamos with added volume fall-out.

Tonight Blue Oyster Cult and Black Sabbath (once posited by metal guru Sandy Pearlman as the arch exponents of guitar music as triumph of the will) are engaged in a battle of the bands before an extremely drunk and rowdy rabble of local citizens.

The natives are restless, living proof of the crowd-as-animal dictum which seems so much hokum when you're happily in its midst and terrifyingly true when you observe from outside.

After bill-openers Shakin' Street have whipped the audience into a limited frenzy a calm descends, but the advent of Sabbath uncovers a potentially lethal time bomb. The concert promoter fluffs his crowd control completely, he's all macho threats and the beast will not respond even though people are getting badly crushed and the security guards (in customised muscle shirts) look like extras from Altamont. The kids press themselves into a flesh sandwich. Punches are indiscriminately traded.

Black Sabbath lap this up like Romans at the Christian picnic (they are after all the satanic princes of doom etc) and drone their downer rock on and on, applauding the fanatics who set fire to huge black crosses and fling them into the air – hideous burnt offerings.

After a while the sight of 20,000 restless crazies obliterated on reds and wine starts to take on the glint of the second ring in Dante's Inferno. The prospect of becoming a statistic in some headlong riot, caught in a crush of fire and bone and falling masonry, strikes the appropriate note of horror. Blue Oyster Cult are not at all amused to find themselves involved in an irresponsible death pit and deliver the promoter an ultimatum. These people simmer down, move back, or they don't go on.

By now the atmosphere is beyond straining. The audience surges about the wire fence dividing group from customer in a display of white devil madness.

Eventually Cult guitarist Buck Dharma (aka Don Roeser) succeeds in releasing the pressure valve by talking to the crowd like a human being. The gambit is partially effective and backstage the limousines are ready for a quick getaway should the fence collapse. If that happens and the kids break through there are two options. Either they wander around in a harmless daze, examining the equipment and baiting the roadies or, more likely, they eject like a cork out of a champagne bottle, taking the flimsy steel stage with them, plus several tons of highly dangerous electrical equipment, a massive tarpaulin and a few dozen bodies trapped twenty feet above ground level. Me included.

About that time the brain starts to run amok and you hope your employers remembered the insurance. Could be a pretty ignominious way to go too, stuck underneath a bloody great Marshall amp and frying at the toes.

TWO HOURS later I was relieved to find myself alive. The crowd was flowing slowly out the gates and past events subsided into more mellow matters. The discarded wrecks by the Speedway drag took on an unearthly aspect as the twilight faded.

I'm walking along the empty track with Dharma, him lamenting the awful state that American kids get into on narcotics and the appallingly lax precautions taken by the promoter. Turns out that Buck is a race fan himself. He reminisces about the Surfaris and surf rock and the declaration from Jimi Hendrix that we'd never hear that stuff again.

"But we will. Time was when to emulate the Surfaris was mandatory. You'd made it then. I only appreciated Hendrix fully after he'd croaked. The only time in my life I ever rushed a stage was a Hendrix gig at Stony Brook. The last amplifier I bought with my own money was used by Hendrix too."

As for the heavy metal resurgence, well Dharma would rather hear the Pretenders. "Personally, I hate most metal rock. It doesn't have any intelligence or any melody. It is junk, it deserves its bad reputation with music lovers."

Enter the old spectre: are the Blue Oyster Cult a heavy metal band? If so why is Buck Dharma belittling the genre? But I can't be bothered to revive that chestnut. It's too boring. After all BOC have suffered the slings and arrows for nigh on ten years – ever since they crawled out on their soft white underbelly in the late '60s, the last and the first of the great psychotronic destroy-all-monsters outfits. They've gone from playing dives like Conry's Bar in Pennsylvania where the punters sloped off to carve each other up in the parking lot, to Madison Square Garden. They've taken a critical nosedive or three and bounced back with Cultosaurus Erectus – the new album which is as exact a representation of their enigma as the earlier masterworks. If has to be good, Creem magazine hated it.

The following morning I picked up the local Albany paper (The Knickerbocker News) and gaped at the headline. TWO DIE LEAVING AREA ROCK CONCERT.

A third death remains unidentified and two people are seriously injured in crashes. Others had overturned cars, driven four abreast down the streets and smashed police car windows. The dead youths were involved in hit-and-run accidents near the grounds, ordinary teenagers pushing their luck and judgment too far. Now their cars are crumpled heaps of useless tin. Dragster racing and public highways are not compatible.

THE NEXT time I catch BOC is in Asbury Park, New Jersey – Springsteen country. It lies forty odd miles from Manhattan, a seaside town, characterised by its amusement parks, fish restaurants and that sensation of loose boredom you feel in coastal resorts after midnight. Asbury Park is very suburban, conservative, a bit like Hastings.

The Convention Hall backs onto the beach, surf laps around the outer walls. Inside 3000 Cult fans are getting decked out in some appropriate artefact. A booming merchandise business indicates that the group are enjoying another peak of acceptance after the trough of their previous album, Mirrors. Tonight's set is more suited to a small auditorium, benefitting from a greater spontaneity and even an impromptu encore of 'Roadhouse Blues'.

In recent years Blue Oyster Cult's recorded work has been far more ambitious than their live act. Like any tested big time operation, they are stymied by giving the public what it wants. There are few suprises. BOC are aware of that trap and tend to revert to their earlier Soft White Underbelly bar status when the going gets static. In that context they become recognisable as a non-calculating, informal rock and roll group.

Asbury Park reflects their smooth side, straffing through without a hitch until they perform an anarchic, jangled 'Hungry Boys'. This bizarre tale of addiction is one of three Albert Bouchard songs from the new album, a hilariously tasteless joyride with an acceleration straight out of the Stalk Forrest vein. The crowd isn't sure how to take the off-beat.

Later we talk down by the oceanside. Singer Eric Bloom, bluff and straightforward, is clutching a belated gold record for Some Enchanted Evening. Sandy Pearlman (manager, long-term producer and confidante) wanders over and looks at the disc. "Told you it would sell."

"Yeah, but it took two years," Bloom retorts. Pearlman shrugs, probably imagining himself eating a few of the specials in a Chinatown restaurant. Pearlman has always had such priorties right and if his methods have indicated a certain peculiar obsession, he is certainly not the evil influence some people have painted him to be. Specifically, The Clash's reported discontent is far more indicative of their own confusion. Mention that to Pearlman now and he chuckles. "Whaddya mean? I'm producing their next album."

Bloom talks about working with Michael Moorcock, with whom he co-wrote 'Black Blade', and with whom he will shortly start filming an epic Sword and Sorcery flick, set in Celtic times. "It'll be an Elric film in the genre Moorcock's master of. I've done no acting before except this (thumbing at the stage). My job. The hero is the eternal champion, a Sojan figure who fucks up a lot like our great yoyo president. Someone put a bee in Michael's ear about casting the Winter Brothers, 'cos they're albinos. Yuk! I'd rather see a real actor in a wig."

Bloom will assist in the screenplay and the soundtrack and probably get to enslave a few Rhanians and do some galaxy hopping, mystic signs in tow. (Elric Bloom?).

Apropos of gold records I ask him if the recession has affected Cult sales. "Of course. Nothing is selling anymore. Not that I blame people for blank taping, I do it. The market is getting narrower. Give buyers the choice between Billy Joel, Pink Floyd and Blue Oyster Cult and they'll settle for Billy Joel and Pink Floyd. I can't listen to the new album myself but I like it. I disliked Mirrors mucho, partly because I didn't get to play on the record and the producer, Tom Werman, had everyone sing their own songs. It's very dry and we took a lot of flak for it, everyone said we'd gone soft. Cultosaurus is the reaction. It took six weeks to make in a small Long Island studio near my home. Simple."

Pearlman is back. Bloom tells him "We were just discussing making frisbees out of Mirrors."

"That would be too good for it I feel."

Bloom snorts derisively and goes off to speak to the inevitable bike freaks who show up when the Cult hit town. If he isn't out riding hogwild with the local MC, Eric likes to relax at home with a bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream and the latest Autodrive, practise Japanese and research world-wide disasters with which to preface 'Godzilla'. Mo sura ta corjira, as someone at the Toho monster factory once remarked.

THE PRODUCER of the new album, Martin Birch, is an Englishman selected by Pearlman and admired by the group for his sound on Machine Head, Beck-Ola and Heaven And Hell.

Birch's unobtrusive approach is highly praised by BOC and despite the similarities in effect with those premier hard rock extravaganzas, Tyranny And Mutation and Secret Treaties, they say his style got them out of the formula of working with Pearlman while retaining a unified and spacious impact – no overdubs necessary.

According to Don Roeser (aka Buck Dharma) the sessions were intentionally designed to exorcise the memory of Mirrors. "We did just what the hell we pleased instead, throwing away all notions of calculation. Ever since 'The Reaper' was a hit we've been under pressure to duplicate that success; the body of our work failed. Even on Spectres everyone tried to write a hit single and that's a bad mistake. The Cult is never destined to be successful at a format. To be a singles band you have to win the casual buyer."

So why did they ever use Werman at all?

Bloom reckons they were stuck with him, a name producer, well liked at Columbia/Epic (he'd worked with Cheap Trick, Nugent and Molly Hatchett). "Plus you need the whole band to tell a producer to get lost and Werman's method of working with us individually made that difficult. Unless you're particularly rich you can't afford to switch around."

The rebounding form of Cultosaurus Erectus can be traced to a renewal of strength in writing and a collective sound that suggests they enjoyed deploying their reliable gambits. Add the assortment of melodies to the outrageous Cassiopeian explosions, intelligence and idiosyncratic humour and you've got yourself a proper Cult album. The title, a fiendish steal from Charles Mingus' Pithecanthropus Erectus, is also a heavy metal jibe, parodying its dinosaur image and evoking a healthy self-deprecation. Great BOC deviations have always combined elements of expansive fantasy and recognised the absurdity of placing rock and roll on a pedestal. The unused title 'Power In The Hand Of Fools' (for Secret Treaties) is one time when Pearlman thought they might be pushing their luck too far.

This contrast is manifest in the characters of the band itself. It's hard to link the off-duty Albert Bouchard as the writer of 'Monsters' (gang bangs and piracy in hyperspace), and the collaborator of 'Unknown Tongue' (with satirical odd-ball David Roter). The subject of 'Unknown Tongue' is a nice teenage girl who just happens to drink her own blood. Ridiculous but true.

"Yeah, the girl Margaret was someone David used to go out with. She was perfectly normal except that she had a fetish for cutting her big toe with a razor and drinking the results. Nobody knew that at school, she was a pleasant Catholic girl, hee hee."

Donald Roeser's hypnotic 'Deadline' is even more gruesome, the one obstacle that prevents it making the radio in America. "It's a little under-appreciated in terms of air play. The song is about an old friend of ours, Phil King, who used to book us in small clubs. He was murdered as the result of messing with organised crime and not paying up. He disregarded the gravity of the consequences. On another level the narrative thrust is a cautionary rap. It's all true."

Pearlman mentions that it could be a single in Europe. "But it'll be banned," he counters with customary exaggeration.

Roeser's writing is marked with a subtlety and resonance that has nothing to do with heavy metal. While the English new wave of blissed-out morons operate from a position of one dimensional ignorance and sexual boasting the Cult have always abhorred any super-heroics. They don't pose for back street male publications either.

Roeser's 'Divine Wind' is an ingenious summation of the crisis surrounding American attitudes to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Its oblique beginning, invocations of the witches in Macbeth and McDonalds ("fast food/fast cars/fast women/movie stars") gradually unravel into a convincing study of misguided patriotism. "It's not one of those bomb, bomb, bomb Iran songs. There is a song like that that's popular in the States. In a way it's more to do with America than Iran. I was annoyed when the hostages were taken but I could see how the Iranians would justify it. When you know everything that's bad in our country, the fact that we have the capacity to destroy, that we screw up Third World countries when we could be helping them economically, our greed with oil, the things expected as a right... maybe if the Iranians really think we're evil, the devil, then perhaps we are. We could be rushing headlong into Armageddon.

"The crux of the problem was that Iran disregarded diplomatic immunity and while no-one doubts that people spy in embassies that's another frightening breakdown in world-wide convention. The UN is reduced to the old League of Nations, everyone trying for the hammerlock and no-one's kidding each other anymore.

"Actually I've always thought aliens are the only answer, though if they're anything like us they won't necessarily be benevolent."

Roeser's approach to writing is just as valid and rewarding as say, Elvis Costello's or David Byrne's. He has no more truck with the phallic posturing that turns the rock star into some kind of gift to women. "I like songs that deal with personal experience but if you're prolific you tend to live your life creating fodder for lyrics when a lot of your average life isn't exciting at all. Songs only ever ring true if they articulate understandable emotion. Chrissie Hynde is good at that and I liked 'What A Fool Believes' by the Doobie Brothers for the same reason. It's plausible. Stuff that's totally from the imagination seldom works and boogie lyrics are always trite."

THIS YEAR the Cult members will start to finalise their solo plans. Roeser will be the first. He'd like to approach Stephen King, the dean of contemporary horror, many of whose themes seem ideally suited to the BOC treatment. "King is called a gothic writer but he's not like Poe or Lovecraft. He's expert at interpreting the mundane and making that scary."

King for his part was sufficiently taken with 'The Reaper' to quote it after the title page in The Stand, his best book to date.

Allen Lanier, studious romantic keyboards player, the oldest member of the Cult, has no intention of making a solo record and refused to write songs for Cultosaurus Erectus. "The band didn't need any personal lyrics like the ones I had on Mirrors, they needed BOC type material. My songs are atypical and it was really now or never for us. For the Cult to succeed again we had to indulge our bizarre side, the mixture of Science Fiction and fantasy, to project the image that suits the band best."

While Lanier has been fingered by some writers as the Cult's closet intellectual, he has contributed greatly to its initial core, having written extensively with both Pearlman and gonzo rock writer Richard Meltzer in the past. "Yeah, but now my approach is different. I'm not enamoured of the solo idea, it's a very lonely ride. I'm more interested in working with Jim Carroll 'cos I've always preferred co-operative music. The exciting thing about Jim is that you'd expect him to be stuck with that limited edition crowd, with his writing handed around a select few. Yet his book (The Basketball Diaries) is a Bantam paperback, it's on sale in airports... Otherwise I just like working with other people, that's more what rock and roll is about. Carroll's record (shortly to be released on Rolling Stones records) is strictly amateur in terms of what he does but the enthusiasm and the push are very organised. One song called 'Some People Who Died' is almost talked as opposed to sung, the language carries a great power."

Albert Bouchard: "It has the same effect as the early Stones in fact, plus a rhythm in words, what you wished Dylan was still like."

The Bouchard Brothers still manifest an incredible family tightness (I can't think of any other brothers who could stick ten years in the same rhythm section and still talk to each other). Albert perhaps clings to the Pearlman legacy more than the others and will now record his Immaginos album (the cycle of Desdanova songs). Pearlman continues to write for that eventuality. 'That's a priority now, I have to do it. Sandy has a film company to finance the record. The album will be orchestral too, I hope, I haven't been able to get the musicians yet. It would be nice if the Cult played on some of it."

PERHAPS ITS critical naivety but I've always imagined that in an ideal world the Blue Oyster Cult would shake off the shackles of the business and garner the appropriate appreciation. Their fusion of the arcane and the sardonic hasn't enabled them to make that transition unscathed but it has fuelled the only hard rock band in America worth taking seriously.

Having Pearlman working for them inside and out of Columbia has kept them mercifully independent of company hyperbole; no-one in the towering 6th Avenue skycraper even knows who they are.

This time around the band even wrote a song together. 'The Marshall Plan' is a logical epitaph for the ultimately misguided heavy metal fan. The would-be hero, Johnny, is trapped in the Mid West, striking poses and practising for the day when he has a guitar and a big amp. Eventually he becomes a rock star but he loses his girl. So much for the image.

Albert Bouchard outlines the possibility for a 'Marshall Plan Part II'. "I want the guy to get killed in a car crash and then be brought back to life by his amplifier. The amp starts glowing and suddenly he bursts through the speakers, triumphant, alive again! But the others said that was too ridiculous."

Even the Horn-Swooped Bungo Pony might agree that it was. I look forward to hearing it soon.

Max Bell || NME

The 61 Terrible Secrets Of The Blue Oyster Cult

The Blue Oyster Cult is what's sometimes spuriously referred to as a "critic's band" (see #43). As befitting such a characterization, critics - and ever writers - like to embroider their BOC copy with the scrimshaw and folderol of their own unfortunate, miserable existences. In The Biz, this is what they call "color." In real life, however, it's called a heap of dirty lies.

There's been a persistent grumbling among the literate electorate that certain pieces in CREEM, most recently Rush, Queen and all the July record reviews, are for the most part sad delusions of drug-addled writers' sick imaginations. That, in fact, there are no facts. The furtive scribbler would just as well have dreamed up the whole thing between episodes of Woody Woodpecker.

All too true. Honestly, if you knew the sordid slime that goes on among these elevated typists - the crude lies, the bitterness, the unholy pacts and sleazy deals [see #58], the fast n'loose promo floozies who take it on the run and never look back - you'd start reading Nude Musclemen for your rock info. All the writers do.

Each and every one of these terrible secrets, however, are guaranteed to be 100% T-R-U-E. I ask you-would a Ranger lie to a little camper? Well, alright, so maybe #30 isn't altogether free of suspicion, and maybe #2 isn't strictly above-board and - OK, for Pete's sake! - #16 is stretching it a bit. Hey, it was deadlinesville, Floyd!

But everything else is absolutely the whole truth and nothing but! Even the rumors are true, or at least actual rumors. Would you just give us a break and steal these secrets before they all come true!

1. The story behind "OD'd On Life Itself": "If we don't live it, we think it's funny. 'OD'd' isfunny, a totally bullshit song. Sandy saw this chick who was totally out of it, a real asshole. She'd OD'd on life. We cracked up."- Eric

2. Rumor '76: As a promotional stunt for " (Don't Fear) The Reaper," Buck and Eric firebombed the office of a New York suicide prevention hotline.

3. BOC have never appeared on television. How do we know they really exist?

4. Wrestling critic and BOC lyricist R. Meltzer was the lead singer for a brief period in 1968. Says Buck: "We were sandwiched between James Cotton and Richie Havens at the Cafe a Go Go and Meltzer sang the blues. To a packed house of college kids, the band did like a frenetic and desperate jam while R. took off his shirt and ran back and forth across the stage yelling 'Piss!' into the microphone. We knew then we needed a real lead singer."

5. Allen claims that former manager/producer/ writer and whipcracker-in-general Sandy Pearlman initially reminded him of Eddie Haskell.

6. Buck wore pants with pennies glued on them at their first Fillmore gig.

7. Hot crullers to Hell: Original bassist Andy Panda left the band so he could work in a bakery.

8. Albert used to live in a New York apartment where "the neighbors are twelve feet across an air shaft and there was this guy who liked to beat off right in front of the open window. I tried to stare him down, but he always kept doing it 'til I had to pull the drapes."

9. Buck's solution to above: "Next time he does it, go over to the window with a carrot and a knife and start cutting away at the carrot real slow."

10. A pool shaped like sunglasses: Eric lives near Ian Hunter in Connecticut.

11. The singing replacement for Meltzer was Les Bronstein, who would do things like sitting on the studio floor and chanting "I got to crap this vocal." "Also," added Joe, "he couldn't sing."

12. The group's catchy moniker was made up by Pearlman, who never said why.

13. Original title of Spectres: The Big Hurt.

14. Eric Bloom initially got into the group (as road mgr.) because he had a truck and PA.

15. The "real weirdodom lurking behind their unassuming physiognomies," according to Lester Bangs: "A girl I know retired upstairs from a party one night, only to find one of the Cult nosing around her doorway, kneeling to nuzzle this all-but-stranger to his particular heights of ooh-lah. She demurred. 'I don't know,' she said later. 'Suddenly it was like we were just two... things.'"

16. Buck on the early days: "Jac Holzman of Elektra saw the band live for the first time on hog tranks. Had the contract blanks set up right there!"

17. Al B. named his first kid Jacob Dylan. So what if it was a girl.

18. Bryan McLean, formerly of Love, was considered as the replacement for mung-lung Les Bronstein, but after hearing the band, he said, "No. I really can't do this and anyway I gotta go tp Tampa and see Liza Minnelli."

19. Rumor'73: Buck to marry the girl from the Summer Blonde commercials?

20. "We have a hard-core of about a quarter-million fans," says Eric, a total which is roughly equivalent to the number of hogs slaughtered daily in the U S.

21. Donald Roeser. Donald Roeser: "The raw side of us has never been captured. It's like wax build-up on a kitchen floor."

22. Kings of the party? Eric: "We hung out with Alice Cooper on one whole tour, and our idea of 'partying'was to go to one of the motel rooms, drink maybe a six-pack of beer and watch Beverly Hillbillies 'til 3 a.m,"

23. The group's favorite audiences are in the South and the Northwest.

24. The famous wrestling match between Lester Bangs and the tag-team of Dharma and Lanier, as reported by ringside announcer Air-Wreck Genheimer: "It all started when Al called Lester a fucking goober in reponse to his latest attack on Sandy Pearlman. Upon that note. Buck came in and was grabbed in the throat by Letter, leaving Buck's little feeties dangling off the ground. Bangs spinned the wiry guitar player around and started humping him in the back as if Buck was a little French poodledoggy with a mustache. Then Buck pulled a double-reverse while Al dumped a can of Oly down Lester's shirt and knocked him on his butt with a double bump-bounce from bed to floor. 'Bad' Dharma then strangled Bangs while sitting on his face. Finally, Al kneed him in the labanza." Sorry, no decision.

25. True fact: the first LP Sandy P. bought was Trini Lopez Live At P.J.'s.

26. Transplanted Detroiter Deniz Tek, leader of Aussie band Radio Birdman, was so overcome by "Dominance/Submission" that he named their obscure-but-great first LP Radios Appear. That's the one with the original "Aloha Steve And Danno."

27. The story behind "Dominance/Submission": "A kid is hitchhiking on New Year's Eve in 1964, down as you can get, when he gets picked up by what you gotta envision as this frowzy divorcee and her daughter. They scoop his ass up and zip off, and then..." Darn, Lester never finished the story.

28. The original title for Agents Of Fortune was This Ain't The Summer Of Love.

29. If you think Blue Oyster Cult is a stupid name, get a load of their earlier calling cards: the Stalk Forrest Group (No Stalk, No Forrest, of course), the Soft White Underbelly, Oaxaca (Elektra's idea) and, according to R. Meltzer, the Santos Sisters for one night.

30. Rumor '81: Joe Bouchard is the real father of the Humbard Grandkids.

31. There is no such thing as a stun guitar.

32. BOC's very first live release was a limited edition 12-inch promo EP called Live Bootleg (Col. AS-40). "The most powerful live recording ever," according to Metal Mike Saunders, it included concert takes of "Cities On Flame With Rock 'n' Roll," "Workshop Of The Telescopes," "The Red And The Black" and the now-legendary take of "Buck's Boogie," which later turned up on the anthology LP, The Guitars That Destroyed The World (Col. 31998, '73).

33. You used to be able to send away for the complete BOC lyrics, back when they were worth sending for.

34. "The best description of their material ever to appear in TV Guide, "according to some CREEM nitwit, is this summary of an old episode of Thriller: "The Trashers move into a grim, unpleasant old house - where all the mirrors are hidden away in an attic."

35. Sorry, 'nothing about David Lee Roth in this one.

36. Rumor 75: BOC are all the sons of symphony orchestra repairmen.

37. Meltzer again: "'I'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep' bears a strong resemblance to various European national anthems."

38. The now-defunct hippie rag SunRise gave Tyranny And Mutation a peace-sign rating in a 73 issue. Also rating the chicken paw were Toni Brown and Terry Garthwaite's Cross Country LP and the third or fourth Doobies album.

39. Some of the "lost" songs performed but never recorded include "Donovan's Monkey," "Just Like Hansel And Gretel," "Curse Of The Hidden Mirrors," "Holiday Hill" (a Patti Smith tune about dating a werewolf) and BOC versions of "Under My Thumb," "Purple Haze" and a 35-minute attack on "It's Not Easy," featuring triple drums and fuzz bass.

40. To finally clear up the issue, lyricist Helen "Wheels" Robbins is definitely Albert B.'s ex or she isnt.

41. The band retains their very own optical physicist, David Infante, to run their laser light show. Infante has to focus the light beam through a series of mirrors to make sure the laser doesn't roast the audience's eyeballs.

42. Incidentally, it's the same kind of machine that Goldfinger used while trying to reduce 007 to Jello soup.

43. Why is BOC considered a "critic's band"? Is it because they can count among them one or more actualy rock critic (you used to see an occasional Bouchard byline in the original Crawdaddy) like the Dictators, Gizmos, Mogen David and the Winos, the Jon Tiven Experience and Slick 'Em? Is it because the critters loved them back when John X Public was still heavily into Emerson, Lake and Palmer? Does anyone care?

44. The shortest band in America? Well, let's just say that, in the Third World, where relief agencies use a height-to-weight proportion to determine who gets the food, BOC would receive Oreos, Snickers and birthday cakes every day.

45. Inspirational verse: "They're ten years ahead of their time, but 1 love them anyway, especially their asses. - "Some Girl," 1972.

46. Complaint Dept.: "'Reaper' is a really great song, so it pissed me off that I didn't have any songs by me on the album 'cause it was their first to go gold." - Meltzer, 77

47. I had this bitch, you see... - Patti Smith is considered by some to be the sixth Oyster. Not only has she collaborated on some or her finest tunes ("Career Of Evil," "Baby Ice Dog") but she even sings some leather icicles in "The Revenge of Vera Gemini."

48. Oh yeah, she's also married to Al Bouchard. [Anything you say, Rick. - Ed.)

49. More important Albert facts: he says "Golden Age Of Leather" is like Queen, and his drums are Zickos, "the first plastic set I've ever owned."

50. Way back in 1975, the group had to make between $40-50,000 a month just to break even. This is the same amount that Americans now spend daily to fight dandruff.

51. The guitar that Buck first used with the band was a $14 Tosca with Condor Echo Pickup. He later switched to a 74 Les Paul.

52. Elektra still has enough early BOC material in the can for two LPs.

53. Eric Bloom's nickname is Manny.

54. Two out of three ain't bad... some of Manny-boy's pearls of swine wisdom include: "All Englishmen are faggoids or fungoids," "Baseball is punk shit," and "The only things louder than us occur underground."

55. The umlaut over the O in BOC was Al Lanier's idea. He's the only one that knows what an umlaut is.

56. According to ex-producers Sandy and Murray (the Grimmer Twins), the Red/Black sides on Tryanny And Mutation stand for mutation/Quaalude (red) and tyranny/methadrine (black).

57. It was because of Sandy P.'s last minute maneuvering that the Cult (then Oaxaca) was dropped from Elektra. He kept stalling the release date so that he could figure out the exact sequence of cuts and because "Nobody buys albums in July."

58. Later, Sandy redeemed himself by lining up Krugman at Columbia. He still needed press clippings to cinch it with Clive Davis (then boss at Col.) so he "dictated whole reams of laudatory copy" to who-else-but R. Meltzer to get printed under various different names. Says Richo, it was the only time in my dozen-year word-jockey career I ever played the mindless goddam shill."

59. Rumor 74: Buck Dharma to play Big Brother in Stanley Kubrick's remake of 1984?

60. The Blue Sell Out?-or-Why so sappy these days, guys?: Albert: "What we were trying to do on Agents Of Fortune was please everybody all of the time. We're trying to keep a balance between having enough smooth pop stuff so that people will buy the record and enough heavy stuff we can do in our live show." Too bad it hasn't worked.

61. The real story behind "Going Through The Motions": Albert: "It's sort of like P.J. Proby. It's the story of a relationship not built on love, but merely the physical..."

Rick Johnson || Creem

Why You Should Care About Blue Oyster Cult

Action conforms to preexistent imagery.
- Sandy Pearlman, The History of Los Angeles, 1965-1969

SCIENCE GONE too far? Let's face it, bub, mythology's a pretty old move. Just roll it off your tongue; it even sounds old. But high-speed megamedia in the rock age gave it a shot in the arm, thus creating that revolutionary new subset of instantly manufactured myths called (with the ironic vulgarity it deserves) hype.

Remember how suddenly Brian Epstein's fuzzy/cuddly Beatles seemed OK to take home to Mom? (Maybe not to Dad, though, 'cause his fuzz was thinning out on top.) Overnight the Rolling Stones shed their suits and became proponents of a bad-boy image so shocking it took 'em years to catch up to it in real life (or death - pace , Brian.)

But try this on for size: a band whose entire concept, even form and content , f'chris-sakes, was imposed by its manager. Nope, not the Monkees, which even little kids didn't take seriously. I'm talking about Blue Oyster Cult.

Who cares about the Cult? the skeptical reader asks. You mean those old farts in the hot air of mainstream rock (and not that successful at it either)? So what if Patti Smith still throws 'em a lyric occasionally? Noooo street credibility.

Let us not forget, though, that the Cult's got a clutch of arguably (some unarguably) classic vinyl to their credit, and were only a silly millimeter away from becoming a great band. Their relative failure reflects the malaise of mainstream rock that punk/new wave revolted against and to which it is itself threatening to succumb.

Beating a dead horse? Maybe, but what's a little necrolatry among friends - and besides, lately the corpse has been showing signs of life. How/why/when/where, you say? (Of course you do, and get your finger out of your nose.) Well...

Well (cont'd), most rock critics are mediocre or worse (yeah, I know, takes one to know etc.), but for a few years in the mid-'60s a bunch of 'em deserved attention. Sandy Pearlman and his crony Richard Meltzer were among them. Pearlman, though, found that writing about bands wasn't enough.

Meltzer: "Pearlman and I went to college together at Stony Brook out on Long Island. It was the Summer of Love; we went to the Monterey Pop Festival, hung out in Haight-Ashbury, there were bands galore, and when we got back Pearlman wanted a band and put out the call."

Folkie Andrew Winters was drafted out of Pearlman's father's drug store to play bass; he knew guitarist Donald Roeser who knew drummer Albert Bouchard. Toss in a couple more pals and voila : the psychedelic Soft White Underbelly. Keyboard player Allen Lanier came in later, after Pearlman found he couldn't get along with Meltzer's buddy John Wiesenthal; Winters wasn't replaced by Albert's brother Joe until a name-change or two down the line, but you get the idea - a malleable bunch of guys taking direction from a critic.

"Before I met Sandy I had no burning ambition to be a rock star," Roeser says. "I just played for bar-band-like enjoyment; I never thought that was what I would do seriously. We would never have surfaced as even a Bob Seger type of band - or even at all - if it wasn't for Sandy."

Singer/guitarist Eric Bloom agrees, and the pair feel they can speak for the rest of the Cult in saying so. But Bob Seger? That refers to American rock without the stylistically affected trappings the Cult developed. Seger's ethos is of the hard-nosed Detroit variety; since the Underbelly was in New York, which had no homogenous sound or stance, the band just assimilated whatever was around at the time - psychedelia - though Meltzer indicates they were closer to the West Coast's amphetamized folk/R&B than Vanilla Fudge's barbiturate baroque.

"They were a good psychedelic band," Meltzer insists. "They used to play with Group Image - remember them, the Grateful Dead of the Lower East Side? - at the Hotel Diplomat. They'd change their sound every few months." The Dead, the Byrds, even the Stones were reference points, but "they didn't calculate a goddamn thing until they became the Cult. They knew certain aspects of show-for-its-own-sake, but their musical ideas were much more independent of the 'march to success'."

Still, Pearlman did nudge them from time to time, and was able to determine a large part of their identity by writing song lyrics, as Meltzer says, "from the word go. And I came in maybe 15 minutes after they came into being and started writing songs for them too. At first they were very reluctant to sing. The lyrics didn't really take hold of their total identity until they took responsibility for singing them."

Everyone took turns as lead vocalist until the slot was bequeathed to "this jerk Les Bronstein," Meltzer says, "who became the official lead singer mainly because he had a van they needed - exactly the same reason why Eric Bloom became the singer after Bronstein's van was repossessed."

Even with the van, Bronstein was so horrible a singer that the band never mixed an album's worth of material the Underbelly had cut for Elektra Records. The band's name had to go, too; after an opening-act slot at New York's Fillmore East was awarded a non-reception from the audience and a pan in the Village Voice , Pearlman (according to Richard Meltzer) declared "our name's mud in this town" and rechristened the group Oaxaca, after the Mexican city/state. They recorded a new album, with Bloom; Elektra decided not to release that one either.

"There was a single they might a pressed 200 copies of, though," Meltzer says. "It was called 'What Is Quicksand?' and 'Arthur Comics' [obsurantists might recall the 1977 Anglo-punk band of that name]; I wrote the words to both. I wrote seven songs on the album that was almost released. Pearlman wrote the rest." Before the album was almost released Oaxaca became the Stalk-Forrest Group - another Pearlman insecurity ploy.

By 1970 Pearlman was scheming better than ever. He was working up a group mythology, and even went so far as to get other writers to promulgate it for him. Meltzer describes a coterie of hack writers who hung out with Pearlman and awaited gems of rock wisdom to drop from his lips. "They'd pick his quotes out of the air and use them as their own. Pearlman's original hype on the Underbelly - which was not too inaccurate - was that they were like a cross between the Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. After he said it we saw it in print [under someone else's byline]."

In the course of a metaphysical essay (published in Jonathan Eisen's 1971 anthology Twenty Minute Fandangos and Forever Changes ) about the precedence of imagination over action, Pearlman constructed a mythic sub-group of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club which embodied the true evil of Altamont: the Transmaniacon MC. ("That's what he wanted to have everybody write about the band," Meltzer says.) With very few changes, the words to the pseudo-legendary biker's club song would soon roar out of stereos playing the first Cult album. Of less obvious but more significant interest is Pearlman's discussion of the group Love, which he apotheosizes as "the synthetic operator, the archetypal ready-made manipulator" alone among LA bands capable of "transmit [ting] imagery from an actual Manifold of Imagination."

Think of the Cult's original thrust; now read Pearlman on Love: "Love looks good to people of Satanic imagination. Love's excess isn't wretched, it's plain corrupting." Then Meltzer on the Cult: "The way that they are to this day an expression of Pearlman is Pearlman's whole riff that life is an illusion."

Pearlman shortly stopped writing altogether and became a full-fledged entrepreneur. Now he was putting all his ideas into the band. He wanted a Love of his own to manipulate, to carry his vision to the great unwashed. In a review of the Cult's first LP, Robert Christgau quoted Pearlman as saying, "We want to be disgusting, not trans-replusive." The marketable illusion of corruption?

Meanwhile, back at the band, things weren't going so hot. They needed money to live on, so they were a bar-band. "We had to do all these covers: Beatles, Stones, Kinks, some Grand Funk - we even threw in some Tyrone Davis and Van Morrison's 'Domino'," Roeser says. "We had a 'bad attitude,' though, as the club owners called it."

"We'd slip in 'Stairway to the Stars' or 'Cities on Flame' or maybe 'Transmaniacon' as 'here's another Glen Campbell song,'" Bloom explains.

One gig where they were able to rock out was a swingers/nudist party at an off-season summer camp in the Catskills. David Lucas, a TV/radio commercial jingle producer, liked them so much he let them use his studio to cut a demo. Pearlman took the result to Columbia Records.

Columbia marketing man Murray Krugman's attitude was, "Those guys from Stony Brook? They stink!" But Pearlman prevailed upon him for another demo (this one sponsored by Columbia), and then - in between out-of-town bar dates - an audition. What hadn't clicked before now passed muster.

The first album, titled Blue Oyster Cult , emerged in 1972 to good notices but didn't sell very well; 'She's as Beautiful as a Foot' may have been too subtle for the masses. Live, however, the Cult was as subtle as a flying mallet. "I think they might've done the first album before going whole hog into heavy metal," Meltzer recalls, "but suddenly they were heavy metal." Pearlman hadn't even settled on the band's final name (pulled from one of his lyrics) until after the album was done. Blue Oyster Cult 's cover included no picture of the band, only spooky drawings incorporating the band's insignia, an upside-down question mark parodying the ankh, that hip Egyptian symbol of enduring life.

With the second album, Tyranny and Mutation , there was no doubt: these guys, whoever the hell they were, were heavy metal mutants.

Meltzer: "Watching them was like looking at this chess game where everything was total calculation. It had a high degree of comedy attached to it, because you could tell they were somewhat resistant to the notion of being heavy metal; they would be ironic about it and make reference to it rather than just be it. Little by little the will to resist went away."

Secret Treaties and Agents of Fortune followed. It was in this period, Meltzer says, that he stopped liking what they were about. Bloom and Roeser declared it was then that (in Bloom's words) they "took over" from Pearlman and Krugman, the latter by then the Cult's nominal co-manager.

"We told Sandy that we had no more interest in this leather foolishness," says Bloom, who was the onstage focal point. "We enjoyed it up to a point, but then we started seeing ads for us with, like, S&M leather and zippers over the mouths preaching on pulpits and stuff, and we said, 'What the fuck?' So we started taking more of a hand in lyric-writing and image-, or non-image-, making."

Funny, though; there weren't many stylistic changes from Treaties to post-takeover Agents . Meltzer hasn't noticed much change at all over the last 10 years, except for Pearlman (and Krugman) doing less lyric-writing and production. The Cult may have wanted to get away from their image but they didn't shake it. Instead their ironic use of heavy metal became self-parodic; lately it seems unintentionally so.

What's really weird is that Blue Oyster Cult had a genuine hit single after "taking over" from Pearlman; '(Don't Fear) the Reaper''s pretty, Byrds-like tune masked its morbid message. The Cult thus did without Pearlman's direct creative guidance - maybe, they thought, in contravention of it - what he wanted them to be able to do all along. The marketable illusion of corruption: "Beautiful, chock-full of meaningful interference."

Unfortunately, since 'Reaper' it's been largely downhill, or at best a holding pattern, for the Cult. A double-live album (On Your Feet or on Your Knees ) lacked fire; a single-live album (Some Enchanted Evening ) caught the excitement yet retained an air of redundancy. Three studio albums (Spectres , Mirrors and Cultosaurus Erectus ) yielded between them one almost-semi-non-hit, 'Godzilla', and almost nothing of any artistic worth. These LPs did broaden the band's image - or perhaps simply muddled it. Blue Oyster Cult is not much of a critics' band in any sense these days.

Roeser thinks the Cult's image has always been confused, and admits that "our 'sinister' reputation works at cross purposes to what actually gets the most airplay - which has made us, marketing-wise, pretty inefficient." Bloom and Roeser agree they tried to make a hit single after 'Reaper', but couldn't work to formula.

Which brings us to 'Burnin' for You', from Fires of Unknown Origins , which cracked the Top 40 and just happens to sound as un-Cultish as, ahem, 'Reaper'.

"Yeah," Bloom says, "lotta people call it 'Son of Reaper,' but it's not the same kind of lyrics. They're Meltzer's."

It is Roeser's music, though (like 'Reaper'); most importantly, and obviously unbeknown to Bloom et al ., there's that Pearlmanian "meaningful interference." 'Burnin' for You' doesn't sound like the Cult; its high-tech, streamlined sound (courtesy producer Martin Birch, an Anglo-metal veteran) might put you off if you're sick of the Eagles or Boston, but the high, lonesome feel of the lyrics rubs off if you give it half a chance.

"My set up with them," Meltzer says, "is every so often I send them a bunch of lyrics, like maybe 10 songs. For Fires I gave 'em seven, but they actually had 'Burnin'' for the album before. I've given 'em these kind of personal lyrics before, but they've never used 'em until now.

"The Cult very rarely show their soul. They've generally avoided using lyrics as a cutting edge. Instead they go for the arrangement or pompous guitar." Not so strange, then, that their most worthy material in the last six years have been exceptions to that rule.

The Cult now headline at huge arenas; there's no need even to share the bill with Black Sabbath (now also managed by Pearlman), as they did on the "Black and Blue" tour. Their "mythological" attempts in recent years, however, have been almost inane. Around the time of Spectres , a billboard greeting motorists emerging from the Queens Midtown Tunnel said, "Welcome to Long Island, Home of the Blue Oyster Cult"; by then they were buying homes in Connecticut.

"They've been together 14 years," Meltzer says. "They're in their late 30s. It's not just them; bands that old tend to get a little rigid and there's not that much room left for irony."

The rigidity was apparently too much for Albert Bouchard; the drummer showed up late for two shows on the Cult's fall tour of England and was fired.

Bloom: "The majority of the band members decided that Albert should, uh, rest for a while."

Roeser: "He got on our nerves on the road, and we got really mad and told him to take a hike."

Bloom: "Well, actually, like I told another interviewer, it's been a 10-year problem. Now, anyway, Albert's taking it easy, doing whatever he wants." Bouchard is rumored to be engaged in Rolf therapy, as well as working with occasional Cult lyricist David Roter. (The band's lighting designer, Rick Downey, sat in for the rest of the tour Bouchard sat out.)

Rigidity? Despite all their alleged reluctance, the Cult went heavy metal even more rigidly and bloodlessly after supplanting Pearlman's creative directorship. Maybe creative tension gave rise to their best work; their most calculatedly outre music hasn't sold the best, nor has their blandest homogenized hard rock. 'Reaper' and 'Burnin'' prove that Blue Oyster Cult, intended as manipulators of readymades, attain that superlative level of Pearlmanian "interference" when they don't calculate at all.

Maybe they should take a lesson from the Stones, an even longer-lived band. The Cult used to play Stones tunes in clubs, and tried to simulate their sound - even when they cut a "Catch that Pepsi Spirit" commercial for David Lucas. The Stones were able to bounce back.

Or maybe they should hire Meltzer as creative adviser.

Jim Green || Trouser Press

The Return Of Blue Oyster Cult

"Rossignol's curious, albeit simply titled book, The Origins of a World War, spoke in terms of Secret Treaties, drawn up between the Ambassador from Plutonia and Desdinova, the foreign minister. These treaties founded a secret science from the start. Astronomy. The career of evil. "

Words found on the inner sleeve of the Blue Oyster Cult's Secret Treaties, a hard rock record to end all hard rock records. The cover portrayed five unfriendly looking characters collected around Nazi Germany's crowning achievement in aviation, the ME 262 - a jet fighter (among the first of its kind) that could have conceivably turned the tide of the air war over Europe had Hitler not been blind to the advice of his generals. It looked like it was parked in the courtyard of some 'burg in Paraguay; presumably the Cult had flown it there or were, at the very least, its "ready" crew. Or so I imagined when I was 18.

Can you picture it here in 1988? A young kid totally swept away by the imagery of a strange silver obelisk on the cover of Tyranny & Mutation (the previous year's offering); so much so that he stared at the cover for so long that when he looked away at the living room wall, the image lingered on in his fundi as an optical trick.

In BOC, ca. this time, you had an act tailor-made for teen kids like myself. Five unsavory boyos who made records that delivered the ultimate riffs, not just once, but again and again on songs like "Cities on Flame (With Rock n' Roll)," "The Red & the Black,'' "Seven Screamin' Diz-Busters," and "Flaming Telepaths." Add to this an almost impenetrable lyrical gobble which mixed equal parts Outer Limits thriller, Madame Veronica's Dungeon Of Discipline, Lovecraftian themes expounded in The Shambler From The Stars and Beyond the Mountains of Madness, And cosmological conspiracy theories; heck, BOC were an act who, unconsciously or not, became the living embodiment of a pulp novel. It didn't surprise me at all when, in 1985, Elektra released a sampler of material which contained a cut called "Arthur Comics" by a pre-BOC ensemble known as the Stalk-Forrest Group.

BOC were a band capable of engendering a fanatical response in their fans; deservedly so, since Tyranny & Mutation has been credited on "the Black side" as being "the finest example of riff in the history of the substance" and the subsequent Secret Treaties was a sophisticated masterpiece of metal which set the cretins to hopping long before Ramonesmania. Among many other brain-twisters, it featured insta-philosophico-history lessons on "ME 262" with the protagonist complaining, "Must these Englishmen live that I might die/Must they live that I might die?" Subsequently, many labeled 'em "pompous."

"Pompous" maybe, but BOC were the very first "big deal" American heavy metal band. Typically, they possessed an almost exclusively male audience (no chicks before "[Don't Fear] the Reaper") and the wherewithal to mount elaborate and overblown stage shows which cemented such an audience. (For example; Outright purchase of albatrossian laser gimmickry including a 40-foot-long mechanized "Godzilla" and notable squabbling with then support-act, Kiss, overuse of pyro and stage explosives.) This was all before MTV, mind you; the national attention span had yet to decline to the five-minute threshold and a major label act didn't have to look like fashion models - they could even be short, pudgy, and sinister if they wished. (Or tall, pudgy, and comical in the case of ZZ Top).

Heart and soul, no matter how addled, meant something to the majority of the fans spurring Buck Dharma to plaintively remark at the close of our interview, "Do you think the kids care as much about the music now? I don't think so."

And that sums up the decline of BOC in this decade. Fire of Unknown Origin, released in 1981, was the last effective Cult record. "Burnin' For You" became the band's second hit single; "Joan Crawford," and "Vengeance (The Pact)," weren't too shabby either. Two years later, drummer Albert Bouchard - he of the gold lame shorts and leader of the guitar conga-line spectacle that was "ME 262," left under a cloud and the audience ceased to bother. Club Ninja with its credits to "heavy metal" Sensei and totally unrocking delivery didn't make it. BOC were reduced to opening for Rush, guys who once supported them, and small club tour dates.

Despite fan turnoff, the Cult's stock remains high among their most successful (and younger) competitors. Bret Michaels has admitted that in his pre-Poison days he fronted a BOC tribute act known as Spectres. (Hard to imagine Michaels emulating Eric Bloom.) Lars Ulrich confessed backstage at Monsters Of Rock that "Harvester of Sorrows" from... And Justice for All was, in part, inspired by ëëHarvester of Eyes" from Secret Treaties. (Facts courtesy of Deb Frost and Albert Bouchard.)

Could it be possible, then, for BOC to regain lost fame and fortune if the "right" record was made? Imaginos, the new LP, tries to answer that question; the record being a concept piece which ties (or tries to tie) together all the cryptic theory of extra-dimensional treachery hinted at on the first three albums. It tells the tale of the Imaginos, a human of limitless power and influence acting under the guidance of Les Invisibles, super-beings whose dreams are of all human history. Their aim: The outbreak of World War I! (It does sound like an Outer Limits episode, don't it?)

Although I'm not a teen anymore, I still find this Sandy Pearlman - BOC Svengali-type manager - concocted cloud of phlogiston much more entertaining than the prospect of say, a new Bon Jovi album entitled New Jersey. Columbia's worked up too and maybe they should be; the album kicks harder than anything since Fire. It should; it's been laying around for some time as Albert Bouchard's unfinished solo work many of the numbers dating back to writing sessions for Blue Oyster Cult and Tyranny & Mutation.

I've been called upon to speak with Buck Dharma (once and sometimes still known as Don Roeser, legendary searing lead guitarist for the band) who admits: "Yes, at one point Imaginos was Albert's work. The lyrical totality, Sandy's story, had been around since the band was formed. It had been around since the release of the first record and he (Sandy) had tried to get the band to record the Imaginos concept since the very beginning. The band members (Roeser, Eric Bloom, Albert, Joe Bouchard, and Allen Lanier) resisted because they wanted to write and to continue to do so. I think we thought the concept was foreboding."

Foreboding??? What could be more foreboding than lyrics like, Harvester of Eyes/that's me and I see all there is to see /When I look inside of your head; right in front to the back of your skull/That's my sign that you are dead. (From "Harvester of Eyes," natch.)

Buck steams right ahead. "Well, for reasons mentioned we resisted recording the LP. I think that the resistance of the members who didn't write Imaginos songs was the biggest factor.

"Meanwhile, it fell to Albert to write most of the music to the Imaginos lyrics, although there are contributions from everyone. All throughout the 70s, he (Albert) was working on it and when he left the band at the beginning of the decade the way was clear for he and Sandy to make this record; they began working on it. For several years it took quite a bit of studio time and money and it didn't come out as Albert's record. As a project, it was moribund until we agreed to finish it and put it out as a BOC album."

Imaginos does make clear to all the old fans, should they care to listen, what BOC thought they were about from the beginning or, at least, what Sandy Pearlman wanted 'em to think they were about. Finally, it even constructs a theme song entitled "Blue Oyster Cult," very handy if the record finds a new audience and a spiritual touch-base for expatriate followers since graduated to yuppiedom and convinced of the fact that "heavy metal'' is "kid stuff" when compared with the cold-fish boredom of more mature singer/songwriter types who populate VH-1 and sound nicer at wine-and-cheese parties. Not that the record needs those fans anymore; it's a hammer blast of iron weirdness yearning to capture a whole new audience too young to have been around in the early 70s and receptive of that early majesty.

Dharma is excited. "I think what's really neat about Imaginos is that it's an overview of what BOC were from the very beginning. It's a lot more coherent a vibe of what the band is than any of our recent records, certainly."

Keeping the history of Imaginos in mind, it's difficult to picture Dharma and Albert Bouchard as students at Clarkson College (where they first met and subsequently began working together) with the idea of constructing a "super-chops" heavy band around the ideology of some sci-fi hoodoo.

"No," Buck says, "that came a little later. During the Soft White Underbelly era (another, pre-BOC incarnation with the tag "legendary" affixed to 'em courtesy of a few loose tapes and apocryphal test pressings), we were much more psychedelic. We were running four or five different concepts simultaneously. Half of our music was totally cartoon-like. I think we made a conscious move toward BOC after we started floundering with the Underbelly. It didn't happen when Albert and I were at Clarkson - it happened much later.

"Originally we were a copy act heavily influenced by the white blues guys: Mike Bloomfield, Danny Kalb, and the Blues Project in America."

The eyebrows go up again. One thing which I thought was pretty neat about BOC was the way in which they stood alone among their contemporaries in their almost complete lack of identifiable "heavy blues" influence.

"I think the sound was produced by the disparity of musicians," Dharma muses. "We weren't all deep blues aficianodos. For some it was their first band."

The unique, muscled sound they flexed in 1972 is still without peer. Back then, marketing hard rock records wasn't as cut-and-dried as today's rush toward "niches" and easily pitched to "pigeonholes." BOC did find an audience but eventually they lost much of it, unlike Kiss, competitors with much simpler appeal who were able to rally at the turn of the decade and regain numbers without changing much of anything except allowing their style to become even more simple-minded.

"I think Kiss had a clearer conception of the youth they wanted to appeal to," Dharma explains. "I guess we were less calculating; we didn't know whom we were targeting in terms of our music. I don't think we're ever known in terms of that. We just put it out there."

The question then arises as to how in this era of Poison/Def Leppard/ Whitesnake dominance, Imaginos can get a fair shake? It's not a simple record; it's complex and lacks any immediately identifiable hooks which would attract poodle-haired teens in spike-heels and Nikes. In essence, it's a record that you have to and want to listen to again and again. It's not disposable or throwaway like much of the competition. (As a good example, "The Seige and Investiture of Baron Von Frankenstein's Castle at Weisseria" sports trademark BOC slinky riff and the amazing choral refrain of "Carpe diem!")

"I don't know how the record will be sold," Dharma continues. "I do know that CBS is real excited about Imaginos, whereas they haven't been in quite a while. After you're at a label for x many years - you do get lost. I do know that they regret having lost artists like Heart and Aerosmith who have since come back strong for other labels. I think they're aware of that and something about the content of Imaginos has lit a fire under them too. They really like it and they're sincere which, is good."

In a sense it is, since such was not the case after the release of Club Ninja. No one seemed excited and the wheels had come off the act.

"I think we were very burnt out," admits Buck. "Lack of perspective did it. We went from one tour to another record. We had spent fifteen years together. Personalities were ragged; Albert had left. I think we lost our psyche. Speaking for myself, that's what did happen to me. I was very glad to spend a year doing nothing professionally."

While Buck was away, the heavy metal steamroller which he and his compatriots had been so instrumental in building got out of control and became somewhat less than music with a stupid message (analysis by way of Rick Johnson); it became music as stupid parody. This leads an intelligent person to think that Spinal Tap should be retroactively dubbed the only act that mattered, real or not, in this decade.

Dharma is amused. "Heavy metal seems like opera. The form is very rigid and the quality of the group is judged on how well they adhere to format. It's much like the situation of opera singers who are rated on their interpretation of material which has been around for so long that everyone has a clear idea of how it should be done. I mean, the singer sounds a certain way. The guitar leads are done a certain way." (Curiously, this brings to mind Blotto's "Metalhead" which pre-dated Spinal Tap and featured Dharma on "lead histrionics." The man knows what he's talking about.)

"What I think is great about metal is that it endures and thrives without the support of the music business or the rank, stinking, commerciality of pop music and all the commercial tie-ins and product endorsements," he continues in a conciliatory tone. "It just makes me want to puke! Music in today's age is so much like 'soap and hamburgers'; it's not what I went into it for. It's just disgusting to put it bluntly. In that respect, heavy metal which survives on its own is great."

Maybe not. Followers of hard rock can tell you that metal is infected with the same "soap and hamburgers" malaise that Dharma says wrecks pop music. That it exists outside the framework of commercial radio and video promotion doesn't tell the whole story; there does exist an entire promotion and support system designed for the handling of "heavy metal" product - any A&R rep worth his soap will tell ya.

Happily, Imaginos is not "soap and hamburgers." Like the best of Secret Treaties, it's still mysterious, busy, and crunching - hallmarks of "classic" BOC. Dharma and pals should give extra-special consideration to getting it out there in front of the kids and to serving it up in the fine hell-fire and brimstone style that it deserves.

"I'm ready to play. I want to get back out there. In fact, I'm feeling more excited about all prospects than at any time previously. I'd like to do more on my own; I know I'd like to produce. If the right bands are out there, that's something I'd like to do."

And that's about it. BOC have a new record for ya and they're rarin' to go. Maybe they should patch things up with Albert too. He's great! They're great! Look at the Ramones and Mark Bell! Carpe diem!

George "Metal" Smith || Creem

Blue Oyster Cult: Reaping The Benefits

In the summer of 1976, Blue Oyster Cult were not just an American arena-rock band in cream suits and aviator shades, they were a cultural phenomenon. Their breakthrough album Agents Of Fortune was released in the spring of 1976 and spawned a monster hit that we're still reeling from 30 years later. (Don't Fear) The Reaper's ghostly autumnal guitar line beckoned like a skeletal finger as temperatures soared and Son of Sam haunted the backstreets and alleys of New York City. It was a weird and beautiful song for a desperate and stressed-out nation. Kiss kept the kids happy with lunchboxes, and pop metal and disco numbed like a new drug in the inner cities, but Blue Oyster Cult were the brooding kings of the teenage wasteland.

BOC were men of mystery, wrapping their proggy thunder rock in nearly impenetrable sci-fried lyrics about harvesters of eyes and silverfish imperatrixes, hiding their human faces behind lasers and motorcycles and mirror shades, carefully cultivating a sinister image that hinted at exotic drug experimentation and dark occult practices. They were the original stoner rock band, mixing up a lethal cocktail of ancient witchcraft and technical ecstasy, and jacking it all straight into the pleasure centres of all the heavy metal kids of the me-first decade. Guys who worked on their vans all day and lost their virginity in the woods to the local acid queen during an all-night beer bash would listen incessantly to mysteriously titled BOC albums like Secret Treaties and Tyranny And Mutation, scanning the covers for hours, searching for hidden symbols and arguing over what, exactly, a 'screaming diz-buster' was. Blue Oyster Cult were the belching biker beasts that destroyed the Summer of Love. At least, that's how it looked from the back of the van...

As with most rock'n'roll stories, the truth could not possibly be as brain-melting as the adolescent super fantasy. In this case, the truth is almost comically anticlimactic. Blue Oyster Cult were not warlocks or space bosses or even backyard Satanists, they were engineering students and fantasy-novel readers from upstate New York who started their musical lives together as a jam band called Soft White Underbelly in 1967. Hippies, really, but hippies with vision – and two hotshot, first-generation gonzo rock writers scribbling endless pages of freaky lyrics for them. Richard Meltzer and Sandy Pearlman both wrote for the seminal 60s rock magazine Crawdaddy, and both went on to long and varied careers in journalism and music production, but they will forever be remembered as the architects of Blue Oyster Cult's ride on the hot rails to Hell. Not only did the two pen such memorable lines as 'Got a whip in my hand, baby/And a girl or a husky at leather's end' (I'm On The Lamb...) and 'Three thousand guitars/They seem to cry/My ears will melt/And then my eyes' (Cities On Flame...), but Meltzer also used his considerable power within the press to write increasingly implausible tales of Blue Oyster Cult's debauched madness on the road. Pearlman went so far as conjure up distinct visual images, like lead singer Eric Bloom's sleazy leather-man look and Buck Dharma's shiny white suits. Oh, and he came up with the name Buck Dharma, too.

A group of rock'n'roll intellectuals, managed by the natural enemies of most other bands: smart-ass journalists. A rocking contradiction. Were BOC a clever ruse? Marshall-stack performance art? Or, beneath that soft white underbelly, were they really the bum-trip shock troopers they seemed to be, here to rock you – in the words of their 1975 live album
– On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, whichever came first?

"That's me, baby. I'm the dark side of 70s rock." BOC frontman Eric Bloom, calling from his home in New York, chuckles when I tell him what the main thrust of my story is. He is about to puncture gaping holes in my preconceptions. I tell him about older friends I have who were in their late teens during BOC's biggest years, in the mid-to-late 70s; about their Cronos-logo tattoos and druggy meditations on nonsensical wordplay riffs like Wings Wetted Down, and Bloom's mysterious 'Stun Guitar', and lasers so powerful they could make you go blind if you looked at them directly. I tell him I was only seven years old when (Don't Fear) The Reaper first hit the airwaves, that it scared me to death, and that older kids in the neighbourhood warned me, in hushed tones, that BOC were "heavily into the occult".

"Well, we were definitely heavily into the literature," Bloom explains, "but we didn't practise anything. That's one thing that was smack-dab correct about us. I remember one time we had to do an interview in the dressing room after a gig; I think this was in 1980. The reporter walks into the dressing room, looks at us and says: 'What's going on here? Is this a set-up?'. I said: 'What do you mean?'. And he says: 'Well, you're all reading books!'. Well, yeah, that's what we do. He thought it was like when you have a hot date and you hide all your Playboys and put intellectual books out to impress her. He didn't believe we really did like to read books."

Al Bouchard was Blue Oyster Cult's drummer from their days as Soft White Underbelly until 1981, when he was unceremoniously fired, mid-tour. He also claims that the band was more erudite than their peers in the arena-rock sweepstakes. "Yeah, I'd say we were intellectuals. Eric Bloom was the one with his nose closest to the street but he went to college, too. We all got it together playing in college bands. College was the cultivating medium for the band."

I ask him if they thought the less-educated bands in their circuit seemed like cave-dwelling dummies to them. "Like Iggy and The MC5? Yeah. They sorta did. It didn't matter, they were still really good, but we were a much different band. We were 'the thinking man's rock band'."

A big part of the 'thinking man's band' concept sprang from the fertile mind of Sandy Pearlman, often considered the Svengali of BOC. Bouchard recalls how the band chanced upon him: "I remember before I ever met Sandy Pearlman, me and Buck Dharma were going to the same college [Clarkson] studying engineering. One of the other fellas bought a copy of this magazine they found in New York City called Crawdaddy, and in it [future Springsteen manager] Jon Landau had written a review of this band Blues Project that we were all very taken with at the time. He had given them a bad review, and we ended up tearing up the magazine and flushing it down the toilet. And, lo and behold, just a few months later, not only are we forming a band with two of the writers for Crawdaddy, but they're getting us to write reviews for the magazine as well."

Eric Bloom didn't join BOC officially until 1969, but he moved in with the band a year earlier. "When I moved into the band house in 1968, Meltzer and his girlfriend were living there. Pearlman was in and out on a daily basis. The band was playing in the basement. Patti Smith was around a lot – I believe she was dating Sam Shepard, the playwright, at the time. I guess they broke up and she started dating Allen Lanier, our bass player. They ended up living together for many years. Anyway, it was a real hippy kinda scene. Meltzer and Pearlman were writing, and there were piles of manila folders full of lyrics lying around, so everyone was taking these piles of lyrics and writing music to them. And that's how the band really started."

When I mention that 'The Aesthetics Of Rock' author Meltzer is sometimes cited as the mastermind behind BOC's dark fantasy, Bloom laughs. "I don't know about Richard being a mastermind, he was just a character around the house who wrote a lot of lyrics. But Sandy really had a Platonic idea of what Blue Oyster Cult should be. He had his own vision: 'the American Black Sabbath' or 'the thinking man's rock band'. It certainly got us off the ground, his push."

"The lyrical content was all Sandy Pearlman's doing," Bouchard agrees. "He had a vision of us as this black humour kind of thing, pessimistic and dark, but with lyrics filled with puns and oblique references to other disciplines, like science and maths. Sandy is a true intellectual. I'm still amazed by some of the stuff he came up with us for us."

Having two prankster wordsmiths around helped in other ways as well. "Sandy and Richard were writers, so to help promote us they'd make up shit about us." Bloom says. "Meltzer wrote an apocryphal article about us in some rock magazine that was totally tongue in cheek. He wrote that we played at the Mount Rushmore rock festival. Of course, there was no such thing. But he said that the highlight of the show was when Eric Bloom jumped off of George Washington's nose. A couple of years later, we're driving somewhere in America in our van. We see some poor guy hitch-hiking on a two-lane blacktop, so we picked him up. 'Are you guys a band?', he asks us. 'Yeah', we tell him: 'We're Blue Oyster Cult'. The guy says: 'No kidding! I was at the Mount Rushmore festival!'. He said he saw my jump off the nose..."

Another important aspect of the band Pearlman developed was their distinctive look, in particular Bloom's natty biker threads. "He took me to a gay store in Manhattan," Bloom remembers, "and he said: 'This is where you buy leather clothes. They don't sell this stuff in Bloomingdales'. It seems pretty normal now, but not in 1971," he laughs. "I got my first outfit from Leatherman on Christopher Street."

I ask Bloom if he ever thought the leather might have pegged him as a gay icon. "Well, Elvis wore the same outfit," he says. "When I put that stuff on I felt like Batman; nothing gay about it. I just felt very transformed when I put the clothes on. And I always wore sunglasses, even when I was 13 years old, so that was easy. The artist Robert Mapplethorpe used to make my jewellery. It all came together nicely – and the alternative to me was Buck, in the white suit."

Eric Bloom, then, was the original leather guy, not Rob Halford. "I had a motorcycle on stage before him, too," Bloom adds.

Pearlman presented the band with readymade stage names, which is how Donald Roeser became Buck Dharma. The rest of BOC declined to adopt their new monikers, except for Bouchard, whose new name just wouldn't take. "I was Prince Omega. I really liked it. It wasn't because I didn't like it that it didn't stick."

Loony concepts in place, BOC spent the early 70s honing their craft on stage. "Our first tour ever was opening for The Byrds and the Mahavishnu Orchestra," Bloom remembers. "You could not have had a more eclectic show. We did not do very well at all. We had to regroup and think of a new image, a new way of thinking and a new way of playing if we were going to succeed at all. We had a period of about six months where we just tore down the band and built it back up again. We put more of an edge on everything and that paid off. In mid-72 we got offered to do a run with Alice Cooper. Our first album was just about to come out. Alice liked us and off we went. We 'broke' on that tour."

Inspired by Alice's 'evil' theatrics and stage presence, BOC began developing some of their most enduring trademarks – the Stun Guitar, for example.

Eric Bloom not only sang, glowered and wore cool gay biker clothes, he also sometimes picked up an axe, adding to the towering pile of riffage in BOC's trademark guitarmy. But his instrument was not like the others. Oh no. Bloom played the Stun Guitar. And the Stun Guitar was as mysterious as it was powerful. As latter-day BOC lyricist John Shirley explains: "The secrets of the Stun Guitar are protected by four powerful, steroid-inflated eunuchs who stand with swords crossed at the gates to the Stun Guitar vault. Bones whiten in a pile at their feet."

At least that's the horror author's version. The guy who actually played the Stun Guitar has a less florid explanation: "I used to play through a customised fuzzbox and I called it the Stun Guitar. I got the name from Star Trek. But that's me, I'm a total sci-fi nerd."

Nerds or not, Blue Oyster Cult continued to gain ground in the US and Europe with dense, keyboard-laced rock that Pearlman referred to as 'heavy metal' but was more like decadent biker art-prog. Five albums and seven years into their career, they finally achieved real success with 1976's Agents Of Fortune album, which spawned the monster hit (Don't Fear) The Reaper, and brought them fame, if not fortune.

"Rich? You mean in dollars?" Bloom laughs. "No. You've got to remember, ticket prices were much lower back then. You couldn't get $150 for a seat like The Who or Billy Joel get now."

Bouchard at least got to upgrade his transportation fleet. "I had cars before, but they were all used ones," he says. "So when ...Reaper came along I bought two new cars: a Toyota and a Honda."

No Rolls Royce?

"No," he deadpans. "There was a gas crisis."

As the 70s wore on, BOC began to reject the dark image Pearlman and the record companies had saddled them with. Gone was the biker doom and crunching panic rock. The band began experimenting with poppier sounds and less dense imagery. "Pearlman wanted us to be faceless," Bloom says. "He thought it was better. That was one of the reasons we rebelled against that in the mid-70s. We told Columbia, our record company, that we were sick and tired of the zippered-leather torture stuff we were getting in the press."

Bouchard agrees: "We were basically playing a part. The songs were in the first person but they weren't about us. We were actors playing a part."

So, there was no real menace behind the message? "Well you can't just dress up and fake it. I think I was more into it than the other guys. I did revel in it quite a bit – and it was fun. But I would also read stuff like: 'I wouldn't want to meet up with Eric Bloom in a dark alley', which is kinda silly because I'm 5'7" and I weigh 135 pounds. But, you know, I took martial arts for years and I always had motorcycles, it's not like it was all crapola. But people thought my house was full of leather and spikes; far from it. It was all a fun, comic-book kinda thing for me."

You really couldn't conjure up a more comic-book gimmick than lasers that shoot at the audience, which became BOC's post-Reaper trademark. There are people in my neighbourhood who still shuffle around in a murky haze, damned forever by the blinding beauty of BOC's infamous light show. At least that's what they mutter between bong hits. And, from what Eric Bloom tells me, there's a reason so many minds were blown. "'Mind-blowing' is not enough of an adjective to describe those lasers. It was like dropping a nuclear bomb on the audience," he says. "We did stuff that cannot be done [now] because it's illegal. We were the test case for having lasers on tour. The Carter administration sent scientists to our gigs. After our tour, they wrote a three-inch-thick report on what can and cannot be done with lasers on stage."

The idea for the laser show was sparked when Sandy Pearlman took Bloom to see a performance artist named David Enfante in Manhattan in 1976. Enfante was experimenting with lasers and putting on mixed-media shows in his loft. "David had these lasers that moved to the sounds on a tape recorder," Bloom explains. "Nobody was doing anything like this at the time. He was a scientist. He developed this fibre-optic wiring, which I ended up wearing so it would look like the laser was coming out of my hand. Light would shoot out of my hand and hit the mirrorball on the ceiling."

The band developed a laser light show based on Enfante's designs, and took it on the road from 1976 to 1980, but they were plagued with technical problems and the cost of maintaining the lasers was astronomical. "We had to stop doing it, because it was killing us," Bloom says. "These things were not made to be put in the back of a truck. Every time they broke, it would cost $6,000 to fix. It was just crazy."

What happened to the lasers has always been open to speculation. There are fantastic rumours that the US government bought them to develop into high-tech weapons, or that they now sit somewhere in the Smithsonian Institute, curious relics from the dinosaur-rock era. According to Bloom, the truth is less compelling. "I think Sandy Pearlman palmed them off on Black Sabbath," he laughs.

For Blue Oyster Cult 1981 was a tempestuous year. They released the Fire Of Unknown Origin album in May, which resulted in two minor hits: the dark pop Burnin' For You and the campy Joan Crawford.

To promote them, they made ultra-low-budget video clips that were shown sporadically on MTV. Burnin' For You took the concept quite literally, by featuring a horny teen in a car who combusts into a ball of flames from sexual frustration. "We did those videos in 24 hours," says Bloom. "One day; no sleep. That was the only way we could do it, because we had no budget. I think we made both of those videos for $20,000."

The singles gave the band some much-needed momentum and BOC hit the road, touring with Foghat in the US and then heading to the UK for a series of summer dates, culminating in the Monsters Of Rock festival at Castle Donington. Bouchard was let go during the UK tour, and a roadie took his place for BOC's appearance at Monsters. It was a disastrous show for the band, who were plagued with such bad sound that rumours circulated that their set was sabotaged by headliners AC/DC. BOC were presented with a memorial plaque after the set – Eric Bloom smashed it to bits. It was an ugly time.

Bouchard recalls his abrupt dismissal after a dozen years with the band: "We were going to England and, before we left, the guys said: 'The band's wives don't want you to bring your girlfriend.' They didn't like her and said she couldn't ride in the bus with the rest of us. So I said: 'Okay, I'll just rent a car and drive around England, no problem'. I'd never done it before, but how hard can it be? Well, it was hard. It's all confusing there and I got lost a few times."

After one tense show, when Bouchard didn't make it onto the stage until the last three songs, the band had enough. "After the gig, they started berating me about being late. I said some things I probably shouldn't have, and they canned me. Looking back at it, I probably could have handled it a lot better than attacking their manhood. Later on I apologised but the damage had already been done." After leaving BOC, Bouchard went on to pursue a solo career. Meanwhile, the rest of the band ploughed ahead through the 80s in an increasingly more difficult musical climate.

"Disco came along, punk came along, metal came along and what we were doing started to look a little archaic," Bloom admits. "By 1985, 1986, we had stopped filling up big places. We had a tremendous run, but we went from being the number one band to a certain generation, to the 'Where are they now?' file. It had become apparent that we could no longer operate the same way, and we were not going to reinvent ourselves every year-and-a-half, like Madonna.

"Sony dropped us in 1988 and we had to find a new label. Allen Lanier left the band for a while, which left just Buck and I to continue on, and we didn't get another record deal until the mid-90s, when we signed with Sanctuary. We did three records with them and they did pretty well. About that time, we started getting good gigs again. The places weren't as big as they used to be, but people were coming out to see us and it all started picking up again."

In April 2000, US comedy show Saturday Night Live aired a sketch that featured a satirical recreation of the ...Reaper studio sessions, with Christopher Walken as a manic producer demanding "More cowbell!" on the track. Six years later, you can still get "More Cowbell!" t-shirts and mugs, while the sketch is acted out by others on youtube.com. Almost overnight, BOC had been rediscovered by an entire new generation.

"Not only is ...Reaper the only song by us they know," Bloom sighs, "but they only know it because of the SNL sketch." Still, it's testament to the song and the band's staying power. BOC is now [in 2006] in its 37th year of existence, and continues to perform 70-80 shows a year with three original members: Bloom, Buck Dharma and Allen Lanier. "It's not a bad job," Bloom chuckles. "Not a bad job at all."

As for Bouchard, he has no regrets. He is currently playing in NYC band the Brain Surgeons. "I'm still making records and writing songs, and doing all the things I did with BOC. The only difference is that I have to carry my own gear now."

But what of all the gnawing darkness? What about the flaming telepaths, the cagey cretins, the cities on fire with rock'n'roll? Were all the primitive blue-ink tattoos and blotter acid trips all for nought? Did Blue Oyster Cult just bluff their way through the sick 70s?

"They had an aura of occult weirdness because Pearlman deliberately evoked that with ambiguous lyrics that had a flavour of Aleister Crowley, but didn't usually get into specifics," John Shirley says.

"Our lyrics were a little different," is all Bloom will offer. "We had Patti Smith writing for us, Michael Moorcock, John Shirley and Richard Meltzer, so a lot of our lyrics are a little strange."

Bouchard is just as vague: "Even Eric Bloom will tell you he doesn't know what it all means. But it all means something, just not necessarily what you want it to or what you think it means. What it all adds up to I'm really not quite sure, but it's more than just a bunch of words, that's for certain."

And so it ends like it began: shrouded in mystery. Yes, Blue Oyster Cult may have been just college boys with guitars back in 1969 but, four decades on, their bizarre odes to 'Beers and barracuda/Reds and monocaine' still inspire writers, filmmakers and freaks to delve ever deeper into the cosmic rabbit hole, stretching rock'n'roll into twisted shapes and finding blinding truth in crazy old hippy ramblings. Reaper be damned – the Cult continues.

Sleazegrinder || Classic Rock

Don't Fear the Blue Oyster Cult

IN THE SUMMER of 1977, Blue Oyster Cult found themselves in one of the trickiest situations for a rock band: recording the follow-up to a breakthrough hit.

After steadily releasing an album a year throughout the decade, the classic song '(Don't Fear) The Reaper' had finally given the band their first hit single in 1976, reaching #12, while the album the song appeared on, Agents of Fortune , reached #29.

"Agents of Fortune was huge for us," agrees Eric Bloom, a founding guitarist/singer with BOC. "It kicked us into headlining our own tours in coliseums. And, of course, we were hoping to repeat that success. But you don't know if you're going to repeat it. You can only try."

As it happens, the follow-up album, Spectres , was only a modest success, reaching #43. "There was no real hit on Spectres ," Bloom concedes, "but it did very well. It was a gold record and had some good material on it."

And now, it has even more, as it's joined the collection of BOC's expanded reissues on Columbia/Legacy, with four previously unreleased bonus tracks added to the recent reissue. And Spectres was released alongside an even more expanded reissue of the 1978 live album Some Enchanted Evening ; the two-disc set has seven previously unreleased tracks on the CD, while the DVD, named Some OTHER Enchanted Evening, features a previously unreleased concert shot in Landover, Md., in 1978.

Both albums capture BOC at a high point in the band's career, a time when "we were flush with the success of having a platinum record, which we'd never had before," says Bloom. "So we were thrilled; a bunch of young guys just trying to take the world by the ass, you know?"

And while there wasn't a 'Reaper' on Spectres , there were crowd-pleasers like 'Godzilla', stompers like 'R.U. Ready 2 Rock' and eerie voyages to the dark side in 'Nosferatu'. The record company left the band to its own devices while recording the album.

"There was nobody breathing down our necks," Bloom confirms. "But certainly amongst ourselves we said, 'What can we do to take our success and double it?' And, of course, you can only write what you can write; you gotta hope that you have something on there that people like as much as what you did before."

Bloom's sole contribution to the album was the hooky, pop-flavored 'Goin' Through the Motions', co-written with Ian Hunter, whom he'd met when BOC toured with Mott the Hoople. "He asked if I had a studio in the house," Bloom explains, "and I had a little four-track studio. And he said, 'Why don't we kick around some ideas, see if we can come up with something?' So we did, and that was the result."

The bonus tracks were discovered when the original tapes were dug out for the reissue. "They're fun to listen to," says Bloom. "The cover of 'Be My Baby' I thought was a lot of fun. Though Buck [Dharma, guitarist/vocalist] and I were talking about it, and my recollection is different than his. I remember we were taking a lunch break during the sessions, and I said, 'Why don't we go out in the studio and put this down quick?' It was a song we did in clubs years before. And he thought it was from the pre-production sessions, a rehearsal tape."

The other bonus tracks, 'Night Flyer', 'Dial M For Murder' and 'Please Hold' were leftovers. "A lot of songs would go by the wayside," says Bloom. "You just couldn't get as many songs on a vinyl album. So, songs were stopped sometimes mid-session, like, 'These songs are not going to make it, let's not even put bass or drums on them.' There was no vocal on 'Night Flyer,' so Buck did that recently, cause there was no vocal on it from the '70s."

As for Some Enchanted Evening , Bloom is especially pleased with the DVD in the set. "The DVD I think is a lot of fun, because it's a no-frills video shoot," he says. "It's slightly better than a bootleg and not as good as a professionally made video. I think it's just the video from the JumboTron that evening, you know, the big screen they'd have in the middle of the theater. There's no editing, there's no sound mixing; what you hear and what you see is what it was. And it's a really good indicator of what our show was like in those days. It's got a little bit of bombast in it, some flames and some pyro and some lasers, the kind of thing we were doing back in those days."

Many big rock acts of the '70s had an extravagant light system, and BOC had one of the best. "We could talk an hour just on the laser system!" says Bloom. "It was huge, powerful, million-dollar stuff. And at the time the government had no regulations on it and were worried about giving a bunch of hippie dippy guys like us all these lasers to go and do whatever we wanted with it."

A licensed laserist used to accompany BOC on tour, but eventually, the band's show caught the attention of OSHA. A long report listed a number of things BOC had to change in its laser show. Ultimately, they stopped using it.

As for the CD part of the package, Bloom points out, "Our live records are really live records, compared to many many other bands of the era who just took the live bass and drums, re-did everything in the studio and called it a 'live record.' All our records are really live; there's certainly no overdubs. We saw no reason to fudge it."

BOC still tours today. Along with Bloom and Dharma, the lineup includes Allen Lanier on guitar/keyboards, Richie Castellano on bass and Jules Radino on drums. You'll also find the group well represented in cyberspace at www.blueoystercult.com, and guitar fans can check out www.ericbloomguitars.com for Bloom's series of custom art guitars.

So in spite of the lineup changes since the band's formation, BOC continues, somewhat to Bloom's surprise. "It's an oft-asked question," he agrees. "Did I think in '71 when we were working on the first record I'd be talking about it 35 years later? The answer would be no! Why we're still here ... it's just the chemistry has always been good. Me and Buck get along fine. We both respect each other's strengths. Sometimes we disagree, but it never gets odious. Pardon me if I wax philosophical, but I really believe in a bit of destiny, karma, or whatever you want to call it. And for some reason, Buck and I were thrown together for this time of our lives to just do this together. I don't know how or why it was meant to be that way. It just was."

Gillian G. Gaar || Goldmine

The Making of '(Don't Fear) The Reaper'

Riff approaching! Buck Dharma and co's "trans-awesome" tune, and the spookiest FM staple ever. "Nothing like the Byrds," apparently...

"WE GOT TARRED with the whole devilry thing," remembers Blue öyster Cult's singer Buck Dharma. "Were church leaders taking our records and burning them? Yeah. There was a public outcry."

Dharma — aka Donald Roeser — is telling Uncut about the backlash that greeted the band's 1976 breakthrough single. '(Don't Fear) The Reaper'. The reason? Many misinterpreted the song as being about suicide — something Dharma dismisses. It's a love story, he insists. Diagnosed with an irregular heart rhythm, he was "contemplating my own mortality, and I thought, 'Gee, wouldn't it be great, even if you died, that your love would survive?

Instances of record burning aside, '(Don't Fear) The Reaper' nevertheless transformed Blue öyster Cult's career. They started out in 1967 in Long Island as Soft White Underbelly; the name change came in 1970, thanks to producer-manager Sandy Pearlman. Along the way, they found admirers and collaborators in Patti Smith, Michael Moorcock, Stephen King and rock critic Richard Meltzer. But despite such storied friends — and Pearlman's ambitious plans to present Blue öyster Cult as America's answer to Black Sabbath — the band remained very much a cult concern.

"Our first record (Blue öyster Cult, 1972) sold 100,000 copies in the first year," says Dharma. "Each one after that doubled the sales again, but we didn't have a gold record until 1975."

'(Don't Fear) The Reaper' reached No 12 on the Billboard charts in America and has become a regular fixture in horror movies and TV shows like Hallowe'en , True Blood and Supernatural . In 2000, Will Ferrell debuted a Saturday Night Live sketch parodying 'Reaper''s recording, with Christopher Walken as a producer and Ferrell as fictional band member, Gene Frankel. Walken's pleas for "more cowbell!" made the sketch a massive hit and gave the song a new lease of life. And who really played cowbell remains a point of contention within the band itself...

                                           *

Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser (singer, lead guitarist): A lot of my strongest stuff is like automatic writing. I came up with a guitar lick and the first two lines of the lyric in about five minutes.

Albert Bouchard (drummer): The first time I heard it was May of 1975, and Donald called me up and said, "I got this new riff," and played it for me over the phone. Two weeks later we were out on the road and Donald played me the demo. I was like, "Holy crap! This is awesome. This sounds like it could be a hit record." Not everybody in the band was on board right away. Some people thought it was real soft.

Eric Bloom (rhythm guitarist): I remember hearing Don's demo and thinking it was a good song, but it wasn't really like anything else we'd done before. I know both Alan Lanier [keyboards/ rhythm guitar ] and I thought it was a bit light compared to our earlier work.

Sandy Pearlman (manager, producer): I thought it was trans-awesome. Rarely did any of them write by themselves before this. 'Reaper' was a watershed in the development of their song writing. It was definitely coincident with the appearance of multi-track home recorders on their doorstep.

Albert Bouchard: Everybody got Teac four-track tape recorders. Now we could record multiple parts one on top of the other, the way it's done in a studio. That changed the way we wrote because we all brought in songs with much more realised arrangements than previously.

Eric Bloom: The four-tracks gave everyone a chance to write on their own. Don's always been a good engineer and his home demos always sounded slicker than anyone else's. Although we'd always written as an ensemble before, everyone always brought in their ideas and kicked them around. Don brought in '... Reaper' essentially finished.

Albert Bouchard: Donald didn't really ask for any help. I gave him some thoughts, which he totally didn't use.

David Lucas: [co-producer ] At the time 'Reaper' was a little bit long and so I made some suggestions for edits, trim it down. We trimmed it down and went into the Record Plant.

Joe Bouchard (bassist): We chose the Record Plant because John Lennon had worked there. Everybody had worked there, Hendrix, Aerosmith, Gregg Allman, but it was the Lennon vibe we liked. We'd go out into the lounge and watch The Exorcist on Lennon's videotape machine that he left there, while we were recording. I think that rubbed off on 'Reaper'.

Buck Dharma: David was our co-producer — a very successful jingle guy who we met at a swingers' party in the early '70s.

David Lucas: I made a deal that I would do all music production, be in charge of music and recording and sounds and Sandy would mix. So he would stay out of the studio when we made the music, and I stayed out of the mixing room when he mixed the music. All of the songs that I ever produced with them were smooth as silk. I would stand at a podium and I would dance and do my conducting thing, just to keep the band alert, and to keep the rhythm.

Sandy Pearlman: 'Reaper' benefited from a tremendous infusion of new recording technology that the Record Plant, which was one of the three or four or five best and most advanced studios in the world, had. It made all sorts of sound manipulation tools available to us that hadn't been available just a few years before.

Shelly Yakus: [engineer ] The technological things that became available in 1976 certainly helped. Sure, there was equipment that made it easier for me to get what I was looking for. Would I have found another way? But remember, it's not about the racecar, it's about who's driving it.

Sandy Pearlman: 'Reaper' has a tremendously tall soundscape. It has a very high sonic horizon. Not only is there a lot going on, but you can hear everything that's going on. And given the conditions under which it was made, what's going on is pretty much going on well beyond your hearing capabilities. So it's a kind of festival of overtones.

David Lucas: So, whose idea was it to put the cowbell on the track? Mine. The song just floated and the drums were moving along but it didn't have four-on-the-floor drive. I had a cowbell that I'd been using for years for my studio, went and got it. It wasn't because I played the cowbell that I cranked it up. Sandy did that because he did the mix.

Albert Bouchard: I played the cowbell. When I got to the session, I thought that David Lucas was going to have me do a shaker because he always put 'em on everything. But he said, "I want you to play a cowbell." So I played it, and said, "It's not making it for me." So David says, "Let's tape it up and try it again." We covered it in gaffer's tape and I used a tympani mallet. Everybody went, "That's the sound we want." I see the cowbell as like the relentless march of the clock. The funny thing is that on the Saturday Night Live skit, Will Ferrell is made up to look like Eric. Eric would play the cowbell onstage, but not on the record.

Eric Bloom: Who played the cowbell on it? I did.

Buck Dharma: I think there was some worry with in the band, the organisation, that if 'Reaper' was really popular, would that mean that the Öyster Cult was going in a direction that would preclude our more sinister stuff. But my thought was, I can't help it.

Joe Bouchard: While it fit into the science fiction aspect of what we were doing, sonically 'Reaper' was different. We'd played covers of Byrds songs in our club days, and specifically the pattern came from 'So You Want To Be A Rock 'N' Roll Star'. Then the other part was Hendrix's 'All Along The Watchtower', for the pacing and the fills.

Albert Bouchard: When Sandy Pearlman heard it he said, "This sounds like the Byrds." I was like, what? It sounded nothing like the Byrds!

Buck Dharma: I've heard that I dreamt the whole song, including the arrangement. It's a great story. Certainly, the arc of the story was always in my mind. I started contemplating my mortality, and thought, 'Gee, wouldn't it be great, even if you died, that your love would survive.' I had a heart irregularity and I was all worried about that. It turned out to be not life threatening but it certainly got me thinking about my own mortality. I think that's one of the attractions about 'Reaper' is that it does resonate with people. People think about this stuff. About dying. After I contemplated my own dying, I didn't really dwell on it. Whatever dread I had about a short life was eventually assuaged by my existence. But it took 20 years for me to get on the proper medication to correct my arrhythmia.

Joe Bouchard: We didn't know that Donald had heart problems, so we didn't know what the inspiration was. We were all getting older, of course. I just thought he was affected by that. For years he was pretty ambiguous about the song, saying: "It's just another silly love song."

Buck Dharma: I was kind of appalled that some people thought it was about suicide. If I had thought people were going to think that, I would have changed some of the lyrics. I probably would have taken out the reference to Romeo and Juliet, but it was too good a metaphor.

Joe Bouchard: I don't know why people connect with it so deeply. It's a song that's been able to hold a lot of mystery. Even though I think part of it can be analysed intellectually there's something still very elusive and otherworldly There's always another door opening. Maybe someday it'll be all figured out.

Buck Dharma: 'Reaper' posits that there is an afterlife and you can cross over. Every once in a while the reality can be rent open and you can actually move within these different realms. When I wrote it, I was hoping it was an afterlife. But now? I'm accepting that this might be all there is. But I'm quite willing to be surprised.

Sandy Pearlman: Did the success of Buck writing 'Reaper' by himself change the dynamics of the band? At the time. I didn't think it did, but as time went by it was obvious that the market spoke. It was obvious that Donald was much more likely to come up with Top 40 material, radioactive material, than the other guys.

David Lucas: I don't think the guys in Blue Öyster Cult expected to have a hit They just expected to have a career.

Buck Dharma: 'Reaper' changed things in the band. It created a little confusion in the band's identity. After that, Blue Öyster Cult lurched in a direction we'd otherwise resisted, in terms of our conscious image. I never thought we pandered to the occult or violence or any of that. We would deal with these themes much like an author or a filmmaker would. We were hammered as being Nazis or devil worshippers, we like to create mindscapes with our music but it's not like we lived. It was very uncomfortable because we're basically just middle- class kids.

Joe Bouchard: The biggest thing to change was we were playing to empty halls, and as soon as 'Reaper' came out we were selling out. It happened like within a week. It's the power of a hit record.

Eric Bloom: The success launched us into the arenas. A lot of people thought it was our first album and weren't familiar with the previous four. We were already beginning to headline shows off the success of the earlier albums. Now booking agents advanced that schedule.

Joe Bouchard: Donald resisted the pressure to write 'Reaper Pt 2'. He refused, flat out. Of course, the follow-up for Donald was a tribute to [1950s movie monster ] Godzilla.

Buck Dharma: The song has become more like a memorial to people that have passed. It's something you play or say when someone passes away. And I'm good with that. I'm gonna play it at my funeral.

Jaan Uhelszki || Uncut

From Soft White Underbelly to the Stalk-Forrest Group

NOTE: In an excerpt from the new edition of Becoming Elektra : The Incredible True Story of the pioneering Elektra Records label and its Far-sighted Founder , Mick Houghton explains how the future Blue Oyster Cult evolved out of Soft White Underbelly and the Stalk-Forrest Group.

THE YEAR 1969 was one of high drama for Jac Holzman and Elektra Records. Delaney & Bonnie's Accept No Substitute was released in May and, within months, Holzman had fired Delaney for threatening to shoot him.

Holzman also released the MC5 from their contract after an incident when the band took out an offensive ad in a local underground paper excoriating a large Midwest retail chain, Hudson's, for not stocking their album. In Miami-Dade County on March 1, Jim Morrison was arrested for "lascivious and lewd behaviour". On April Fool's Day, the little-known Stooges were recording their debut album at the Hit Factory, a seedy New York studio off Times Square, marking the first major step for a group to whom controversy was second nature. It was 1969, OK.

By contrast, Bread – also signed to Elektra that year – proved to be a dream band for Holzman to work with and would become one of the label's most commercially successful groups. Working with the civilised, anonymous mister nice guys in Bread must have come as some relief in a year when, even in the light of experience, he had been required to deal with a whole slew of so-called difficult artists and situations.

He says he didn't usually see them as being difficult with him or the company. "They sometimes did foolish things or were self-defeating but all of those so-called difficult artists had very different 'problems'. Phil Ochs was trying to be better than Dylan; Arthur Lee didn't want to leave L.A., thus severely truncating his career; Jim hated authority or constriction and loved to see how far he could test the limits. Iggy was trying something so new in a world that didn't get him at the beginning but he was a sweet guy. I didn't discount sticking with Iggy after we had let the group go, but he had already moved on and we never had the conversation."

Although Holzman was much more at arm's length with them, trouble was soon brewing with another new Elektra signing: Soft White Underbelly, who had begun recording in Elektra's New York studios in November 1968, with Peter Siegel assigned to produce them. Elektra arranged several New York shows for the band and Holzman committed to signing them after seeing the group in the Ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in New York. Richard Meltzer and fellow Crawdaddy magazine critic Sandy Pearlman managed the group, all of them residing in a run-down communal house where they were came together as students or part-time students at Stony Brook University in Long Island.

The housemates played their first gig in the University's Gymnasium in October 1967, as a backing band for Elektra singer songwriter Steve Noonan. It was Pearlman who christened them Soft White Underbelly after "Winston Churchill's description of Italy as the soft white underbelly of the axis".

Six months later, they were joined by aspiring songwriter Les Braunstein, who took over vocal duties, which the group had never entirely settled upon. Braunstein's writing pedigree included a frivolous song called 'I'm In Love With A Big Blue Frog' that Peter Paul & Mary had covered on 1967's Album 1700 .

"I heard Soft White Underbelly," says Peter Siegel, one of Elektra's hot team of in-house producers, "and they had a young, good-looking singer called Les Braunstein who had a dark, brooding personality, and I thought they were going to be the next Doors." Indeed, Elektra's early publicity buzz centred round the notion that Soft White Underbelly were the "East Coast Doors".

"Les had that kind of star power," says Siegel. "We proceeded to make a rock album; we laid down all the tracks, and he was going to over dub all the vocals – we had only done scratch vocals. At this time an argument took place between Les and the rest of the band. Les was difficult; his mood swings were unbelievable. He was living in the band's communal house but he wanted his own house, and he wanted the band to rent him or buy him a house to live in alone. So it became, 'If you don't get me my own house, I'm going to quit.' And they didn't get him his own house, and he quit, and that was pretty much the end of my involvement with them. I thought somebody was going to back down. Maybe the rest of the band wanted him out; most of them had known each other from high school so he was always an outsider."

The stories surrounding Braunstein are legion, including one about how he didn't like his vocals and crept into the studio one night and wiped them. "That didn't happen any time I was around," says Siegel. "I would have known, trust me. We made an album, we spent $30,000, and I thought they were great tracks but with just guide vocals for the band to hold on to. It was very frustrating because the recordings and the songs were great but it was just never finished. If Les been able to hold it together he was a fine singer, but that star quality came from the same place his mood swings came from. It's one of those great rock'n'roll tragedies. They eventually brought in another singer but by that time I was on to something else."

Drummer Albert Bouchard told his side of the story to Max Bell in 2015. "What it boiled down to was that Les wasn't as serious about the music as the rest of us. He was gifted and talented but when he did the vocals it all got fucked up. He started by lying down on the floor twelve feet from the mic or he'd insist on singing when we weren't there."

Whatever version of the story, the singer – on whose strength Holzman had essentially signed them – was no longer in the group. After bringing in their road manager, Eric Bloom, the group – Bloom on lead vocals and guitar, Donald Roeser (aka Buck Dharma) on lead guitar, Andy Winters on bass, Allen Lanier on keyboards and guitar, and Albert Bouchard on drums – recorded a substantially different-sounding album under the Mexican appellation Oaxaca, before switching names again to Stalk-Forrest Group. Their second shot at recording, this time with Pearlman co-producing, took place in Elektra's Los Angeles Studios in February 1970, under the supervision of company man Danny Murphy. The completed album was scheduled for summer 1970, with 'What Is Quicksand' and 'Arthur Commix' pressed up as a promotional single. According to Meltzer, the group thought it was a mistake to release the album in the middle of the summer, so they did their best to delay the release. In the end, Holzman decided not to release it at all. The following summer, re-christened again, this time as Blue Öyster Cult, they were brought to the attention of Columbia's Clive Davis, who auditioned and signed them.

The Stalk-Forest Group's St Cecelia was released by Rhino in 2003 but included nothing from the recordings with Les Braunstein. "I thought that the eventual recordings I heard were less than I expected from having seen them," says a rather downbeat Holzman. "I just felt they didn't measure up to the other great groups we had on the label. It wasn't there but it happened for them later. Those unreleased recordings eventually came out purely because, in retrospect, they had become more interesting to people, but that didn't make them any better."

The fully revised and substantially expanded Becoming Elektra includes a brand new foreword by John Densmore of the Doors and draws on extensive new interviews with a wide range of Elektra alumni, as well as further conversations with Holzman himself. The new edition also adds two new chapters: a look at Elektra in Britain in the '60s and a reappraisal of the label's '70s output.

Mick Houghton || Jawbone

Imps of the Perverse

One Stop Records, Dean Street. Saturday morning. February 1973. Thumbing the "Just In" racks of US imports I experience a nape hair-raising vinyl revelation. What the hell is that? An album called Tyranny And Mutation? By The Blue Öyster Cult? "Just came in," says the hippie behind the counter. "Got another of them, in the ABCs." They have. The first Blue Öyster Cult album. Both have mindboggling covers. Futuristic, architecturally alien landscapes devoid of humanity, as cold and silent as outer space. One hour later, I'm back home in Holborn. For the next three months all I do is play those records on my 60s Bush SRP31 Portable. It's only monophonic but makes no odds. The music is as unearthly as those covers.

In 1974 the NME runs a competition to win the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time. So I send in my 10-pence-worth on Tyranny and they publish it but I don't win. Curses. Instead I write a letter to editor Nick Logan explaining why they need my 18-year-old self on Long Acre and he takes the bait. Three days later he gives me work. "Go and review Dr Feelgood at Dingwalls. Go and interview Tangerine Dream." Bliss. A career of evil. Wandering round the back office where scribes are tapping out their manuscripts on temperamental Olivetti's I see a flyer pinned to the wall that reads, "Blue Öyster Cult – On Tour For Ever." Right at home.

If it seemed that the Cult arrived as a fully-finished entity from hard rock hell the truth is far more complicated. Drummer Albert Bouchard recalls the early days.

"I met Allen Lanier in 1967," he tells me in December 2018. "He was in a group with Andrew Winters, John Wiesenthal, David Roter, Joe Dick and Donald [Roeser]. John put the group together before Sandy Pearlman [manager/master of propaganda] arrived."

Winters worked in Pearlman's dad's pharmacy in Smithtown, Long Island, near Stony Brook University, popular haunt of students and hippies. Roeser and Winters, a folk guitarist who moved to bass, were high school friends. Roeser and Bouchard were in a group called Travesty for about 10 minutes. Pearlman came up with the name Soft White Underbelly (a phrase Winston Churchill used to disparage Italy in WW2); Wiesenthal provided their first logo. Other names mooted were Cow, The Santos Sisters and 1-2-3 Black Light.

SWU settled their line-up when Bouchard replaced Dick. They acquired a band house at Great Neck on the Island where a tall saxophone player and occasional singer, Jeff Richards, would join the jams. In October 1967, Pearlman (a renowned rock critic for US mag Crawdaddy) got the boys their debut gig as Steve Noonan's backing band at the Stony Brook University gym. Wiesenthal quit. "He had trouble concentrating," recalls Bouchard.

Soft White Underbelly played a blues set in November at the Café Au Go-Go supporting James Cotton, and did their own thing at a Christmas party in Stony Brook to try out some original material: Bouchard and Pearlman's fellow rock critic Richard Meltzer's All-Night Gas Station, a lengthy psych jam, mutated into A Fact About Sneakers, a song they recorded as Stalk-Forrest Group in 1970.

Bouchard's other contribution was You. "That was a dream I had about being drafted, though I never was," he says. "Sandy changed the words to an elaborate tale about Canadian Mounties which became I'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep [it appears on the initially unreleased Stalk-Forrest Group album, and the debut BÖC album, then as The Red And The Black on Tyranny And Mutation]. For the first half-dozen shows I sang and played drums using a boom microphone. Jeff was a good singer with terrible stage fright. It wasn't ideal."

Meltzer tried his hand, too, but confined himself to shouting obscenities. "At Café Au Go-Go I stuck my head in the bass drum and yelled 'piss' incessantly," he remembers. "That was me done." "Richard was always contrary," Roeser points out.

"He had no boundaries. He was like a shark: keep on moving or you die. I liked him a lot but he had no discretion. Civil society wouldn't function if everyone were like him. But he and Sandy did have folders full of possibly great lyrics, and we spent hours sorting them out." They were not your usual run of the mill lyrics, either, more like arcane poetry.

And remember the times. It might have been The Summer Of Love but Draft was in the air. And SWU were peaceniks to a man. "We were all called to the board," recalls Meltzer. "Allen actually had to join the army where he was so freaked he attempted suicide. He OD'd on painkillers. Albert stayed up all night before his interview taking acid and listening to Sing This All Together from Their Satanic Majesties Request. He told the board he was homosexual. They asked, 'Active or passive?' To which he replied 'both'. He was excused. Pearlman gave me a note for the shrink that said, 'He considers himself an avant-garde artist who uses fire as a means of expression. He reads a paperback then immediately burns it. And he takes LSD. He is frequently incoherent.' That worked. Pearlman got a letter from the staff psychologist at Cosmopolitan, which stated he was a dangerous psychopath. That worked, too."

The Viet Cong's loss was the Underbelly's gain but they still needed a singer. In early '68 a longhaired stranger arrived at the house in the woods. This was Les Braunstein, who entered the Underbelly after bumping into Pearlman's girlfriend (later wife), Joan Shapiro, while visiting friends on campus.

An aspiring songwriter, and a graduate from nearby Hobart, where he'd shared anti-authoritarian conversations with fellow student Eric Bloom, Braunstein had written a cutesy jug band track called I'm In Love With A Big Blue Frog that Peter, Paul & Mary had just covered as their obligatory "kiddy" song on Album 1700 (1967). It was more than faintly twee, yet this ditty gave Braunstein a regular $75 a month royalty cheque, enabling him to buy a VW bus. He had other things to commend him: he'd seen The Doors play in 1967 and he'd hung out with Nico and Tim Hardin.

"When I turned up at St James, they were taking a break and smoking so I joined in," he recounts to RC. "We got more stoned on my bus and then I entered their rehearsal room, with all the equipment squeezed in. They played and it sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before: powerful, electric. I got very paranoid. I felt so trapped inside the music I had to run outside. Joan came to fetch me and said, 'Oh, that happens to everybody.'

I went back and it was still the best thing ever – Donald, Albert, Allen and Andrew. They showed me some songs. Meltzer's were whacked-out; so odd I didn't see how they could ever make sense, but Donald and Albert worked them up. They were like heavy metal elves living in an enchanted hard rock cottage in the woods."

Once integrated, Braunstein offered to participate and sang: "I'm in the band house, we're all in the band house." Sheer poetry. "Yeah, but it got more complicated," he adds. "I tried out one of my college jug band songs, Rational Passional; slightly silly but it came out like the Jefferson Airplane. The lyrics were pretty subversive."

Braunstein joined in earnest after jumping onstage at the Anderson Yiddish Theatre, Greenwich Village but didn't complete a set until February '68: a drug-bust benefit starring Country Joe & The Fish and The Fugs. Back from the army on a furlough, Lanier was horrified to find "the band house guy" upfront. "The constant, the communal context, was altered," he remembers. "I was always an outsider as a matter of style but it was all about the band so I got over it."

In April '68, SWU supported BB King and Chuck Berry at the Generation Club, NYC, and also backed the bonkers rock'n'roll star. "That was very cool," Bouchard reflects. "We arrived early. Chuck didn't turn up 'til 15 minutes before the doors opened. He plugged in and asked, 'Who is the drummer?' I was actually sitting at my drums! 'OK. You know my songs. This is what happens: when I bring the head stock of my guitar down that means stop and the song ends, but keep the beat going in your head and be ready to come back in; when I lift up my left leg and bring it down to my right leg that means wrap it up 'cos that's the end of the song, okay?'

"He told Andrew to 'play Memphis but not like the record, like Johnny Rivers' and Andy goes, 'Wh-a-aat the fuck are you talking about?' That was the entire sound-check," Bouchard laughs. "We played, then we backed him and he was incredibly loud but lucid and dynamic. What a great singer."

In May, SWU supported the Grateful Dead at Stony Brook. Bouchard thought "they [the Dead] were a little boring, they went on and on and the vocals didn't do anything. But Don liked Jerry Garcia and stole a bunch of ideas. They were a folky jug band and we still had an East Coast jazzy influence. Oh, but Phil Lesh [Dead founder] came over and said, 'You'll be great someday.' Dunno if that was a compliment."

Finally, a break. Pearlman persuaded Elektra boss Jac Holzman to watch the Underbelly play in the Ballroom at the Hotel Diplomat, New York City, where Meltzer gave the record company boss a joint laced with horse tranquilliser. Evidently it worked because, after they climaxed with All Night Gas Station, Holzman came flying out of the bleachers. "He jumped onstage and threw his arms round Les," Melzer recalls. "He hugged me and said, 'You're in the family, boy!' It was a very special moment," adds Braunstein.

Holzman viewed Braunstein as an East Coast Jim Morrison. In late '68 SWU started recording at Elektra's New York studio, then moved to the recently opened A&R Studio 2 in early 1969. Here, they recorded enough material for an album. The songs included Mothra (an early Cult-style abstract Japanese horror monster-piece), Queen's Boulevard (about the death of the classic US motorcycle and the joys of driving down said Boulevard) and Fantasy Morass (about urinating in a public toilet with a lyric that goes, "It's not a yellow cloud, it's not a smelly vent..."). Bark In The Sun would become the 1974 Secret Treaties song, Cagey Cretins, when recycled with another SWU tune, Mystic Stump, something they never recorded. Pearlman and Bouchard wrote Buddha's Knee, a trance song performed under the influence of LSD with a fast guitar passage that indicated how ridiculously good Roeser had become on guitar.

There were also attempts at the following: St Cecelia, Bonomo's Turkish Taffy, Arthur Comics, Ragamuffin Dumpling (written by Meltzer about Braunstein, who used to make the band dumplings and referred to himself as "the magic man" of the song), Donovan's Monkey and All Night Gas Station. These six were revisited and drastically altered by the Stalk-Forrest Group. Finally, there was a Braunstein folk song called Jay Jay that Bouchard says, "Was how Les wanted us to be. We thought, 'Oh well, The Beatles always do some weird shit folk, so why not?' We gave it our best shot, Allen especially."

During the final recordings, with bemused producer Peter Siegel going slowly nuts, Braunstein decided he didn't like his vocals and erased them without permission. According to Bouchard, "He really didn't want to sing Meltzer's songs. Meltzer didn't like him and he didn't like Richard's tone because it wasn't positive. Les wasn't as serious about the music as the rest of us. He was talented but when he re-did his vocals it all got fucked-up. He started by lying down on the floor 12 feet from the mic or he'd insist on singing when we weren't there." The ultimatum was sotto voce: either Braunstein played ball, or he could do one.

Meltzer remembers, "Les destroyed the SWU sessions. During Sitting On The Buddha's Knee he brought in a gong and in the middle of a terrific Don solo he starts banging it. He thought he'd invented the new music! When we played The Scene he brought in a bag of root beer lollipops and started a rap – 'There's a riot on the streets... the pigs are out there' – and he threw the lollipops into the crowd. They replaced him without regret."

That decision infuriated Holzman. He refused to release the SWU album. Nothing emerged apart from a rough acetate of Rational Passional in late '68 but a distraught Pearlman persuaded him to give them one more chance. Changing their name to Stalk-Forrest Group, rehearsals were sluggish until Eric Bloom's arrival on Thanksgiving '68. They met their future vocalist on a trip to recce equipment at Sam Ash Music Stores where Bloom worked. He got on with them at once, particularly Lanier, the two sharing an interest in Hot Rods and sports. "I had a PA and a van so I moved in and heard all their material," Bloom says. "I was in the living room watching TV when Pearlman walked in holding my tambourine and giggling. He said, 'The boys want to talk to you.' That was April '69. I was by no means an instant member."

Having demo'd at Elektra, New York in early 1970, confusingly as Oaxaca, Stalk-Forrest travelled West in May to make their second unreleased album. "It was chaotic," says Bloom. "Producer Jay Lee quit so Sandy took over with Pete Siegel and Dennis Murphy. Holzman never showed up and he didn't like me. After an Electric Circus show he told Sandy, 'He adds with his rhythm guitar but I don't like his singing', which was odd 'cos I had my amp turned off for the whole show."

Elektra had invested $5,000 of development in SWU/SFG but didn't rate the California sessions. Bloom mentions, "At a meeting in New York the legendary art director William Harvey [The Doors, Love] told us, 'Your album cover doesn't have to look typically Elektra,' to which Winters replied sarcastically, 'That's good.' They threw us off the label again but then gave us one more 'last chance'. Don Gallucci flew out from LA to reconsider the mixes. In the middle of rehearsal Andrew, who had a part-time job in a bakery, left to go to work. Gallucci took over the bass but that night he phoned Holzman and told him to drop us."

Winters tetchily disputes this. "Gallucci arrived very late. As for Harvey, yes, there was a feud. At one point we sent him a package with a turd in it – not me, someone else I won't mention. Was I snide? How the fuck would you know? Were you there? The real reason they dropped us is Pearlman's fixation on academia. Elektra was ready to release summer '70 but he wouldn't agree until a Fall date 'when the kids are back in school'. BÖC used me as a scapegoat for his incompetence and have spent 40-plus years propagating, with the help of eager groupies – oops, journalists – like you that somehow I was to blame for Elektra not releasing our album.

I've lived with this shit 40 years but I founded the damn band in the first place." (The SFG album was finally, officially, released in 1998).

In September '70 the prototype Blue Öyster Cult (the umlaut added by Meltzer and Lanier as a quasi-fascist in-joke) played at a nudist swingers' convention in the Catskills, in Camp Swan Lake, New York State, attended by one David Lucas. Impressed with their performance on a tennis court inside a large orange bubble, Lucas offered demo time at his then-unique 8-track Warehouse studios on 46th Street. Pearlman played them to new acquaintance Murray Krugman, a budding staff producer/A&R man at Columbia, and an audition was arranged in the label's conference room on 6th Avenue. Says Roeser: "The audition was intimidating because Clive [Davis, Columbia president] brought in Blood, Sweat & Tears drummer Bobby Colomby, Patti Smith and this other guy who turns out to be Harry Nilsson. During our five-song set Nilsson walked out so we thought we'd blown it. But turns out he just went for a cigarette, and, in fact, he told Clive to sign us. Sandy came in five minutes after the audition and says, 'Clive likes you. We're in.'"

They recorded their self-titled debut in two weeks. Bassist Joe Bouchard recalls, "BÖC was new material, reworked from our psychedelic past. We were told by Murray Krugman to 'make it heavier'. Led Zeppelin was hot at the time and Clive wanted us to ride that wave.

It was a magical time. The building was a spice warehouse." The smell reminded Roeser (or Buck Dharma as he was now known) "of Dune. Arakis. The spice mélange. A pungent but not unpleasant aroma – much like the album, which I think is unique.

It was a distillation of everything we'd done; our very best stuff to date."

To Joe's drummer brother Albert, "It came out different to what I expected. It sounded mysterious and that Bill Gawlik cover was like, 'Wow.' He came up with the symbol of Kronos/Saturn that identified us immediately. That came from his City of the Future Masters in Architecture at Stony Brook University. Sandy saw that symbol first so he hired Gawlik on the spot. I think he got $500 a piece for the first two records. We owed him. I liked the fact there was minimal information; it gave the listener more to imagine. We had no image then. On our first Cult tour we wore sweaters and looked cornily preppy. It wasn't until we did a mini-tour with Alice Cooper that we realised we needed to look a lot more dangerous to back up the music."

Pearlman wrote the Columbia advertorial: "Get Behind The Blue Öyster Cult. Before They Get Behind You." Meanwhile, he persuaded Meltzer "to write whole reams of laudatory copy, which he dictated. Standing at my shoulder and checking every word."

As Lanier said: "Sandy was great at that shit. He turned us into BÖC Inc. And who cared? It was a great idea. Sandy was way ahead of that game." Studio owner/producer Lucas was vital. "His demos were so good," says Pearlman. "That's how we got the deal. It was a cosmic coincidence." Lucas is clear-eyed about it all: "I put them on the map, the fucking scruffy hippies. They were mystical, cool and floated, not necessarily heavy metal at all.

I made them melodic and insisted on harmonies. I liked their voices. They had a weird sound; Sandy just got in the way.

He was a pain in the ass. I let him mix and he made them more brittle, more punk. Him and Meltzer were fabulously talented, though. Murray just sat there reading a newspaper. Albert was the most important member; he was the soul of the group."

Whatever, this was the most cohesively peculiar set of songs around. Starting with an amorally pitched Transmaniacon MC, about the Altamont Hell's Angels episode, it got stranger and stranger. I'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep stomped over a tale about Canadian Mounties who "get their man". Critics loved it. Lester Bangs called drug double-cross murder epic Then Came The Last Days Of May "a teen tragedy for our time". Nick Tosches described Stairway To The Stars as "homicidal" and slavered over Before The Kiss, A Redcap: "Who else would construct an entire song around being offered a tuinol from the whiskey-drenched tongue-tip of some sleaze-feral endomorph in a Long Island bar."

To critic Lillian Roxon, Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll was "the climax of the violence" while Workshop Of The Telescopes reminded fellow scribe Jon Tiven of "that old Boris Karloff Bela Lugosi thing called 'The Invisible Ray'." Changes magazine concluded: "The first album with not a single bad cut since 1967." It sold 100,000 copies.

But second album Tyranny And Mutation was possibly better. Press ads warned, "A Spectre Is Haunting America." According to Pearlman, "I played Columbia the test pressing of Tyranny one day. In walks this guy, Bruce Springsteen, who didn't have a career yet. He was dumbfounded: 'I can't believe anyone can play that fast!' Actually, we were late delivering the deal and Gawlik was late with his artwork. I went to see him. He was taking vast amounts of amphetamines while driving a NYC taxi by day, then listening to the mixes non-stop all night. He says, 'You know what you must do? Turn up the air-conditioning on the group so the studio is freezing cold and don't let anyone leave 'til it's finished. By the way, I have a name for this album: Tyranny And Mutation.' I agreed wholeheartedly. I wanted us to be disgusting, if not trans-repulsive."

To Meltzer, "It was hard rock comedy, the best pseudo-metal. It contains my all-time-favourite song, Teen Archer – teen idol, teen angel, teen archer. It was about taking a shot at groupies, let's say. Back then they didn't have many; eventually they had their score."

Joe Bouchard: "I wrote Hot Rails To Hell after taking a subway ride with Gawlik after seeing a Roland Kirk show. Going back to the Dix Hills band house from the Lincoln Centre we got on the train and someone had sprayed '1277' on the side. The subway was so dangerous back then, hence 'Riding the underground, swimming in sweat.' I called it Hot Rods To Hell but Sandy changed it for the better. Wings Wetted Down was a lot of fog based round some Pablo Neruda poetry. It had that mood, a classical music ending like orchestrated heavy rock. Albert was the instigator because, when Don wanted to go to lunch, he'd persevere like the older brother he is."

To Roeser the arrival of Patti Smith (who'd helped broker their Columbia deal) was vital; her lyric for Baby Ice Dog in particular. "I wasn't involved with her New York intelligentsia but she helped us get edgier; so did Sandy and Joe. We really wanted success but we didn't want the Columbia communality. We went in the opposite direction." And now they had their image, according to Albert Bouchard: "The leather look came from Christopher Street, a dangerous S&M locale. On the Tyranny tour we deliberately set out to be scary, to make you feel uncomfortable. Maybe it went too far because, in the South, they thought we were a Satanic Death Cult. At a Seattle gig someone turned up in a full SS uniform."

Bloom was in his element. Being Jewish (as were Pearlman, Krugman and Lucas), he'd laughed when the Jewish Defense League started picketing Columbia with anti-Cult placards. "Sandy took me to The Leatherman, a mostly gay leather clothing shop on Christopher Street. Sandy and I looked over the leather gear in the store with the help of Bill, the owner, who became a good friend of the band. I chose a set of black leather jeans and black leather jacket. I'd always had motorcycles, plus this was similar to the outfit Elvis wore on his comeback special. I shopped around 'til I found a motorcycle primary chain belt. Robert Mapplethorpe provided me with some 'jewellery' made from plastic. Robert was Patti Smith's friend when Allen and Patti were a number. Later on, I got a studded leather belt with chrome handcuffs in front.

I always wore sunglasses, way before meeting the band. Sandy suggested Donald's white suit to counteract the black leather. I got boots made by the Anania Bros, the same guys who made KISS' boots – mine were studded.

I wore a black leather-studded wristlet and asked Bill to make me a one-stud leather ring. I bought a wet-look nylon shirt on 8th Street to complete the look. I later added a dog chain through the belt-loops that I used to whip the drum cymbals."

This is when many Cult fans dialled up. Albert Bouchard: "We were much better musicians now. The arrangements are so nifty – like the music box sample Murray Krugman stuck onto Flaming Telepaths [actually an excerpt from a 19th century waltz, by J Ivanonici, called Danube Waves], which just made it more brutal. Old people like that bit, but the drums kill the song. The journey from Career Of Evil to Astronomy is immense". Roeser concurs: "BÖC was all over the map. We'd got more aggressive. That's also a time when you listened to a piece of black vinyl and turned it straight over." To Joe Bouchard, "We were so focused. Flaming Telepaths is the purest BÖC song whereas on Dominance And Submission, Career Of Evil and Subhuman eyebrows were raised."

For Lanier, the boy from Gothic Southern Georgia, there were always caveats. "ME262 came out rock'n'roll like MC5. I said it should have been more Stonesy, blusier. You couldn't always make a point because the group was uptight about anything personal, though we started out living and working together.

"We also weren't sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, though we enjoyed some of that pie. I used to think, 'This band isn't bent enough, it's too bourgeois, too civilized.' We wanted to achieve perfect heaviness but I don't think we ever quite did. Oh, no, we did on Tyranny. That is hardcore; so deviant. It has a cave-like claustrophobia." Lanier provided one of Treaties' key moments on Telepaths where his detuned Moog solo bridges a slow crescendo like a swinging lead weight.

Released in April '74, Secret Treaties sold 300,000 copies. It warned (in Pearlman's fair hands) that "Aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed." The advert showed the Cult dressed as US WW2 flyers in front of a blackboard promising MAX EFFÖRT. Behind that was a photo of Hitler's 1939 Nuremberg Rally speech, used as a dartboard. Circus magazine ran it, before apologising. "They said we were neo-Nazis," laughed Allen Lanier in his last ever interview (he died in 2013, three years before Pearlman passed).

Secret Treaties wrapped up the first Cult phase. Almost. The 1975 live double, On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, with its chilling cover shot taken by John Berg of a hearse parked outside St John's Episcopal Church in South Salem, NY, polarised critics but not the group. "A Cult monument," Roeser decrees today. For Bouchard, "It got a bum rap, but it's our best record." To Pearlman? "It's the live gospel. It's scripture... Unrestrained, unfettered, unleashed in the temples of rock'n'roll."

And now the Reaper was at the door. It was time. Power in the hands of fools.

Blue Öyster Cult play Manchester Academy on 1 March.

Max Bell || Record Collector