Blue Oyster Cult: Classic or Dud?

Ok, this:

the 12/31/73 academy of music show with the stooges and teenage lust and kiss

and this:

saw them at the palladium w/thin lizzy

is just too much.

I fucking love this thread

yeah that lizzy show was great. iirc boc's equipment truck never arrived, with included their laser light show. so they were forced to play a bare-bones set using amps that all had "dictators" stencils on them. most memorable thing about the lizzy set was the guitarist (don't remember which) breaking an important string right at the start of his big lead break and carrying on, completely unphased, with a truly wicked solo.

kiss was...unanticipated. i think they were a last-minute addition to the bill (maybe to delay boc's set until actual new years at 12am?). i had never heard of them. some of their primitive pyrotechnics came close to landing on audience members, and gene simmons ignited his own hair unintentionally. in retrospect i cannot believe our parents let us go to that. i was 15 i guess.

Sometime after that I found out Joe Bouchard wrote the melody while walking along this same beach at night. I came across a blog entry all about this written by a ghost hunter or something.

here it is. I could def talk a bit more than the author does about the specific resonances between their music and the location. I just worry it might be too much?

If you're back in the spring let me know and we can do a beer on the porch and spin BOC.

You're on!

i think eric bloom lives in port washington.

I know he lived in Port for a time in the 70's, I have been under the impression that he's lived in GN for years, don't remember why, but there was a Newsday(?) feature on their band house in Thomaston where he basically said as much (can't find it). I have ties to both towns and visit these places a lot but never run into him lol

. i also attended a passover sedar with eric & his fiance -- my family was going to nj, but i wanted to stay local so my friend & i could see renaissance /elo at the westbury music fair. which we could basically walk to.

love this so much!! that's an enviable gigography for sure

looking back at the ad for that elo show (https://rocktourdatabase.com/sites/rocktourdatabase.com/files/1974-04-06_0.jpg) i see that it was rescheduled to passover. i doubt we would have gotten tickets if it had originally been scheduled on passover. that must have been 1974. elo was touring their "on the third day" album. i'm sure i've told this before too but it's a good story so...

during the sedar meal, my friend bobby's mother (eric's sister) served potato kugel, a traditional dish like a potato pudding. eric commented "good kugel, joan!" afterward i must have remarked to bobby that "good kugel, joan" was not something i ever expected to hear a rock star say. recall that the iggy / boc show we had seen at the academy was just a few months before this.

the next time eric was over at bobby's house -- i always made a point of being there when eric was over -- bobby's parents had just gotten a new living room couch. eric tried it out and announced "good...cushions, joan" while glaring at me. clearly the "good kugel, joan" story had made the rounds.

can i out my buddy bob? i think there is a family resemblance.

Well, that's the best thing i've ever heard. xp

I could def talk a bit more than the author does about the specific resonances between their music and the location.

One thing is, the 'gothic horror stories blog' author describes Long Island as being full of ghosts. And I think what creates the haunted atmosphere- it's not just remnants of the Gold Coast era, though that's part of it. the north shore is a place with strikingly unique terrain, exposed glacial till and Cretaceous clays, unstable bluffs that are eroding, an irregular shoreline with various 'necks', the ridges of a terminal moraine paved over by this blandish mid 20th c suburbia. Moving through these sites, you're constantly confronted with that Ice Age past. All of this used to be nature.
One of my favorite things about BOC's music, lyrics and cosmology is a transhistorical and nonlinear property, temporal layers coinciding in a way that's very unsettling. The transparency of foreground elements that reveals all this other stuff lurking behind and beyond...

Not long after moving here I was walking around on a late-autumn night and had this sudden feeling of being able to see the place as it had been in the the 17th or 18th century. I imagined the village mostly gone and pirate ships hiding out in the harbor with brigands on the hills and paths. I get that "temporal layers coinciding" every couple years at similar times.

BOC definitely has vibes of 50s pirate/horror comics.

Arthur Comics, even.

Lol, I've never heard the Stalk-Forrest stuff - there you go!

my friend always used to tell people his uncle was in a rock band -- soft white underbelly, stalk forest group....nobody cared. we knew they'd hit the big time when, on the LIRR ride home from the boc / rod stewart & the faces gig, bob defended the band to some drunken rod stewart fan and said his uncle was their singer, and the guy responded "yeah and my grandfather's jerry garcia."

i remember when bobby told me they'd changed their name to blue oyster cult. when he'd asked why i think eric said "i dunno, our manager told us we're blue oyster cult."

Great thread, it reminded me of when I was in my first studio job, and a producer there appeared with an American intern one day.

A tiny, funny, and cool girl, super friendly and talkative. After a few days we got to talking properly about music and she produced one of those big cd wallets (for her Discman) She was very into alt/college rock and played me a few things I'd never heard, things like Sarah Mclachlan, The Connells & The Rheostatics iirc.

Well, after a time it came to light that she was Buck Dharma's daughter. I wonder how she's doing nowadays and if she's involved with music somehow.

She and a friend of mine had a little holiday fling and on leaving she passed me a mixtape to give to him, it had 'The Golden Age of Leather' on it.

A tiny, funny, and cool girl, super friendly and talkative.

after seeing BOC at a casino, we ran into Eric and Buck at a in-casino sports bar later, got a pic w/them and my lord Buck is a tiny tiny person

when he'd asked why i think eric said "i dunno, our manager told us we're blue oyster cult."

This is some lol, svengali, stuff.

The last month of this thread is absolutely golden, especially deflatormouse BOC/psychogeography posts and TSF startling first hand accounts. Amazing shit.

"she has a nice voice" was as much enthusiasm as eric could muster when he heard we were seeing elo/renaissance.

For real! This thread is the greatest.

i see Imaginos is now on streaming, was missing for a long time

albert seems to have released imaginos II, with contributions from all the other guys.
https://albertbouchard.net/imaginos-ii-bombs-over-germany-minus-zero-and-counting-credits

interesting...Ross the Boss on a few tracks. who is "Prince Omega"? is that what he's calling himself now?

wikipedia says However, a bad review of a 1969 Fillmore East show caused Pearlman to change the name of the band – first to Oaxaca, then to the Stalk-Forrest Group. Pearlman also gave stage names to each of the band members (Jesse Python for Eric Bloom, Andy Panda for Andy Winters, Prince Omega for Albert Bouchard, La Verne for Allen Lanier) but only Buck Dharma kept his.

jesse python

i vow to start a wrestling faction containing all of these pseudonyms

lmaooooo Jess Python is the best, of course that would be Eric's name

Ross the Boss also plays on alberts Brain Surgeons album Denial of Death which is urgently, urgently recommended to those itt

ross the boss was in the version of the brain surgeons i saw in 2006 in a friend's parents' backyard in brooklyn (a benefit for AIDS research my friend called "brooklyn woodstock"). ross does a serviceable buck dharma. just as fast but not as precise and not nearly as melodic.

brain surgeons is pretty good, though that guitar tone is pretty beefy sometimes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM-0Kni9dEA

such a beautiful song, they were so good live

The last month of this thread is absolutely golden, especially deflatormouse BOC/psychogeography posts and TSF startling first hand accounts.

First of all, thank you. Also, "Good kugel, Joan" kinda got stuck in my head and remained there all week. Also, I'd never heard of "psychogeography" so I Googled it- yeah, this stuff interests me for sure. Honestly I worried I was posting too much stuff that might be perceived as only tangentially relevant. My last post about "temporal layers coinciding" was supposed to tie all this to BOC more concretely, but stopped short of that in the end and just reads as another personal impression. I mean, Pearlman has said one of Imagonos' special powers is the ability to move in and through time, like, it feels safe to say they were thinking along those lines.

One thing I've thought a lot about over the last few years is whether a record can be narrative. Some records seem to have a narrative quality, but the narrative is ultimately elusive and can't be pinned down. Imaginos isn't really one of those. It's just very unclear and confusing and seems to require additional explanation. And I always saw this as a failing until I realized that the ease with which BOC's music is able to eacape its assigned function is the very thing, the very perverse thing I love so much about 'em.

Take this post:

and not just weird lyrically but they were such and odd mix musically, like you can hear (esp. on the early stuff) the vestiges of San Fran psych and Steppenwolf proto-hard rock boogie but there's something more menacing and angular about how they do it...also a metal element that's almost more there as an abstract feeling than *actual* metal music....then later stuff like "Joan Crawford" is what? AOR Goth?

― M@tt He1ges0n, Thursday, April 10, 2008 12:50 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

To me, this excellent and very OTM post upthread hits on possibly the most important about this band without actually saying it, which is that their music constantly evades whatever it's supposed to do, or even whatever I personally think it does. Nothing is what it seems like and there's no "real" thing on the other side we can all agree on, just some glimmer of an illusion that feels like the whole story.

The enduring mystery of BOC to me is: how does this band that plays, yeah, Steppenwolf proto-hard rock boogie via SF psych achieve an incongruous supernatural allure, and is everyone else even hearing this or is there something wrong with me?

Also, "Good kugel, Joan" kinda got stuck in my head and remained there all week.

haha it's been stuck in my head since 1974! great posts -- i hear what you're hearing too, for what it's worth.

I can't honestly think of any subsequent acts you could say were heavily influenced by BOC, in the way you can with Sabbath or Zeppelin or Lizzy or whoever. They were just too weirdly eclectic, and sounding anything like them is incredibly difficult to achieve anyway. Was Joe Bouchard the secret weapon in terms of arrangements, I wonder?

Anyway, if anyone can recommend a BOC-influenced act please let me know! And don't say Ghost, they sound more like the first couple of Europe albums tbh.

Radio Birdman had a lot of love for BOC.

Their first album was called Radios Appear, for Pete's sake.

Yeah I really really love this thread. BÖC had long been on my list of music nerd acts that (outside of the big three formidable classic rock staples) I just didn’t “get”. I had legitimately tried, too, at varying points. I’ve owned Tyranny, Agents, and Spectres for years and would pull them out every so often. Unlike with others where I secretly suspect I may just be right (Waits, Zappa), BÖC was one where I was pretty sure I was not.

Anyway I was mildly stoned and listening to E.T.I. a couple of weeks ago and it sounded absolutely amazing. Something unlocked for me and I believe I may have found the awful truth.

welcome to the club. I know what you mean, they have a certain "magic eye painting" quality, they were a band that I knew from the small handful of classic rock radio staples but sometime this switch flipped and I had a period of being obsessed with them

xpost it doesn't translate into their music sounding like BOC but the Minutemen were huge BOC fans

For me the only thing that quite compares is the original Alice Cooper band. Not sure the comparison quite does justice to either group, but there is some kind of sui generis weirdness to both that can get overlooked and is hard to find elsewhere.

Afghan Whigs and R.E.M. two bands where the BÖC influence is noticeable, as hs been noted before, although obvioiusly those bands also have other things in their bloodline.

Afghan Whigs sub out HP Lovecraft for Elmore Leonard maybe.

To my knowledge, Husker Du are the only other band to list "stun guitar" in their album credits, so there's that and them.

Plus, umlauts appear.

ha I never thought of that but of course, esp since the board game used lines over the u's not umlauts

https://images.app.goo.gl/kyYn93fXzzEh7zB17

my half-serious monkees comparison upthread is worth considering for half a second. hired hands grow wings to become some strange kind of meta-version of the original concept. of course they were too early to have been influenced by boc, and boc were not necessarily influenced by them.

So you are comparing Sandy Pearlman to Raybert/Kirshner?

heh i think pearlman's concept was a little more out-there. maybe it gave them more room to grow. maybe his whole master plan was to have them grow into and inhabit the concept? wait, i'm getting the idea for an album here...

Has anyone in the band, or the other "outside" lyricists, ever talked about whether Pearlman imposed lyrical guidelines or limits to preserve the BOC conceptual brand? Were certain topics or approaches encouraged or discouraged?

these sort of touche on it a little bit. i think pearlman started branching out and getting involved with other bands, and losing his influence over boc. especially when reaper came along. albert seemed the one most influenced by him.

https://drankf.medium.com/imaginos-sandy-pearlman-blue-oyster-cult-and-me-b90d41ee7119

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/albert-bouchard-on-blue-oyster-cult-sandy-pearlman-and-re-imaginos