Blue Oyster Cult: Classic or Dud?

I lived in Sea Cliff for a while, we must have been practically neighbors.

Went to a couple of parties at Albert Bouchard's house in GN when I was in high school or just after. I think he's moved to the city since but afaik Eric Bloom still lives there!

Uh, holy shit. That's where I've lived since 2001.

SC

Whoa

On the other hand... i mean, of course, where else would an ilxor live in northern Nassau?

I lived on 14th av between 2006 and 2009-ish. I am still out there ALL THE TIME (like every couple of weeks), we would prob recognize each other.

I lived at the Glen Cove Mansion for a month while I was between apartments. Business was slow and the monthly rate was insanely cheap. For others reading this, it's a late 19th c estate on 55 acres that was converted to a conference center hotel in the 70's. When it was empty, it felt exactly like The Great Gatsby meets The Shining. SERIOUS Blue Oyster Cult vibes there and in the surrounding area, though i don't know of a direct BOC connection to that particular spot. I was playing their first 3 albums almost exclusively during that time.

On Pratt's beach down the street, there's a private island across the tiny creek where you can see into the house Jackie O rented right after JFK was assassinated. At times it's idyllic, at other times it's pretty creepy. That's another place I associate with BOC.

Ha, we're on 15th near Prospect and were during that time as well. We were kind of homebodies then, but who knows. If you're back in the spring let me know and we can do a beer on the porch and spin BOC.

My wife runs up in the Glen Cove area a lot, so she knows all those private roads and estates there better than I do.

mineola man here. i think eric bloom lives in port washington. when he did his interview at the port washington library he sure sounded like a local. (search 'Inside the Musician's Mind' with Eric Bloom of Blue Oyster Cult).

I was on the other side of the border from Long Island, but of course I went to LI a lot for my friends's bar and bat mitzvahs, to visit relatives and, most of all, to go to the A&S (was it in Hempstead?) and see the ducks outside.

TSF, I think you're a little older, were you old enough to hang at My Father's Place in Roslyn? I've heard stories about that place and I drive by that location regularly. The BOC links Deflatormouse posted mentioned them playing there early on.

Was TSF ever at MFP? Is the Pope Catholic?

i wish i'd spent more time at MFP, but i can't complain. it was a nice place, converted bowling alley i believe. roughly equivalent to nyc's bottom line.
long narrow tables (later on they removed the tables up front). bar food. strangely enough i'm not sure i ever saw boc there. i'm sure i've mentioned this but i grew up best friends with eric bloom's nephew and wound up seeing my fair share of boc shows incl. the 12/31/73 academy of music show with the stooges and teenage lust and kiss. also saw them at the academy w/ triumverat! saw them open for the faces at msg. saw them at the palladium w/thin lizzy. saw them at the coliseum opening for kiss. 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. this probably all sounds like fantasy land, but those were some heady years.

anyway back to my father's place, off the top of my head, here are some shows i've seen there. i'm sure there are some i am forgetting.
new york dolls (early '75, i was underage)
television
johansen (prob. multiple times)
captain beefheart
steel pulse
iggy (with some sex pistols in his band)
gang of four / buzzcocks
pfurs
go-gos
ian hunter
xtc
grandmaster flash and the furious five
x
marshall crenshaw
dave edmunds
nrbq
jonathan richman
doc watson

Ok, there you go, lol.

oh yeah, patti smith too, in her neck brace. delbert mcclinton. muddy waters!!!

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.