Blue Oyster Cult: Classic or Dud?

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

touch

Voivod have a touch of the flavor IMO

I cannot imagine Richard Meltzer taking direction from anyone

meltzer: By the time they were Blue Oyster Cult, they had very little use for me. I wasn't living with them anymore and they smelled big bucks. While I still had relationships with certain of them from time to time, it became an effort to sell them a lyric, where once upon a time they were begging for stuff. They did an album for Elektra that was never released, as Stalk-Forrest, that I had eight songs on. They were the best things I ever did for them, or for anybody. But I never had more than two songs on a single Cult album. On their biggest seller, Agents of Fortune, I had nothing. I think part of the reason I was banished from that one is I behaved rudely at the wedding of the guitarist (Buck Dharma). I felt up his mother when I was dancing with her.

https://www.furious.com/perfect/meltzer2.html

omg

I haven’t listened to stalk forrest in quite a few years I just realized

other memories:

listening to "don't fear the reaper" on the hi-fi in bobby's living room with bobby's parents and eric. bobby's parents were not from the rock'n'roll generation; eric must be a fair number of years younger than his sister. bobby's father: "see, eric, this is what i've been trying to tell you all along. all you have to do is go 'la la la' and people will start buying your records."

eric telling us that buck came to the band with a demo, and all they could hear when he played it was cash registers ringing. i *think* the song he was talking about was 'godzilla.' memory fails.

eric's inscription on the cover of the tin holding the piece of cake bobby brought back to me from eric's wedding:
my heart is black
and my lips are cold
eat this cake
hot or cold
<<boc symbol>>

That's awesome, I wonder if that was a go-to inscription technique of his, like in a birthday card perhaps:

my heart is black
and my lips are cold
I am still young
'tis you who are old

Maybe that should be posted on the Ideas for Valentine’s Day thread

my heart is black
and my lips are cold
roses are red
or so I am told

Please be my Valentine!
EB

<<boc symbol>>

Vera Gemini hitting all the spots this afternoon.

One of the all-tyme greatest revives, and mention of Brain Surgeons NYC '06 in Brooklyn backyard reminds me that they made my Nashville Scene ballot's Country Singles category for that year's releases:

Brain Surgeons NYC sometimes do the urban country boogie, like they
worked extended temp in the Dallas Schoolbook Suppository, lookin' at
the world through a computer screen, like the rest of us, and, if Ross
The Boss's leads didn't seem quite so trite quite so often, and if Al
Bouchard gave up the mic more often to Deborah Frost, then Denial Of
Death might well have made my Rock Top Ten. But even so, on
"Lonestar," you get that Metal Brenda Lee is comin' on strong, and
Lemmy Lee too, pert' near (still meaning her, def not Al). But Al's the
Yankee boy proudly reporting for duty in "1864," and no less country
for that.

Oh yeah, and their "Plague of Lies" made my Idolator ballot for 2006 releases!

Prairie Oyster Cult

In the new episode of the Rock's Backpages podcast we welcome heavy metal expert Deborah Frost, Zooming in from her native New York City, and invite her to talk about her career as a writer and musician.

Deborah reminisces about Flaming Youth, the all-girl "female Dolls" in which she drummed in the early '70s, and then explains how she came to write her first pieces for Circus in 1977. She talks about her love of hard rock and heavy metal, and about contributing to Rolling Stone and the Village Voice — including her acclaimed 1985 Voice piece "White Noise: How Heavy Metal Rules", with its unflattering descriptions of the drug-and-groupie-addled Mötley Crüe.

interview with joe bouchard on todd-o-phonic todd's show:

https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/116574

Three shows in nyc in September with one of the first three albums played each night. Albert joining in.

yup, thanks -- that was mentioned during the interview (joe b hasn't been asked to participate as of yet). if i were still seeing shows it would be on my list for sure. still covid-shy.

Same here. Still tempting to get tickets for secret treaties night and hope the numbers are comfortable for me by then.

and of course, in addition to covid there's the probability of getting sucked into a transdimensional vortex

True… on the other hand, if that happens you get a Q&A with Sandy Pearlman

braving it thurs & fri, at $80 a ticket incl. service fees i will prob be disappointed if something like that doesn't happen

Is this Sony Hall? I've been there once for Parliament and it was a surprisingly casual set-up, albeit with posh surroundings. Like the band members just mingled with the crowd between their set and the opening act, and there was no barrier between stage and floor so a LOT of people easily got on to the stage when they wanted people to dance during the climax.

I need a really good soundboard recording from 1974ish where they do mostly Secret Treaties material, closest I've found is a kind of thin audience taped show from Baton Rouge

Yeah there’s not much

I just end up going back to OYFOOYK

http://soundaboard.blogspot.com/2010/02/blue-oyster-cult-live-in-west-1975.html?m=1

https://www.discjapan.com/product/blue-oyster-cult-soundboard-collection-3pro-cdr-uxbridge-305/

In the west is great I guess I didn’t mention it bc is it 75 but I guess that counts as 74ish lol

:D

Has anyone seen the doc about the lead singer who became a Buddhist monk known as The King of Chanting or whatever it was?

One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das. About a guy named Jeffrey Kagel.

But his involvement with the band was very early on: https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/ex-rocker-finds-a-different-path-to-fame-chanting-all-the-way/

who knew?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baD0sBuJVu4

Lenny Kaye on Sandy Pearlman, pretty cool & some stuff I didn't know: https://www.pattismith.net/souvenance.html

Was playing video games with my 10 year-old tonight and he asked me to put on a record while we played. “Something rock,” was his request. Cultosaurus Erectus was on the nearby rack, so on it went.

“Black Blade” starts to play and about two minutes in he goes, “yessssss this is what I needed to hear tonight”.

Folks, gonna consider that a parenting win for the month.

\m/

so Buck released a multi-CD home archives thing I'd never heard about, here's the demo for "I Love The Night", really interesting as 1) there's more/different lyrics, bit longer and 2) WOW Buck's demos are really polished and fully formed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2334KJL0UgM

Apart from "(Don't Fear) the Reaper," an aggressively middling band with fun ideas.

so wrong!!!!!!

I have a special place in my heart for that one song where they turned into Martha and the Muffins with better lead guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arc_I54oYrg

Oh man I LOVE that track

yes.

at this point, youtube has trained itself to play me live bootlegs from the black and white era after absolutely anything i watch, no matter what it is. i don't know why it's doing that- probably because it's the one thing i won't switch off after 5 seconds- but this is the first time any kind of algorithm has actually felt useful to me.