Blue Oyster Cult: Classic or Dud?

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

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/