The Blue Öyster Cult: America's Hawkwind? A Discography.
Created | Updated May 29, 2013
The Core Line-up:-
Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser - lead guitar and vocals
Eric Bloom - vocals;
Albert Bouchard - Drums , vocals;
Joe Bouchard:- bass guitar, some keyboards and vocals;
Allen Lanier - keyboards;
Sandy Pearlman - manager and occassional lyricist;
Discography:-
Let us begin at the beginning…
Blue Öyster Cult (1972)
This was the band’s first LP, released at a time when rock was raw and heavy rock was almost exclusively a British phenomenon, which while it was finding its feet (and fans) in the USA was yet to discover a genuine American voice and identity.
This LP has definite overtones of Black Sabbath:- it is easy to see where the label American Sabbath came from to define the band’s style.
But what also emerges is a native North American approach to heavy music. In its origins in Britain, heavy rock was a logical development from blues music, and a natural step beyond the Rhythm and Blues music that dominated the pop charts in the early and middle sixties.
The Blue Öyster Cult clearly acknowledge their roots lie in heavy rock, but quite tangibly add an ethnically White American identity to their music. This is most apparent on the track Then Came the Last Days of May, which in every important respect is a Country and Western song. This song is so C and W, it could be performed “straight”, with a lot less electric guitar, by any mainstream Nashville artiste who doesn’t get holier-than-thou about the drug references!
The Country and Western influence on this album is most blatant on “Last Days of May”, but is a tangible force running through the rest of the music. While the Blue Öyster Cult’s later dabbling in C and W – the Mirrors album of 1979 – is nowhere near as happy or comfortable a mix of genres, it certainly works here and makes this LP a satisfactory listening experience! This LP should be viewed as a pioneering work in American heavy rock music. From one of the first heavy bands active in the USA, it stakes out a genuinely American identity for heavy music, and makes it less of a clone of British musical style.
There is also a certain humour at work:I’m on the lamb (but I ain’t no sheep) and She’s As Beautiful As A Foot stick out both as songtitles and as inspired lyrics.
Transmaniacon MC is the first of many tracks acknowledging an association with the Hell’s Angels and motorbike culture.
Tyranny and Mutation (1973)
The second LP of what the band came to describe as “the black and white trilogy”. The first three albums are distinguished by minimalist LP designs which are primarily in monochrome, albeit with a restrained touch of scarlet.1This is partly because CBS were not inclined to invest that much hard cash into an unknown quantity serving a niche market (not just heavy rockers in the earliest years of heavy rock, but the very first proto-Goths, long before the tribe emerged as a youth archetype). However, the band turn this cash-limitation into an advantage, their first two LP sleeves becoming a stark sci-fi, Escher-influenced, experience: the spacey sleeve designs go with the music and the often impenetrable lyrics.
The Country and Western influences of the first LP recede into the distance, but are never entirely absent – for instance, Quicklime Girl (Mistress of the Salmon Salt) is of a piece with Last Days of May.
What characterizes this album are wild stream-of-consciousness lyrical forms and exuberant music, for instance impenetrable tracks like Seven Screaming Dizbusters, Hot Rails to Hell .
Tyranny and Mutation is deliberately divided into two sides, described as “The Red”, and “The Black”. This is partly a tribute to Stendhal’s gothic novel, but provides extra opportunity for the band to advertise its collective erudition by exploring the Freudian symbology of these colours: red and black, respectively, standing for sex and death, Eros and Thanatos.2
Secret Treaties (1974)
The third LP from the “black and white period”. This comes down to earth, at least in its sleeve design: the five group members are seen, in a pencil and charcoal sketch, posing by an ME-262 jet fighter which stands, ready for action, on a runway. A close look at the pilot betrays either extreme anorexia, or Death making his first guest appearance in the B.Ö.C.’s oeuvre…
There is little evidence of “third album syndrome” here, as B.Ö.C. again combine the surreal and the hyper-real through eight medium-long tracks. Cagey Cretins is perhaps a little weak (although the lyrics, about a nerdy teenage misfit on the edge, have a Bowling for Columbine menace to them).
Dominance and Submission works on the imagination.
When you read the lyrics off the album sleeve, they’re really saying not very much at all. The mind of the listener fills in the gaps. What is the nature of the relationship between Susie and her brother “Charles the grinning boy”?
What exactly happens to the (presumed) ten year old narrator of the song at midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1963?
The lyrics suggest, but do not specify, and the mind of the listener fills in the lacunae.
Patti Smith's sneering Career of Evil provides a catalogue of vividly depicted horrors, and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner receives a makeover in Subhuman:- “I am becalmed; lost to nowhere; warm weather and holocaust!”
If Dominance and Submission, with its hints of incest and child abuse lurking beneath the all-American family psyche, is potentially in bad taste, what can be said for ME-262?
Another Guide article on the Blue Öyster Cult describes this track as the last word in tastlessness. In fact, some commentators have called it a "glorification of war and the Nazi ideology" and even questioned the political orientation of the band.
Calling the Blue Öyster Cult a bunch of Nazis, however, founders on one fairly obvious fact about most of the group members.
Names like Bloom, Pearlmann, et c, do not suggest any sort of affinity with Nazism. And as collaborator Michael Moorcock described them, "They're a bunch of good Jewish boys from upstate New York"
To have any sort of affinity with Nazism would make the B.Ö.C. either very unorthodox Jews, or else very confused. It seems more likely that the song came about out of naivity rather than malice.
On your feet! Or on your knees!(double live LP, 1975)
Somewhat patchy, and the sound recording and editing are a bit primitive, but this is an accurate “soundbite” of where the group’s live performances were in the Black and White period. The tracks are taken off the first three LP’s, along with cover versions of Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild and the Yardbirds’Beck’s Boogie. (renamed Buck's Boogie, after B.Ö.C.'s lead guitarist Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser)
Best Bits? The dominatrix-sounding lady M.C. who opens the gig with “On Your Feet! Or. On. Your. Knees. Here they are! The Amazing! Blue! Öyster! Cult!”
The live version of Me-262: as mentioned elsewhere, this must be the band’s ticket for inclusion in the
Spinal Tap Hall of Fame!
Five minutes on the LP bloat out to fifteen minutes on stage, and the endless not especially inventive guitar repetitions just start to stale after a while; the track goes on, and on, and on, as if no member of the band has a clear idea of where to stop.
Agents of Fortune (1976)
This was the long-deserved breakthrough album that brought the band wider public recognition and propelled them to the dizzy heights of the big stadiums, at least for a year or three.
For one thing, the gatefold LP sleeve was the band’s first in full colour – this was a step up from the cheap-looking (but visually arresting) sleeves of the first three albums.
The LP cover has a rich symbolism of Tarot cards, gambling casino, Gothic architecture, and the trickster god Loki appearing in his aspect of casino dealer/croupier, laying down a portentous Tarot spread about death and rebirth.3The ever-present group logo is there, the stylized reaper’s hook that symbolizes Saturn/Chronos/Death. Dominating the night sky is the “Blue Öyster” itself: a nearly-occluded Moon with only a small crescent glowing with light, the rest is in the blue-black dark, but still just about visible as a perfect circle. It is a real shame the original(and heavily occult-influenced) LP cover art is so sadly truncated on the CD release. Something was definitely lost in the transition from good ol’ 12” vinyl to CD format: the sleeve art was not so much edited as butchered.
The Moon features inside the gatefold: the five regular band members, plus occasional Cultster Patti Smith, stand around a roulette wheel on the lunar landscape. Alas, CD owners will have to take this on trust, as this photo is not replicated on the CD art. Is it possible to find out who decided these things, so they can be put up against a wall and shot, for crimes against classic LP art and sleeve design?
Temporarily boosted to eight band members (this LP boasts the services of horn section The Brecker Brothers4, as well as long-time affiliate Patti Smith)the group’s studio sound had never been so polished and rounded.
The bit everyone knows: the group’s only British hit Don’t Fear The Reaper happens as side one, track three.
. There are nine other tracks which are almost as worthy of reverence, representing as they do the pinnacle of the Blue Öyster Cult’s creativity.
The Crowleyan sentiments of "Sinful Love" and the surreal lyrics of "Tattoo Vampire" co-exist on this album with the Close Encounters of the third kind theme - "Extraterrestrial Intelligence", with its cargo of mediaeval alchemy, alien visitors and Men in Black. Any B.Ö.C. album is a delight to listeners of a Fortean bent: Agents of Fortune is possibly the most Fortean of them all.
Spectres (1977)
Building on the momentum of Agents of Fortune and establishing a solid reputation for righteous rock.
Agents of Fortune and Spectre mark the band’s commercial high-water mark where they could do no wrong.
The LP sleeve: the band are photographed as cowboys in a Western saloon, in a heavy sepia-tint photo redolent of the turn of the century. Beams of converging laser light are bouncing in and out of the photo. Strangely for a Blue Öyster Cult LP, the Chronos logo is almost completely absent from the sleeve art.5
The music is delicious. From the massively over-the-top gig favourite and crowd-pleaser Godzilla6 this LP never once loses its edge.
Golden Age of Leather is another track celebrating Hells Angels' culture and ethos7.
Going Through The Motions is a collaboration with veteran British rocker Ian Hunter, of Mott the Hoople fame. Is the presence of a British collaborator the reason why Spectres is spelt in the British-English manner, and not, as you might have expected from an American band, Specters?
I Love the Night is a track that should have been, but wasn't, the follow-up to Don't Fear the Reaper. The story is simple: a forlorn lover wanders the night, having been dumped by his girlfriend. He is drawn to an unearthly glow and "a lovely lady in white is by my side". She turns out to be a vampire who'd quite like a boyfriend who shares her interests, and a certain agreement is struck up between them which means he is fated to nevermore be able to shave himself nor go out in daylight without a lot of barrier cream.
Nosferatu continues the vampire theme - the track is homage to the eponymous vampire of black and white silent movies.
Some Enchanted Evening (live) (1978)
A capably done live LP, which serves as an update of “On your feet!....”. The highlight is a live version of “Don’t Fear The Reaper”.
One B.Ö.C. fan was impressed enough by this LP cover,( a skeletal scythe-toting Death on a white horse), to pay homage to it in his own work. Until Terry Pratchett came along, who would have thought the horse was called Binky? Or that its rider, Ingmar Bergman notwithstanding, would be hampered, in a competitive game of chess, by not always being sure of what way the little horse-shaped pieces are meant to leap?
Interestingly enough, the band's version of the Animals' standard We Gotta Get Out of This Place was recorded in Newcastle, England -in their home town, a fitting homage to Eric Burdon and Alan Price.
The CD release expands the live set to 73 minutes, including a version of ME-262 that, while muted, at least knows where to end, and the infamous "5 Guitars", in which all five members of the band don guitars and come down front to share the riffs.
There is also a DVD of live concert footage from the same tour which while of variable picture quality is worth watching,
Some OTHER Enchanted Evening (liveDVD )
Impressions of a live B.Ö.C. gig based on the 1975 concert DVD footage:-
"5 Guitars", is in fact more like four guitars plus a drummer, as while hapless stick-thrasher Albert Bouchard is there and holding a guitar, he is in semi-shadow in the background and clearly not doing very much with it at all. While the other four are trading riffs, Albert is quite obviously wishing the gimmick to end so he can get behind the drum-kit again where he belongs...
The band's much acclaimed laser light show receives limited use in the concert. From a point of view of 2007 there isn't really very much to see at all. This is a shame, as a vantage point of 32 years onwards obscures the fact that this was revolutionary, pioneering, stage presentation in 1975. What little there is looks good: the rebirth of Desdinova in "Astronomy" sees a soaring pillar of electric blue and eerie green light shoot up and rebound from a disco mirror-ball hanging over the stage, bouncing beams of reflected green light everywhere. Unfortunately, this is where the poor film quality lets the show down: there is a suspicion that better quality, more focused, filming would have captured more and an awful lot has been lost.
This researcher also became uncomfortably aware that in the flesh, as it were, Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser has a very marked resemblence to Lancastrian folk singer and comedian Mike Harding. This is unfortunate, as a niggling little thought transposed the two and had Harding performing "Golden Age of Leather" with accordion solo, while Buck Dharma was announcing to the crowd that the next track would be "Rochdale Cowboy"..... A further thought noted Eric Bloom's very Seventies hairstyle which made him look not unlike Tony "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" Orlando of Dawn.... geting past this coincidence, however, and accepting the limitations of film, it's actually not a bad live set.
But it still feels as if the band are marking time and have run out of new ideas, a feeling confirmed by
Mirrors (1979)
Something went slightly wrong here. This is considered to be the group’s weakest and least effectual album: after the heights reached by Spectres, this is definitely something of a disappointment as a follow-up.
The crossover into country and western form (In Thee) is dissappointing. There would have been nothing wrong with this song if the Eagles had recorded it, as, say, the B-side to Lyin' Eyes; but this is the Blue Öyster Cult. This is a band whose fans expect hard uncompromising rock music, with maybe a hint of another genre such as country music, as in Last Days of May. Here the cart is put before the horse, and the song becomes a piece of bland country rock.
What should also be noted is the second crossover this LP makes into another musical genre that (in defence of the band) was pretty big at the time.
The track Doctor Music crosses over into that other late seventies musical style, Disco... the resulting mutation is certainly done with a lot of energy and brio, and sounds like an attempt to parody and send up the "dance till you drop" disco mentality. The result is certainly unique - a one-night stand between disco and heavy rock - but ultimately sterile, like most forced hybrids, or most ill-adjusted strangers who meet in a disco and have a one-night stand.
If Mirrors is significant for one thing which displays a positive development in the B.Ö.C.'s style, it introduces a new collaborator and occassional band member.
British fantasy fiction writer (and occassional rock guitarist) Michael Moorcock collaborates with the band on the track Great Sun Jester, and these lyrics, based on one of his spaced-out sci-fi novels, become the first of several collaborations spanning this and the next three albums.
And the classic B.Ö.C. theme of alien contact expresses itself potently in "The Vigil", with the band's raw power showing itself in "Moon Crazy" and "I am the Storm".
Apart fom one or two justifiably high notes, Mirrors reflects nothing outstanding in the band's career and is thought of as being for completionist collectors only.
Cultösaurus Erectus (1980)
A return to form after Mirrors. As Buck Dharma said, while the LP might have sold less than Mirrors, "we at least got our pride back"
Highlights: the Michael Moorcock penned Black Blade about the tormented fantasy hero, Prince Elric of Melnibone.
The all-American counterblast to the Ayatollah Khomeini (at the time he was holding American hostages in Iran) Divine Wind with a chorus that could resonate today, in America's dealings with and attitude towards the Islamic world: If they really think we're the Devil - then let's send them to Hell!
Fire Of Unknown Origin (1981)
At least on a par with Cultösaurus Erectus.
Moorcock's influence introduces a new theme into the B.Ö.C.'s ouevre. Take for instance the track Veteran of the Psychic Wars, and listen closely. Then go and listen to (for instance) Hawkwind's Live '79. It is no accident that Michael Moorcock's other association with rock music is via the spaced out, high-octane space-fantasy rock of Hawkwind.
From the Patti Smith-penned Fire of Unknown Origin to Don't Look Back this LP is a listening delight. Perhaps the best track on the LP is the joyously Gothic Joan Crawford Has Risen From The Grave, in which the revenant actress and Satanist returns from death to terrorise Brooklyn and discuss the finer points of Mommie, Dearest with daughter Christina....
Selected tracks from Cultösaurus Erectus and Fire Of Unknown Origin were used in the soundtrack of the animated movie Heavy Metal, based on the French sci-fi/fantasy magazine, in 1984.
Extraterrestrial Live(double live LP, 1982)
The sine qua non of the band’s four live albums.
The sound is solid, the vibe is good, Joan Crawford rocks, and Veteran of the Psychic War sounds more like Hawkwind than Hawkwind do. There is a stomping cover version of the Doors' Roadhouse Blues that sets everything off, and we have four sides of listening pleasure - all that's missing are the lasers and the twenty-foot tall Godzilla stage prop! Enjoy.
Revolution By Night (1984)
With a new lineup (Albert Bouchard having had an existential crisis in Norwich, Norfolk, during a British tour, and having walked out on the band), this LP generates some good rockin’stuff. The cover art is monochrome with a hint of red, and appears to be consciously harking back to the “Black and White” trilogy. The music has moments that evokes Tyranny and Mutation, for instance tracks like Shadow of California. The Hells’ Angels association lives on: the track Feel the Thunder is about what an Angel might consider to be a perfect death and a perfect afterlife! Bouchard - no doubt embarrassed to death by the nightly shame of having to hide in the shadows pretending to play during Four and A Half Guitars - is replaced on drums by long-time roadie Rick Downey.
Club Ninja (1985)
this is critically considered to be a poor offering unworthy of the band’s reputation. However, this LP has its devotees who will indignantly point to the glorious guitar solo on Perfect Water as being, on its own, worth the cost of the record. They will also point to the presence of shock-jock Howard Stern, who co-wrote the track When the War Comes and contributes a guest vocal, of sorts. Others, of a more mystical bent, have perceived an occult significance in the tracks: there is certainly a knowledge of martial arts philosophy which comes out in the track Shadow Warrior. The tracks dwell on war, unrest and violence: transcended in Perfect Water and Shadow Warrior, but allowed to run riot in Spy in the House of Night and Madness to the Method (there is an indefinable sadness underpinning this last song, which superficially glories in gang-fights and violence and Saturday night machismo.)
Imaginos (1988)
A return to ground briefly visited in Secret Treaties. The track Astronomy which closed the Secret Treaties album always felt as if it was something of an anomaly, a smaller fraction of a longer tale that had yet to be told.
Well, this is that tale: together with a reworking of Astronomy, fourteen years on, and with the full overlay of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Possibly the B.Ö.C’s one bash at a fully integrated concept album.
All five of the original core line-up are credited on this album, but exactly how much they contribute to it is open to question.
All the songwriting credits go first to Sandy Pearlman, with members of the original B. Ö.C. line-up credited second.
It is also noted that at least NINE additional musicians are credited on the LP: each core member of the band has at least one " understudy" present on this album. Given the lineup changes evident in Club Ninja, then the honest answer to the question "how much of this LP is the work of the original lineup of the Blue Öyster Cult?" is likely to be "Not very much."
There are alternate recordings of tracks from Secret Treaties; Astronomy gets an intriguing makeover, while Subhuman receives a re-titling as Blue Öyster Cult
This LP is otherwise a little bit dissappointing, although Magna of Illusion is a track that would find its way onto any "Greatest Hits" album without too much of a struggle.
1988 - 1998:- "On Tour Forever" - no LP's
Well, except for.....
Cult Classics (1994)
With a line-up sadly diminished from the original core-group, somebody thought it was a good idea for the "new" Blue Öyster Cult to do an LP of covers of its own classic seventies songs. No wonder one of the ex-members brought a court-case...
The over-riding sensation is one of "Why the hell bother?" as the new B.Ö.C. manage to produce an LP of covers which are more-or-less indistinguishable from the originals and add nothing new or of note to the group's canon. (well, there are two vocal-free versions, of "Reaper" and "Godzilla", which are meant to add to the canon available for karaoke parties. To this Researcher, this adds to the sum of human happiness, as it would mean less time available for "I Will Survive!" or other musical cliche.)
Paradoxically, this most indifferent B.Ö.C. album manages to have one of the very best covers: done in the style of Aleistar Crowley's artwork for manuals of ritual magick, and incorporating unmistakeable homage to the work of Terry Pratchett, a comic author who has used B.Ö.C. imagery liberally in the Discworld books. The rear cover - a cowled scythe-carrying Death walking through a field of very tall corn - must surely be homage to Pratchett's novel Reaper Man.
Heaven Forbid (1998)
On this LP, only at most two of the original B.Ö.C. lineup remain. Ten years of solid touring caused rifts and dissensions, and the Blue Öyster Cult who recorded this album are, alas, the B.Ö.C. in name only. This has a dreary “contractual obligation” sort of feel about it and leaves long-time fans with the emphatic knowledge that the journey’s over, the gig’s finished, and the shutters have come down over the bar. It’s time to put the chairs on the tables to make it easier for the cleaners, then to leave the venue and walk home in the memory-strewn night.
Incidentally, the first LP cover, depicting a drooling mis-shaped maniac terrorising a young girl, seems to have been dropped, as the later version shows a vaguely familiar blonde, robed like Columbia or Lady Liberty, with a Chronos-tipped sceptre in her right hand and a Book of the Law in her left. The vague familiarity of the model was troubling, until her identity came in a flash of memory: soft-core porn performer Shannon Tweed. Well, they say in jest "I couldn't recognise you with your clothes on!"
One more LP followed Heaven Forbid. This was
Curse of the Hidden Mirror (1999) But this researcher has yet to listen to it.
Hidden Mirror was followed by yet another live set, Longest Day's Night (2001), which is reputed to have been a workmanlike live set recorded on June 21st 2000 - ie, the night of the longest day. Since then, a version of the band, fronted by Eric Bloom and the tireless Buck Dharma, has been touring the world and was last in the UK in 2006.
1 British psychologist Stan Gooch has a lot to say about the significance of the colours red, white and black: he makes a case for these being the first three pigments accessible to the human race when it made the first cave paintings. These have been around for longest, have stark and clear mental and emotional associations, and are typically colours of the irrational, the subconscious, the dark, the Moon-side. While Gooch cites Nazi flags and regalia as an extreme example of his thinking – about how these colours can be used to shape and condition the human mind – it’s fair to wonder about a rock band using these, and only these, three colours on its record sleeves….2 That Gooch man again…3 On the cover, the Dealer/Loki the trickster God fans out four Major Arcana cards with his left hand, while his right hand points to the Chronos logo carved into the windowframe. The four cards, for Tarot –minded people out there, are Death, The Empress, The Emperor and the Sun.4 During the 1970’s, The Breckers were “the Goodies” of session horn work: their motto could well have been “We’ll do anything, any time, anywhere”.5 “Chronos” is not completely absent from the cover of Spectres: its presence may be inferred from the laser beams, although it would spoil the fun to explain exactly how. Just buy the LP (for preference) and take a REALLY close look at the laser light. 6 A hit in the USA but not in Britain: even though the song celebrates the destruction of Tokyo by the eponymous giant lizard, it was something of a hit in Japan!7 For lovers of trivia, it may be interesting to know the Newark, New Jersey, boys' choir on this track also provided backing vocals for Van Morrison on his Hard Nose The Highway album of a year or so previously. This sounds like a good choir for a growing lad to have been a part of: one gig, you get to back George Ivan on Snow in San Anselmo, and the next it's a Hells Angels' chapter fight in Golden Age... certainly an education you don't get in church!
