I love Blue Öyster Cult... (Uwe's Edit: That makes two of us ...)

[uwe]

Finally, all you BÖCies crawl out! About time too.

I guess it's telling that they are - unlike, say, Ritchie Blackmore - not routinely discussed here and it explains their lack of all-out success: They never had a real larger than life persona as a frontman for the wider public to latch onto, they were very much a collective. And of course no one in the band - maybe Lanier with his NYC cool muso features excepted - looked the part. Another thing about BÖC was that they could be smart in one song and incredibly dumb in the next, but they were dumb with a wry smile and not convincingly, devotedly dumb like, say, AC/DC. BÖC were always taking the piss a bit.

For the uninitiated, Agents of Fortune (not consistenly strong in the songwriting department though "Reaper" is on it), Mirrors (bit lightweight in production), Cultösaurus Erectus (lacks an easily accessible hit and is perhaps a bit too clever an album) and The Revölution by Night (although Albert had left by then and had been replaced by their synth drum-happy tour lighting director as a drummer, it was the beginning of the end for them, but a lot of songs are real gems ) are good albums too.

[gweimer]

I wore the vinyl out on their first two albums, and played the death out of Fires of Unknown Origins.   I reviewed The Revolution By Night, and remember liking it enough that this song stuck with me.



I'm still hooked on the first two, though.  I managed to get on of my old bands to cover this.

[uwe]

I found the first two albums still a bit formative ("OD'ed on Life" was cool though), things took off for me with Secret Treaties, "Harvester of Eyes" was such a great track. Not because of the Me 262 Sturmvogel on the cover I hasten to add!!! The album was hidden in a lot of German record shops at the time because the cover was deemed inappropriate, you had to ask for it. And when BÖC toured Germany for the first time mid-seventies there was criticism about their black-leathered look and the chaos logo they used which was a bit swastika'ish. Of course, most of the band were Jewish and it is safe to assume that anybody named Erich Blum (= Eric Bloom pre-anglicisation) would have had a few questions to answer applying for Nazi party membership ...

"Take me away" is co-written by (pitch your voices high now!) "Life is just a fantasy, can you live that fantasy life" Aldo Nova.



Mark/Frau Steed plays it in his/her band (not the BÖC track, the Aldo Nova one!). Now I've really outed her.  

[Denis]

...the Me 262 Sturmvogel on the cover...

You mean like my new avatar?

I still have an ME-262 kit I built years ago but built as the one on the cover of "Secret Treaties".

[gearHed289]

They were always kind of a mystery to me. I first heard them in the summer of '76 - Don't Fear the Reaper. Loved that song! Ended up seeing them at my first concert, which was headlined by KISS, in August of that year. I never got hooked though. I thought Godzilla was cheesy, even as a 14 year old who loved the big green guy as a kid.  And they got super commercial in the 80s. I just didn't "get it".

[TBird1958]

I need to be "outed" here  

Secret Treaties is a life long fave for me, I think the entire album quite good, somewhat conceptual and way out of the ordinary for it's time. For me, still fresh today. As a total album, personally I think it their best effort, while I like other songs from them including "Take me away" (cheesy vid and all!) it never got better than Secret Treaties........
If I recall correctly the last time I saw them was at University of Washington's Hec Ed Pavillion about the time "Godzilla" was out, they headlined, sharing the bill with UFO just before Michael Schenker left -
I have fond memories of Pete Way playing a Thunderbird that night, he used it to push his Marshall stack over at the end of their set!
 

[gweimer]

On the show I saw, which had a painful set from Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Kathi McDonald), they were great.   Eric Bloom had this chain that he used effectively to grab the mic stand and yank it in for vocals.  The drums were mic'd so hot that when Albert, who looked completely out in the ozone, did his drum solo, one segment was him stamping his feet on the drum platform as if they were bass drums.  When that album first hit, "Cities on Flame" was already the underground hit of the high school crowd.  Close behind were songs like "Stairway to the Stars" and "Transmaniacon MC". 
The hit from Fires... "Burning For You" is another fave, but I have a real fondness for "Joan Crawford".  The title track was co-written by Lanier's more famous girlfriend, Patti Smith.  The lyrics for "Veterans of the Psychic Wars" were penned by sci-fi author, Michael Moorcock.

[Denis]

Check out the 13 minute version of "7 Screaming Diz-Busters" on this one, starting around the 47 minute mark. Strange, with an almost middle eastern feel at parts before Eric starts talking and before busting back into the groove. Pretty cool.

[uwe]

I've got the box now before me, both compact and lovingly done, it features:

CD 1: debut, remastered (rem) with 4 bonus tracks (btr)
CD 2: Tyranny and Mutation, rem, 4 btr
CD 3: Secret Treaties, rem, 5 btr
CD 4: On your Feet or on your Knees, rem
CD 5: Agents of Fortune, rem, 4 btr (a 1976 demo of Fire of Unknown Origin among them)
CD 6: Spectres, rem, 4 btr
CD 7: Some Enchanted Evening, rem, 7 btr + DVD with 11 tracks
CD 8: Mirrors, rem
CD 9: Cultösaurus Erectus, rem
CD 10: Fire of Unknown Origin, rem
CD 11: Extraterrestial Live, rem
CD 12: The Revölution by Night, rem
CD 13: Club Ninja, rem
CD 14: Imaginos, rem
CD 15: Rarities (19 previously unreleased live and studio tracks)
CD 16: Best of Broadcasts (13 prviously unreleased radio broadcast tracks).

That's a whole lot of BÖC!!! That said, Godzilla can indeed only be heard (reptile) tongue in cheek. It's BÖC's Spinal Tap song.

[Highlander]

... They never had a real larger than life persona as a frontman ...

You mean Eric Bloom's diminutive stature, I presume...? He could easily fit that description at the time, imho...

... influences on the Hoodoos.

They still going... saw them in the clubs over here a number of times...

I still have an ME-262 kit I built years ago but built as the one on the cover of "Secret Treaties".

You can not post that statement without producing the evidence...

[uwe]

True, that Me 262 doesn't even exist until further visual proof.

I liked Bloom, and he could entertain, but when he sang "well, I woke up this morning and I got myself a - raises beer can into air - beeeeehhhheeeeeeeeer, well, the future's uncertain, but the end is always cleeeeeeear" during their Doors Roadhouse Blues cover, he had none of Jim Morrison's self-destructive mystique, you didn't believe for a minute that Herr Blum guzzled a Bud first thing in the morning (Alice Cooper could have sung it credibly for a while though!). Of couse he was the most frontmanly of them all, but relatively asexual, BÖC were a guys' band. He was too intellectual/Long Island Jewish nerd-kid in biker regalia to fit the Paul Rodgers, Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Sammy Hagar, David Lee Roth etc chest-beating image and girls wouldn't swoon at him like they would at Steve Perry or Peter Frampton either. Nor did he seem deranged like Ozzy.

I'm not saying that BÖC would have at all worked with a more prominent frontman, they were what they were. I will now leave office and listen to In Thee!!!

[Highlander]

Good closing arguement...

[gweimer]

[uwe]

Ironically, PROG magazine (an offshoot of Classic Rock) just ran an article on BÖC in the current issue debating whether they were prog or not (the conventional wisdom on this is that they at least had prog influences). So I mention the new boxed set to Edith (who knows nothing of BÖC except "Reaper" which she thinks is boring) and show her a pic of seventies BÖC and she immediately says: "Oh my, they were all ugly!!!!" That much for losing half your potential audience right from the start!!!


The Mirrors remaster sounds a lot better and has given that already at the time incredibly thin Tom Werman production at least some belated clout. The songwriting was very good though and I only realized now that In Thee was a Lanier and not a Roeser composition. Great chords.

[Denis]

Here you are, you unbelievers! I built this many years ago so excuse the dustiness. Notice the skeleton in the cockpit.