Blue Öyster Cult - The dark side of hard rock

Blue Oyster Cult belong to a rock subgenre, arena-rock, which running from the hard rock of Queen and Meat Loaf all the way to its pop landfall has proven to be among the most wretched of all subgenres. And yet Blue Oyster Cult, like Queen, managed, in their own distinctive way, to craft songs (a dozen or so out of a hundred) and albums (3 or 4 out of 14) that are truly memorable.

Blue Oyster Cult were a band assembled on the drawing board in the late Sixties, in the New York area, by rock critic — then still a college student — Sandy Pearlman. He would go on to launch them, produce their albums, and write most of their songs. It was his idea to build a "concept" band, and to make that concept dark, horror-tinged settings populated by ghosts, extraterrestrials and paranormal phenomena. Pearlman (who over his long career as a producer would also work on the Clash's second album, "Give 'em Enough Rope", on the Dream Syndicate's "Medicine Show", on the Dictators' masterpiece "Dictators Go Girl Crazy", and on Pavlov's Dog's debut) sought his breakthrough by banking on originality: in particular, he had the brilliant intuition to answer the rhetoric of the late "power of flowers" era not with singer-songwriter introspection, experimental virtuosity or brash hard rock, but with the more mysterious side of life — the one bordering on unspecified extraterrestrial presences, and tied to tracing their possible influence within an apparently placid everyday existence. This kind of dark transfiguration, and its systematic thematization, had already been pioneered in England by Black Sabbath. Pearlman smoothed it out and made it more genteel, so as to make it palatable to a less extreme, less youthful audience — one capable of appreciating rock only as entertainment or pastime, rather than as a vital experience.

Technically, Blue Oyster Cult offered up a Cream-style garage-blues: a kind of post-hard rock built out of proto-hard-rock. They did so in the early Seventies, by which point we were already into the second generation of hard-rock, the one embodied by Aerosmith.

The classic lineup of the band is built around the distinctive, refined voice (somewhere between childlike and extraterrestrial) of Eric Bloom, the ever-present keyboards of Allen Lanier shaping the harmonic structure of every song, the rockabilly/dark guitar of Donald Roeser, and the rhythm section of the Bouchard brothers (Albert, the drummer, would go on to marry Patti Smith). When these musicians don't let themselves get carried away by the stalest rock clichés, they manage to conjure a dark, enigmatic, otherworldly sound, recognizable a mile off: much like Black Sabbath, of whom they represent a less hard-edged version centered on UFO themes rather than satanic ones. The inner demons that haunt Blue Oyster Cult are inhuman presences, just like those haunting Black Sabbath: the former, however, concern assorted Martians, the latter the Devil and his retinue.

Blue Oyster Cult's influence would prove enormous, even though they never spawned any true direct heirs: by offering an original, little-explored take on hard rock, and by turning into a concept (alongside Alice Cooper and a handful of others) a genre with no real sub-strands, only two or three unavoidable reference points (sex, fun, music), they won converts both among the more "intellectual" fringes of hard-rockers and among the more open-minded corners — for opposite reasons — of pop and metal. The bands that drew on their devices did so both for their visionary themes and lyrics, and for a substantially "genteel", dreamlike approach to performance, and more specifically for various inventions, especially on keyboards (essentially the equivalent of Tony Iommi's doom guitar). Moreover, Blue Oyster Cult reinvented the hard rock song, complicating its structure in symphonic fashion; but in practice their music isn't hard-rock in the traditional sense.

Blue Oyster Cult carved out a rhetorical space that, far from the sexual or romantic concerns of hard rock and pop, pushed into new territory: that of fantasy, of daydream, of respectfully confiding some surreal mirage — always without excess, never forgetting that it's a game. They were perhaps the first to do so, and they did it in an era plagued now by unbearable 60s-style jam sessions, now by equally unbearable nostalgic communities, more or less hippie and more or less acid, now by the ever-unbearable experimental megalomania that was neither rock nor avant-garde, just boredom.

The most redeemable part of Blue Oyster Cult's music should be reserved for the tender, naive, vertiginous confidences that 10- or 11-year-old children might share on a particularly inspired afternoon, or on an evening whose darkness is a little too obvious. Even if, given the volume levels, it's still a far cry from a music box, it remains suited to the ears of more adult, but no less sensitive, listeners — sensitive at least in remembering past states of mind.

One can talk about Blue Oyster Cult (1972), but no track is really worth remembering: suffice it to say that, technically and thematically, the band, right from this first effort, already lays out everything it will ever be capable of. The problem is partly that they failed to write a genuinely good song (in what would become "their" genre), and partly that they clumsily copied (we're in a different era!) bits and pieces now of Cream, now of Deep Purple, now of Yardbirds.

Tyranny And Mutation (1973) celebrates the band's most inspired period, and it does so with a record that feels heartfelt from start to finish, unified, coherent, meant to be listened to in one sitting, and learned and sophisticated (for rock). "The Red & the Black" kicks off at breakneck speed and thematically ("baby") stays within Rolling Stones-style rhythm and blues: but it does so with a dark, spatial allure (credit above all to Bloom's voice and Roeser's guitar, now acidic, now doom-laden) that magically transfigures everything; the coda, even faster, even more enchanting, turns the track into a masterpiece. "O.D.'d on Life Itself" greatly broadens the inventive spectrum of extraterrestrial inhumanity: now, at a slower, more dilated pace, in a non-ballad, with a chorus that, were it not for the androgynous context, could pass for Merseybeat, we're plunged into some futuristic, UFO-haunted corridor: but always, and this is where this music's substance lies, with a vivid feeling for the present and the real. "Hot Rails to Hell", somewhere between rhythm and blues, rockabilly and Black Sabbath, lays down a powerful yet highly refined groundwork. This is music that has been felt since rock began to exist; and yet no one had ever played it quite like this, with such transfiguring pathos, following the strategy of going to Mars in order to better sublimate earthly emotion. "7 Screaming Diz-busters" strings together another track in the style of an alien singing like Elvis Presley; the dark tones and rhythmic restarts are heightened, which ultimately makes the transience of time and human lives all the more piercing, a transience for which the extraterrestrial perspective (wholly atheistic, after all) offers a vantage point of both finitude and infinity. "Baby Ice Dog" again evokes mellow, romantic, adolescent atmospheres, under a werewolf-like dome (what better than animals to recall extraterrestrial enigma?). "Wings Wetted Down" takes the harmonic crown of the album: as if the Beach Boys were playing Black Sabbath: the result is something poignant and moving, especially, again, in the guitar's doom-like march and in Bloom's expressive, compassionate, delicate voice. But every instrument here gives its utmost in terms of expressiveness: the bass is the great protagonist, packing the atmosphere tight, tempered by a discreet, syncopated drum part and the tinkling of the keyboards. "Teen Archer" is again built on an original rhythm (original because this is '73, and this is music out of the '50s), broken here and there before picking back up. "Mistress of the Salmon Salt" places the hard ballads of Jethro Tull (in many respects, though in different ways, the band closest to Blue Oyster Cult) within the same surreal, dark setting.

Secret Treaties (1974) offers up the usual 8 tracks, over the usual 38 minutes; less extraterrestrial and dark than the first album, it boasts greater variety — and that variety would be, overall, mediocre (see the Patti Smith track, "Career of Evil", as bad as everything she would write for her husband), on a par with the debut, were it not for two tracks — two absolute masterpieces — and one excellent idea, "Subhuman", which leaves the extraterrestrial setting behind for more tribal, colonial terrain, in an elegant alienation and moving reflection on human lives. The two masterpieces that follow are among the peaks of rock as a whole: "Flaming Telepaths" is 5 minutes of deep feeling where all the dark strings (the extraterrestrial) and the bright ones (earthly emotion) typical of Blue Oyster Cult are pushed to their fullest, between light and shadow, in a constant elegy that is never rhetorical or maudlin and yet entirely inward-looking, with the fragility of an adolescent soul. "Astronomy" relates to the previous track as epic relates to lyric poetry; without doubt the best Blue Oyster Cult song ever: it's no accident that Metallica would later cover it. Formally it should be a hard rock ballad, but it is one in the way a magnificent sculpture should, materially speaking, be a block of marble. Either it redefines the genre, or, more accurately, it stands as a one-off, much like Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (released that very same year).

Without wanting to establish cause and effect, for the rest of the 70s Blue Oyster Cult did two things: 1. they released one album after another, each more pointless and less artistically meaningful than the last, following the clichés of a saccharine arena-rock barely tinged with their trademark mysticism (Agents Of Fortune in 1976, Spectres in 1977, Mirrors in 1979, Cultosaurus Erectus in 1980); 2. they achieved a certain popularity, filling stadiums and, finally, selling their records.

Resilient, like all historic bands, Blue Oyster Cult returned — for those with patience — to making music in 1981 with Fire Of Unknown Origin (without Pearlman since 1979; produced instead by Martin Birch, producer of Iron Maiden, Rainbow and Deep Purple), remarkably in step with the times, given the era of goth/dark music, which thus reclaimed its own virtual forebears. The album above all offers up a string of tracks, almost all inspired, all conceived as proper songs, and nearly all built around a chorus that's refined and poignant in the best sense of the word. Fire Of Unknown Origin drops the rhythmic daring of Tyranny And Mutation, but amplifies (in a more mature key — that is, turning even more movingly toward adolescence) its atmospheres and, above all, its substance. "Burnin' for You" teaches the Cult how to stir emotion with one scratch of fantasy and one of realism. "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" offers up a first masterpiece: epic drums (but an intimate kind of epic), ambient keyboards, a deeply alluring and touching voice, sincere harmony, a weary and moving guitar. "Sole Survivor" is an even greater masterpiece, and one of the most underrated and flawless songs ever written: as if it took a child's heart at a birthday party and set it adrift over the greenest fields steeped in legend; as if, at the same time, it felt the full transience and futility of it all (in the face of death: now entirely concrete, despite the childlike setting). Decisive riffs, near-disco female backing vocals, yet never intrusive; the tight musicianship of Cheap Trick in service of sincere emotion. "Vengeance" is almost a saga, with Blue Oyster Cult having shifted from "vertical" dimensions (spatial: UFOs) to "horizontal" ones (temporal: the precariousness of every condition in time). Sadly, neither this song nor this album would ever receive the appreciation they deserved, from critics or audiences alike. "After Dark" is the most '80s Blue Oyster Cult track there is: in fact, it's a track that helped shape the '80s; a whole host of bands would owe no small debt to these old-timers from the 70s — much as, on different shores, was happening with King Crimson and Discipline (also from '81). "Joan Crawford" is, alongside "Sole Survivor", the album's other masterpiece; an intricately structured composition that would shape the band's future, yet entirely focused on communicating — communicating nostalgia, astonishment, delicate feelings.

1981 was a miracle: for the first time, the band changed lineup, with Albert Bouchard forced out. After two pointless records, The Revolution By Night (1984) and Club Ninja (1986), the band broke up.

In 1988, another miracle. It would be the last one. With a lineup splendidly back at full strength and once again led by Albert Bouchard and Pearlman. Working within their usual stylistic framework, they shifted approach once more; the result is a decadent sound that broadens (including in track length) the atmospheres of Fire Of Unknown Origin, moving them away from that record's prevailing intimacy toward the more universal, objective quality of Secret Treaties. The release, which isn't quite a proper album but a collection of unreleased tracks and alternate versions, contains four masterpieces, as rich in atmosphere as in feeling. "In the Presence of Another World", after a desolate, spacey keyboard-and-voice intro, bursts into the best arena-rock guitars imaginable, with huge amounts of evocative power lavished throughout the unfolding of the long, varied composition, full of nostalgic, reflective harmonies. "Del Rio's Song" is a fascinating dark-toned reworking of exotic Brazilian atmospheres. The childlike-dark vocabulary becomes one capable of translating any situation or state of mind; it becomes universal, and perhaps all the more precious for it. "The Siege and Investiture of Baron Von Frankenstein's Castle at Weisseria" is the masterpiece within the masterpiece: the best Blue Oyster Cult song alongside "Astronomy" (with "Joan Crawford" and "Sole Survivor" counting as two gems for connoisseurs): the arena dimension is supremely transfigured into a choral piece awash in expressionist, fantastical tones, geared entirely toward emotional communication. What Agents Of Fortune had failed to achieve. Bloom delivers an extraordinary vocal performance, reaching heights (both in timbre and expressiveness) never heard before. "Magna of Illusion" very nearly matches that peak; a limping rhythm, still utterly captivating, a gripping harmony, but always within refined bounds. It feels like it has many stories to tell, and a strong desire to be heard. For the genre, for arena-rock, this album represents its absolute peak.

Heaven Forbid (1998) and The Curse Of The Hidden Mirror (2001) were released under the Blue Oyster Cult name, but by then they were little more than a faded photocopy of the band's major works.

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