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I've seen Blue Oyster Cult (BOC) seven times in concert, once naked — me, not them. Keep that in your pocket for a moment and I'll explain it after some context.
BOC is a band that's been out of step with the rest of the popular music since they started touring 40 years ago. (I have to emphasize this band's slogan, "On tour forever," is one that's been earned. They took off less than three years since they began playing together at Long Island's Stony Brook University in 1967.) Their songs are grounded in the poetry of former Rock journalist turned music producer Sandy Pearlman. He wrote stories about the Blue Öçyster Cult, a secret society that fought to possess a black Aztec mirror that could control entire nations.
The liner notes from BOC's 1988 album Imaginos set the stage for the discovery of the cursed mirror and do a good job illustrating the feel of the music:
"To the Spanish, agents of a Catholic Sovereign, the New World was no place of grace ... anti-genesis, anti-Eden, seat of evil, pit of darkness ... the priests in the expeditions could imagine no place worse than this place ... visibly in the thrall of invisible spirits."
I discovered their music around 1990, after I graduated high school, when I was out of step, too. The music I was tuning in was hubbed by an aesthetic of New York urban Rock mysticism — the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith and BOC were the voices I listened to as I tried also to hear myself, that deep, inner self that Carl Jung spent so much time exploring.
I'll take this moment to wince as some of my geek roots show. BOC, while standing out among their Heavy Metal peers as being lyrically literate and layers-deep in musical complexity, also rate very high on the charts of geek culture, with songs about UFOs, psychic wars and a weird back story of an occult underground shifting the sands of World War II. The band is best known for the dark love songs, "Don't Fear (the Reaper)" and "Burnin' for You," as well as the catchy, if slightly silly, anthem "Godzilla." When you grow up overdosing on Star Trek, it all makes a lot of sense.
By 1994, I'd seen BOC in concert twice. As today, the act that once opened to thousands in sports arenas in the '70s was playing to modest crowds in second-tier venues by the time I saw them. Another Rock artifact that made it into my personal mythology was Woodstock. I jammed on that live album to get in touch with this Platonic ideal of urban tribalism. A convergence, an understanding and a peace, even if for just a few days. I went to Woodstock '94 that summer, but left the magic back home with my liner notes. It's another story, but suffice to say that my inner demons bested me.
In August of the following year I heard about a Woodstock knock-off concert called Nudestock '95. More than 10,000 people were gathering at a nudist resort in Union City, Mich., to see Eric Burdon from The Animals, Starship and Blue Öçyster Cult. This blend of myths was like a clarion call to me. The sound was also a bit flat as the tickets were $150 and I was flat broke.
"Why don't you pretend to be a reporter?"
Slymer, my Punk Rock buddy, gave me his best advice, although he'd never done this himself. His forte was scamming fast-food dives at the drive-thru. Still, I have to give him props; he sold some of his plasma to help me get to Woodstock the year before. It's a true friend that'll separate himself from his bodily fluids so that you can follow a dream.
"It's 350 miles — too far to go on a con," I said.
And I thought about it for a moment and considered, "What if I was a reporter?"
I scanned the masthead of a certain alternative newspaper and gave the editorial department a call. It was 5 p.m. on Friday and the concert had already started. Only one person, an editorial assistant was still in the office.
"You were gonna sneak in? That's pretty ballsy," she said and offered to get my press credentials in order.
That's how I became a reporter; I did something outlandish to follow this band at a time when following bands was the most important thing I could be doing with my life. The Jungian psychologist and author Clarissa Pinkola Estes might have framed this as releasing my duende — following my muse by following my appetite.
BOC still sounds quite raw and untamed in the their post-prime era. The band maintains the sci-fi verve of their early work through new, 21st-century tracks — some co-written by Cyberpunk author John Shirley. Most of their work hangs on the backbone of the band's collective stream of unconsciousness. One abstraction flows into another and the secret wars they sing about are metaphors for the secret struggles of our interior lives.
Three of the band's original members — Eric Bloom, Donald Roeser and Alan Lanier — remain in the lineup. All are well into their fifties, and it's easy to see them through the lens that filmed the decaying members of Spinal Tap. Despite the extended half-life of their talent, it's hard to resist seeing a grandpa playing Hard Rock as an absurdity.
In the song "Sunday Morning," Nico of Velvet Underground sings about "the wasted years so close behind," and there's an all-too-rational part of me that sees it that way, too. That voice describes the music of BOC as belonging to that set of things I kept in my pocket when I was going nowhere, following nothing and rebelling against anything that moved. But I prefer to listen to that right side of my brain that smiles and sings a few lines of BOC's song, "Don't Turn Your Back": "Don't turn your back on intuition/Don't turn your back on superstition ... Things are not always what they seem/She won't say what she means..."
BLUE ÖçYSTER CULT performs at downtown's Whiskey Dick's this Saturday.
