from the LP Blue Öyster Cult, Columbia Records, 1972When coming up with a description of this band it’s difficult to avoid the standard narratives about them being a musical laboratory creation, or some such inventive way to highlight the fact that Blue Öyster Cult (BOC) was, indeed, formed & informed by rock music critics (Sandy Pearlman & Richard Meltzer); however, once you’ve listened to their albums enough you realize something: who fucking cares who put them together, because it works man! This is reptilian amphetamine mayhem, abstruse and cryptic in all the right ways, ultimately psychedelic without falling prey to any of the fey trappings that word normally conjures up. My brother-in-law had a couple BOC albums that attracted me from a very early age, not for the music inside initially, but due to that powerfully mythic-seeming symbol which came to adorn nearly all their LPs---when matched with their weird name (taken from one of Pearlman’s poems about a race of aliens who secretly guide the history of humankind), that icon seemed to assure my curious mind of their being hidden hedonistic treats inside…and I wasn’t wrong, “…I cross the frontier at ten, got a whip in my hand, baby, and a girl or a husky at leather’s end…” Woof!
