The sign remains the same
Blue Öyster Cult mugged flower children right and left, loved weirdness, wrote great songs, and are still together – which should stand for something.

By Mike McGuirk

If you want to talk about the death of the Free Love generation at Altamont, look no further than the music of Blue Öyster Cult.

Bay Guardian contributor Will York

I DON'T REALLY know what that statement means, but I definitely agree with it. Blue Öyster Cult were the weirdest, most fan-spurning semi-heavy heavy metal band of all time. Since they're still together, and are in fact playing a show I can't wait to go to at Slim's March 7, I should probably refer to them in the present tense. But let's face it, no one is going to read this article if it starts out, "Blue Öyster Cult is the most weirdest band today!" Because today things are way weirder than they were when BÖC was putting out records. While I don't think things could be as weird as they are today without the weirdness BÖC fostered, I don't hear their musical influence in anything on the radio, or even in anything I have in my record collection.

In fact I can't think of one band that resembles Blue Öyster Cult in the faintest of terms. The sort of irony that permeated their heyday didn't really surface again until the Melvins put out those Kiss-inspired solo albums. Now it's everywhere. Sure there were jokers in music in the '70s, but no one brought their jokes down to the level of having multiple songs about the Canadian Mounted Police or ripping off material from bad Hollywood schlock the way "Joan Crawford" is based on Mommie Dearest. Metal bands don't take the chances these guys took. Rock bands don't even play rock today. And if you hear a Byrds influence in a song these days, it's a disgusting one, not like the hollow beauty of "Don't Fear the Reaper."

They dropped so much crazy shit into their songs that it's a wonder the records got released at all. Not so much musically, although the band was unpredictable as hell in that regard – incorporating all sorts of rock, folk rock, metal, boogie, punk, balladry, and Broadway show tune stuff – but in the way they adopted unrelated bizarro imagery. There's the UFO thing (album covers, the song "E.T.I. Extra-terrestrial Intelligence" on Agents of Fortune), a career-long horror movie and gore obsession, WWII stuff (the cover of Secret Treaties and the song "ME 262," about a Luftwaffe pilot), and all the satanism. Not to mention vampires, schizophrenia ("Fireworks"), some dude who can see the future named "Imaginos," ninjas (way after the whole ninja craze), space travel, ninjas and space travel, dinosaurs ... Did I mention the Mounties thing? Then there's the whole element of unabashedly generic rock that inspired them to deliver horrible versions of "Born to Be Wild" and "Kick out the Jams." And even some of their best songs ride dangerously close to the cliff of genericness. Is it on purpose? Were they jerking all our chains?

Who knows. With rock critic wiseass Richard Meltzer an early contributor to the band, you can assume most of this stuff was designed to be some kind of joke. But it's all played so straight that it becomes difficult to tell what's a joke and what isn't. Like, if "Burnin' for You" is a joke, a song about selling your soul to get in someone's pants, with a video that has Eric Bloom sitting in a burning car with his arm dangling out the window, that's just a strange joke to be telling. So they're making fun of satanists, townies who chill out in front of the liquor store in Camaros, and rock music's tendency to trivialize things like love, right? Kind of an elaborate joke, especially when the payoff is that no one really gets it and most of us who love that song just think it's a classic rock tune about STDs. And that's one of their hits. "She's As Beautiful As a Foot," from their first record, features the great lines "She's as beautiful as a foot / Didn't believe it when he bit into her face / It tasted just like a fallen arch." I guess that's funny. Then: "Don't put your tongue on the bloody tooth mark place / Her face changing now, a guernsey cow." These are some strange dudes.

A couple weeks ago my friend Will and I were given the opportunity to DJ a Sunday night at the Hemlock Tavern on Polk Street in the Tenderloin. Because we both happened to be in a Blue Öyster Cult phase at the time (spurred one night by Will's making me listen to "In Thee," off of Mirrors, an act that reawakened my interest in the band because that song is mega), we decided we would play nothing but Blue Öyster Cult for the whole night at the Hemlock. All BÖC, all night. I envisioned total pandemonium breaking loose around hour two. People crying for mercy, begging us to stop. Or maybe they would be as enthralled by the awesomeness of Blue Öyster Cult as we were. At the end of it all, Will and I would either be worshipped as gods or we would be pariahs. We were both pretty into the idea of being told to leave and never come back.

What ended up happening is that we played Blue Öyster Cult classic after Blue Öyster Cult classic, skipped both "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "Godzilla," played "In Thee" on both turntables at the same time and phased it out a little bit, and high-fived each other all night waiting for people to catch on, which never happened. No one even noticed. One guy came up to Will during "ME 262" and was like, "I haven't heard this in 25 years. Thanks for playing it."

Whatever man, people need to listen to Blue Öyster Cult more. Blue Öyster Cult play Slim's, 8 p.m., Fri/7, 255 11th St., S.F. $25. (415) 255-0333.

Multi Cult
Some BÖC records you must own in addition to Agents of Fortune

Blue Öyster Cult I have this friend who often says, "This is [band X]'s best one all the way through" about various records. I have another friend who never says a record is good; he always just says, "Man, that first 7-inch of theirs was good, but the record is garbage. You need to hear one of the four remaining copies of blah, blah, blah." I'm always like, "That band had a 7-inch?" Whatever. With the floating "Planet Caravan"-type psychedelia of "Screams," their Canadian Mounties song "I'm on the Lamb but I Ain't No Sheep," the melodramatic masterpiece "Then Came the Last Days of May," and "Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll," on which Buck Dharma just puts Jimmy Page to shame, BÖC's first is easily their best one all the way through.

Secret Treaties "Career of Evil," with it's game show-theme chorus and lyrics about stealing your best friend's wife, and "Flaming Telepaths," which may not be about melting people's eyeballs with lasers but really sounds like it is anyway, are the two songs that make it onto anthologies. But "Harvester of Eyes" is the one you need to check out – great title, great guitar riff, terrible vocals by Eric Bloom. A classic combination.

Spectres This one has "Fireworks," which for a minute sounds like one of the Tony Iommi acoustic songs you used to skip over, then it turns into some kind of hand-clapping girl-group pop song. The lyrics involve exploding heads. This is my favorite Blue Öyster Cult song. "I Love the Night" is where Billy Idol's "Eyes Without a Face" and that asshat Steve Stevens's accompanying chorused guitar sound came from, for better or for worse. "Goin' Through the Motions" is another really weird one. I think it sounds like Sparks, but that will probably make some people angry.

Mirrors This one will cost you about a dollar, and it's got "In Thee" on it. "In Thee" rules. Byrds harmonies, acoustic guitars, and yearning, heartbroken lyrics. One of the few times the band aren't making any jokes. "Dr. Music" is another one on which they get away with generic guitars, and "The Great Sun Jester" is perfect psych-folk-meets-"Lady"-by-Styx. Think about it.

Cultosaurus Erectus Arguably the one with the best album cover, Cultosaurus Erectus was also voted the number-one metal record of all time by some scholar Will's always quoting. I don't know – the production is awfully crispy, and the guitars are all shadowed by synthesizers, so it may take a while for it to get through to me. Still, "Monsters" is like that crazy Japanese metal band Sigh, and "Deadline" is another fantastic BÖC curveball.

M.M.