Blue Öyster Cult stays in front of the joke
Among the less urgent debates found in the Googlesphere is one involving Blue Öyster Cult’s hit “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.”
Some maintain the metronomic thok heard throughout the song cannot be a cowbell. These sharp-eared sleuths insist they’re hearing the sound of a wood block. BÖC has weighed in, which should resolve the whole matter: The sound is, in fact, a cowbell, though one wrapped in duct tape to muffle its sound.
As if Blue Öyster Cult didn’t have enough to contend with all these years — a parodic aura of jest thanks to the band name’s umlaut, the Spinal Tap-esque nine men who have drummed in the band — the cowbell has more defined the band over the past two decades than its music. The skewed legacy owes its status to an admittedly funny “Saturday Night Live” sketch involving too much Will Ferrell, not enough shirt, just the right amount of Christopher Walken and a debate about how much cowbell is the right amount of cowbell.
BÖC drops in on White Öak Music Hall this weekend on its On Tour Forever tour, with “forever” meaning 45 years and counting for Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser and Eric Bloom, the two members of the band whose tenure dates back to the time in the early 1970s when Blue Öyster Cult formed from a Long Island, N.Y., group called Soft White Underbelly, an amazingly bad band name that only further confines BÖC to a corner of rock ’n’ roll dismissal.
Yet Roeser, Bloom and their Cult have proven to be survivors, and not just because they’re still able to tour decades later. BÖC has become an agesspanning cultural curiosity: An entity that never took itself too seriously, sometimes to its own detriment. The group wasn’t as self-serious in the ’70s, which makes it undervalued decades later as the creepy riff that opens “Reaper” has shifted from something used in the horror film “Halloween” to gristle for late night TV comedy.
But at every stage, Blue Öyster Cult has been in front of the joke, even if rock snobs haven’t quite figured that out.
“I always felt that the depth of our humor was unappreciated,” Roeser once said.
A fine example is on the band’s website. “What does the BÖC logo mean?” goes one Q in the FAQ. A: “We like to say it is an ancient symbol that means ‘Blue Öyster Cult.’ ”
Another example, the first lyric for the first song on the band’s first album: “With Satan’s hog no pig at all, and the weather’s getting dry/We’ll head south from Altamont in a cold blooded traveled trance/ So clear the road my bully boys and let some thunder pass/We’re pain, we’re steel, a plot of knives/We’re transmaniacon MC.”
Somebody needed to take the piss out of rock’s self-important mythologizing. BÖC did that. “This ain’t the summer of love, this ain’t the Garden of Eden.”
They would not foot around the hacky sack with the hippies under any circumstances. Certainly other ’70s monsters of rock similarly pushed against the ’60s, but Black Sabbath never flinched, suggesting the darkness projected was sincere.
Roeser told Vintage
Guitar magazine his band “has always had a historical and intellectual bent as far as what we’ve been doing, but we’ve never pandered to devil worship or any of that stuff. We deal with themes of good and evil in our tunes, but we don’t take a position. The idea that we have an agenda, political or otherwise, was always silly. If we talked about the dark side of humanity, we just laid it out there and said, ‘Here it is.’ ”
But doing so with a bit of theatricality and without sincerity came with long term costs. During some eras, theatricality has been embraced in rock. Other times it’s gauche. Queen has enjoyed renewed interest. Blue Öyster Cult has not. But the band has spent decades flickering through popular culture: from prominent use in film fare like “Halloween” and “The Stand” to covers from all sorts of knowing admirers ranging from Smashing Pumpkins to Foo Fighters to Wilco to Elliott Smith.
More than “Burnin’ For You” and “Godzilla,” “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” has become the stoner rock equivalent of a Broadway standard. But to dig a little deeper than the holy trinity of BÖC songs reveals quite a bit of good stuff. The group turned out five great albums in the ’70s, including three before “Agents of Fortune” locked them in time — specifically 1976 — with the unavoidable single “Reaper.” That album is a fine introduction, though. Venerable rock critic Robert Christgau described it perfectly as “the ‘Fleetwood Mac’ of heavy metal.”
“Spectres” from 1977 contained “Godzilla,” but offered plenty of other strong songs like “I Love the Night.”
Album guides frequently treat BÖC poorly beyond the trinity, but album guides often are built from groupthink inertia: Beatles great, Monkees bad, and so forth. BÖC should’ve been out of ideas by the ’80s, but “Fire of Unknown Origin” (1981) and “Imaginos” (1988) are both ripe for rediscovery. There’s much to admire and enjoy: Doing so just requires listening beyond the cowbell skit. Though it should be noted, BÖC’s members have professed affinity and admiration for the “Saturday Night Live” sketch, which, frankly, could provide a point of entry.
My favorite BÖC recording remains “Secret Treaties” from 1974. It contained the song “Flaming Telepaths.” And within that song is the line, “And the joke’s on you.”