There has never been a photograph of the Blue Oyster Cult on the cover of one of their albums, and there is a very good reason for that. The reason has to do with non-jibing of image and reality. You can pretty well figure what anybody who puts out albums with titles like Tyranny & Mutation is supposed to look like, and the BOC, though they try hard, simply don’t have the physical chops to totally carry through their producers’ grand plan for total assault. In fact, three out of five of them look like little boys. Street-scrabbling boys, but nonetheless.

Bearing their hype in mind, however,

I came to interview them armed with questions consonant with the ultimately ludicrous and unnecessary extramusical riff they’re laying down:‘“Are you guys Nazis?” “Would you rather fuck your mother or kill her?” “Do you hope you die before you get old?”

Jive I admit, but listen to some of their more muddled lyrics sometime. They responded first with “Hunh?” and then with “Aww, c’mon, Lester, cut the crap.”

But this is what you’re supposed to be, I insisted. This is the vision that your producers, Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, are trying to project through the sights of your stengun musical prowess upon the blank left bum cheek of the world.

“Just what do you think this image is?” asked Sandy, who is sitting there and also manages the group and writes many of their lyrics as well as being an ex-rock critic.

“You see them,” I said, “as malevolent metal-flake suprahuman switchblade reptiles arriving off the streets of space implacable with mystic Nazi trappings.”

Sandy chuckled like a chipmunk. “That’s pretty good,” he admitted. “That’s about it.” It was about this time that keyboardist/rhythm guitarist Alan Lanier, who is the coolest person in the band, remarked that the only thing left for rock critics and musicians to do is get in flstfights.

But although I hate to windbreak wimpoid even in such diminutive company, I gotta say that there ain’t no need for the fisticuffs, because I love the Blue Oyster Cult, because I have seen and heard them transcend all their absurd and involuted trappings. They are simply a monster band, one of the very best and most precision-tooled powerful on the current boards, and they don’t need all this hoodooobscurro college boy crap; they can play till you fall over dying and cry your

boots full, and then drink it and reel back and Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser, who is shorter than the German shepherd sleeping at my feet right now, will still be lashing the rafters with his own incredibly economical and firemad lead guitar attack.

Earlier the day of this interview I sat in at one of their practice sessions. Pearlman earnestly explained to me the story behind the song they were about to begin rehearsing: a kid is hitchhiking on New Year’s Eve in 1964, down as you can get, when he gets picked up by what you gotta envision as this frowzy divorcee and her daughter. They scoop his ass up and zip off, and then. . .

Sound like a great song? Sure, and the BOC launch into one of their distinctive power riffs, building like ten pissed-off cranes yanking you to the top story of a quavering skyscraper, where the lyrics throw you completely off the wall and out the window: “In Times Square now/ People do the polka/ Dominance, submission/ [And then, for no apparent reason, in an oldtime Coasters/ Do-Wop bass voice] Radios appear. . .”

Alan Lanier cut it off in mid-stroke, being as confused by the apparent pointlessness of all this as I was: “Ahh, sounds dipoid, man.” But he went ahead and did the song, as did they all, as would you and I were we in their shoes. It’s like lead singer Eric Bloom, who wears shades and black leather and whips the cymbals with a chain onstage — that’s right, a sort of rich man’s John Kay — says: “If we don’t live it, we think it’s funny. ‘OD’d on Life Itself is funny — a totally bullshit song. Sandy saw this chick who was totally out of it, a real asshole; she’d OD’d on life. We cfacked up. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s funny and I sing it with a smile on my face.”

Alan: “An alternative to I Got De Blues.”

Yassuh boss. I can dig it. And perhaps all you fans out there in readerland, waiting for your eyeball kicks and hoping to hear lurid tales of how the BOC actually stab babies in the brain and such instead of being what they are, which is so frustratingly normal that they’re probably sicker than ten Wayne Countys, perhaps you can most easily dig it in natural harmony when you know the history of the band. Because this is a band with a history if ever. They were a legend for years before they ever got an album out, and what they really are is defined far more by where they’ve been than any albumliner nonsense about secret treaties with Plutonia. It all begins on Long Island, Lou Reed country, where a band called the Soft White Underbelly was formed of Donald Roeser, Alan Lanier, Albert Bouchard (drums), and some kid named Andy on bass. This was the early acid days, and the Underbelly began working ginmills to stay alive.

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Alan takes it: “Donald and Albert used to play in college together. They dropped out, and met this kid John Wiezenthal who used to go to college at Stony Brook, where Sandy went to school. John invited me out to Long Island one day: ‘You play guitar, right? I know these guys out there who play.’ We went to this degenerate house where all these college kids were hanging around and jammed one night. Sandy walked in, and they said ‘Sandy writes for Crawdaddy! magazine. I thought he

looked like Eddie Haskell. But he said, You guys sound great, I haven’t heard such energy since the Steve Miller Band.’ He’d just got back from California.”

I interpose: this must have been where the tag-line of “rock critic’s band,” which is still biting the BOC’s ass, first reared.

“It was just a matter of who was hanging out at the house,” says Alan. “Days when we stayed wasted and stoned and just kept playing. We started out right away trying to make up our own songs.”

Donald: “The conceptual spur came when Sandy started writing, and knowing that you had to have something more than just musicianship.”

Alan: “Sandy brought in the buzz that made it all possible. We played, and he kept saying ‘More! More!’ Especially since at that time there, was nothing in Long Island, we were the only people playing.”

“We started at the top, in a big league,” remembers Donald, not quite bragging. “At that time it was all West Coast shit; we’d open for Country Joe.”

But they still didn’t have a lead singer, although for a while the post was filled in typically outrageous fashion by rock critic R. Meltzer, who also wrote many songs for the earlier band and some of the BOC’s very best material: “We were sandwiched between James Cotton and Ritchie Havens at the Cafe a Go Go,” remembers Donald, laughing, “and Meltzer sang the blues. To a packed house of college kids in 1968, the band did like a frenetic and desperate jam while Meltzer took off his shirt and ran back and forth across the stage yelling ‘Piss!’ into the microphone.”

Great stuff, but can you build on it?

No, says Alan, “We knew we needed a real lead singer.”

Donald: “We kept bumbling along like this. Sandy had his rep, he could get his foot in the door and get us a lot of studio demo time.”

Wish I could do as much for the Stooges right now. But you know those were different times: “The producers and A&R guys didn’t know anything,” snorts Sandy. “But I was famous, because in that time I was one of the only three or four rock writers.”

“It doesn’t really bother me that people might consider us a rock critics’

group,” says Donald, “because 1 know that it takes more than that to survive.”

“Yeah,”, says Alan. “It means nothing to the kids, obviously.”

Donald takes up the thread of mischance: “We’d been doing shows at the Diplomat Hotel in New York, which was famous for being the only hotel in New York that would house the Communist Party’s annual convention. Peter Siegel from Elektra came down and thought Jac Hozman [President of Elektra at the time and an'all-around swelleroony even if he is a folkie] would really like us, so he got us some studio time and we did a real good demo. Peter Siegel used to go around in Nehru shirts, but he looked like Goofy, saying `Oh wow, far out, groovy man!'Peter sort of sold Jac on the ban,d, and Jac came down high on TCH. Saw the band live for the first time on hog tranks. Had the contract blanks set up right there. There was definitely magic in the air that night."

By this time they had acquired their long-sought lead singer, in the person of one Les Bronstein, a yelper who was a minor legend in himself. And I do mean in. "Les was a very heavy person," remembers Donald, "could really exert his personality. That was one of his problems. And Holzman thought he was gonna be the next Morrison. And us the next Doors. So in that vein Sandy went in and negotiated us a really good contract. We survived on it for two years. We made a record with Les, and when we got in the studio Les was in the process of really going totally crazy."

Sandy: "Also turned out he couldn't sing.

Alan: "He'd sit down on the floor and say, `I got to crap this vocal.' He'd deliberate for years and years and never come up with anything. So we go to make this record and Les bombs out."

Donald: ` He'd come in and wanna just lay down in a corner and moan all the way through a track. He wouldn't wanna get in there and really put across a tune. By this time Eric had come into the band. We'd met him in a music store

where he was working. Came to pass he had a truck and a PA; pretty soon he was road manager of the~ group and he'd moved into the house.

"In fairness to Les, he did some pretty transcendental stuff sometimes -bringing girls up out of the audience and giving `em guitars, jumping on people undergoing massive acid freakouts. We'd jam off Les' rap when we weren't totally nauseated by it, which was most of the time. But Les is out now, we got an album fulla tracks and no singer. Two weeks later we were due to play the Fillmore. There was even talk of bringing in Bryan McLean of Love. He comes in and hears the band and says, `No, I really can't do this, and anyway I gottã go to Tampa to see Liza Minnelli.' So Eric was in."

"We had no clothes for the Fillmore gig," says Eric. "Donald wore a pair of pants that he glued pennies all over. It was really ridiculous. My second gig. I barely knew all the songs. Didn't know how to play on half the songs, had the guitar turned off. My very first gig, Jac Holzman came to see what the band would be like without Les, and said to Siegel: `Well, Eric doesn't make it as a singer, but he certainly adds a lot to the music with his rhythm guitar playing. And I had the guitar turned off three quarters of the time."

"Anyway," summarizes Sandy, "Jac's dream of another Doors was shattered."

Eric: "But I had to go in and sing on all the tracks. They were all in the wrong key for me, wrong style. I went from singing James Brown in the group I was in before to singing Soft White Underbelly."

They finally finished the album, aided by much corporate wheeling and dealing on Sandy's part, and to this day it remains one of the great underground classics, rendered particularly under ground if not classical by the fact that for reasons which nobody can quite explain Elektra refused at the last min ute to put it out. And the Soft White Underbelly (a/k [briefly] /a Stalk For rest Group) was just another one of those strange and alluring names you used to see here and there, like Magic Terry and the Universe, promise of magic unful€illed under the then-magic Elektra logo lost somewhere before the mists of `68cleáred.

Lost also was Underbelly bassist Andy Panda, who decided he'd rather work in a bakery than rehearse a single and was replaced by Albert's brother Joe in the summer of 1970. Which coincided with the group's first assault on Columbia records: after killing time as a copyband, they sent Sandy trund ling over to West 52nd St. with the Elektra tapes, which were turned down by the~i-Columbia prexy Clive Davis on advice from a memo from Murray Krugman, who ironically would end up being the group’s co-producer.

Nadir. Time for nothing less than transcendence of the mung through total immersion. Or, as Sandy says: “Enter Conry’s Bar.”

Alan: “This kid we knew from,Stony Brook said I know this booking agency can get you some jobs. We weredesperate for the money, so in walks this guy by the name of Phil King, a/k/a Phil Friedman, big big dude in a cheap vinyl leather jacket, two-tone blue ’64 Lincoln Continental, wore a Fu Manchu mustache, coming his hair at all times, he had; a perfect Shaft hairdo, chrome shades he never took off, wore ’em to bed. . ..saying: ‘I know everybody in the rock ’n’ roll industry’ — he got us the gig at Conry’s Bar on Long Island which is really a greaser/snappers/reds .bar, place no bigger than this hotel room. . .”

Eric: “We were playing Underground Top 40 — Hendrix, Cream, Stones. It was therapeutic in a way. Because we got into this under limpid circumstances to say the least, which was the whole acid trip at that time. It was great to get back and play some bullshit rock ’n’ roll. Also this band is a great copy band;

“Yeah!” says Sandy. “Like ‘Under My Thumb!’ They played it and in the middle of this, jam hit some chords which I proclaimed were the fundamental Stones chords, and suddenly under my eyes opened up a vast revelation of what ‘Under My Thumb’ and the whole 20th Century were about: dominance and submission. There was a fight going on as usual, and this guy had a gin and tonic, and he threw the glass down on my table, and the gin was glowing in the dark. That was where ‘Before the Kiss, a Redcap’ was born. That night this greaser came up to me, and he had a red on his tongue, opens his mouth and wants me to kiss him! I said ‘Yeah, sure.’ ” v

Thus are the mysteries of the creative process unraveled. The Underbelly had found an element befitting their*name somehow, and suddenly Jt all began to click as a vision, a sound and an attitude. “What happened with hitting the bar scene like that,” says Alan, “was that we found we had an incredible inclination for that sort of thing. It was like discovering a spark.”

Don: “The main thing about the development of this band is the assbackwardness of it. The Underbelly started out playing the Fillmore) and doing the records and all this, and then came down and did this again.”

Alan: “The thing about playing bars is that you gotta be quick, you gotta keep their attention and keep moving. They aren’t sittin’ there watching you like Ornette Coleman or something. Hit

’em hard and hit ’em fast.”

Sandy: “They’re real brutes, man. You gotta be Stonewall Jackson.’’

This was where the band honed their chops, then, from the primordial Conry’s to the whole Scranton-Wilkes-Barre circuit, hundred and fifty dollars a night. Maybe it was in places like The Colonel’s Garter in Wilkes-Barre that Roeser finally mastered his fast, slashing style of perfect electric economy; in any case, in perfect consonance with aforesaid assbackwardness of it all, these terminal troughs led straight and fast to a quarter million dollar contract with Columbia. But one more pool of sleaze had to be swum through first.

Eric: “We got a gig at a party for swingers, a closed kids’ camp in upstate New York. So we got up there and play this big polyethylene bubble: all these late-20s, early-30s couples come up, take all their clothes off and start walking and swimming around the pool, couple of people are balling and blowjobs etc. And it was just a cosmic show, we were great. And in the audience was this guy David Lucas, who had his own studio called the Warehouse in New York City. He thought we ^vere great, so we did some sessions with him when we got back to the city and the demos were what got us on the Columbia label.” Even Clive liked them, which left only one small detail to be taken care of.

“We had the contract all ready to go,” says Sandy, “and still didn’t have a name. So they said, ‘Look, man, we can’t sign you unless we have a name; we can’t put it on the contract.’ So we were sittin’ there rehearsing songs, workin’ on the record, and fuck it, man, let’s go out and think of a name. Murray [ co-producer Krugman] and I named the band. I came back downstairs after about an hour of deliberation and said, ‘Okay boys, it’s the Blue Oyster Cult.’ ”

Eric: “We were shocked.”

Sandy: “They couldn’t really get behind that, but they bore up under it.”

Since writing the above I went to see the Blue Oyster Cult again, and live they are as powerful as ever, but I had to tell them both that I didn’t like their new album (“Well,” said Alan Lanier, “do you think the world’s gonna cave in?”) and that I really didn’t think they needed all the ersatz bizarritude swaddling their sound. Eric Bloom went onstage in a black, cape: “Bad move,” I told him — the last person I saw try to pull that was Captain Beefheart, and it looked even more ridiculous on him. But really, none of this confusion matters at all, because by set’s end they had the mob clawing across the stage, and deservedly so.

Besides, as said earlier, there is the hint of real weirdodom lurking behind' these unassuming physiognomies. A girl I know retired upstdirs from a party one night, only to Find one of the Cult nosing around her doorway not five minutes later, kneeling up to nuzzle this all but stranger to his particular heights of ooh-lah. She demurred: “I don’t know,” she said later. “Suddenly it was like we were just two... things. ”

Well, there’s a little bit of miscreant in all of us. _