JOHN DENVER IS GOD BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS GOD BLUE OYSTER CULT IS GOD!

I hate to be the one to bring it all up again, but goddamnit, the Seventies have to be dealt with. An ugly affair, to be sure, this decade leaves us stranded long past its midpoint at a bewildering crossroads. On the one hand, we have the punks; on the other, we have the Eagles; and, in between, we have all the groups we really like (need I make altogether hideous and unnecessary reference to that band with the puckering name...?). The fact of the'matter is that the choices for the rock ’n’ roll fan at this very significant juncture are narrow and completely discrete, with no satisfactory middle ground among Richard Hell, Kiss (sorry), and those puddinhead birds from South California. End of story. Turn off the typewriter. Brush my teeth. Go to bed. Goodbye.

Not quite. First of all, this magazine would never let me get away with a feature this short (Try us! Try us!— Ed.) and secondly, I really think I may have uncovered the Seventies’ sonic Shangri-La, the place where the decade’s perverse and opposing rock ’n’ roll needs may just be able to co-exist blissfully. Here, look at the Spectres in my little crystal ball.

Cleverly enough, that is the title of the new Blue Oyster Cult album. More cleverly, that is the state of being the band has finally achieved. Spectres. Which is not to imply any inadvertent lack of definition. To the contrary, in the context of the Cult, Spectres represents an acutely conscious and sharply rendered phantom substance. A paradox? Almost. But what better way to reconcile the diametrical crosscurrents of the Seventies? Indeed, the Blue Oyster Cult may just be the band of the decade, hovering over the era at once symbolic and completely functional.

Or, as CREEM’s punditory publisher would have it: In the Seventies,

"The public Is not ready for the sounds of buzzing Insects being tortured to death. ••Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser" maybe you can have your cake and eat it, too!

But let me explain. The Cult arrived in the swirly rainbow dawn of the Seventies packing just about every riff in the book, including many that the so-called New Wave claims to have lately discovered. Primarily a heavy metal band, with traces of their lately famous balladeering style (“Then Came The Last Days Of May”), the Cult could match cosmos for cosmos with Pink Floyd and demagoguery for demagoguery with Black Sabbath and mph for mph with Zep and they did all that with an intelligence and sense of humor that most assuredly set them above and apart from all of the above. They were eclectic and hip and if you think the punks originated chains and other assorted S & M trappings, you don’t know that the Cult gave special thanks to New York’s infamous Leather Man boutique on the second album. Wow. Needless to say, the radio and records marketplace of 1972 were having none of this cool genius —they wanted their Floyd or their Sabs or their Zep neat, or not at all; but mostly they wanted the Carpenters.

The years saw the BOC relinquish none of their humor, intelligence, or metallic atomic weight, and the years saw a lot of BOC albums go down the tubes, relatively speaking—and that includes 1975’s live LP, which was surefire...or so everyone thought. Though after four albums, the Cult had their own respectable cult, Columbia certainly had to be looking askance at their contract. And then, in the spring of 1976, with commercialism nipping ever fiercer at their jackbootheels, the BOC turned out an album called Agents Of Fortune. Most importantly, the LP contained a song called “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” penned by Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser.

“The Reaper” combined longstanding BOC obsessions (death, apocalypse) with a hummable melody, vocal harmonies, and a slick yet subtly sizzling guitar hook. It was a punkish heavy metal easy listening love song, if you can believe it. A perfectly odd synthesis—and perfect. Like feeding the dog his pill wrapped in hamburger, the long-elusive mass audience ate it up. At long last, the Cult had a radio hit and a gold album and, so it seemed to many, the inmates had indeed inherited the asylum.

The Blue Oyster Cult??? Hadn’t they always been just a little too hip? A little too eclectic? Too heavy in their metal and too punky in their punk? The Blue Oyster Cult??? How can those guys ever have gotten a hit?

I'm

dangerous, I'm dangerous! ••Albert

Well, of course, it was for all the reasons they never had had a hit before. All those things that had been too much before were just right now and, miraculously compressed into one three minute single, revealed the Blue Oyster Cult as the quintessential Seventies hybrid. Which is more evil than anything they ever pretended to be—and sells a helluva lot more records.

Naturally, the Big Question now is: Can they maintain it? Will the BOC fall? In order to answer this and other inquiries, we were compelled to travel uptown in Manhattan—in the dark— to the Record Plant where Spectres is taking shape.

The pimp black August night near Times Square where the Record Plant is located is teeming with evil portents as I arrive—and Albert Bouchard is bright and sunny and genial as ever. Allen Lanier, Eric Bloom and Joe Bouchard have departed for the evening. Albert and Donald Roeser, who is a good guy but something of sobersides, are entrenched behind a console with producer Murray Krugman listening to the latest mix of Albert’s vocal on a song called “Death Valley Nights.” Having just listened to the rough mix of another cut, “Fireworks,” in a studio upstairs and having just pronounced it the “obvious” followup to “The Reaper,” I am surprised to find that I like this other one even better and am forced to now declare “Death Valley Nights” the “obvious” single. Everybody else seems wellpleased, too, Albert hunching over in his chair, listening intently to his own screaming, and seeming on the verge of laughter (as he frequently is). After a brief discussion about adding echo to the track, Donald and Albert agree to take their evening break and head around the corner with me to Joe Allen’s, a show folks hangout with good fish and chili. There they will tell me about the real hit on the record.

When we get to the restaurant we’re talking about neighbors and Albert tells me his latest crazy New York story. “In our apartment,” he says “the neighbors are like twelvefeet across an air shaft from us at the same level, and there’s this guy who likes to take off his clothes and beat off right in front of the open window. A lot of the time he’ll turn the light on during the day for better visibility and do it. Caryn [Albert’s wife, recently delivered of their first child, Jacob Dylan] will shout to me, ‘He’s at it again!’ And sure enough, there he goes. Anyway, this guy has his girlfriend over every once in a while and I thought of doing the same thing to her, but I just couldn’t. So he’s still at it and I try to stare him down, but he keeps on ’til I have to pull the drapes...” Albert is laughing outright now. “We have this maid who comes in once a week and he especially likes her. She just says, ‘That man’s as bare as the day he was born,’ and goes on doing her work.”

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Donald, always the most efficient member of the band, has overheard the story and suggests the following macabre, yet plausible, solution: “Next time he does it, go over to the window with a carrot and a knife and stare at him and start cutting away at the carrot real slow.” (“Don’t fear the Reaper,” indeed.) Which causes Albert to fall into rhild hysterics again, shouting, “I’m dangerousl I’m dangerous! That’s great!” That’s Albert, always smiling, nothing fazes him— goofy, a little, but wonderful.

After we order (Albert gets a Molson’s ale, Donald, a vodka martini; both want lemon sole for the main course), the interview gets down to the oh-so-serious business of the new record. Donald explains: “This is the Blue Oyster Cult’s annual album. And it’s the first studio record we’ve done right after another studio record in two years, since Secret Treaties— because of the live album—and I think there’s going to be a parallel between this one and Treaties. We had two years to do Agents Of Fortune, so I don’t think this’ll be like that one.”

Albert takes a broader tack. “What we’re trying to do is please everybody all of the time,” he says grinning at his turn of phrase. “We’re trying to keep a balance between having enough smooth pop stuff so that people will buy the album and enough heavy stuff we can do in our live show.”

Pop tunes don’t work live? I ask, having at various concerts heard stunning renditions of “The Reaper.” “Nah,” says Albert, obviously a diehard heavy metallite. “What works live is still too heavy for the mass public [on radio, in other words]. But we’ll see,” he continues, venturing the following unsolicited (I swear) testimonial. “Maybe Kiss will do it. But if they do, it won’t be because of the music. In a way, I think what they’re doing is real good. They’re trying to take the heavy sound to the mass public. I don’t know if the public will buy it, but even if they 'do, it’s because here’s these guys who paint their faces.” At which point, Donald chimes in with some startling revelations: “I think most people who buy Kiss like the music, too. I don’t think it’s just because of the paint. / like a lot of Kiss music. I don’t like all of it.”

And then, in his inimitably obscure way (I still haven’t figured out who he means here), Albert sums it up for us: “The public is not ready for the sound of buzzing insects, the sound of insects being tortured to death.” He chuckles. Did I say goofy?

My most inevitable question, the one that touches on another very important spectre which I presume must haunt the Spectres sessions, gets the most abbreviated answers, a fact which may bely the true terror of recording again after your first hit. Do you think about “The Reaper” a lot while you’re recording this LP? I ask.

Albert: “Nah.”

Donald: “Nah...If there’s anything I hate it’s a followup single that sounds like the first one. That’s what I liked about the Beatles when they first came out. ‘Please, Please Me,’ ‘She Loves You,’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ —none of them sounded alike.”

Albert: “My only reason for not liking the name Spectres is that it sounds like some sort of followup to ‘Reaper.’” (Earlier, they had toyed with the idea of calling this record The Big Hurt.)

But later on, Albert returns to the subject to place it in a serious perspective. It’s about the most solemn he gets the whole evening. “We’re not trying to deny ‘The Reaper,’ ” he assures me. “We got a bigger budget and the record company’s more excited about us, and we did pretty well this year financially. Everything is because of ‘The Reaper.’ But this is not a followup.”

What will be the first single from Spectres?

“Right now we’re thinking about ‘Going Through The Motions,’ ” says Albert, “which sounds sort of like P.J. Proby. It’s the story of a relationship not built on love—but merely on the physical.” He lowers his voice for the last word, bugs his eyes in mock horror, and then, once again, laughs. “Real heavy. It was written by Eric with Ian Hunter.”

Which is not to say anything about odd couples...So how did that pair happen?

“We did a lot of gigs with Mott— they were headlining—and we got to know ’em,” he explains. “Then Ian moved to Connecticut near where .Erie lives and they ran into each other at a party. Eric got Ian’s address and started hanging out with him. We had started rehearsing for this album at the time, and Eric didn’t have any songs and he felt real bad. So he called up Ian and said ‘Hey, let’s write a song,’ and they got together and knocked it out in an afternoon.”

Then I asked Albert to tell me how the album in general (which they are still keeping almost completely under wraps) came together. “What happened,” he describes, “is we came in with ten songs totally unrelated, and then we dropped four of them. And when we came back from being on the road several weeks in July, the stuff we came back with was definitely with the knowledge of what else we had going on the album. I think that the four new songs fill in the gaps. Also, in the original six, there is no killer, fast rock ’n’ roll and we needed some of that, which is part of what we added. One of the songs we added is what you might expect from Steve Miller and another is what you might expect from Queen...”

Donald wakes up at this reference. “Queen?” he inquires. “Yeah,” says Albert, naming the tune in question: “ ‘Golden Age.’ ” Donald: “A Queen song???” Albert: “Listen to it.” Donald: “I’d be very surprised if I heard that from Queen.” Albert goes on to justify the characterization. “You hear all those high harmonies...and it’s sort of like an opera, a mini-opera...” Seeking to nail the Queen culprit, I query the two of them: Who wrote it? And it’s Albert who responds: “Donald,” he says guilelessly. “It has a lot of harmonies on it...The album as a whole has a lot of harmonies on it, a lot more than we’ve ever done.”

Big Question: Can they do it? Can the Blue Oyster Cult snag their second all-important mass hit? Is that what they have in mind in these sessions?

“I think this alburti is more commercial just because we’re getting better,” opines Donald. “That’s a part of the Cult’s maturation process that we become more integrated into the mainstream of pop music. The longer we go on, we’re not getting farther out. The fact is, we’re getting closer to the mainstream.”

Yes, the BOC is closer to the mainstream. Yes, I think they will have their followup hit. On the other hand: no, I don’t think Donald sees the process correctly. As far as I can tell, it’s not really that the BOC is changing their jagged course, more that the Seventies mainstream has somehow turned into the Crooked River.