The only other thing I can remember from 1972, about BOC, is the favorable reviews from Circus and other rock rags, especially Lester Bangs. Stay tuned for Chapter Two!
I've been collating as many reviews as I can recently - here's what I have for that 1st LP - by the way, one review of that album I've been searching for - for ages - is Jon Tiven's review from "Changes" - they used some of his quotes on the adverts at the time - if anyone has a copy, please let me know!! :
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Blue Oyster Cult (Columbia)
Lillian Roxon
Daily News, New York
Sun 06 Feb 1972 - 720206
The Top of Pop - The Blue Oyster Platter
by Lillian Roxon
On the front cover, under a black and starry sky, are buildings and a railroad track extending to infinity. On the back cover, equally surreal, are an infinity of rooms with doors but no windows or ceiling. Don't ever look at them when you're feeling paranoid; they'll frighten you.
The Blue Oyster Cult, native to Long Island, have finally made an album, and the cover pictures of a country you have never seen are properly descriptive of the music they enclose - the familiar made menacing, yet, ultimately, dream-like and tender. It is a strange album and as fascinating as a snake.
When I heard this group live a few months ago, and I must point out that everyone was in a very mellow mood that night, I screamed out that it was cosmic and the music of the spheres. That holds for the record, but only after about the fifth or sixth playing.
You have to devote at least one hearing to the lead guitar alone. Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser is a completely original guitarist who not only doesn't copy other people but also hardly ever repeats himself. He does something really interesting and eye-popping on every single cut.
Listen to the way the album starts and notice how he can make the instrument convey cold horror without all that tacky cheap screaming that has made so much "heavy" rock so impossible to listen to any more.
Because of a truly dumb decision not to include the lyrics, you have to play the album three times for the lyrics alone. Even then, you're better off with a lyric sheet, which you can get by writing an irate letter to Murray Krugman, Columbia Records, 51 W. 52nd St. New York, N.Y. 10019, and enclosing this column. That'll show them what a mistake they made.
The record opens with a song called "Transmaniacon M.C." about a motor cycle club (that's what the M.C. stands for) that spreads terror at Altamont.
The lyrics ("Pure nectar of antipathy/behind that stage at dawn") are sheer poetry, as are the lyrics of "Before the Kiss, a Redcap," which has nothing to do with railroad porters and a lot to do with a bar in Long Island where the gin glows in the dark and the patrons' thoughts grow too big for their skulls.
Sandy Pearlman, the eccentric writer and poet who has become the group's resident lyricist, manager and honorary transmaniac, likes images of violence redeemed by beauty - lips like swollen roses, ice too thick to be sliced by the light, sailors with black telescopes.
It is very exciting to see how completely the band has been able to get into his head and into the head of another famous eccentric, Richard Meltzer, who has contributed two of my personal favorites, "Stairway to the Stars" and "She's as Beautiful as a Foot." This last, he told me, was inspired by a former lead singer with the group whose face, Richard swears, <i>did</i> look like a foot. In the song, when you bite the face, it tastes like (what else?) a fallen arch.
"Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll" ("Three thousand guitars/my ears will melt...") is the one getting all the airplay, and the third from last song on the LP. It is supposed to be the climax of the violence. I'm more turned on by the first half when everything, lyrics, lead guitar and the complete unity of the band, all come as a constant surprise.
But the band likes the second half best, and who knows by the eighteenth listening what the rest of us will think? This is a band about which I'd be very interested to hear your opinion, but please, only after at least five plays and a close study of the lyrics.
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Blue Oyster Cult
Lester Bangs
30 March 72
Rolling Stone
Blue Oyster Cult
Columbia 31063
Released: May 1972
Chart Peak: #172
Weeks Charted: 8
Through a combination of circumstances, New York has never been a spawning ground for very many good, enduring white rock 'n' roll bands. The Velvet Underground spring readily to mind, and the Rascals, and there have been several fine oneshots that never got the attention they deserved, like the Good Rats and Autosalvage. But the Big Apple, as us farmboys call it, hasn't really come through with solid rockout organizations too often. Now, with the Blue Oyster Cult, New York has produced its first authentic boogie beast, and with any like this one should be around for awhile.
Sandy Pearlman, one of the Cult's managers, modestly described this album as "better than Killer, but not quite as good as Master of Reality." While I can't honestly say that they have yet attained the degree of maniacal control held by either Alice or Black Sabbath, they do have the formula down better than most bands in recent memory, and not only that, but at times they sound a lot like the Music Machine, of "Talk Talk" and one-black-glove-on-each-member's-pick-hand fame, not to mention the whole 1965-6-7 acid-fuzztone-feedback-freakout genre. Which means in front that they have achieved a highly delicate synthesis, uniting the noise which some of us old farts of 23 grew up on and loved with the Zeppelin-Sabbath-Grand Funk juggernaut-rock which many of us have had so much trouble with and which "the kids," of course, thrive on. And that means that the potential audience for a band of this type is very large indeed.
Their first album is an almost too-perfect melange of highly proximate style that, due to production with a definite lack of laser flash and technicolor presence, tends to sound rather mundane, almost monotonous at first. But once you get into it -- and by the second playing you can't help but begin to hear all the great ideas and deft touches -- it'll grab you and move inevitably to the font of your play-pile.
Contrasts abound: "Cities On Flame With Rock and Roll"is the group's big Black Sabbath move, complete with deep gutty guitar slices and triumphantly sociopathic lyrics ("My heart is black/And my lips are cold/Cities on flame/With rock and roll/3000 guitars/They seem to cry/My ears will melt/And then my eye"). "Workshop of the Telescopes" is prototype sci-fi rock, but Merlin-fantasy as opposed to Pink Floyd's and Kantner/Slick's Star Trek fixations, while "She's As Beautiful As A Foot" is as misterioso as any Doors song, although the vocal sounds more like Sky Saxon of the Seeds: "Didn't believe it when he bit into her face/It tasted just like a fallen arch." You would have to hear it to realize just how haunted they can make those words sound; camp it ain't.
"Screams" is the ultimate psychedelic paranoia fantasy, beating Grand Funk's "Paranoid" for sure though maybe not Black Sabbath's classic of the same name and sounding somewhat like Neil Young's "Out of My Mind" plasticised and distended by the Shadows of Knight into a quiet schizo raveup. The identification with the deranged social rebel originally called for in Norman Mailer's The White Negro continues in "Transmaniacon M.C.," a song about Altamont told, if from a rather fanciful distance (bikers never say, "So clear the road m' bully boys"), from the Angels' point of view, which I find a refreshing tack to say the least. And it sounds the most like the Music Machine of anything here.
But there are two songs that rise above the rest to become methodical, compressed statements in two different styles that really define what rock 'n' roll is all about. "Stairway To The Stars" is a modified boogie with MC5 overtones -- modified in the sense that you take an old Ford and turn it into a rod -- about superstar arrogance and loving every minute of it: "You can drive my motorcar/It's insured to 30 thou." Cool. Words, as on "She's As Beautiful As A Foot," by one R. Meltzer. Kid writes dame fine lyrics, even if he is a rock critic.
"Then Came the Last Days of May," and everybody got somebody else's kicks. Probably the first song on the record to leap out and make you realize that something's happening in here, it's a poignant rock 'n' roll ballad utilizing expert guitar work to create the paradoxical exhilaration that comes form the artful sketching of a mightily depressing situation. The lyrics tell the whole tale: "Three good buddies were laughin' and smokin' in the back of a rented Ford/They couldn't know they weren't goin' far... The sky is bright, the traffic light/Now and then a truck/And they hadn't seen a cop around all day (Brief choral interjection: "What luuuck!")/They brought everything they needed/Bags and scales to weight the stuff/The driver said the border's just over the bluff..." Followed by a quietly ominous guitar solo and the ghastly denouncement; it's a teen tragedy of our time. Of such stuff are great songs made.
I don't think you should miss this album. It sounds a wee bit too calculated, and there is the lack of all-out do-or-die mania, the kind of mania epitomized by the Stooges and Black Pearl at its core, as I find missing in Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin. But that probably doesn't matter too much. Everybody loves being manipulated by Cooper and Zep, and despite the higher degree of consciousness which belies adolescent urgency in its purest form, the rushes are just about as gratifying. And the Blue Oyster Cult does possess and understand The Sound as we've known and loved it -- it's as beautiful as a foot.
- Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone, 3/30/72.
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Blue Öyster Cult (Columbia 31063)
Nick Tosches, Fusion, May 1972
May 1972
Fusion
NEVER JUDGE a fellow earthling by the way he/she looks; this was perhaps the first lesson I gleaned from the Blue Öyster Cult — upon perusing a photo of the group, I prejudged them to be but nerds. Then I heard the album. Results? Penatial self-flagellation and a Regis Debray haircut.
The Blue Öyster Cult (the reason for the umlaut over the oscular vowel in the group's name is, like such matters as the Mayan codices and the Necronomicon, best left undelved into) are involved in post-literate lyrics and post-taste music. Who else, with the minutely possible exception of The Holy Modal Rounders, would venture to not only perform and record, but also flaunt, a song titled 'I'm On the Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep'? Or construct an entire song around being offered a Tuinol from the whiskey-drenched tongue-tip of some sleazeferal endomorph in a Long Island bar ('Before the Kiss, a Redcap' — which also includes one of the most eerily sensual images in modern hieratix, that of bottles of "gin that glows in the dark")? And the regressive post-literate is as fully represented as the obsessive decadent strain of 'Before the Kiss, a Redcap' and others such as 'Transmaniacon M.C.' (an homage/pieta to Mars/Set qua biker punch-punch) and 'Workshop of the Telescopes' — there's the spooky infantilism of 'Beautiful As a Foot' ("She's as beautiful as a foot/She heard someone say/The other day") and the homicidal 'Stairway to the Stars'.
And the cover's got an upside-down ankh coupled with one of the most brain-waiving exercises in graphic perspective around. So come out to where theta-wave jukeboxes moil in the gaseous strata of Neptune. Come out to where religious icons bear the desecration-scars of too many sardonic A-minors. Come out to where grim, light-drooling gods etch the likenesses of amphetamine-raven ebb-forms into Plutonian barroom floors. Come to Blue Öyster Cult country.
© Nick Tosches, 1972
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Blue Oyster Cult (Columbia)
Billy Altman
11 Oct 1972 - 721011
Spectrum
If you haven't heard this album yet (and knowing how little you people care about new groups you probably haven't), you better run out and buy it quick. 'Cause the Cult's next album’is gonna tear across the nation just like J. Geils' second album did, and if you get this one, you can be there to say "I told you so."
There is absolutely no reason in the world why these bums shouldn't take over the world of 70's rock'n'roll. They're the best new band of this year, and the fact that there's been almost no serious competition doesn't take anything away from them. Their first record is a rock'n'roll testament: a document that will taste great if eaten and even better if played over and over.
This ain't no new album, either. It's been lying on my turntable for months and months now, and sometimes it plays itself without my hands touching the knobs. But there's something that's been holding back on my telling you all about it. Probably greed - or maybe that the time just wasn't right.
Well, they'll be here a week from tonight, so I guess now's as good a time as any. Of course, the Cult couldn't care less about all of this, being a punk band in the best sense of the word.
Arguments rage among the various contingents as to whether the Cult play the music of the future - the rock to be. Personally, I never think about it. I just go nuts every time I hear them. There's a freshness, a sense of new beginnings, a feeling of breakthrough, together with a vague sense of familiarity and having heard it somewhere before, in the back of your psyche.
If I had my way, I'd put the whole album on side one, so I wouldn't have to forsake the first side for the second when "Before the Kiss, a Redcap" ends. The album starts with "Transmaniacon MC," a tender folk ballad about love between man and motorcycle. Actually, it's about Altamont, as seen from the eyes of an angel. You know, two sides to every story, etc.
Starting with the first of a series of ultimate riffs and tongues that appear throughout the record, it really sounds like an S. Clay Wilson strip set to music, complete with Tree Frog beer and the Checkered Demon. The song is absolutely devastating in its sense of attack and killer potential realized.
By no mistake, the producers are Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, with assistance by ace maniac R. Meltzer. This is a critic's band all the way, seriously thought out before execution. Meltzer contributes lyrics on "She's as Beautiful as a Foot," a glorious perverted love song. The album's words are about murder, rock stardom, "Stairways to the Stars," redcaps - all those lovely realities that very few bands have the balls to talk about.
"Cities on Flame with Rock'n'Roll" has all of urban civilization melting in the face of three thousand guitars while the children dance. Flesh and steel succumb to the omnipotent force of pure tongue. Lead guitarist Buck Dharma is one of the most fear inspiring guitarists I've every been steamrolled over by.
On each tune, he comes from nowhere in blazing, uncompromising notes such as I've never encountered anywhere but Hendrix. Eric Bloom is great singer in the best punk tradition of Lou Reed and Sky Saxon. The Bouchard brothers, Joe and Albert, handle bass and drums respectively, and Albert is terror on the skins.
Though Lester got in print first, you all should know that Fernbacher snuffed them out immediately as being direct descendants to the year of 1965, and, more specifically, the Music Machine, Sean Bonniwell's gone and certainly forgotten battallion of gloved warriors. This album is the essence of "Talk Talk." Real storm trooper stuff.
Before this turns into a manifesto, let's just say that now is the time for... Look, if you're sick of lamo rock (that's you, and Mr. and Ms. Grateful Dead) and you'd love nothing better than to cut off both of Marmadukes' ears, join the Blue Oyster Cult on their journey to oblivion. On, Mush, you Huskies!
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Blue Oyster Cult
Robert Christgau
1981
Christgau's Record Guide
Warning: critics' band, managed by Sandy Pearlman with occasional lyrics by R. Meltzer. Reassurance: the most musical hard rock album since Who's Next. (Well, that's less than six months, and this is not a great time for hard rock albums.) The style is technocratic psychedelic, a distanced, decisively post-Altamont reworking of the hallucinogenic guitar patterns of yore, with lots of heavy trappings. Not that they don't have a lyrical side. In "Then Came the Last Days of May," for instance, four young men ride out to seek their fortune in the dope biz and one makes his by wasting the other three.
B+
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
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Blue Oyster Cult
William Ruhlmann
1995
The All-Music Guide to Rock
Blue Oyster Cult's debut album provided the missing link between the heavy, blues-based rock of the late '60s and the bombastic heavy metal of the '70s and beyond. You could hear major influences like Steppenwolf, with its melodic/aggressive rock, the Rolling Stones (post-'65), and even boogie bands like Canned Heat in their sound. But BOC streamlined the approach, picked up the tempo, overlaid the guitars, brought the rhythm section up in the mix, and de-emphasized the blues, giving the music a machinelike propulsion. Manager/co-producer Sandy Pearlman (who co-wrote five songs) and lyricist Richard Meltzer (who co-wrote two) may have seen the group as a vehicle for their "clever" (in fact, pretentious) lyrics, but in fact lead vocalist Eric Bloom was the weakest element in the band, and you couldn't make out much of what he had to say over guitarist Donald "Buck" Dharma Roeser's furious power chording. What you could seemed to express some sort of mythology -- or demonology; future metal bands would fill their songs with just such half-baked philosophies. Blue Oyster Cult was not quite full-fledged heavy metal: the production was too compressed, the playing too light and energetic. But it was the sound of something new and different in the world of hard rock. * * * *
- William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
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