I didn’t even know if it was getting to the right person.Ī few months later Blue Öyster Cult was playing at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park, July 16, 1973. I told him how much I liked his playing and the band’s music. So…I wrote him a letter, on that lined paper that school kids use. I was a shy kid and thought, you didn’t just call Rock Stars up. And a phone number! Could that be the Donald Roeser? Not a common name…maybe I could just call him up and find out!īut I didn’t have the nerve. I took out the Suffolk County phone book and looked for their names Eric Bloom, Allen Lanier, Albert Bouchard, Joe Bouchard… Donald Roeser. Some months later, an article in Long Island newspaper Newsday profiled the band, and noted that the band members lived on Long Island. Photo by Wikimedia Commons/Eric Meola, Columbia Records. He was rocking but wasn’t playing the usual weedly-weedly rock guitar clichés of the day – it was a far more inventive and virtuosic style. The songs sounded like nothing I’d heard before, rocking hard but…different, with mysterious musical twists and turns and impenetrable yet evocative lyrics about motorcycle gangs, Canadian Mounties, silverfish imperatrix, cities on flame – all set to the beat of roaring guitars and Buck Dharma’s astounding lead playing. The review encouraged me to get the band’s eponymously titled debut album.īy the second song, “I’m on the Lamb but I Ain’t No Sheep,” I was completely stunned. In 1972 a review by Ed Ward in Creem raved about a new band called Blue Öyster Cult, and in particular, the talents of their lead guitarist, Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser. Every month, the magazines Creem and Circus came out and I devoured them, windows into that mythical rock and roll world I so much wanted to be a part of. Add to this the swirling quizzicality of "Workshop of the Telescopes" that lent the band some of its image cred.When I was a teenager I wanted to be a rock star. From its knotty, overdriven riff to its rhythm guitar vamp, Vox organ shimmer, its crash cymbal ride and plodding bass and drum slog through the changes - not to mention its title - it is the ultimate in early metal anthems. But it is on "Cities on Flame With Rock & Roll," that the Cult's sinister plan for world domination is best displayed. Other standouts include the cosmic "Stairway to the Stars," the boogie rave-up "Before the Kiss, a Redcap," that sounded like a mutant Savoy Brown meeting Canned Heat at Altamont. From the next track on "I'm on the Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep," elliptical lyrics talked about "the red and the black," while darkening themselves with stunning riffs and crescendos that were as theatrical as they were musical, and insured the Cult notice among the other acts bursting out of the seams of post-'60's rock. This is dark, amphetamine-fueled occult music that relied on not one, but three guitars - Bloom and keyboardist Allen Lanier added their own parts to Roeser's incessant riffing: a barely audible upright piano keeping the changes rooted in early rock and the blues, and a rhythm attack by Bouchard and his brother Joe on bass that was barely contained inside the tune's time signature. From the opener, "Transmaniacon MC," the listener knew something very different was afoot. This was on purpose - to draw the listener into the songs cryptically and ambiguously. The band's debut relied heavily on the lyrics of Pearlman and rock critic Richard Meltzer, as well as Pearlman's pioneering production that layered guitars in staggered sheets of sound over a muddy mix that kept Eric Bloom's delivery in the middle of the mix and made it tough to decipher. Managed and produced by the astronomically minded and conspiratorially haunted Sandy Pearlman, BÖC rode the hot, hellbound rails of blistering hard rock as pioneered by Steppenwolf, fierce mutated biker blues, and a kind of dark psychedelia that could have only come out New York. Two years before Kiss roared out of Long Island with its self-titled debut, Blue Öyster Cult, the latest incarnation of a band assembled by guitarist Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser and drummer Albert Bouchard in 1967, issued its dark, eponymously-titled heavy rock monolith.
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