I ask him if they thought the less-educated bands in their circuit seemed like cave-dwelling dummies to them. College was the cultivating medium for the band.” We all got it together playing in college bands. Eric Bloom was the one with his nose closest to the street but he went to college, too. He also claims that the band was more erudite than their peers in the arena-rock sweepstakes. Oh, and he came up with the name Buck Dharma, too.Īl Bouchard was Blue Öyster Cult’s drummer from their days as Soft White Underbelly until 1981, when he was unceremoniously fired, mid-tour. Pearlman went so far as conjure up distinct visual images, like lead singer Eric Bloom’s sleazy leather-man look and Buck Dharma’s shiny white suits. Not only did the two pen such memorable lines as ‘Got a whip in my hand, baby/And a girl or a husky at leather’s end’ ( I’m On The Lamb…) and ‘Three thousand guitars/They seem to cry/My ears will melt/And then my eyes’ ( Cities On Flame…), but Meltzer also used his considerable power within the press to write increasingly implausible tales of Blue Öyster Cult’s debauched madness on the road. Richard Meltzer and Sandy Pearlman both wrote for the seminal 60s rock magazine Crawdaddy, and both went on to long and varied careers in journalism and music production, but they will forever be remembered as the architects of Blue Öyster Cult’s ride on the hot rails to Hell. Hippies, really, but hippies with vision – and two hotshot, first-generation gonzo rock writers scribbling endless pages of freaky lyrics for them. Blue Öyster Cult were not warlocks or space bosses or even backyard Satanists, they were engineering students and fantasy-novel readers from upstate New York who started their musical lives together as a jam band called Soft White Underbelly in 1967. In this case, the truth is almost comically anticlimactic. At least, that’s how it looked from the back of the van…Īs with most rock’n’roll stories, the truth could not possibly be as brain-melting as the adolescent super fantasy. Blue Öyster Cult were the belching biker beasts that destroyed the Summer of Love. Guys who worked on their vans all day and lost their virginity in the woods to the local acid queen during an all-night beer bash would listen incessantly to mysteriously titled BÖC albums like Secret Treaties and Tyranny And Mutation, scanning the covers for hours, searching for hidden symbols and arguing over what, exactly, a ‘ screaming diz-buster’ was. They were the original stoner rock band, mixing up a lethal cocktail of ancient witchcraft and technical ecstasy, and jacking it all straight into the pleasure centres of all the heavy metal kids of the me-first decade. BÖC were men of mystery, wrapping their proggy thunder rock in nearly impenetrable sci-fried lyrics about harvesters of eyes and silverfish imperatrixes, hiding their human faces behind lasers and motorcycles and mirror shades, carefully cultivating a sinister image that hinted at exotic drug experimentation and dark occult practices.

The lamb band called the cult