The Origin Of Storms
Posted on | November 21, 2004 at 5:30 pm | 2 Comments
As most of those who have known me for more than a few years can attest, I was really into the band Blue Oyster Cult for many, many years. They were my favorite band from around the late 70s to the late 80s. I saw them in concert many times and eagerly awaited each new album (which, for awhile, came out every year like clockwork – ah, the good old days of hard-working, prolific bands). I made every attempt to find out and decipher the cryptic lyrics, which in the days before the Internet, was not very easy. In fact, I remember sending away to the band for the lyrics, and I received back a sheaf of computer-printed dot matrix green-bar paper containing them. And I don’t think they were all correct.
I still like the band, but they’ve only done two studio albums since the late 80s, so unless you want to follow the band around on their endless tours, there’s not really much for a BOC fan to do these days but play those old albums and dream of better days.
So, anyway, when I heard there was a new book out about the band, I snapped it up and read it quickly over my vacation last week. Those of you without any interest in the band or any interest in my interest in the band may want to skip the rest of this. Otherwise, click on the “read more” for my review of Blue Oyster Cult: Secrets Revealed!
This is a slim volume, but it’s actually fairly dense – 189 pages of small print. The writing, by Martin Popoff, is serviceable but not overly exciting. The author himself admits that it was something he pretty much just threw together from band interviews he did and from published interviews. So much of the book is just non-cleaned up quotes from the band. Heck, some passages (like the story of how Eric joined the band) are repeated more than once. But for someone like me, who has really wondered all these years what’s behind the songs, it’s a real treasure chest. Not only does he interview the band members, but the various people in the BOC orbit have their say as well: producers, managers, hangers-on, and most importantly (since the band did not write most of its own lyrics), lyricists.
In fact, the book really concentrates on the songs rather than being some kind of tell-all about the band members. I found this to be a refreshing approach. Each chapter details a different album, and breaks down the writing of the songs, especially in regards to the lyrics. I would’ve preferred more information about the music, as there is very little analysis of it, but finding out about the writing and the lyrics is interesting enough. Although I did find it strange that for a book which concentrates on the meanings of the songs, the lyrics are not actually included. Must be a rights issue or something.
I learned a number of things I never knew before. The book really clears up for me the making of the Imaginos album (which started life as a solo album by ex-band drummer Albert Bouchard, even though the songs are really part of the continuing BOC story cycle). It’s fascinating the twists and turns that disc went through. And after multiple attempts to explain the Imaginos storyline in the book (apparently the song order is wrong on the disc, and it makes a lot more sense if you listen to them in the proper order), I’m still not sure I understand it. And it was supposed to be the first disc in a proposed, never-completed trilogy. It was also supposed to be longer, as a couple of songs were left off in order to fit it on a single LP.
So, here’s a partial list of interesting things I didn’t know until I read this book:
* The song “Dominance and Submission” (from the band’s watershed album Secret Treaties) is about, of all things, The Beatles. As producer Sandy Pearlman (the song’s lyricist) says, “That is a metaphorical morality play, having to do with the unleashing of the dark forces of rock ‘n’ roll by – even though it seems weird now – by The Beatles on New Year’s Eve 1963.” He goes on to explain in greater detail, but I don’t want to type that all out, and interested people should just read the book anyway. It does make a little more sense once he details it.
* Lyricist and famed rock critic/writer Richard Meltzer doesn’t really seem to like the band or their music all that much. He does qualify the album Tyranny and Mutation as “listenable” though. I kept wondering, while reading his comments, why he kept sending the band his lyrics all those years if he didn’t really like what they did with them.
* The song “I’m Not The One You Were Looking For” on Mirrors really was an attempt by Al Bouchard to rewrite The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” (which I always suspected). He says it was a joke/parody song and was not really meant to be included on the album. Also, the cover of Mirrors is a photo-realistic painting, and if you look carefully, there are sperm in the clouds.
* Bonnie Tyler covered the song “Goin’ Through The Motions” (from Spectres) on her album Faster than The Speed of Night (although the book erroneously states it’s on Total Eclipse of the Heart). That’s the only time I can recall that a BOC song other than “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” or “Godzilla” or “This Ain’t The Summer of Love” has been covered, and it’s an odd choice.
* More songs on the album Fire of Unknown Origin were intended for the movie Heavy Metal than I initially thought. “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” was the only one that actually ended up in the movie/soundtrack, and it was pretty obvious that “Vengeance (The Pact)” (which is a retelling of the epic last story in the movie) and “Heavy Metal: Black and Silver” were meant for it too. But I didn’t know that “Don’t Turn Your Back” was in that group also (it refers to the story in the movie about the taxi driver). And I didn’t know that the one line in the song really was “You’ll use that special option in your car”. I thought I was mishearing that. Somehow, it diminishes the song for me…
* Two songs, “Hot Rails To Hell” (from Tyranny and Mutation) and “Deadline” (from Cultosaurus Erectus) are both about the same subject – the murder of a booking agent/band associate from some gambling-related issue.
* Songwriting credits are not always real reflective of who did what. Sometimes, someone will get a credit just for coming up with the idea or title. For example, one of the guys credited for “Joan Crawford” (from Fire of Unknown Origin) only came up with the line “Joan Crawford has risen from the grave”. The story behind that is pretty funny, BTW.
* BOC was originally signed to Columbia because Columbia wanted their own Black Sabbath. That’s not quite what they ended up with…
There’s so much more, but I don’t want to spoil the book for any interested parties. Buy it and read it yourself!
Latre.
Comments
2 Responses to “The Origin Of Storms”
November 21st, 2004 @ 10:15 pm
I’ve just recently been exploring an interest in BOC – I remember when the records first came out (or within a few years), young teenaged me thought there could be nothing cooler in the world than songs with lyrics (quoted in some long-ago review) like "by silverfish imperatrix / whose incorrupted eye / sees through the charms of doctors and their wives / by salamander drake / and the power that was undine / rise to claim saturn ring and sky / By those who see with their eyes closed / They know me by my black telescope" (that stolen from someone else’s website).
Utter nonsense, of course – but brilliant nonsense.
And your description of the book’s description of the "Imaginos" thing makes me wonder why I bother parodying ’70s rock concept albums at all…
November 21st, 2004 @ 10:23 pm
In the book, Pearlman does explain the whole "Workshop of the Telescopes" thing in such detail that it sure seems to make a funky kind of sense (to him, anyway), including Silverfish Imperatrix and the whole doctors/wives thing. It really is astounding how much thought went into all this, even if it is nutty thought.