![]() Their third album, Secret Treaties, was released in April 1974 and became their first to break into the Top 100 bestsellers. ![]() ![]() Columbia sent a promotional EP, Live Bootleg, to radio stations in October, and followed with BÖC's second album, Tyranny & Mutation, in February 1973. Blue Öyster Cult, their debut album, was released in January 1972 and made the lower reaches of the charts. A second Elektra album also went unreleased, though a single was issued under the name the Stalk-Forrest Group.nn Cut loose by Elektra, they changed their name again, to Blue Öyster Cult, and signed to Columbia Records in late 1971, by which time Winters had been replaced by Albert Bouchard's brother Joe. They then dropped Bronstein and replaced him with their road manager, Eric Bloom, as the band's name was changed to Oaxaca. This quintet signed to Elektra Records and recorded an album that was never released. Initially without a lead singer, they added Les Bronstein on vocals. The band that became Blue Öyster Cult was organized in 1967 at Stony Brook College on Long Island by students (and later rock critics) Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer as Soft White Underbelly and consisted of Andy Winters (bass), Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser (guitar), John Wiesenthal - quickly replaced by Allen Lanier - (keyboards), and Albert Bouchard (drums), with Pearlman managing and Pearlman and Meltzer writing songs. Put together on a college campus by a couple of rock critics, it maintained a close relationship with a series of literary figures (often in the fields of science fiction and horror), including Eric Von Lustbader, Patti Smith, Michael Moorcock, and Stephen King, while turning out some of the more listenable metal music of the early and mid-'70s. Add to this the swirling quizzicality of "Workshop of the Telescopes" that lent the band some of its image cred.Blue Öyster Cult was the thinking man's heavy metal group. 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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