![]() “That’s why I’m talking to you today.”īlue Oyster Cult was initially more of an underground sensation – the thinking person’s metal band – until “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” went huge in 1976. Later, he was asked to help out with their live sound, then, in late 1968, move into the band house and finally to join the band. That got us off the ground, but after a while I think we balked at that and we wanted the public to know who we were.”īloom, who had played guitar in a band at Hobart College, met Pearlman and most band members when they were buying amps at a Long Island music shop he was working in. Pearlman, says Bloom, “wanted us to be invisible as people and for a couple of years, that was fine. Rowling chose Blue Oyster Cult as a key element in her latest crime bestseller (see box).Īt first, band members’ faces didn’t appear on album covers. An appeal that extends to today, when author J.K. His lyrics – be they dark, mysterious, quirky, oblique or sci-fi-oriented – lent the heavy-metal band a more intellectual and mystical appeal. … Having lyricists amongst us right from the beginning helped the band get started and gave the band its early flavor.”Ĭredit Pearlman for being one of the main visionaries. In early days, Bloom says, “Some songs we wrote ourselves, but right from the get-go we started writing songs with outside lyricists. While the current lineup has been relatively solid for some time, more than a dozen players have passed through the band's portals. (Lanier died in 2013 of COPD the Bouchard brothers left long ago, but have rejoined upon special occasions.) Not just Pearlman but Patti Smith, Helen Wheels, Richard Meltzer and others. But there were many behind-the-scenes collaborators. There were co-frontmen Bloom and Roeser, guitarist-keyboardist Allen Lanier and the brothers Joe and Albert Bouchard on bass and drums respectively. When you saw the nascent Blue Oyster Cult, you saw five guys on stage churning out blazing triple guitar riffs and playing the best heavy rock songs of the day. ![]() ![]() Pearlman co-wrote 20 BOC songs plus the entirety of the band’s 1988 album, “Imaginos.”Īs to “ME 262,” Bloom acknowledges the point of view is “certainly an unusual take.” And that’s what Pearlman did best, venture into lyrical territory few rock bands at the time did: extraterrestrials, drug deals gone bad, the Hells Angels at the deadly Altamont rock festival, astronomy, the Canadian mounted police force, a female serial killer. He was pivotal in the band’s career, from its formation and naming, to getting the band signed to Columbia Records, to crafting its public image to writing lyrics. That would be Sandy Pearlman, who died July 26 at age 72. I have thought about the lyric content and whether anybody’s catching it here or there you never know how anybody will perceive anything.”īloom and BOC singer-guitarist Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser wrote the music, but, Bloom says, “it’s a Pearlman lyric and who knows where he was coming from when he wrote that song?” ![]() “It’s no different than any other tune,” Bloom says, “but in England, certainly, somebody might be sensitive about it. Bloom sings about the plane hanging in the air, a target, “like some heavy metal fruit” with the pilot asking, again and again, “Must these Englishmen live that I might die?/Must they live that I might die?” It’s pretty certain the band will play it Saturday night at its Payomet Performing Arts Center concert.īloom sings “ME 262” from a unique viewpoint: A German bombardier during WW II, piloting the world’s first jet-powered fighter aircraft, the Messerschmitt ME 262. The song is “ME 262.” The group played it recently in London and were about to at a festival in Germany, where I caught up by phone last week with singer-guitarist Eric Bloom. And it’s still a centerpiece of Blue Oyster Cult’s live set. The song was written more than four decades ago and it concerns a topic of keen interest three decades before that. ![]()
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