Sure, millions have written, asking, “Tipa, I know and agree that Blue Oyster Cult is the most kick-buttingest rock band EVER, but they have SO MANY GREAT SONGS! Which songs should I have on my Hallowe’en playlist?”
Well, that’s a great question. BOC isn’t just Eric Bloom, Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, Al & Joe Bouchard and Allen Lanier, especially since this classic lineup hasn’t been together for years. Sandy Perlman wrote many of their early songs based around a mythology of alien visitation and supernatural control of humanity that would make HP Lovecraft and millions of trick-or-treaters feel right at home.
You’ve already added “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” to your playlist, so I won’t say much about it. This is one of the patented Buck Dharma ballads that made BOC famous. But if you haven’t heard Dharma’s “Harvest Moon” off the album “Heaven Forbid”, you’re missing a treat. A creepy tale of an evil presence that kills and leaves the thaws of spring to uncover the grisly remains.
I sense the darkness clearer
I feel a presence here
A change in the weather
I feel some evil here
I hear some frightful noises
I don’t go out at night
Since Bobrow’s youngest daughter
Disappeared from sight
“The Old Gods Return” from “Curse of the Hidden Mirror”, written by new lyricist, SF author John Shirley, is a Cthulhu-like tale of ancient creatures, sleeping for eons, who have come back to wipe the stain of humanity from the world. Eric Bloom’s voice lifts us up and crashes us into Hell.
Now is the time the moon is in alignment
With the unknown zodiac, the untold sign
Of the fiery maniac within each breast
Awaits a stirring irridescent whirring
Of a six eyed god whose wings beat
In a time so odd, so very odd
And we’re all lost, all of us blessedly lost
BOC’s collaboration with SF writers extends back to their work with noted New Wave writer Michael Moorcock, as on Fire of Unknown Origin’s “Veteran of Psychic Wars”, the song they contributed to the cult animated film “Heavy Metal”. Buck Dharma’s eerie guitar work entwined around Bloom’s droning, tormented voice, counterpointed with the faltering, labored march of Al Bouchard’s drums and Allen Lanier’s otherworldy synth work make this true classic perfect for making ghouls and goblins feel welcome:
You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars
I’ve been living on the edge so long, where the winds of limbo roar
And I’m young enough to look at, and far too old to see
All the scars are on the inside
I’m not sure that there’s anything left of me
Also on FoUO, “Sole Survivor”, about a man who received a vision of humanity’s end and had just time enough to save himself, but wakes up alone in the world.
Wind blew across the sand
He stood alone and he had no plan
And with the last rays of the sun
He screamed aloud, began to run
“Spectres” has the crowd-pleasing “Godzilla” (Al Bouchard used to wear a Godzilla head when BOC played this), and also the Buck Dharma’s dreamy “I Love the Night”, a tale of a young man’s fateful meeting with a beautiful vampire:
That night her kiss told me it was over
I walked out late into the dark
The misty gloom seems to soak up my sorrow
The further I went on I felt a spreading calm
Then suddenly my eyes were bathed in a light
And the lovely lady in white was by my side
She said “Like me I see you’re walking alone
Won’t you please stay?” I couldn’t look away
Leave the CD running for Joe Bouchard’s “Nosferatu”, about a vampire undone by a woman’s love:
He screamed with fear, he’d stayed too long in her room
The morning sun had come too soon
The spell was broken with a kiss of doom
He vanished into dust, left her all alone
Secret Treaties, the last album before “Agents of Fortune” would make them famous, follows the one-two punch of “Harvester of Eyes” and “Flaming Telepaths” with what possibly is my favorite Cult tune, “Astronomy”, where the powers of darkness and evil gather to herald the birth of messiah of the night, Desdenova:
The clock strikes twelve and moondrops burst
Out at you from their hiding place
Like acid and oil on a madman’s face
His reason tends to fly away
Like lesser birds on the four winds
Like silver scrapes in May
Now the sands become a crust
And most of you have gone away
A trip to their first album before the end, “Then Came the Last Days of May” about a drug deal gone wrong. Included here not for its supernatural overtones – it has none – but for the alternately pushing and floating lyrics lifted by Dharma’s dreamlike guitar to make a beauty that masks the horror:
It wasn’t until the car suddenly stopped
In the middle of a cold and barren place
And the other guy turned and spilled
Three boys blood, did they know a trap had been lain?
If you only have a chance to buy one album for your BOC-laced festivities, though, make that one album Imaginos. Born of an Al Bouchard solo project that would unify and add to the band’s Perlman-penned “Desdenova” mythos, many don’t consider this a ‘real’ BOC album, but Columbia had no interest in releasing it as anything else. Imaginos includes remakes of Astronomy and Subhuman (here titled Blue Oyster Cult), and tales of horror from beyond the stars as told through Les Invisibles, the short-story-in-song Magna of Illusion, and “The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria”:
On the terminal point
Of the cul-de-sac
Patients are dying
The horses are dazed
From the glare of stars
The starry wisdom
Owned by the Baron
And he’s got the cure
BOC Forever!