“We were in a hotel room, on the fourth or fifth floor and we were playing with KISS, they might have been opening for us I don’t remember,” Eric reminisces of one tour. “We took everything in the hotel room and threw it out the window, the room was bare to the walls, all the stuff was in a river. So as the police were coming up the hotel manager called us and we all ran to different rooms and repopulated the room with furniture, so it all looked fine.” After a chuckle, Eric reconsiders the 40-year-old brouhaha. “Maybe you should use that story. If I wanted any stories to get out there I would have told them already, the ones that haven’t gotten out never will. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of stories to tell, from limo rides, inside jokes, airplane incidents. We had a crew guy travelling with us who insulted a flight attendant and she quit on the spot and the whole plane had to wait for her replacement before we took off. There are a million stories. We had some band members get into a fist fight with some cowboys in Oklahoma, they were really stoned and drunk and insulted these cowboys’ wives so the cowboys threw the band through a window and we had to buy the window the next day. Anything that can happen over 40 years, it happened to us.”
While they may be best know for the hit Don’t Fear The Reaper, which is also known for a Saturday Night Live skit in which Will Ferrell plays the cowbell (“We are going to play the song if anyone cares about the cowbell, we will see.”), Blue Öyster Cult have been playing since 1967, making them true torch bearers of the rock’n’roll riff. They carry with them a whole lot of music history.
“As a kid I used to listen to AM radio in the late ‘50s. I discovered music just after Elvis, so the late Do-Wop era and the beginning of pre-Beatles,” says Eric. “I used to listen to them on the radio and sneak the radio back on after my mother told me to go to sleep. That is what got me into music. I remember I was in my second year of college in 1964 and a roommate had brought Meet The Beatles back with him from the UK, so we already had it and no one in the States had even heard of the Beatles at that stage. We listened to it and we weren’t sure if it was going to click or not, so I guess we weren’t very smart.”
Smart enough to fall in with the right group of guys though. “We lived in one house, the whole band in one house, and the basement was a makeshift rehearsal area with fibreglass padding in every corner to hold the sound down. So we would rehearse two, three, four hours a day and then go out and play a gig whenever we could find one. Music was the number one thing, we didn’t have any money but we had music. We were all trying to take whatever experiences we had and put them into a melting pot.”
The sound, so distinct to the band, was crafted in these formative years. “There is never an invention of music there is always an evolution, you take your formative years and what you liked. The key to the arrangements is that it all came from five places, it was a very democratic band, plus our manager would be there quite often for rehearsals and he had an idea of what the aesthetic should be. And we needed guidance.” Like all bands, they had their differences, but the Cult came up with one of the most original revenges I have ever heard. They have a song She’s As Beautiful As A Foot, which is an odd turn of phrase, so I asked Eric about it.
“Richard Meltzer wrote that lyric and the way it was explained to me was he did not care for our original singer, the guy before me, they butted heads personality wise,” he confesses. “So he wrote that song and called it He Is As Beautiful As A Foot. That was the original lyric because he thought it would be funny to have that guy singing about himself without knowing it was about him.” Most normal bands would just get into fights.
This will be Blue Öyster Cult’s first Australian tour and they are coming out to headline Dig It Up! The Hoodoo Gurus Invitational, a festival featuring the Gurus (obviously) Flamin’ Groovies, the Buzzcocks, The Stems, The Lime Spiders, The Moodists, Peter Case Band, Ron S. Peno & The Superstitions, The Straight Arrows, Super Wild Horses, Chris Russell’s Chicken Walk, Bored Nothing, The New Christs, Kim Salmon & Leanne Cowie, The Crusaders and a bunch of others. Really, if you listed to alt-rock in the ‘80s you will love this.
“We will play the obvious songs and some deep tracks from the albums,” Eric promises. “Every show I hope to make a little bit different, I know we have some Australian fans who have already bought tickets to every show, so I have to keep it different for them.”
BY JACK FRANKLIN
