The past few weeks of my life have featured four major pursuits:
*the start of my Summer semester of classes (two online classes, so it's not like I'm really "teaching" as I understand the concept in either theory or practice)
*golf (still shitty and consistently inconsistent play, but slightly less shitty, so...progress?!?)
*show binges (Legion, Westworld, Patrick Melrose, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Arrested Development, Tabula Rasa, and the CNN documentary 1968, among others)
*a shit-ton of Blue Öyster Cult
Blue Öyster Cult captivated me as a kid with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," as I'm sure it did with many Americans in that summer of 1976. (Stephen King's use of BÖC in The Stand helped to cement the song into my personal musical firmament, too.) However, aside from "Burnin' For You" and "Godzilla," I knew next to nothing about the band or their catalog, aside from the fact that a guy named Buck Dharma (!) was one of their guitarists. Oh yes, and Patti Smith (a.k.a. "HORSES! HORSES! HORSES!") helped out with some of the lyrics, as she dated a BÖC band member for years.
In my quest to maximize the surround-sound capabilities of my OPPO Blu-ray/SACD player, I've been hunting for multi-channel releases of classic albums for most of this year. I've picked up the 5.1 Steven Wilson mix of the first Roxy Music album, the 5.1 SACD mixes of the '70s output of Elton John (Tumbleweed Connection, Burn Down The Mission, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy), and some other odds and ends. But what really captured my imagination was two BÖC titles: the 5.1 SACD of Agents of Fortune and the 4.0 Quad SACD of Secret Treaties.
Released in that Bicentennial haze, Agents of Fortune is home to "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" as well as some other solid tracks (such as "This Ain't the Summer of Love" and "The Revenge of Vera Gemini"), so it was the one I listened to first. However, while it's a solid record, it wasn't quite the consistent rocker the way that I imagined BÖC to be. And while the 5.1 mix was a full and replete representation of the tunes, it wasn't the revelation I hoped for. That led me to 1974's Secret Treaties, and all I have to say about both the Quad mix and the songs themselves is...
HOLY SHIT.
Like, "Holy shit, I'm almost 48 years old, with more yesterdays than tomorrows, and I haven't heard this album yet? Are there more like it? Will I eventually stop singing the songs to myself from the moment I wake until I snap into sleep? Holy shit."
Secret Treaties has the riffage of Deep Purple, the fretwork of Free, a consistent melodic sensibility, and some poetic and quirky and dark lyrical turns of phrase. It is everything I want the art of the Seventies to be, and I'm sad that no one -- least of all BÖC themselves -- can offer more of this stuff. The first track ("Career of Evil") sets an impossible standard to follow, and yet, the mini-suite of the last three songs ("Harvester of Eyes" / "Flaming Telepaths" / "Astronomy") beats it to death. It's one of the best three-song runs of anything I own. It draws from progressive and metal and high culture and low culture and your nightmares, and it made me a BÖC fan for life. When I'm listening to high quality new music -- like the Joseph Arthur / Peter Buck collaboration, or the wonderful Shannon in Nashville by Shannon Shaw that somehow conflates Dusty Springfield and Amy Winehouse -- there's still a part of me, lurking in the shallow waters of my consciousness, that wants to play Secret Treaties just one more time. It's something I'll enjoy for the rest of my life, and that's the gift that great art can provide.
Now, this is not to say that BÖC doesn't have other gems in their catalog. Tyranny and Mutation (1973) is hard-rocking and off-kilter in a winning fashion, and Spectres (1977) has a pleasing everything-but-the-kitchen-sink range. And to my ears, Fire of Unknown Origin (1981) is their last solid statement as a band, bringing in new wave flavors to the BÖC stew without betraying their collective sonic DNA. (It's even more fun an album when you find out that the band wrote a few songs specifically for inclusion in the film Heavy Metal, and the filmmakers ignored those tailored tunes, instead using "Veterans of the Psychic Wars" in the movie, which was not written with the film in mind.) Nevertheless, it will always be Secret Treaties and "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" as the platonic ideals of Blue Öyster Cult as a slice of distinctly American '70s peculiarity, a freak flag flying in the post-Watergate and pre-Reagan far-from-United States, a time when, to quote the end of "Flaming Telepaths," the joke's on you.
*the start of my Summer semester of classes (two online classes, so it's not like I'm really "teaching" as I understand the concept in either theory or practice)
*golf (still shitty and consistently inconsistent play, but slightly less shitty, so...progress?!?)
*show binges (Legion, Westworld, Patrick Melrose, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Arrested Development, Tabula Rasa, and the CNN documentary 1968, among others)
*a shit-ton of Blue Öyster Cult
Blue Öyster Cult captivated me as a kid with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," as I'm sure it did with many Americans in that summer of 1976. (Stephen King's use of BÖC in The Stand helped to cement the song into my personal musical firmament, too.) However, aside from "Burnin' For You" and "Godzilla," I knew next to nothing about the band or their catalog, aside from the fact that a guy named Buck Dharma (!) was one of their guitarists. Oh yes, and Patti Smith (a.k.a. "HORSES! HORSES! HORSES!") helped out with some of the lyrics, as she dated a BÖC band member for years.
In my quest to maximize the surround-sound capabilities of my OPPO Blu-ray/SACD player, I've been hunting for multi-channel releases of classic albums for most of this year. I've picked up the 5.1 Steven Wilson mix of the first Roxy Music album, the 5.1 SACD mixes of the '70s output of Elton John (Tumbleweed Connection, Burn Down The Mission, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy), and some other odds and ends. But what really captured my imagination was two BÖC titles: the 5.1 SACD of Agents of Fortune and the 4.0 Quad SACD of Secret Treaties.
Released in that Bicentennial haze, Agents of Fortune is home to "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" as well as some other solid tracks (such as "This Ain't the Summer of Love" and "The Revenge of Vera Gemini"), so it was the one I listened to first. However, while it's a solid record, it wasn't quite the consistent rocker the way that I imagined BÖC to be. And while the 5.1 mix was a full and replete representation of the tunes, it wasn't the revelation I hoped for. That led me to 1974's Secret Treaties, and all I have to say about both the Quad mix and the songs themselves is...
HOLY SHIT.
Like, "Holy shit, I'm almost 48 years old, with more yesterdays than tomorrows, and I haven't heard this album yet? Are there more like it? Will I eventually stop singing the songs to myself from the moment I wake until I snap into sleep? Holy shit."
Secret Treaties has the riffage of Deep Purple, the fretwork of Free, a consistent melodic sensibility, and some poetic and quirky and dark lyrical turns of phrase. It is everything I want the art of the Seventies to be, and I'm sad that no one -- least of all BÖC themselves -- can offer more of this stuff. The first track ("Career of Evil") sets an impossible standard to follow, and yet, the mini-suite of the last three songs ("Harvester of Eyes" / "Flaming Telepaths" / "Astronomy") beats it to death. It's one of the best three-song runs of anything I own. It draws from progressive and metal and high culture and low culture and your nightmares, and it made me a BÖC fan for life. When I'm listening to high quality new music -- like the Joseph Arthur / Peter Buck collaboration, or the wonderful Shannon in Nashville by Shannon Shaw that somehow conflates Dusty Springfield and Amy Winehouse -- there's still a part of me, lurking in the shallow waters of my consciousness, that wants to play Secret Treaties just one more time. It's something I'll enjoy for the rest of my life, and that's the gift that great art can provide.
Now, this is not to say that BÖC doesn't have other gems in their catalog. Tyranny and Mutation (1973) is hard-rocking and off-kilter in a winning fashion, and Spectres (1977) has a pleasing everything-but-the-kitchen-sink range. And to my ears, Fire of Unknown Origin (1981) is their last solid statement as a band, bringing in new wave flavors to the BÖC stew without betraying their collective sonic DNA. (It's even more fun an album when you find out that the band wrote a few songs specifically for inclusion in the film Heavy Metal, and the filmmakers ignored those tailored tunes, instead using "Veterans of the Psychic Wars" in the movie, which was not written with the film in mind.) Nevertheless, it will always be Secret Treaties and "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" as the platonic ideals of Blue Öyster Cult as a slice of distinctly American '70s peculiarity, a freak flag flying in the post-Watergate and pre-Reagan far-from-United States, a time when, to quote the end of "Flaming Telepaths," the joke's on you.
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