Tyranny and mutation

Hey, sorry for the gap there. Friday I had a veritable blizzard of unexpected work appear on my desk, and last night I went home sick. It’s nothing big, just general exhaustion. I haven’t been sleeping more than five or six hours a night, and while that’s plenty for some people, it’s not nearly enough for me. I’m taking today off as well, so this is coming to you directly from the test kitchen at Science Manor.

I was gonna post this last night, but since I was indisposed, here it is now:

I finally broke down and bought myself a walkman-style CD player. It was so ridiculously cheap that I couldn’t say no. The thought is that I can listen to things more often & maybe work up a few reviews for y’all. No sacrifice is too great for my readers, etc. That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, it’s been something to occupy my tiny brain while I’m out walking the dog. Which is a perfectly valid use for the technology, I’m sure you’ll agree, but not really the one I set out for myself.

Be that as it may, I was listening to Radio Birdman while out walking Lucy yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with the band, they were around from 1974 to sometime in 1978. Australian, they were, except for the hot-shit guitarist imported from Detroit. Real proto-punks, they set the stage for the likes of The Saints, The Exploding White Mice, The Hoodoo Gurus, etc. What struck me on this listen, though, was how much they had assimilated various riffs from Blue Oyster Cult.

OK, you can put away your snide “needs more cowbell” remarks right now, junior. I’m here to tell you that BOC was precursor to much that is good and right and decent about rock & roll in these latter days of degradation. Sure, just about everything they did after, say, Spectres sucked the big one, but riddle me this, Batman: how many bands that began in the seventies came out of the eighties with their chops intact, much less their hides? If you said not very many, you are correct. Look at The Tubes, for the love of cake – hot-rod theatrical art-rock incipient punks in the seventies, middle-of-the-freeway crap artists by the mid-eighties. Ditto, sorta, for the J. Geils Band, except substitute hard-driving R&B/blooze boogie-meisters for that art stuff. I’m not even gonna dignify Jefferson Starship other than to mention that they got even suckier in the eighties. You wouldn’t think it possible, but I heard it with my own ears. The list goes on & on, so forget that the eighties even happened to Blue Oyster Cult (I’m sure they’d like to, aside from the cash) and cast your mind back to a day long gone by.

Submitted for you approval: without Blue Oyster Cult, punk rock (as we know it) would be a different critter indeed, or perhaps even non-existent. A bold assertion, I admit, but stay with me here as I dissect it.

As I’ve already mentioned, Radio Birdman was obviously giving them a listen. No Radio Birdman, no Australian punk/garage movement, or at least not the one that actually happened. Also: Mike Watt, late of The Minutemen, plank-spanker extraordinaire since then with such stellar units as fIREHOSE, Porno for Pyros, Dos, J. Mascis + The Fog, the 21st century edition of Iggy and the goddamn Stooges, no less, has made it a point to have virtually every band he’s worked in cover “The Red and The Black” from BOC’s second album, Tyranny and Mutation. OK? How’s that for an endorsement? Not enough? You want more? How about this: providing lyrics for various BOC tunes over the years have been none other than Richard Meltzer and, I shit you not, Patti Smith. So we’ve got progenitors of punk from both coasts AND one the more influential rock crits who ever tapped a Smith-Corona, or at least one of the first. As Science Girl put it, imagine the parties. And what is more: Sandy Perlman co-wrote with the band and produced them as well. The producer of the second album by The Clash? Why look, it’s the very same Sandy Perlman. Coincidence? You tell me.

Now, I’m not claiming that the band themselves were punks. They’re always identified as Heavy Metal/Hard Rock, and rightly so. But look, you could call what they did “Baby Huey’s Diaper Wash” and it wouldn’t change the influence they’ve had over the years. I have a theory about the cosmology of rock & roll…

Wait, come back here. It’s germane, trust me.

OK, you have the originators of a style of music. In cosmological terms, they’d be gods, right? Then you have those who come afterwards; the next generation, if you will. These become the New Gods, and the originators become the Elder Gods. The New Gods acknowledge their debt to the Elder Gods, that what they are doing is merely an extension of that which came before, etc. So far, so good. But when yet another generation comes around, they deny the Elder Gods entirely, since they only know of the New Gods and base what they do on that & that alone. It is as if they have, in fact, killed off the Elder Gods altogether, eaten their flesh and burned the bones. The New Gods then become the Elders, the upstarts become the New Gods, and the whole thing repeats itself from generation to generation.

One gets the idea that Punk Rock just fell from the sky one fine day, an idea which was pushed along by those “year one” types who said that Punk was there to destroy all that came before it. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. Punk did not occur in a vacuum. The people who invented it were influenced by the music they’d grown up to, whether or not they had the good grace to acknowledge that fact. There is a certain bunch of bands which are considered “cool enough’ to cop to as influences, of course, but beyond the usual suspects – Velvet Underground, Iggy, New York Dolls, etc. – there’s a curious silence. If everybody who’d claimed to be into the Velvets actually bought their records back in the day, they would have been number one with a bullet, or at least a syringe.

And it’s just gotten worse. What’s happening now is you’ve got musicians coming up who’ve listened to nothing but punk throughout their lives, so you’ve got an ever-tightening feedback loop of the same ideas over & over. Or, to put it another way, the gene pool has gotten mighty small.

But let’s get back to Blue Oyster Cult (remember them?). As the Grunge boys hereabouts realized so very well, Punk and Metal are just two sides of the same penny that’s been run over by a freight train. I hear a lot of BOC in The Dictators, a first-gen NYC Punk band who later morphed into Man O’ War (one of the sillier hair metal bands - fur loincloths, anyone? - sometime in the mid–to-late eighties). Even down to the look, there ain't much differnece betwixt the two camps. Leather jackets, studded belts, jeans & t-shirts – Punk or Metal? (We’re talking old-school, now. Metal these days seems to require intricate chin hair and the inability to lift one’s guitar above the knees, while Punk is just another flavor available in several boutiques down at the mall.)

I guess I can sum this all up in the words of somebody’s fictional grandpappy: don’t get above your raisin’. And show a little respect for your Elders.

Speaking of which, I need to take a nap.

Comments

[jonmc]

The third album (cassette, actually) that I ever bought was B-muthaphukkin-OC's Fire Of Unknown Origin. The Cult was always a great hard rock band, with smarts, humor and killer riffs to back it all up. I've even heard some of the stuff they did when they were still the Stalk-Forrest Group and it's some superlatively good hard rock.

What BOC's story and this post, point up, is that despite what classic rock radio programmers and indie rock purists would have you believe, hard rock/metal and punk/post punk are not that different from eachother. They share a loud, sweaty performance style, a no-apologies approach to rocking out, and a smilarly disenchanted, angry audience. Plus plenty of common ancestors, in bands like The Yardbirds,Sweet, Slade the MC5, Blue Cheer, etc.

Plus plenty of hard rock bands (AC/DC, Metallica, Guns & Roses, Anthrax) could be described as having at least a big toe dipped in the punk pool, and numerous post punk bands (Black Flag, the Minutemen, Husker Du, Surgery) have nodded to some hoary-assed hard rock as influences.

I await the day when we can all proudly display our X-Ray Spex and Ten Years After side by side and see them as brethren & sistren.

[jonmc]

Oh, and Manowar were fuckin' great, but you had be a part of the culture that spawned them to appreciate both the satire and the kick-ass riffing.

[jonmc]

and yet another punk/metal connection: Iron Maiden lead belter Bruce Dickinson roadied for the Clash as a collegiate, and savaged hair metal better than any of the punx in his solo single "Tattooed Millionaire."

And Metal went through it's own "punkification" that I detail here.

Me and you need to found amagazine or a radio station or something.

[Jimmy Beck]

Who can ever forget that finale that BOC used to have where all five of those motherfuckers would be onstage playing guitar? It was eardrum hemorrhage for the ages. Buck Dharma was a proto-shredder. And Eric Bloom: one of the great all-time Jews in rock and roll. Deserves to be up there with Leslie West and Mike Bloomfield.

[bmarkey]

Jon- If you'll supply the funding, I'll gladly spin a few discs with ya. Also, go back & check out the first four albums, but if you're only getting one, go for the double-live (although I imagine they were able to squeeze it all on one CD) On Your Feet Or On Your Knees. The studio LPs were the blueprints - the live shows were where it all came together.

Jimmy- That would be during "Cities on Flame (With Rock & Roll)", as I recall. If memory serves, that was also the tune where Mr. Dharma and Mr. Bloom rubbed their guitar necks together, after which Mr. Dharma would pull all the strings off his guitar. A great finale; one might even say a grand finale, if one were so inclined.

[monk]

I'm with you on BOC. I don't know if this does much for their punk cred, but Michael Moorcock also wrote for them, which I think is pretty cool.

[jonmc]

I thought that was Hawkwind.

[bmarkey]

No, he wrote with both bands. I just woke up so I can't recall which songs, but I know he's done at least one or two with BOC, I think around the time of Fire of Unknown Origin.

[bmarkey]

OK, according to this, Moorcock wrote three songs with the band; "The Great Sun Jester" appeared on Mirrors in 1979, “Black Blade” was on the Cultosaurus Erectus album (1980), and “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” finished out their collaboration on the aforementioned Fire of Unknown Origin (1981).

And there you have it.