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| -by Elfpants |
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"29? You don't know Blue Öyster Cult."
Let's get one thing straight here: a Blue Öyster Cult concert is not a "concert" in the sense that one normally uses the word these days. In this dim and unenlightened time, the art of the rock concert has been sadly lost. Usually the performance is brief, the headliner's lone hit is saved for last (unless the crowd looks restless, in which case it gets shunted to the front of the meager set. Then there's a called out, "Thank you [stiff recitation of wherever the hell they are that night], we love you1, goodnight!" as the band stampedes offstage to look for the local Ecstasy dealer and a place where they can inhale mass quantities of Jack Daniels off the breasts of a nubile young receptionist named Brandi. The audiences, however, are usually no better. The breakdown generally goes like this:
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Audiences like this tend to fall silent whenever a song they're not intimately familiar with gets played, to magically produce lighters whenever a song they do know (read: the single) is played, and to contain at least one inbred moron who shouts "Freebird!" at every available opportunity. This guy is always seven feet tall, standing directly in front of you, and so drunk that he wouldn't recognize "Freebird" if it sat on his face and wiggled. Nostalgia tours, on the other hand, tend to attract the sort of crowd that resolutely believes that the band hasn't produced anything worth listening to since 1978, that presumably being the date when the band suffered its token tragic overdose incident. For these shows, the lighters come out early and often, and the crowd is massively enthusiastic as the greatest hits and much-beloved obscure album tracks scroll by. That is, they're enthusiastic until such time as the lead singer steps to the microphone, clears his throat nervously, and utters the most dreaded words in rock'n'roll2: "This track is from our new album." One by one, the lighters go out. The heads stop banging. The feet stop stomping. The exodus to the bars (because these acts are always playing 500-seat venues with bars. It's in the rules of "Behind the Music." Trust me) begins. And the new material inevitably, pathetically, sucks. And so the new song gets wailed into the uncaring night, and the audience just sort of sits there until the musicians come to their senses and play something off the Heavy Metal soundtrack. Blue Öyster Cult concerts, however, are different. They're not concerts. They're gatherings of the faithful. And that, in part, is why I went. Blue Öyster Cult has long been described as "thinking man's heavy metal." Whether or not this excludes thinking women who like loud music remains open for debate, but the band has always filled the niche of a very loud Steely Dan, cranking out music that lit majors can screw non-lit majors to for decades. They offered something for various groups of music fans to chew on; the geeks could revel in the fact that they co-wrote songs with Michael Moorcock, while the music snobs could sip white wine and debate Patti Smith's vocal contribution to the track "Sister Gemini." Everyone else just thought that "Don't Fear the Reaper" was cool. Like most of their contemporaries, they hit it big in the 70s, did some double live albums, then faded in the 80s after making an embarassing video or two. A few years back, a friend ran into them at a party at a science fiction convention. The conversation went something like this:
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For the record, he had two and then went looking for nubile young receptionists. But now the Cult is back. Or at least, they're touring. And drawn like a moth to the flame, subverted by the well-worn grooves on my vinyl copy of "Extra-Terrestrial Live," I bought tickets. Of course, I wasn't going alone. Heavens, no. For one thing, I didn't know where the venue actually was, since Raleigh's street grid was laid out by a drunken toddler with an Etch-a-sketch. For another, I've found solo concertgoing to be a sometimes unrewarding experience; large portions of the David Gray show back in May were spent trying to explain to a young woman that no, I wasn't looking for a good time after the show and yes, I was aware that Gray had recorded songs besides "Babylon." Attending with anyone else most likely would have spared me this and allowed me to listen to more than three songs in their entirety. Besides, it seemed like fun. Part of what had always separated BÖC from the horde of guitar-driven bands cranking out goofy science fiction-themed opuses in the 70s was their sense of humor. You simply knew that they couldn't be taking a song called "Godzilla" seriously, no matter how thunderous the riffs were. Anyone looking to find deeper meaning -- or worse, allegory -- in tunes like "Flaming Telepaths" or "Seven Screaming Diz-Busters" needs to put down the Derrida, back away slowly, and spend a few months watching Baywatch. So I rounded up some friends. I was going. A single buddy from work (we'll call him "Chris") with a predilection for really loud, angry music was going. Another coworker and his wife, having hastily arranged a babysitter for their daughter (who could say "Jimmy Page! Robert Plant!" at age 2) were going. And another friend, vaguely aware of the existence of Blue Öyster Cult but willing to do anything on a lark, was going too3. Another friend was supposed to go, but at the last minute he cancelled. Previous plans, you see -- he'd promised his wife and a mutual friend that he'd go see Harry Potter with them instead. This should have been our first warning. What we'd forgotten, in our rush to raise our lighters to "Burning For You" and reclaim our youth, was that we'd gotten old. Civilized. We couldn't just say "Hey, want to catch a concert?" No, it had to be a production number, with babysitters hired, gourmet pizza laid on the table for dinner, and worst of all, carpooling to the show in a minivan. We weren't going to a concert. No. We were having An Evening. The fact that ours wasn't the only minivan in the lot made it worse. BÖC was playing at a venue called the Lincoln Theater, which is one of these grand old relics that's survived since vaudeville days and now lurks around the Norma Desmondish edges of the concert scene. The acoustics are great, the decor is non-existent, and there are two bars inside selling good beer and hard cider cheap. The marquee out front read "Blue Öyster Cult" on the top line, and "God Bless America" on the bottom. Of such dichotomies is American daily life made, but at least we knew we were in the right place. The number of people wearing t-shirts featuring the ever-loving image of Godzilla also served as a useful hint, but by the time we noticed them, we were well on our way. Inside, the crowd was a remarkable mix of specimens. Middle-aged heavy metal fans brushed past the occasional refugee from a Jethro Tull fan club (poofy shirt and all) and nodded warily at the college-aged gamers in black trench coats and fedoras, all swearing mightily not to fear the reaper. Eager young satanists dotted the throng, each sure that the band was singing to them and only them. A gaggle of well-dressed young professional types flitted past, looking as out of place as could be imagined. Presumably, none were named Brandi. Members of the overly-indebted-to-Rush opening act popped up here and there, trying to impress the rest of the audience that just a few short minutes ago, they had been on that stage. And large, shaven-headed men cavorted down front, uncanny in their resemblance to professional wrestlers and stinking of sweat and beer. One, while cavorting, banged into my friend "Chris." Now, Chris is a big guy, maybe 6'3", but this monster towered over him. Drops of sweat poured off his nose as he stared down at my friend's face, assessed him, and found him wanting. "How old are you?" the creature snarled. "29," replied Chris, having forgotten what Ernie Hudson told Dan Ackroyd in Ghostbusters. The beast scowled at him a moment. Blinked twice. Leaned back, placed his hands on his hips, and bellowed, "Twenty-nine? You don't know Blue Öyster Cult!" |
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And in the middle of all this insanity, the show started. At no other time in my life have I ever seen people intentionally making the "devil" hand signal toward the stage; by the end of the night even my quiet, repressed friend was doing it. Lighters went up and stayed up, presumably until they got too hot and went out in a puff of overheated butane. Condoms were waved at the stage at odd intervals, God knows why. Most of the people I saw waving them most emphatically did not look young, nubile, or even vaguely Brandi-like. The vast majority, however, looked like they could kick my ass. As for the band, well, thankfully they actually were Blue Öyster Cult, not a studio drummer who'd played on one B-side and now was touring with a bunch of session musicians he'd found at a rest stop in Knoxville. Three of the originals were still on stage, reasonably coherent, and able to play. The rhythm section had, unsurprisingly, been replaced, but the band's bios on their website (www.blueoystercult.com -- as if you couldn't guess) tried really, really hard to make the new guys seem like part of the band. They even pointed out how the fresh faces had contributed to the new album, The Curse of the Hidden Mirror4. My reaction to this, of course, was "They have a new album?" Which leaves, of course, the question of the concert itself. And yeah, they could still play. The opening chords of "Cities on Flame" still kick the ass of anything Korn's produced, and everyone there knew it. They played the old chestnuts and refused to inflict too much of the new material on the audience. They hauled out a few ancient album tracks ("The Vigil," anyone? Didn't think so), jumped around on stage as much as their aging bones would let them, and closed with the one-two of "Godzilla" (complete with overwrought drum solo) and "Don't Fear the Reaper" (complete with a guy standing nearby nearly setting his own head on fire with the lighter). One encore later, they were done, leaving a theater full of people chanting "Rock and Roll! Rock and Roll!" and the nearby Jethro Tull refugee beating a hasty retreat after the husband of the woman he'd been hitting on all show finally expressed his displeasure. The audience loved it, of course. The human monadnock who'd banged into my buddy earlier stripped off his shirt halfway through the show, revealing the word "Godzilla" tattooed across his chest. Dozens of people vanished during the show, reappearing in their regulation black concert t-shirts. And one poor schmuck three rows in front of me spent the entire evening trying to call out for his favorite track, "Veteran of the Psychic Wars." Unfortunately, there was so little patter between songs that he either ended up bellowing "VETRANOVASYKWARZ" or "Veteran of th--oh, fuck." It didn't matter. They didn't play it. We commented on that as we walked out to the minivan. We commented on the half-naked lunatic, the quality of the show, and how surprised we were that we could all still here. Several of us compared our t-shirts. And as we zoomed off (as much as a minivan loaded with five adults could zoom, anyway) into the night, we agreed on one more thing. "Next time they come through, we're there. We are so there." |
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