Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
The DMV has a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell from nearby West Virginia.
Blue Öyster Cult is ready to rock Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races on Nov. 19.
“In 2020, we put out a new album, so we will be playing some tracks from that album. It’s our newest stuff, mixed in with all of the greatest hits and deep tracks,” co-founder Eric Bloom told WTOP. “We just did three nights in New York about a month ago, where we played our first album, second album and third album in their entirety.”
The band began at a jam session at Stony Brook University in New York in 1967, originally named Soft White Underbelly by rock critic and manager Sandy Pearlman.
“He got the name from Winston Churchill, who called Italy ‘the soft white underbelly of Europe’ during World War II,” Bloom said. “Sandy wrote this huge poetic opus ‘Imaginos,’ a lot of science fiction and fantasy. One of the lyrics was ‘Blue Öyster Cult.’ We needed a name to play for Clive Davis from Columbia Records and ditched Soft White Underbelly.”
Their self-titled debut album “Blue Öyster Cult” (1972) included fan favorites, such as “Cities on Flame with Rock & Roll,” but it was their fifth album “Agents of Fortune” (1976) that truly made the band a household name thanks to the smash hit “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.”
“We do it every night and we’re happy to be playing a song that was so popular,” Bloom said. “It is on classic radio everywhere all over the country almost every day, sometimes more than once a day, so it has stood the test of time — and of course, the famous ‘SNL’ cowbell sketch, which was rated the No. 1 sketch of all time on Saturday Night Live.”
The hysterical bit starred Chris Parnell as Bloom, Jimmy Fallon as Bobby Rondinelli, Chris Kattan as Buck Dharma, Horatio Sanz as Joe Bouchard, Christopher Walken as feverish producer Bruce Dickinson and Will Ferrell as the fictional cowbell player Gene Frenkle.
“I was watching it live when it happened,” Bloom said. “I was sitting on the couch and all of a sudden, there you are being sent up by ‘SNL.’ My jaw dropped. My phone started ringing: ‘Are you watching this?’ Will Ferrell wrote that sketch and presented it to the ‘SNL’ producers more than once. It’s pretty funny. You can see they’re all cracking up.”
The band’s next album, “Spectres” (1978), featured the hit song “Godzilla,” a cover of which recently showed up in the blockbuster “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (2019).
“When we were kids, they used to have monster matinees on Saturday afternoons,” Bloom said. “A guy named [John] Zacherle had an 11:30 TV show ‘Shock Theater’ on ABC in New York. He would play monster movies: Dracula, Wolf Man, Godzilla. We loved that stuff as kids, so we would always talk about Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, so Don wrote the heavy lick.”
Their 10th album “Fire of Unknown Origin” (1981) delivered their catchiest song, “Burnin’ for You,” written by Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser and critic Richard Meltzer.
“Richard went to Stony Brook with Pearlman and donates lyrics from time to time,” Bloom said. “He just sent in the lyric and Don got ahold of it and wrote the great song ‘Burnin’ for You,’ which was a hit in 1981. We were very lucky that it came out at the beginning of MTV and that was a constant rotation song in the early days of MTV.”
Will the band ever make the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?
“Maybe it’ll be posthumous,” Bloom said. “If Judas Priest can make it, maybe there will be time for us.”
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
