Blue Oyster Cult
On Your Feet Or On Your Knees

Since we progsters have been accused of all sorts of misconduct, imagining that we spent the '70s listening to minuets and other sappiness, let's highlight a great and badass album, the inspiration and cult of all these bad boys who get contracts by pulling a tough face and trying to make more noise than a turbine: and maybe they can actually play really well (the writer is a huge fan of the avant-garde, from John Cage to Morton Feldman, and if it's noise you want, we'll soon talk about Metal Machine Music).

So, once upon a time there was a New York band - friends of Lou Reed and Patti Smith - who had been around since the '60s but got a contract only in 1972. They sowed three absolutely crazy studio albums, hard rock and roll mixed with garage and keyboards, from piano to Farfisa, incredible lyrics, and an overall more lysergic and visionary background than that of the Grateful Dead, dark and mutated, much more evil than any satanism around... also because they chose a symbol as obscure as it gets and a name you won't even find in Doctor Strange comics: Blue Oyster Cult, the Cult of the Blue Oyster, actually taken from a brand of beer (they are die-hard rockers).

When the third album comes out, a masterpiece of the early period: "Secret Treaties," BOC concerts (with the diaeresis on the O) are set on the proverbial double live album, four sides that testify to the energy and alien magic of the band. "On Your Feet Or On Your Knees" is released with a famous cover, a funereal American car with a flag-logo parked in front of a sinister-looking mansion, the church of an unspeakable cult, so much so that on the back, two gloved hands from an assassin (Dario Argento docet) hold a psalter with the tracklist... and in the gatefold, the band performs in a baroque hall, in front of a hooded audience, with morgue drawers behind them. The set opens with an already enigmatic track because the bizarre "Subhuman" combines Doors and Grand Funk with Santana-like guitar phrases and flows into the synth hiss within the messianic Harvester Of Eyes, slow and granite hard rock and roll with memorable bass work, leading up to a smoking rock and roll on a Train to Hell, the Express 1277, and here you can already hear a few too many guitars but can't anticipate what's to come. Heard at the beginning of Side 2, the fast The Red & The Black and admired once again the evocative voice and pronunciation of Eric Bloom, we descend straight into a skewed nightmare said to be about seven demons, and Lucifer ("hey Lou"): "Seven Screaming Dizbusters," eight absolutely tremendous minutes with a thousand theme and time changes, oblique keyboards following the riffs and the BOC's technique beginning to show, especially for Buck Dharma (a guitarist as good as Jimmy Page).

The remarkable instrumental keyboard-guitar boogie of "Buck's Boogie," a showcase for the speed of phrasing and the band's compactness, closes the first vinyl to make way for a masterpiece of lyricism, "Then Came The Last Days Of May," once again a dark story (this time about drugs and escape at the Mexican border) with an obviously hopeless end, and one of the most liquid guitars ever heard in the hard rock genre. The anthemic "Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll" combines a complex and brilliant riff - again in unison with the keyboards - with an alien theme par excellence, that of hypnotized and controlled oceanic masses by heavy metal, the roar of Marshalls, and the control of Fenders, a dark and Orwellian vision that seems straight out of the graphic works of Philippe Druillet. But the concert's peak is yet to come: a long performance of the fast and cursed "ME 262" (Messerschmitt 262), an ode to a new Red Baron promised fame and glory by Hitler and Goering, indeed lineup in the central part the famous and thunderous interlude known as the "5 Guitars", where all the musicians on stage wield a six-string (even the drummer) and engage in an impressive clash of phrases and counter-melodies. Although the live performances shine with rock energy and therefore feature less of the studio mixing's sonic oddities (carillons, pianos, various sound effects), the very strange "Before The Kiss (A Redcap)" remains enigmatic: another cursed story of rockers, life on bikes, sleazy bars, and burned lives, which after a big rock riff, shoots a full-on swing, then seems to veer towards tango but instead passes through solos and other riffs... it's clear that Blue Oyster Cult doesn't like being banal, neither in musical styles nor in thematic cores of the lyrics: it is certainly not a band that likes to describe its own exploits or boast of its own bravado, a full rock cliché, or least of all rely on volume for its malignancy (everyone knows how to turn up the volume).

The last two tracks are covers, the standard "I Ain’t Got You" (renamed "Maserati GT") and the famous "Born To Be Wild" by Steppenwolf (another group worth reevaluating), performed with devotion, fury, involvement, and unspoken references ("LA Woman" by the Doors). It is difficult to explain and convey the changed charm and intelligence of Blue Oyster Cult's musical proposal; it's too particular and subtle (it references '50s horror, Godzilla, Nosferatu, alien disturbances, and media possessions), Patti Smith contributes to the lyrics and the titles of their songs became famous: Heavy Metal (The Black And Silver), Mistress Of The Salmon Salt, and the terrifying Astronomy, perhaps the most beautiful song of the decade (listen and read the lyrics before jumping around like crickets). And when we're all reaching the terminus and we have no choice but to take the Great Leap, it won't be useless to have listened to and read Don't Fear The Reaper carefully... ask Stephen King.