Dinosaurdays - Blue Oyster Cult

They first started out as Soft White Underbelly and Oaxaca and later as The Stalk Forrest Group in the late sixties, releasing one album for Elektra Records. Guitarists Eric Bloom and Donald ' Buck Dharma ' Roeser, together with keyboard player/guitarist Allen Lanier and brothers Joe ( bass/vocals ) and Albert Bouchard ( drums ) were the members of the band that would go on to become one of the US' best ever hard rock outfits, with production work expertly handled by Sandy Pearlman, who originally put the group together. BOC's live act is legendary, complete with a smoke bellowing Godzilla, costumes, masks and motorbikes on stage. They released 14 albums between 1971 and 1988. and they also wrote and performed the music for the horror movie " Bad Channels" in 1992. We were extremely happy to know that one of our favourite bands had reformed a few years ago and released a new album. "Heaven Forbid" in 1998 was an exceptionally good record and it showed that BOC are still a force to be reckoned with.

BLUE OYSTER CULT
The song played was I am the storm, from 1979's The Mirror, their eighth album. They are New York's finest band. Still going strong (as far as is known) They released a great new album, Heaven Forbid last year. Visit their website.

Blue Oyster Cult
Blue Oyster Cult - The Vigil, from "Mirrors", in 1979, their 8th album. We've featured this album in the past, so we won't go into too much detail about it here. It is, however, considered to be one of the best albums ever recorded by this amazing New York based outfit who started out as the Stalk Forrest Group and Soft White Underbelly. BOC went on to become one of the best live acts in the US, and, after having split up and reformed a few times, they are, as far as we know, still around today.

Blue Oyster Cult
Blue Oyster Cult - Harvester of Eyes, from "Secret Treaties", their third album, released in 1974. BOC are the subject of this week's Dino Quiz (number 200),and we have a copy of their excellent live "Some Enchanted Evening" album to give away. You can read up on this great band's history elsewhere on these pages, but just to recap... They were formed in New York in the early seventies, evolving out of Soft White Underbelly, Oaxaca and, later, The Stalk Forrest Group. The original members were guitarists/vocalists Eric Bloom and Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser, drummer/vocalist Albert Bouchard, bassist/vocalist Joe Bouchard and keyboard player/guitarist Allen Lanier. This line-up remained pretty constant for most of the band's career, which spanned nearly 20 years and 14 albums. The band split in the late 80's and reformed in the late 90's. An excellent band who released some really good material.

(If you have more info on this band, please e-mail us)

Biography by William Ruhlmann & Greg Prato
Blue Öyster Cult was the thinking man's heavy metal group. Put together on a college campus by a couple of rock critics, it maintained a close relationship with a series of literary figures (often in the fields of science fiction and horror), including Eric Von Lustbader, Patti Smith, Michael Moorcock, and Stephen King, while turning out some of the more listenable metal music of the early and mid-'70s. The band that became Blue Öyster Cult was organized in 1967 at Stony Brook College on Long Island by students (and later rock critics) Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer as Soft White Underbelly and consisted of Andy Winters (bass), Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser (guitar), John Wiesenthal — quickly replaced by Allen Lanier — (keyboards), and Albert Bouchard (drums), with Pearlman managing and Pearlman and Meltzer writing songs. Initially without a lead singer, they added Les Bronstein on vocals. This quintet signed to Elektra Records and recorded an album that was never released. They then dropped Bronstein and replaced him with their road manager, Eric Bloom, as the band's name was changed to Oaxaca. A second Elektra album also went unreleased, though a single was issued under the name the Stalk-Forrest Group.

Cut loose by Elektra, they changed their name again, to Blue Öyster Cult, and signed to Columbia Records in late 1971, by which time Winters had been replaced by Albert Bouchard's brother Joe. Blue Öyster Cult, their debut album, was released in January 1972 and made the lower reaches of the charts. Columbia sent a promotional EP, Live Bootleg, to radio stations in October, and followed with BÖC's second album, Tyranny & Mutation, in February 1973. Their third album, Secret Treaties, was released in April 1974 and became their first to break into the Top 100 bestsellers. (It eventually went gold.) BÖC released a live double album, On Your Feet or on Your Knees, in February 1975. In May 1976, came their fourth studio album, Agents of Fortune, including the Top 40 (Top Ten on some charts) hit single "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" (featured in the classic John Carpenter horror film Halloween), which became their first gold and then platinum album. (On Your Feet went gold shortly after.) BÖC's sixth overall album, Spectres, was released in October 1977 and went gold in January 1978. In September 1978 came a second live album, Some Enchanted Evening, which eventually would become BÖC's second million-seller, followed by the studio album Mirrors in June 1979. A year later, BÖC released its ninth album, Cultosaurus Erectus, with the gold Fire of Unknown Origin, containing the Top 40 hit "Burnin' for You," following in June 1981.

In the summer of 1981, drummer Albert Bouchard was replaced by the band's tour manager and lighting designer, Rick Downey. BÖC's third live album, Extraterrestrial Live, was released in April 1982, followed by the studio album The Revolution by Night in October 1983. Downey left in 1984 and was replaced in 1985 by Jimmy Wilcox. The same year, Lanier left and was replaced by Tommy Zvonchek. BÖC released its 13th album, Club Ninja, in January 1986. Bassist Joe Bouchard left in 1986 and was replaced by Jon Rogers. In 1987, Lanier returned to the group, and Ron Riddle replaced Wilcox on drums. BÖC's 14th album, the concept recording Imaginos, became their final new album on Columbia Records in July 1988. BÖC scored the movie Bad Channels in 1992, by which time Chuck Burgi had replaced Ron Riddle on drums. In 1994, Blue Öyster Cult released Cult Classic, an album of re-recorded favorites, in connection with the use of their music in the TV miniseries of horror novelist Stephen King's The Stand. Numerous lineup changes ensued throughout the '90s (as the band kept on touring the world), and in 1995, were the subject of a double disc anthology, Workshop of the Telescopes. By the late '90s, BÖC had signed with the CMC label, resulting in their first album of all-new studio material in ten years, 1998's Heaven Forbid, and three years later The Curse of the Hidden Mirror. The group's music reached a whole new generation of hard rock fans when Metallica covered the BÖC classic "Astronomy" for their best-selling Garage Inc. album in 1998, as a few other best-of collections surfaced around the same time — Super Hits and Don't Fear the Reaper: The Best Of. In 2001, Columbia/Legacy reissued BÖC's first four releases with a newly remastered sound and added bonus tracks.

Eric Bloom
Albert Bouchard
Joe Bouchard
Chuck Burgi
Rick Downey
Allen Lanier
Ron Riddle
Donald Roeser
Bob Rondinelli
Jimmy Wilcox
Tom Zvoncheck
Tommy Price
John Miceli
John O'Reilly
Jon Rogers
Greg Smith
Danny Miranda
Les Bronstein
John Wiesenthal
Andy Winters

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