Before we get too far down the road of thinking this Substack is going to have much of substance or deep meaning, I thought I’d jump into a subject matter that I expect to be a core offering of this site: music. In particular, revisiting old albums and CDs in my collection that I haven’t listened to for years, or maybe not much at all, to see what I think of them now.
I originally thought I’d pull out some one-offs that I picked up over the years for various reasons. But I couldn’t shake the thought of going back to the record that represents probably the greatest disappointment in my music-buying life, the 1983 offering by Blue Oyster Cult, The Revolution By Night.
Background
Unlike, say, The Connells, who I expect we will get to fairly early in this project, I was an established BOC fan when The Revolution By Night came out. I can’t really pinpoint a chronology from 40+ years ago, but I am certain I bought Agents of Fortune first because of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” then followed up with Spectres because of “Godzilla.” I know for sure I bought Fire of Unknown Origin (featuring “Burning for You”) when it came out in 1981. And somewhere along the line I picked up the first three albums from the early 1970s. There were a couple of other albums that I hadn’t gotten to yet by the time Revolution came out.
I’ll take a moment to mention how challenging it was, in rural Oxford County, Maine in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, to learn about music. We didn’t have a record store in my home town, so I was forced to flip through the bins at Woolworth, or the offerings in the Columbia House catalog. (We’ll probably get to some Columbia House offerings in the future.) Obviously there was no streaming, and no online research for record reviews. You heard a song on the radio - and a lot of music wasn’t on the radio in Maine at that time - and if you liked it you bought the album and hoped for the best.
Which is all to say that, if you were following a band that wasn’t super radio-friendly, and didn’t happen to have seen the album reviews in Rolling Stone magazine, and hadn’t yet decided to pull Cultosaurus Erectus out of the bins at Woolworth, you likely missed the fact that Fire of Unknown Origin had been a blip in an otherwise significant creative slide by a certain band from Long Island. But you were about to find out.
Revisiting Fire of Unknown Origin
Well, right off the bat “Take Me Away” hits us with a killer guitar riff. The first minute of this song is vintage BOC. The chorus is a little tepid for my liking, but this is a decent tune that would have fit right in on Fire. Alas, the first sixty seconds is the absolute peak of this album.
Disappointment firmly sets in on the next three songs. “Eyes on Fire” and “Veins,” while lyrically in line with typical BOC mystical/sci fi/occult themes, are imbued with the synth-laden sound of the day. There are guitars, but it’s all super generic and sounds like any other band from this era. In between those two songs is “Shooting Shark,” which managed to reach the lower end of the charts. This is not a rock song, just a synth ballad that could have come from, I dunno, Kajagoogoo.
Side two begins with “Shadow of California” and “Feel The Thunder.” Here the band dials back the synths and delivers two tunes that would fit right in on the soundtrack to a cheesy 80’s teen Halloween thriller. That’s not good, but it’s not all bad.
“Let Go,” however, is all bad. It’s so, so terrible. Here is the chorus:
B-O-C
You can be whatever you want to be
You’ve got the power, we’ve got the key
B-O-C
This the kind of thing penned by an eighth-grader writing a song about how great his band is. It’s utterly embarrassing for a superstar rock band.
Impossibly, “Let Go” might not be the worst song on the album. One could argue that the closer, the incredibly vapid “Light Years of Love” is even worse. There is no right answer to this question. This record already had one synth ballad, it didn’t need another one. On the plus side, “Shooting Shark” sounds a lot better in comparison.
The biggest crime with LYOL is that the band almost pulled this album back to respectability with the song sandwiched between it and “Let Go.” “Dragon Lady” is a classic Blue Oyster Cult boogie that could have swapped in for a weaker song and elevated an album like Agents or Spectres. They almost redeemed the record with this song. Almost.
In summary we have two songs that would fit right in on a good BOC album, two cheesy rockers that could have been fun in a different context, three utterly generic 1980’s pop/rock songs that don’t sound at all like BOC, and two of the worst songs the band ever released. Taken together, it seems like less than the sum of its parts. For example, when I listen to “Feel The Thunder” on its own, I kind of like it. It rocks. It’s got motorcycles and ghosts. But put it in the middle of this album and it’s just part of the trash pile.
Critical reviews:
I can’t find a Rolling Stone review for this album online. Allmusic, I site I find indispensable, gave it two stars out of five, which I find a bit generous. I found a lot of fan reviews online that are fairly positive, but then again “Cult” is right there in the band name. These people are clearly true believers. (That joke was teed up for me, so I hit it. I try not to judge other peoples’ taste in music. You like what you like.)
Final Thoughts:
Ultimately, this is the record that ended the idea that I was a big Blue Oyster Cult fan. It made me realize that a fair amount of the band’s output wasn’t music I actually enjoyed all that much. There’s a reason why Agents of Fortune and Spectres, despite being two of the bands most popular records, were never in my own heavy rotation like Aerosmith or Van Halen or the Cars were. Outside of the hits, the material wasn’t all that strong. (I still think the first three records are all great, however.) I don’t believe anything that followed would have changed my mind. Our tastes are ever evolving.
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