Sandy Robertson, 1978
Sandy Robertson, Sounds, 13 May 1978

Sandy Pearlman Interview

ERIC BLOOM is adamant about the current position and status of the band he sings and plays for, the am-aaa-zing Blue Oyster Cult; they are 'evolutionary', and that's how they got where they are today.

Some critics wouldn't agree with that assessment of their transition from arcane/metal outfit to potential hit makers of the 1980s. Many are the pundits who revel too much in the mistique of lyrical wonderment and the knowledge that Blue Oyster Cult's moniker may or may not have been an anagram from some across-the-pond brew called Cully Stout Beer, or (even weirder) a reference to the gourmet's delight of blue point oysters, to get off to something like the transistorised joy of their latest single, the Mott The Hoople meets ? & The Mysterians melange of 'Goin' through The Motions' (which was, incidentally, co-authored by Mr ian hunter himself).

Tuff, BOC are hitting their peak, I'd say, and I doubt if anything's going to stop them from increasing their reputation as one of America's most tasteful and inventive rock exports of this decade. Eric explains the subtle shift of emphasis from obscurity to accessibility like this (even though he still tops off the face fuzz with his omnipresent mysterious shades...no pictures of the eyeballs allowed): "...We had Secret Treaties, the third album, then the fourth album was live, and the fifth album was Agents Of Fortune...people forget we had two years between studio records, they think we got to Agents and all of a sudden made a left turn and did pop material."

One of the more unusual things about BOC has been the role of producer and mentor Sandy Pearlman, who some people saw as being almost entirely responsible for the group's stance and image (more of him later). Hasn't he kind of been 'edged out' of late?

"Sandy has a lot less time, 'cos he has a lot of other things to do. And everyone feels a little more ambitious, that they can write lyrics themselves. I wrote 'Goin' Through The Motions' with Ian because working with the other guys, I've been doing it for ten years. I just wanted something fresh."

Eric's collaboration with Hunter is from the band's latest album, the dazzling Spectres, but the turning point was the previous record, Agents of Fortune. I wonder whether there was and real significance in a remark made in a Creem magazine interview awhile back, when Cult member Allen Lanier told Lester Bangs that it'd 'be nice to make a little money for a change'.

"Lets face it, financially speaking we weren't making a living up until Agents...what is it that made it sell? It was '(Don't Fear) The Reaper'. We were always sort of snowballing a little bit more every year...The live record did about 15-20 per cent better than the third, so we figured Agents was probably going to be our first gold album, probably gonna do alright, get us a little further down the road...Then "The Reaper' was a hit so we went 100 per cent further than the previous record.

'It was really 'The Reaper' that allowed us to do a lot of things...to buy recording equipment for our homes; we could take time off since we didn't have to tour so hard...All these things add up to being able to spend more time writing material, and I think it shows."

The Cult have always been a good draw live, but groups like Aerosmith who started off as support bands to BOC seem to have overtaken them. Does this bother them at all?

"I could name you about seven bands...Bob Seger opened all our shows last year; Aerosmith; Kiss played a whole tour opening for us; Kansas...I was talking to the guys in Angel the other day, I said 'You guys are probably gonna make it big 'cos you're opening for us!'...I'm not killing myself about it. There's never been a year where we didn't do better than the year before."

Somehow the New Wave creeps into the conversation, and I mention that Nico had some stuff thrown at her recently when sandwiched between The Adverts and The Killjoys at the Music Machine. Eric bares his fangs: "I think the New Wave is a crock of shit! None of 'em know how to play anything...I dislike 90 per cent of it.

"If any of this quote/unquote New Wave crap happens on our tour...the kids were great tonight. We expected kids with chains through their noses! I don't need any rowdyism at our concerts, 'cos the show would stop.

"Maybe some bands like getting spat at, but if any bottles hit the stage I'd find the guy and throw his head against the wall..."

Well, I agree about the violence, but weren't the Cult (like the New Wave) the critics' delight for a time?

"It was kind of self-generated, 'cos we knew all the critics like Richard Meltzer and Lester, Nick Tosches, but the first album didn't sell for shit. I still like to think of us as the world's largest underground band."

TWO THINGS which may have kept the band underground to some extent, are their macho rock image and their militaristic undercurrents.

Firstly, the Black Sabbath audience set-back: "It's the guitar trip. Guys just stand there and pretend to play guitar, y'know? And we are the ultimate guitar band, five in a row...count 'em! How many great girl lead guitar players are there? Not too many. It's a macho, masculine trip, maybe it's phallic...I have no idea...

"But ever since 'The Reaper' was a hit there are some ladies up front, which is nice. Nice to have some tits to look at once in awhile. Gotta focus on something interesting!

"We were a parody of the heavy metal beast and then turned into it...It was that we were sort of an inside joke to ourselves of what heavy metal really is, and yet we transcended the joke and became it..."

The Cult's famed logo (an ancient symbol for chaos, and representative in alchemy of lead, the heaviest of metals) bestowed on them by Bill Gawlik, their premier cover artist, has been mistaken by many cretins to be some kind of neo-Nazi swastika substitute, a symptom of the leather/stormtrooper aura that has dogged them for far too long. There was that famous ad of them in American flyers uniforms, with a picture of Hitler with a dart in his forehead, which ran in the American press ages ago, causing no end of trouble with the popular rockzine Circus.

"All of a sudden we hear that next month's Circus has an editorial by Jerry Rothenberg, who is the editor and I think owner of Circus magazine, apologising for the bad taste in running the ad. He was into, 'did the six million die for nothing?', and all that stuff.

"So I called him up and tried to explain the whole thing, that we were in American flyers outfits and so on...I said, 'You say anything more about us and hook up "Nazi" with it and I'm personally gonna be very angry'. Next issue has the 'Heavy 60 Personalities of the Rock Business', with my picture in it, and it says, 'Blue Oyster Cult, who have alienated as many as they have chilled with their neo-Nazi antics'."

Subsequently, Eric had lunch with Rothenberg to explain the finer points of the Cult's feelings and vision as regards their, er, motivations. He also took time out to show an outraged Rothenberg that the last two letters of the logo of Kiss (the most popular act featured in Circus) were more than a shade similar in design to the German S.S. insignia.

"I said, 'You've got to understand what Nazism is to people over 35 is one thing, but to kids it's motorcycle guys, somehow macho, not shaving, tough...' he said, 'then we've failed...' I told him. I agree with you, but those are the facts...

"Then there was a CBS trade ad campaign for us two years ago. A picture of the inside of a church. You see the backs of a few people next to the pulpit, and there's a guy in a black leather mask with a zipper for a mouth, chains, studded boots, total S & M outfit, with a whip in his hand. When we saw that we went bananas. When we vetoed that ad it cost us six months promo..."

The band also nixed plans for the gatefold of the live double to show them using a black guy's head as a bowling ball, and in addition to all this they had to overcome record company generated hype that they were being hounded by the powerful Jewish Defence League (totally false, as it happens).

WITH THEIR new-found AM acceptance, and the fact that they've overcome their previously somewhat anonymous look by managing to get their faces on the front of an album cover at last with Spectres, it seems as though the Blue Oyster Cult may be finally heading for the stars and their just rewards. One thing's for sure: they aren't lacking in new ideas. They've ploughed money back into the phenomenal lasers and special effects which have become apart of the Cult's live show, a new live album is planned (including a version of the MC5s 'Kick Out The Jams'), and Eric hopes to work with Michael Moorcock.

And you're a part of all this too kids! Know why the Cult don't print lyrics with the albums (although you can send off for them if you so wish)?

"It's like looking at a painting where the artist hasn't explained to you what it is...I've had kids come up to me and say, 'Hey man, you know that song where you say, 'Get laid in the hay'?'...And I'll think about it and I know I never said that in any song, and I'll say, 'Yeah, yeah.'...They hear stuff that isn't there...like I saw an album of ours released in Japan, and they just listened to it and wrote out the lyrics the way they heard them, and it's totally different to anything we're saying...

"Sometimes, it's better than anything we ever could've thought of.

INVENTOR OF the term 'heavy metal', record producer, lyricist, critic, rock genius. Sandy Pearlman is all these things and probably more. Apart from the Blue Oyster Cult he has worked with The Dictators, Pavlov's Dog and soon (hopefully) The Clash. He is not in a good mood. He has just been on the transatlantic phone trying to find somewhere to manufacture Cult discs during the current pressing plant strike in the USA. Casually dressed, thinning on top, he flops into a chair and steadfastly refuses to affect any requested pose for photographs

Firstly, is the Clash thing still happening?

"Sure... the studio is booked, engineer has pneumonia but we'll be here, so it's happening with as much certainty as there is in this world."

A lot of people think that the Clash are very street-level and that you might dilute them, though Patti Smith says she thinks you can give the record technical competence enough to appeal to the U.S. market...

"I guess so! Patti Smith knows what she's talking about, whatever she says goes, Ha-ha. Who knows...they don't sound the same way they sounded 6 months ago...they sound much heavier...more like a mainstream band.

A lot of people, Creem magazine and all those guys, seemed to think you had a master plan to take over the world with Blue Oyster Cult...

"A five year plan! Obviously we failed...Creem? They don't have any brains anyway, so what do they know?

Don't you like any of the magazines?

"No. they're terrible. The only one I like is Circus because it's total trash. I like the English ones 'cos they're loaded with irrelevant news, so at least it's data...raw data. The American ones don't even have any data.

How do you see that in relation to the fact that the early Cult records appealed to critics?

"We were able to exploit them...now they don't wanna be exploited; they think they were burned. We've reached a certain level of success, so maybe it's not fashionable to like the band any longer, I really wouldn't know. There's a certain amount of resentment over the fact that they were manipulated, but they're dumb enough...they deserve to get what they get...I'm being candid with you, I don't care...I'm not just saying this becouse we're here in the U.K., but I happen to like the stuff in the U.K. a lot better, honestly. It's so trival, I don't care."

Don't you think rock'n'roll is a trivial medium anyway?

"No. Definitely not. I think it's obviously the most important art form of the second half of the 20th century. Good statement!? Yeah, but it is! It obviously has the power to move the world, whether it will or not, I don't know. But these morons who have no idea of what's going on, their parasitic existence is of little interest to me...they should go away and stop wasting paper."

Do you think anyone in rock'n'roll ever changed anything really?

"Yeah, I think The Beatles did. I don't like The Beatles at all, but they unlocked a certain energy source which obviously had some effect upon the history of the world...may well be nothing more than too many American soldiers were smoking dope in Vietnam so were unable to effectively man their high-technology weapons, so the war which may have gone one way went another way. Or that too many possibilities occurred to people in late 60s America and they decided that, 'Oh, I am part of some amorphous quasi-revolutionary movement and I don't feel like becoming pate in Vietman', something like that. So The Beatles helped change the world, whether for good or bad I wouldn't know."

Can the Blue Oyster Cult do something like that?

"Depends on how popular it gets...it isn't popular enough at this point,'

Do you think it's a good move that the last two Cult albums are more commercial, then?

"No, because the more commercial they become the less power they have to change the world...they contain less revolutionary content, revolutionary in the most wide sense."

They're less subversive of the order of things as perceived, they're less dangerous. Are you unhappy with that?

"No...I really wouldn't say that I'm unhappy with it...they sell more, we make more money, they're technically more perfect, there's that satisfaction. Someday maybe they'll be subversive to the established order again...it would be nice to reach a larger audience for a lot of reasons, and there does seem to be some of this latent subversive content. That's more than anybody else is doing."

Do you think that it could only be in America that a band like the Cult could develop, with this whole mythology behind it? A country with all these leather bars and sex palaces, and huge discos...it's just that America seems so unreal...

ERIC: "Even people who live in New York City probably don't know what's really going on...the so-called 'trucks' area. You walk in and every kind of thing you could even think about is going on in these places...there's meat markets there under the West Side highway. Long semi-tractor trailers parked there that're emptied of their meat, and the so-called gay-blades go in there after it's night-time and perform upon each other all these various...

SANDY PEARLMAN: "Anonymous mass-sex acts!"

ERIC: "80-90-120 guys..."

SANDY PEARLMAN: "With their pants dropped! Waiting for somebody to insert an organ, an erect organ into 'em! But I'm sure lots of your Lords perform the same thing. In the United States so many people have extra leisure time...."

WE DISCUSS Saturday Night Fever, discos and 'Environments'...the Cult are constantly evolving their technological side....lasers, etc. By the summer this system will be totally computerised and able to generate concrete images, like 'Godzilla' for example. Holograms?

"No, a hologram is a bad avenue to pursue.... it's got too many problems. You can create holographic illusions with the equipment we have if it's properly controlled. The 3-dimesional effect comes from the fact that it's projected in a visible gaseous medium, smoke. You ever see a movie called Forbidden Planet? The Id monster...we now have the technology to create the Id monster. That is without a doubt the best single concept in a science fiction movie."

Is it hard to maintain your inspiration?

"No, not at all...it's hard to generate enough time to act upon the inspiration. I'm always dreaming. If I didn't dream all the time it would be hard to take this stuff. Charles Ives was vice-president of the Hartford Indemnity Corporation, one of the biggest insurance comnpanies in the world...he used to write his music at his desk."

Even optimistic people, like Colin Wilson, had a breakdown.

"Well, he's a great writer...been writing the same thing though for 20 years. I think that The Philosopher's Stone is a really great book about optimism...one of the best books I know about human potentiality. But he has been saying the same thing, I would presume that after awhile that might prey upon you. And all he is is a writer, so he's saying the same thing and he's doing the same thing...I don't mean that as a criticism, just as an observation. That might become profoundly unsatisfying...He has all these things in his mind, all these potential events, all these imaginary conquests...he's only a writer, y'know? He reaches an audience maybe of...what did The Outsider sell to, 100,000 people, 200,000 people?...50,000 people for his average book, that's probably optimistic. That could be a very trying thing to have on your mind, to know everything in the world and not be able to do much about it. But he's had a great influence upon me."

Is that why you like rock'n'roll? It's a more heroic field.

"YES!...it has leverage because it's popular."

Is there anyone in the field of rock'n'roll that you consider to be a genius?

"No...I used to like Ken Scott, but all these things are unsatisfying, what we do...which is good, I guess. I thought a couple of David Bowie records were amazing...Ziggy Stardust and a lot of The Man Who Sold The World and a lot of Hunky Dory were amazing. And then when he became John Travolta, when he entered his disco period, I was sick. I couldn't understand how somebody who idolised the idea of Bob Dylan and was able to express all the idealism and optimism inherent in that notion could write 'Yound Americans'."

I WAS THINKING more of behind the scenes megalomaniac type-guys like yourself, Phil Spector, Kim Fowley, those type of people...

ERIC: (laughter)

SANDY PEARLMAN: "Kim Fowley?"

Why do you laugh?

ERIC: "Cos we know him so well.

SANDY PEARLMAN: "Yeah, we know him, he never really did anything. He's a character who makes enough money to survive, that is his functional role at this point. That's been his role for a long time. Phil Spector? I don't know...he had his riff 15 years ago.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER: Bob Marley?

SANDY PEARLMAN: "What about him?

"I don't know that music...his music hasn't succeeded in America to any great extent, y'know, and it hasn't even succeeded in the U.K. to that great an extent. It's not as popular as Queen...something as thoroughly despicable as Queen. They're the worst species of...they've taken a certain kind of imagery and debased it, and in addition to that the relationship they have with their audience is an image of aristocratic patronisation which deserves immediate extermination. I mean, to see the man standing there with the champagne glass with his tou-tou on, with the champagne dripping from his glass in front of an audience of people who this year constitute the dancers at the 2001 discotheque in Saturday Night Fever was too much for this reporter to take! You could only hope for the lone madman with a gun, y'know?"

But things like Fleetwood Mac are the most popular...

"I think there were metaphysical heights of expression reached in 'Rhiannon', I'm not joking! I think that what that girl was doing at that moment in time was amazing! It sends chills down my spine. I think that Fleetwood mac is not trying to manipulate an image of which it is not the master."

Wouldn't you like to work with someone in that area, be subversive to a bigger audience?

"Ah, who knows...I just drift along. The Clash is interesting, because the Clash possesses to me a really anti-authoritarian tendency. I don't know if it'll survive, but it certainly exists right now, and existed on the last record they made.

"That's what I admire in the Clash...I could be naive...I know that all art is a lie, but it's also the truth at the same time. It's the lie which is the truth. And to me the Clash is a lie which contains an enormous amount of truth in it, and Queen is a lie which contains no truth...obviously it has no content at all to alter the condition of consciousness, while the Clash does, to a certain extent, possess that ability. The Rolling Stones possessed that ability until 1967."

Do you think you're a genius?

"No...I might have the brains, but lack the willpower."

Are you just like Brian Wilson then, "A hard working guy"?

"No...I think he's a sap. It's like some sort of Joan Of Arc where they spoke to her for 10 munutes, and then they stopped speaking to her. They had two years of inspiration and a year of preparation before. So from 1964 through 1967 the Beach Boys were on top of the world.

"I was riding down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston when I heard 'Good Vibrations' and I knew at that point they'd reached the absolute apex of what they could do. Then they brought in Van Dyke Parks because they just didn't understand what lyrics were any longer. What have they done? They're popular in this country and they're popular in the United States and they're wonderful and they're entertaining, but they no longer have contact with great sources of inspiration."

Do you think that humans have the ability to ultimately transcend death?

"Probably within in very short period of years. Pessimistic 50 years, maybe 25 years."

Just think, you could make 100 Blue Oyster Cult albums...

"Hopefully, the time could be put to better uses."

THEN THE TAPE ran out. Before I'd reached the door Pearlman jumped from Elvis ('a real porker') to Albert Camus ('he died right on schedule') to Johnny Mathis ('I'd like to record him doing the Arthur Lee songbook'), among other subjects, all within the space of about three minutes.

Obviously, his inspiration will keep him busy, and us fascinated, for a long time to come....

¨© Sandy Robertson, 1978