13. Blue Oyster CultTyranny And Mutation
A very, very, very smart record. A lot of the records I’ve been talking about are like idiot savants in their genius, while this is very, very tailored in its genius. Before Blue Öyster Cult made it big with ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’ and many many years of hating them and making fun of Godzilla and stuff, they were a really smart bunch of writers. I’m sure some of that was down to working with similar people. Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman were the production team and co-songwriters and they wrote these records, the first three records, and I can’t figure out which one is the best one, so I picked Tyranny And Mutation because it’s kind of cool. They were like British proto-metal made in Long Island. It’s really well played by amazing musicians and everyone knows that Buck Dharma is an amazing guitarist, blah, blah, blah, it’s fantastic, but what really got me was the lyrics. The lyrics are really, really studied. They’re not truth lyrics, like he’s singing his heart out. It was that time in the seventies when rock bands were singing about stuff that’s scary. You aren’t singing about yourself or where you’re from, you’re singing about wizards and demons and shit. But these guys went way back and were bringing in old 1930s pulp magicians, sorcerers, way beyond what Zeppelin was coming up with! Even Sabbath turned out to be pretty Catholic in the end, pretty religious like "oh God! Don’t hurt me!" These guys were singing about pure evil, you know, and they weren’t about putting Nazi references in. Satanists, Nazis, stuff you didn’t know where it came from! The stuff they were doing was just so out of hand lyrically and it amazes me to this day. It’s funny that they somehow got the reputation for being the dumb guy’s rock band because they weren’t at all. It was so finely done, and the cover art on that, I just think it’s one of the best covers of all time as well. It was done by this guy called Bill Gawlick. I can’t find the guy anywhere! I tried to get him to do a Monster Magnet cover a long time ago. It’s amazing. Post psychedelic psychedelic and he used the Greek symbol of chaos as their sign, which vaguely resembled something like a swastika. Black, white and red, really cool. There’s nothing like it.
