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High above midtown Manhattan in the lobby of BMG International, Eric Bloom, Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser and Allen Lanier of the venerable Blue Oyster Cult stand face to face with the new monster of rock, Sean "Puffy" Combs.
Sort of.
The trio are in town to promote Heaven Forbid, their first album of new tunes in ten years. But for the moment, their focus is on a blown-up poster of Combs squatting for the cover of Hits magazine.
"That's gonna be you on the cover of the next album," Bloom teases Dharma. "Buck Daddy."
They share a chuckle. An aggro BOC fan, on the other hand, might be tempted to chuck the framed poster out the 33rd floor window, considering that Combs was cherry picked for a track (collaborating with Jimmy Page) on the soundtrack to this summer's inevitable monster smash, Godzilla, while BOC's own classic homage to the big lizard -- 1977's "Godzilla" -- was not. History shows again and again how fashion points up the folly of record labels.
Perhaps the snub would sting more for Dharma, the writer of the song, had he not recently performed it for a more worthwhile cause: a benefit for an eleven-year-old Atlanta boy named Rick Browning with an inoperable brain tumor.
"He used Godzilla as a visualization to kind of marshall his mind/body connection," explains the guitarist. "And it worked. Don't call it miraculous, but he had a pretty amazing recovery considering his prognosis was pretty poor."
As for the song not being optioned for the film, Dharma and Bloom both admit being perplexed by its exclusion, but Dharma does have his guesses. "I think they're trying to make a scary movie, and certainly our Godzilla's not very scary," he says. "Or maybe we're just not popular enough at the moment to cross-promote their movie."
That may seem like a big slice of humble pie to swallow for a band once widely hailed by critics and fans as America's foremost exponent of heavy metal. But it quickly becomes obvious that the Oyster Boys are not about to indulge in the routine of trying to keep up with the Jones, Combs or Pumpkins. The days of headlining stadiums and putting on groundbreaking light shows may be behind them, but BOC have been selling out mid-to-large-sized clubs and festivals for more than a decade. They also enjoy a rabidly loyal audience with whom they communicate personally through the band's multiple fan folders on America Online's classic rock bulletin board. All told, there are more posts in the BOC folders than the lone Beatles folder, and they're not far behind board leaders the Moody Blues.
"Believe it or not, Blue Oyster Cult is comfortable," says Bloom. "We're not under the financial crunch like we were in [the seventies], when we'd make about $100 a week. We're still going to go balls to the wall promoting this album, but we're not under a lot of pressure."
If BOC can afford to take a deep breath at this point in their career, it's a luxury that was hard won through nearly three decades of constant touring. From the band's acclaimed self-titled debut in 1972 through 1981's Fire of Unknown Origin, BOC was the band of choice for those who favored their conceptual hard rock spiked with a sharp twist of irony and wit. You knew Bloom was taking the piss when he snarled, "I'd like to do it to your daughter in a dirt road," on "Career of Evil," but only just.
"We never could deny the humor," says Dharma. "It's part of what we do. Unlike a lot of artists, I don't think BOC has ever taken itself too seriously."
They counted among their fans and collaborators rock critics Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer, fantasy/sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock and punk poetess Patti Smith, who dated Lanier and whose voice and lyrics appear on the platinum LP Agents of Fortune. The band peaked commercially with a pair of atypical but glorious singles "Don't Fear the Reaper" ('76) and "Burnin' For You" ('81), which reached the Top 40 and remain staples of classic rock radio.
In the wake of 1981's Fire of Unknown Origin, however, desertion set in with the departure of Lanier as well as founding members Albert and Joe Bouchard (drums and bass, respectively). Bloom and Dharma retired the band after 1986's woefully titled Club Ninja. It took an overly ambitious project by Albert Bouchard and producer/lyricist Pearlman, 1988's Imaginos, to bring the band back together. The record company, unhappy with Bouchard's vocals, wanted Bloom and Dharma to come on board so the long-delayed album could be released as BOC product. The result was a stunning if confusing masterpiece. Though the project hardly closed the growing rift between the band and the Bouchards, it did at least bring Lanier back into the fold and kick BOC back on the road again.
"It was kind of ironic when I came back," says Lanier. "I had been re-reading Greek classics and planning a trip to Greece with my wife, and the phone rings and its [manager] Steven Schenck, and he says 'Listen, there's this gig that I'm trying to get the band to do. It's in Greece, would you like to go?' And I said, 'Sounds good to me.' The band sort of reformed, and we've been together ever since."
Over the next decade, BOC toured constantly and cashed in on the independently released Cult Classic, which featured re-recordings of their best-known songs. The new version of "Reaper" ended up being optioned for Stephen King's mini-series The Stand, which helped finance the demo of bonafide new material that became Heaven Forbid (CMC International). BOC '98 is rounded out with drummer Bobby Rondinelli and bassist Danny Miranda, with cyberpunk novelist John Shirley pitching in on lyrics.
If Heaven Forbid is not quite a born-again masterwork on the level of, say, Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, it is far from the embarrassment cynics might expect. Dharma's mini-epic "Harvest Moon," a song the band has tantalized fans with in concert for nearly a decade, could sit tall and comfortable between "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "Astronomy." And if Metallica has cut a speed metal anthem even half as brutal as "See You In Black," then bring it on.
"History's been pretty kind to us," says Dharma. "We've come through our career with our reputation pretty much intact, and that's good. It would be nice to be taken seriously today. It's an uphill thing to sell the concept of a new record by a band like BOC as anything noteworthy. We think we've got something here, so we're going to give it the old try."
RICHARD SKANSE