CD Odyssey Disc 716: Blue Oyster Cult

After a brief after-work nap I’m back and ready for the Odyssey to carry me a little further out on the tide.

I like all my music in one way or another, but I’m always particularly excited to roll an album by this next band – call it the CD Odyssey house band, if you will.

Disc 716 is…. On Your Feet Or On Your Knees

Artist: Blue Oyster Cult

Year of Release: 1975

What’s up with the Cover? Blue Oyster Cult hits the big time, as evidenced by their ability to afford a swanky limo, complete with a Blue Oyster Cult car flag. Either that or the band crept up and planted this flag on some limo waiting for a bride and groom to emerge from that church behind the car.

How I Came To Know It: As I may have mentioned in previous reviews, my older brother Virgil introduced me to Blue Oyster Cult, and I’ve loved them ever since. I have this album on vinyl as well, and just like when I was a kid I like to fold it open and revel in how massive and important it all seems. The limousine helps.

How It Stacks Up:  I have ten studio albums of BOC as well as three live albums. I like to stack them up separately and as the live albums go, “On Your Feet Or On Your Knees” comes in second, right behind “Some Enchanted Evening” (reviewed back at Disc 391).

Rating: 4 stars

The live album that garnered all the attention in 1975 was KISS “Alive” but for my money the real gem of the year was “On Your Feet Or On Your Knees.”

Unlike “Alive,” “On Your Feet…” did not create instant commercial success for the band. Instead, BOC would continue to toil in relative obscurity until the following year, when “Agents of Fortune” was released and fans were taught to not fear the reaper.

But as little impact as “On Your Feet…” had on the rock charts, I consider it the better record. It covers material that is principally from BOC’s first three albums. These records form a natural set of the band’s proggiest, weirdest stuff.

I’m not going to get too much into the individual songs in this review, because I want to save that fun for when I review the studio album originals.

The live versions capture the raw energy that BOC had in their live shows at this time. This is before complicated light shows and lasers and giant models of Godzilla. This is the band at their purest, standing tall on mostly smaller (but by no means small) stages and rocking out.

Not unlike Dire Straits’ “Alchemy,” Blue Oyster Cult welcomes the live track as an opportunity to noodle around a bit with the original song. Most if not all of these tracks are longer, drawn out versions compared to the studio versions. The band has a great knack for knowing just how much more excitement to ladle into the song without going overboard.

In some cases the noodling makes the song even better, such as the opening track “The Subhuman” which has both a crazy organ solo from Allan Lanier AND an amazing guitar solo by Buck Dharma. This combination of Lanier’s weird Lovecraftian flair, and Dharma’s blues/rock guitar shreds are part of the alchemy that makes Blue Oyster Cult so awesome. “On Your Feet…” shows that it isn’t just studio tricks and production – these guys can recreate the magic right in front of your eyes.

The record has pretty good production for a live album, but it isn’t studio album quality. Fortunately the organic energy of the band comes through perfectly. Also as a double album record (only 12 songs, but 75 minutes of music) I felt like I was getting a good representation of the whole show, even if I couldn’t be there in person. Helping this along was an artful capture of crowd cheering that wasn’t too self-congratulatory (they edit out part of the ‘earn it!’ cheering that precedes the encore).

The encore itself is awesome and covers the final three songs on the record. It features a Buck Dharma classic from their debut album “Before the Kiss (A Redcap)” as well as two covers. The first is a cover of the Yardbird’s “Maserati GT (I Ain’t Got You)” that pushes the song from the original two minutes out to nine. They probably could’ve cut it off at around seven, but hey – nothing exceeds like excess.

The final song is a cover of Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild” which is so good it feels like BOC wrote it. Because I knew this record as a young and impressionable kid I thought they had, and would go around claiming it was a BOC original and Steppenwolf did the remake. I even attracted a few followers of this heresy from the swing-set crowd.

I last saw Blue Oyster Cult about seven or eight years ago and while I enjoyed it, the magic wasn’t there. Only two of the original members were still in the band, and there was just too much lead to turn into gold. “On Your Feet…” is a golden moment in this band’s development where they were on the cusp of fame (moderate as it was) and still essentially an amazing bar band out there winning their fans with blood sweat and chords. At times it is a bit overblown and rough around the edges, but that’s how rock and roll should be.

Best tracks: Based on how good the live performance was rather than whether it is my favourite song: The Subhuman, The Red & the Black, Cities on Flame, Before the Kiss (A Redcap), Born to be Wild