VINYL DESTINATION 4: The Blue Oyster Cult

"The Blue Oyster Cult were American psychos who emerged fully formed and full-blooded on a wave of scintillating imagery" --Dave Thomson, "I Hate New Music"


"Dont Fear the Reaper" is one of the penultimate songs of my youth. From the moment when I first heard Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser's signature riff (which I'm having a whale of a time playing myself, damn rigid fingers) to the time when my brother-in-law and I sat up for an hour after he completed his third shift week trying to interpret the lyrics from listening closely to my sisters ancient Panasonic tape recorder. But it isn't the album it came from, "Agents of Fortune", it's their late 70's romantic masterpiece I need to speak on here, "Spectres".

It opens with the apocalyptic waffle-stomper "Godzilla", a riff as memorable as any, (this one I can play, with relative ease), and a seminal rock chop. The riff begins a fun tune that finishes in typical BOC fashion, with seriousness. The reprised lyric, "History shows again and again, how nature points out the folly of man.". It's a message echoed by the 1954 Inishiro Honda film of the same name that inspired it. Nukes are bad. Radiation is a monster.

"I Love the Night" is a great piece of rock and roll storytelling about a heartbroken chap having late night hook-ups with a mysterious "Lady in White". It's beautiful layered harmonies provide a nice apex for a mid-tempo ballad. Very cool stuff.

This LP actually provides a few glimpses into off-kilter romance and obsession.

"Going thru the Motions" an Eric Bloom track co-written with Mott the Hoople's Ian Hunter, speaks in a melancholy yet whimsical way of an ill-conceived relationship that is somehow fondly remembered when viewed through the sandy glass of time. A sad-feeling verse leads to an almost doo-wopish chorus complete with hand claps and piano. It's actually catchy.

"Nosferatu" tells the legend of Dracula in the guise of F.W. Murnau's German expressionistic horror film of the same name. Instead of ending with the stake through the heart, it climaxes with the dread vampire dying because he "stayed too long in her room." He's a victim of the sun and it's light, and his own love.
Simple yet beautiful piano scales accompanied by Buck Dharma's guitar provide a gorgeous backdrop for the story.
The fate of the Demeter never sounded so lovely.

There are other rockers here besides "Godzilla" however. "R.U. Ready 2 Rock" is a great fist-pumping concert opener, and "The Golden Age of Leather" is a ripping rythym line over a lengthy lyric about Excalibur-style battles taking place on motorcycles in a distant future that somehow feels like the past.

Weird, huh?

That's what BOC does best. "Spectres" is exhibit A.

Do your own deliberation and give it a listen.

IT WAS A GRAND OLD GAME

Growing up in the early 80's, my first exposure to baseball was the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers, a team of blue collar, long-haired, crush-em and ask questions later beasts with a local who had a wooden leg as the manager. I loved it. It had mystique then, and has it even more now.

Observe, if available:
http://www.amazon.com/Harveys-Wallbangers-1982-Milwaukee-Brewers/dp/B000MX7TY0


Oh, how it's twisted since then. Like everything else I've taken in since my brother Dan, God bless 'im, introduced me to the grand old game, I inhaled it's history. I've read dozens of books on baseball lore and biographies, memorized stats from bubble gum cards, and absorbed World Series highlight films as if it were my lifeblood. I take a look at current tv shows like the ones being run on FSN where they clean up old home videos of the glory years, watch MLB TV retrospectives, and can't help but feeling as if something's missing.

I can't quite put my finger on it. Money has made the game ill. It's dying. The era I grew up watching the Brewers, there were million dollar ballplayers, but they were the ultra-elite. Today's "common" ballplayers are millionaires, and the elite are performance-enhancer taking liars. Don't insult me or the game by comparing HGH to the "greenies" ballplayers took back in the day for alertness purposes on road trips. The logic doesn't match up.
Guys like Mays, Aaron, Mantle, and Maris got by on batspeed and natural strength. They weren't much bigger than I am, and quite often smoked cigarettes and even imbibed on occasion

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that behavior. My point is the numbers produced by these people today on ridiculous foreign substances aren't that much greater than what was accomplished by "normal human beings".

Attitudes. Manny Ramirez, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens are more often referred to as a-holes than nice guys. It's a sad state of affairs considering their considerable gifts. Yes, there were jerks back in the day, but the buttface to nice guy ratios is tilted much more significantly in the negative direction these days.

I carried baseball cards, bound by a rubber band, in my back pocket. Now they're stored in airtight, sealed containers, and little kids get trampled by adults for that expensive autograph, and in culmination, memorabilia has become a cottage industry.

It's all about what it's worth today. Not how it matters.

MY COMPONENTS (an attempt at poetry)

WHY I HATE THE CUBS (and most of the haves in the major leagues)

"See, this is the kind of thing, quite honestly right now, that makes you want to see this Chicago Cubs team lose. .. [F]ar and away, the most obnoxious fans in baseball, in this league, are those who follow this team right here. ... You simply root against them. I've said all winter — they talk about this team winning the division — and my comment is, they won't win it because, at the end of the day, they still are the Chicago Cubs, and they will figure out a way to screw this whole thing up." --Marty Brenneman, legendary Cincinatti Reds Broadcaster

After sitting by idly and watching the rich get richer yesterday, (i.e. Red Sox get Victor Martinez, White Sox get Jake Peavey, Cubs get Doug Grabow and Gorzelanny), I decided to vent. My therapist says it's a good idea. "Rage, Rage, against the dying of the light"--Dylan Thomas.

Here's why the Cubs suck, have sucked, and always will suck.

1. There rich North Shore moron fans come up here in droves and take over Miller Park. Yeah, partial blame should be given to the locals for not buying up all the tickets ourselves, but it's not merely the space-occupying that annoys the Brewer faithful as much as it is Cubs fans complete sanctimonious obnoxiousness. The holier-than-thou Crapitude where they act like they have the world coming to them because they've been losing for the last 100 years.

Try not sucking.

Illinois Cub fans, let me share a few things with you:

2. The Brewers payroll is less than half of your bonus babies, and they have won more playoff games in the last two years combined than the Cubs, yet the Brewers didn't even make the post-season in 2007. Can I get an LOL?

3. Your players are jabronies. Nobody admires their flyballs more than Alfonso Soriano and Aramis Ramirez, and this is coming from a fan of the team Ryan Braun plays for. (And yes, I loved every second of it when the Hebrew Hammer cadillacked a little when he took Dempster over the right field wall at Miller after getting donked in the head with a slider two innings earlier. One good turn deserves another.) Soriano couldn't play his way out of a wet paper bag in left field, lollygags like a tee-baller out there after he kicks one, and his batting stance looks like a futile attempt at a painful bowel movement.
Ramirez postures like an overgrown heavyweight champion after he homers, and if it was off the walk-off variety, he dances around the bags. Soriano, as well. Jeez, act like you've been there before. And the pundits criticize the Brewers for their "arrogance"?
And Zambrano. Where do I start? He's a borderline psycho who creepily wandered out onto the field during a Matt Young/Derrek Lee dustup (Yes, the classic brawl where Lee took a poke and quickly flitted away Carmelo-style behind his aging manager) with his removed belt in his hands, grinning like an undertaker. Wow. Oddly, despite the fact that it was recorded in HD by several sports nets, no action was taken by the league. He was what, changing his pants?

4. There are no Bears in Illinos, let alone Cubs.

5. Question: If Chicago is so awesome, why do you people buy up all of rural Wisconsin?

6. Wrigley Field fans still have to pee in troughs. It's 2009. Who built your bathrooms, Charles Ingalls Construction?

7. Your fans launch trash and debris at outfielders of the opposing team (Braun, jealous of a real right fielder?) WHILE THE BALL IS IN PLAY. Holy Cow, indeed.

8. Again with the rich get richer theme. Did you notice how the bulk of your team is made up of free agents from other organizations, but most of our guys came from the AAA Nashville Sounds Brewers farm club. Must be nice to BUY a team. But it hasn't gotten you much farther than us anyways.

9. Lou Piniella. I've read several books by former teammates of his, namely Sparky Lyle and Jim Bouton, and the tomes display what a bloomin nut this guy was. Now they didn't use the terminology, but their description of events paints the picture. He was beyond gifted as a hitter, they didn't call him "Sweet" Lou for nothing, sure as hell wasn't his personality. He's about as cuddly as a porcupine. Where Ken Macha seems like a kindly old uncle, Lou comes off as Macha's annoying alcoholic neighbor. It's been illustrated that he's been known to beat inanimate objects with other inanimate objects, and umpires shoes have a nasty habit of getting dirty when Lou's around.

The fact that he's still in the big leagues is a testament to his managing ability. I begrudgingly admit that fact, just as I'll begrudgingly admit that, just like the Chicago Bears, I need to hate the Cubs. It is what keeps my Brewer fanblood moving.

I think my shrink would appreciate that admission.

Chicago, I need you.

Damn it.

THE RETURN OF THE EEPHUS PITCH

Over the years in major league baseball, the occasional "floater", or eephus pitch, is a tantalizingly slow pitch. Sometimes it's a curve, sometimes it's just a pitch thrown so ridiculously slow it takes forever to get there and catches the hitter off guard. Observe:



That was Steve Hamilton's "Folly Floater". Dave LaRoche threw something referred to as the "La Lob". Now journeyman reliever RJ Swindle has been recalled by the beloved hometown Milwaukee Brewers. He throws an 85 MPH fastball, a slider, and a curveball so slow, and so tedious to get to the plate, it at times fails to register on the radar. God love 'im.

Swindle, by the way, is a perfect name for this cat, being that most hitters probably feel swindled when they take that falling meteor for a called strike, and swing and miss by 3 feet, as Carlos Delgado did earlier this season.

Look at the dude. Doesn't he look like he's up to something?

THE NUCLEAR WARHEAD AND ME, Part One

As a kid growing up in Reagan-era America, I had one fear of the outside world. Things could be tumultuous at home with some illnesses and typical sibling infighting as the primary source of my domestic anxieties. But the fear outside my front door, the horror on the front page of the newspapers and leading off the 530 newscasts brought by Tom Brokaw every night was the dark beast of my mind-made nocturnal horror films. Nuclear Holocaust.

The haunting reminders were thrown at me on a nightly basis from all three network news teams. Sometimes I intentionally avoided watching the evening news with my parents in order to shelter myself from the barrage of increasingly distressing information. The verbiage of the whole messy conflagration between the United States and the Soviet Union were terms that a child of 12 should probably not comprehend, much less digest, but somehow I got it, and I was not particularly happy to do so.

Arms race, tactical nuke, MIRV buss, ICBM, ad infinitum were words that I feared and heard on a growing basis. It seemed like daily I would be briefed about one of the two nations, horns ensnared in the cold war, developing something so powerful that the yield of the weapon would be multiplied exponentially by "the bomb dropped on Hirsohima". Was this necessary, did we need to expand on destsruction so complete and extreme?

It seems it wasn't a desire to push the magnitude envelope, as much as it was one nation goading the other to stay ahead of it's rival's ability to annihilate the world. Reagan and Brezhnev, the two titans of atom-splitting might, would have been accurately portrayed on one of those main event boxing advertisement posters, staring each other down with resolution and barely restrained antagonism.

The nightmares I mentioned in passing earlier, still occur to this day. They feature myself sitting in some calm place of enjoyment, a cove of peace that I feel secure in and happy. I would be relaxed, fully absorbed in some activity that was pleasing to my psyche, whether it be throwing the rawhide around or simply vegetating in a lawn chair.

Then it happens.

A fearsome, monolithic mushroom cloud rises up in the distance. The titanic demon would be far enough away for me to avoid being decimated by the blast, yet close enough to awaken in me all the gut-wrenching dread of accumulated news-watching and headline-reading. I then snap up from the dread sleep, wide-eyed and in a confused state of agitated pensiveness. It was awful, and could become a load that would take me days to shake loose.

TO BE CONTINUED......

DEALING WITH IT : A Portrait of Hatred in one Part

God would damn dusk, if it wasn't hell already. It has a pointless pink sky that somehow despite it's bright tone seems to muffle light. As if it were a brief time period where the clock stops and and life becomes something you should perhaps be a little more careful around, be wary of. The headlights of my car do absolutely nothing to cut the dimness, and it's too dark to make out some of the shapes that cross my path on the road. I sink my 2006 Ford Taurus further into a massive wooded area that is like something made out of a mixture of Cajun swamp and the northern woods of Alaska. It is grimy, cluttered, foreboding and does not seem to welcome life.
I pass through this wooded damp in my car and see another vehicle shimmering toward me in the opposing lane. It's headlights are not on. Not that they would help. This car is spectral as it almost seems to just fade in from nothingness.
"I know whose car that is." I think, almost startling myself with my own inner monologue. Did I think it, or speak it?

It doesn't matter.

A flash of static impedes my vision. Dead air. When sight restores, everything I see is tinged red. Seeing the world through blood-colored glasses, now. My breathing is now rushed. The other car is a 1940's Ford, jet black, and the driver is Cancer. He turns his head and looks at me. It's not a smile, nor a frown,...his facial expression just is.

I slam on the brakes of my 1969 Dodge Charger and wheel the Beast around.
I've seen that black car before many times. I've been in this movie prior to this. I lean over, reaching ito the hidden holster under my glove box and pull out my Beretta, finger the clip, check the action. The piece is fine, and in this vision, Cancer becomes tangible. It is now on.

As the Charger runs him off the road, his Ford shudders to a stop in the ditch. I'm rocket-sled harnessed into my seat, so I barely feel the jar. I get out, walking hard down to the Ford. It's leaning almost on it's side, steam dancing through the bent hood, seeming to enjoy playing in dusk's unsubtle shitpile. I kick the glass in on the driver's side door, reach in, and pull Cancer out.
Not an attractive one is he, but I'm used to looking at him. An eyeless black wraith that has a cowling set of wings instead of arms. He smiles like a chainsaw. I grin back as I turn and see my father in the back seat of the Ford. He looks to the floor of the massive vehicle and just shakes his head. Tears? I don't give a damn. I put the Beretta in Cancer's jagged-toothed mouth and cock it.
Clenching my teeth, I utter, "You've taken so many." My grin grows wider so slowly, I can almost hear it. "I am gonna shut you off."
There's a low chuckle from Cancer, as we've done this before. I pull the trigger repeatedly until all 16 in the clip and the one in the pipe exhausted and the clink of falling shells stops it's consistent jingle. They are not unlike coins to pay the ferryman. I could almost have danced to their twinkling rhythm. Right now, I don't feel like dancing. No, not at all.

Cancer squints his empty eyes and shakes his head. I turn to see Father in the back seat mouthing inaudible words.
"Robby, let it go."

That wave of brief static is there again, and my vision restores minus the crimson. I shake my own head out of this dark fantasy, as dusk continues to suck the light out of the air. I see a Doe and her fawns grazing on the crisp fall grass on the side of the road, from behind the Taurus' windshield. I continue shaking my head. It's clear now, but filled with the feeling of foolishness, and not a little bit of embarassment due to the game I just played in my head.

Cancer of course, is not a being. He doesn't walk the streets freaking out children. He doesnt call your house in the middle of the night. He drives no ancient black car of death with his loved victims in the back seat. He's just a motherfucker who doesn't watch where he steps because more often than not, he doesn't have to.
I put my beretta, back in the sleeve, the safety never having come off. It's black metal now glistens with my perspiration, my palms now mirror the texture of the pistol's grip.
I think I just heard my dead snap the holster shut.
See, the car is still a Taurus, it never turned a rubber burning sphere in the country road to seek my vengeance. I am facing the same direction as when the static came, just with a few more miles behind me. I shake the self-induced stiffness out of my hand as I accelerate. I grit my teeth into the blackening sky and flip the radio on.

The Stones: "I see a red door and I want to paint it black".

No.

I flip to AM: "....another body found this afternoon, as Milwaukee's record murder count rises by one..."

No.

I tap the CD button...

Misfits: "Come on, sweet death, one last caress...."

I punch the off button and it snaps in half, clicking to the floormat. Looking ahead, shivering, the sun crawls down the sky like a tear.

So be it.