Blue Öyster Cult’s New/Old Ghost Stories: Meh 262

Frankly, I don’t especially want to talk about Ghost Stories.

That’s Blue Öyster Cult’s “new” album of unfinished and unreleased archival material, (mostly) from 1978 – 1983, which Steve Schenck and Richie Castellano have “De-mixed, Re-mixed and Produced” (to quote the album sleeve; Schenk has a long history of working with BÖC dating back to their glory days, and Richie Castellano has played bass with the band since 2004).

Without any doubt, these guys mean well, but I’d much, much rather talk about the archival BÖC albums I wish I had in front of me. 

First, let me make this explicitly clear: I freaking love the mighty Blue Öyster Cult, especially their first four albums, released between 1972 and 1976. Man, when these over-read, planetarium-hoppin’ greasers were going full tilt on the dark grind of dreamy tar pit rock ‘n’ roll, it was like they were running on a cocktail made up of mercury, iron shavings swept from the shop class floor, melted-down Show World tokens, pages torn from the works of Moorcock and John Rechy, and sparks harvested from the piss-stained rails of the 8th Avenue local. While fortified by this cruel, sludgy, filling-burning sustenance (quaffed while watching World At War on an endless loop while Meddle and Machine Head played simultaneously in the background), Blue Öyster Cult made three adamantine, essential albums (Blue Öyster Cult, Tyranny and Mutation and Secret Treaties), and another one full of diamonds and aspiration (Agents of Fortune). 

See, for a magnificent half decade, Blue Öyster Cult, these sinewy boogie/boogieman dart-throwers born of Haight and hate and desert and Bowery, were the Dark Floyd, sci-fi loving over-read hoodlums terrorizing a car full of LIRR commuters on the 1:20 from Penn Station to Port Washington. Now, after Agents of Fortune the story gets a bit, oh, ropey. Starting with 1977’s (mostly satisfying, but creatively ominous) Spectres, the band began to mix limousine bills for radio promoters and the stale, martini-scented breath of corpulent FM DJs into their magnificent, sinister cocktail. I won’t detail what’s wrong and what’s right about BÖC’s studio albums after Agents of Fortune; there’s plenty that’s good and bad, let’s leave it at that.  

But back to Ghost Stories. I wish I had better news here, I really do. I had reasonably mid-to-high expectations for Ghost Stories; after all, many of the tracks featured Blue Öyster Cult’s “classic” line-up – that is, inclusive of drummer Albert Bouchard (the “George” of the band, an essential songwriter, conceptualist, and tertiary lead vocalist) and keyboardist Allen Lanier (the Stuart Sutcliffe of BÖC, i.e., a primary part of their definitive spirit and sexy, cranky, spooky swagger). In addition, in the last few years BÖC put out a string of surprisingly strong and enjoyable live albums (both archival and recently recorded), five (!) released in the last four years. (I especially recommend 45th Anniversary Live in London; Radios Appear: The Best of the Broadcasts; and Live at the Rock of Ages Festival 2016).  

But Ghost Stories is largely mediocre, at times awful, occasionally curious and enjoyable…and almost completely unnecessary; all of which means it’s probably better than any studio album the band has released since 1998 (2020’s The Symbol Remains was full of flop sweat and good intentions but lacked anything that really sounded very much like Blue Öyster Cult). 

Before I climb on a milk crate, clear my throat unattractively and holler about what I really want to discuss, some more about what’s on Ghost Stories: “Gun” is a riffy, attitudinal boogie that definitely feels and smells like halfway decent BÖC, but if I had heard it on WLIR in 1978 next to a first-rate Good Rats track or a second rate Cactus track, I would have thought it was the lesser of the three, and probably left the room to get a Fresca.

“Shot in the Dark” is more of the same, but a little worse. “So Supernatural” is a very reasonable imitation of an okay-ish Spectres or Mirrors track, but fails to lift off. “The Only Thing” finds BÖC revisiting the space/desert ballad territory they mined so very well on their extraordinary early albums, but it ends up sounding like a sad attempt to write a Desmond Child song. It’s as if the muscle memory is there, but the magic is gone (on the plus side, “The Only Thing” has a sweet and smooth Buck Dharma vocal, and I am a sucker for those lazy but pointed Buck Dharma vocals).

“Money Machine” appears to be a peculiar, radio-hungry attempt to write a Springsteen-type thumper, and in doing so, there’s a slight, happy echo of the astral bar band sound of BÖC’s wondrous first three albums; I’d like the finger-pointing, smashed streetlight swagger of album opener “Late Night Street Fight” a lot more if the song wasn’t such a transparent re-write of “The Revenge of Vera Gemini” from Agents of Fortune. 

“Cherry” is almost a great BÖC song, maybe the most promising track here, except it’s plagued by the radio-fellating arrangement and production style that put cement shoes on so much of BÖC’s work after 1977.

The much-touted studio version of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” is, well, okay, but adds utterly zero to the live version on 1978’s Some Enchanted Evening (I actually think there’s a possibility that the instrumental tracks of this studio “Kick Out the Jams” IS the version that appears on Some Enchanted Evening – please recall that virtually every classic live album released in the 1970s was recorded in part – if not largely – in the studio).

The cover of the Animals’ “We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place” is so forgettable I literally forgot it was on the album until I did a last-minute listen-through of the album (this is another song that was covered on Some Enchanted Evening, but at least I’m pretty certain this is, indeed, a different recording).

And “Don’t Come Running to Me” sadly reminds us that there was a moment – specifically around the time of 1983’s Revolution by Night and especially ‘85’s Club Ninja – when the once fearsome, original and inspiring Blue Öyster Cult were grasping to climb the chalk outline around the corpse of Aldo Nova. I would like to say that “Don’t Come Running to Me” is as bad as it gets, But Ghost Stories actually gets worse: the album-closing, completely unadventurous acoustic cover of the Fabs’ “If I Fell” may be the most conceptually discordant and unnecessary thing Blue Öyster Cult ever recorded. 

VIDEO: Blue Öyster Cult “Don’t Come Running to Me”

I’ll say it again: I really wish I had better news, because I love this band, and I love that they’re still out there. But here’s the point I really want to make: though entirely well intentioned – I mean that — Ghost Stories is not the gussied-up archival Blue Öyster Cult album we need. There are two gigantic holes in the catalog of the mighty Blue Öyster Cult, and if BÖC were so eager to revisit and/or re-sell their past, I desperately wish they had addressed these instead:

We need a version of 1975’s On Your Feet or On Your Knees without the distracting fake and/or bulked up and ludicrously over-mixed crowd noise. Yessir. On Your Feet could – and should – be one of the very greatest live albums ever recorded; the material is drawn from BÖC’s first three albums – three of the greatest albums ever effing made – and these live performances are fierce, tough, full of sass, energy, and intention. But the annoying crowd noise takes it down more than a few notches. Even assuming the egregious and distracting elements of the crowd noise isn’t fake (though it certainly sounds it), it’s still mixed way, way too high, and seems to deliberately obscure some of the music. 

And it would be brilliant to have a definitive version of Imaginos, the album that should have been Blue Öyster Cult’s Quadrophenia. The “official” 1988 release of Imaginos is a compromised bunt, a reasonably listenable but unsatisfactory shadow of Albert Bouchard and Sandy Pearlman’s ambitious vision of an epic concept album that would tie up all of BÖC’s mythology, imagery, and musical, sexual, and literary obsessions in one place. Albert Bouchard’s own version – Reimaginos (2020) – is significantly better than BÖC’s ’88 release, but lacks the majestic, desert-swept, ominous mystery-under-the-Milky Way quality the material suggests; and the best extant (though unofficial) Imaginos is Bouchard’s original demos/roughs, available on YouTube and various boots. We need someone who can take all of these disparate elements and sources and creates a definitive Imaginos. If anyone in the BÖC family is reading this (and hasn’t already been understandably offended by my negative comments about Ghost Stories specifically and the band’s post-1977 output in general), please find someone to clean-up/clean out On Your Feet or On Your Knees and undertake the formidable but oh-so-necessary task of FINALLY making a definitive Imaginos. 

Not that you asked. 

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Tim Sommer

Tim Sommer is a musician, record producer, former Atlantic Records A&R representative, WNYU DJ, MTV News correspondent, VH1 VJ, and founding member of the band Hugo Largo. He is the author of Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish and has written for publications such as Trouser Press, the Observer and The Village Voice. Learn more at Tim Sommer Writing.

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