Blue Öyster Cult – "Before the Kiss, A Redcap" (1972)

Their tongues extend and then retract

A redcap, a redcap

Before the kiss

[NOTE: This post is a heavily-edited version of my 2010 post about “I’m on the Lamb But I Ain’t No Sheep,” which was also released on Blue Öyster Cult’s eponymous debut album in 1972.  I was a huge fan of BÖC’s first three LPs, and I can’t think of another group whose first three albums are a match for BÖC’s.  (Maybe Led Zeppelin?)  I should have already inducted a BÖC song into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME, but better late than never.]

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I discovered Blue Öyster Cult 47 or 48 years ago when I picked up a Columbia Records 3-record sampler album titled The Music People at a record store in Houston, Texas.

Record companies issued sampler albums like that one to publicize new bands or give a bit of a goose to more well-known musicians whose forthcoming albums weren't expected to do very well.  

The most famous of these sampler albums were the "Loss Leaders" series of mostly double albums produced by Warner Brothers/Reprise records and sold by mail order for $2. The musicians represented on The Big Ball, Schlagers, and others of that ilk included some very mainstream artists (like Petula Clark and Peter, Paul and Mary), but were dominated by crazies like the Fugs, Captain Beefheart, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

Columbia Records also issued several samplers, and Music People included cuts by superstars (Bob Dylan, the Byrds), cult favorites (Spirit, It's a Beautiful Day, Mahavishnu Orchestra), and utterly forgotten never-wases (Sweathog, Compost, Grootna, and Mylon with Holy Smoke).

The fourth cut on side one of Music People was "I'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep" by Blue Öyster Cult (or "BOC," as I will hereinafter abbreviate it) -- and it impressed me sufficiently that I immediately ran out and bought BOC's eponymous first album, which led off with this song. (That's right, Columbia Records sucked me right in – I did EXACTLY what they hoped I would do.)

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BOC's first album cover – the artist was a guy named Bill Gawlik – got your attention. It looked like it definitely meant something serious and important, but who the hell knew what?

The cover featured the band's logo – that funny thingie right in the middle – like a cross with an upside-down question mark.  Here's the flag featuring the logo that was displayed at some BOC concerts:

Blue Öyster Cult is generally credited with being the first band to use the so-called heavy metal umlaut – that's the two dots over the "O" in "Oyster" – which was later copied by Mötley Crüe, Motörhead, Queensrÿche, and others.  Since umlauts are used in Germanic languages but not in English, its usage by such bands is presumably intended to add an element of menace and general nastiness. 

Of course, umlauts should be distinguished from diaereses, a diacritical mark graphically similar to the umlaut.  (If you want to know more about this topic, be my guest – just don't expect me to accompany you on your little side trip to Minutiaeville.)

The titles of the songs on the first BOC album were attention-getting, to put it mildly: "Transmaniacon MC," "Before the Kiss, A Redcap," "She's as Beautiful as a Foot," "I'm On The Lamb But I Ain’t No Sheep,” etc.

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The lyrics of today’s featured song are obscure, but Buck Dharma (BOC’s guitarist) and Sandy Pearlman (the group’s manager) have explained the lines that are quoted at the beginning of this post.

According to Dharma, Sandy Pearlman witnessed a woman and a man exchange a “redcap” – slang for a psychoactive drug (possibly Dalmane, which is a trade name for the drug flurazepam) – while kissing during a BOC show at a Long Island bar. 

Pearlman told a slightly different story to an interviewer in 1974.  He said that he was approached that night by a man who had a redcap on his extended tongue, apparently offering it to Pearlman. 

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The second BOC album, which was released a year or so later, featured an equally portentous Bill Gawlik cover:

The inner sleeve of Tyranny and Mutation said you could write in for a copy of the lyrics, which I promptly did.  A few weeks later, I received the lyrics for the songs on both albums printed on old-fashioned 11" x 14 7/8" continuous-feed computer paper.

BOC lyrics are generally enigmatic and just plain odd.  Adding to my bewilderment concerning what the lyrics meant is the fact that whoever transcribed them was either careless, or high, or dyslexic, or had a very curious sense of humor – the text of the printouts was often quite different from what I heard when I played the corresponding songs.

For example, the lyrics for "Before the Kiss, A Redcap" took "Four and forty redheads meet/Come to doom, doom the dawn" and rendered it as "Four and forty redheads meet/Bold with soup and then the corn." 

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I saw BOC on August 7, 1974 in Little Rock, Arkansas (along with the Guess Who).  That was the summer before I went to law school, and after quitting my summer job (which was driving a water truck for a company that was widening US Highway 71 south of my hometown of Joplin, Missouri), I decided to go visit a high-school friend who had moved to Alexandria, Louisiana, and then say good-bye to my college girlfriend, who was spending the summer in Houston before heading off to Stanford Business School.

On the way, I stopped to visit a cousin of mine who lived in Little Rock, where her boyfriend (now husband) played baseball for the Arkansas Travelers, who were the Double-A minor-league affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals. 

Richard Nixon's resignation speech

The reason I know I saw that concert took place on August 7 is that Richard Nixon went on television to resign from office at 9:01 pm on August 8, and I was at the Travelers game with my cousin that night. I had no idea he had resigned until the next morning, when I was driving through the wilds of southern Arkansas on my way to Alexandria.

[NOTE: It appears that this concert is a figment of my imagination.  I can find no evidence that BOC ever opened for Guess Who – those two groups played very different music, and would have made a very odd pair – despite my vivid memory to the contrary.  There’s no doubt about when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, so whatever concert I saw must have taken place on August 7.  Did I see the Guess Who perform with a different opening act?  Did I see Blue Öyster Cult but not the Guess Who?  I’m sure that I’ve seen both bands, and I can’t imagine when else that might have happened if not on August 7 – I saw very few live concerts in the seventies, so I should be able to remember each and every one.]

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I must admit that BOC did not always bring out my nobler side.  

I left my copy of the first album on the back deck of my 1970 Olds Cutlass Supreme (the smallest engine this two-door coupe came with was a 350 V-8) and the hot Houston sun warped it a bit.  So I went to the local record store and bought a new copy of the album.  

A 1970 Olds Cutlass Supreme

I then returned to the store a few hours later with my warped album and my receipt, claiming that the store had sold me a defective record and demanding a refund.  The store manager wouldn't give me a refund, but did allow me to exchange it for a fresh copy of the record.  (Curses – foiled again!) 

The summer after my first year of law school, I worked at a large Houston law firm.  I got chummy with one of the secretaries in the department I was assigned to and socialized with her a bit outside of the office.  ("Dating," unfortunately, would not be an accurate description of our relationship – much to my chagrin.)  

Sherry told me that M&Ms went very well with beer – I was skeptical at first, but she turned out to be right – and I responded to that kind gesture with a lie, hoping to impress this fair lady.  To be exact, I showed her the computer printouts of the Blue Öyster Cult lyrics, and claimed I had written them.

She probably saw through this pathetic falsehood, but even if she had believed me, did I really think that lines like "Lecherous, invisible/Beware the limping cat" or "Didn't believe it when he bit into her face/It tasted just like a fallen arch" would win her heart?  I guess I must have.  And that, kind reader, goes a long way to explaining my limited success those days with the fairer sex – even though I was super cute in those days.

Actually, Sherry did take a liking to "oyster boys," a term used in "Subhuman" – "Oyster boys are swimming now/Hear 'em chatter on the tide/We understand, we understand/But fear is real and so do I." (Say whut?)

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One final BOC story and then I must bid you adieu. (I know you wish this post would never end, but my well of BOC material is about to run dry, I fear.)

My favorite author, George Pelecanos, often mentions the names of song titles in his books. "Then Came the Last Days of May," a song from the first BOC album (it's about three friends who are murdered by the confederate who is driving them to Mexico to consummate a drug transaction) is mentioned a couple of times in his 2008 novel, The Turnaround.

The key event in The Turnaround (which takes place in 1972) is an ugly confrontation that takes place when three white teenagers insult three black teenagers who are standing on a street corner in a working-class black neighborhood in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.  The driver of the car (a Ford Gran Torino) is the one who precipitates the fight, and he is shot and killed.  One of his friends – who tries to prevent the trouble – is badly beaten.

Prior to the incident, there's a scene where the character who is later beaten was listening to the first BOC album in his bedroom, waiting for his girlfriend to call:

He was looking at the Blue Öyster Cult art now, while "Then Came the Last Days of May" played in the room.  The song was about the end of something, its tone both ominous and mysterious, and it troubled Alex and excited him.  The cover of the record was a black-and-white drawing of a building that stretched out to infinity, stars and a sliver of moon in a black sky above it, and, hovering over the building, a symbol that looked like a hooked cross.  The images were unsettling, in keeping with the music, which was heavy, dark, dangerous, and beautiful.  This was Alex's favorite new group.

After the incident, Alex goes home to recuperate after a long hospitalization and several reconstructive surgeries.

[H]e listened to his Blue Öyster Cult album incessantly, returning to the song "Then Came the Last Days of May" over and over again. "Three good buddies were laughin' and smokin'/In the back of a rented Ford./They couldn't know they weren't going far." It seemed to have been written for him and his friends.

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A couple of years ago, Pelecanos edited an anthology of noir stories set in Washington, and he a couple of the other authors featured in that anthology did a reading at a local bookstore/restaurant.

I bought a copy of the anthology for my older son, who is also a Pelecanos fan, and got all three authors to autograph it after the reading was over.  But I also got Pelecanos to autograph the jacket of one of my two copies of the first BOC album, which includes "Then Came the Last Days of May."  

I’m not sure if he autographed the one I paid for, or the one I exchanged the old warped record for.

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Click here to listen to “Before the Kiss, a Redcap.”  It’s like no other song you’ve ever heard.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Grateful Dead – "Truckin'" (1970)

Lately it occurs to me

What a long strange trip it’s been

A Grateful Dead song in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME?

Believe me, I’m just as surprised as you are.

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Have you heard this old joke about the Grateful Dead?  

Q: What does a Deadhead say when the drugs wear off?  

A: “This music sucks!”

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Druggie humor isn’t funny.  (Are Cheech and Chong funny?  Are Dude, Where’s My Car? and Half Baked funny?  Or The Big Lebowski?)

Likewise, druggie music usually isn’t good music.

As regular readers of 2 or 3 lines know, I am not a big fan of the Dead. For one thing, their records are generally waaaaay too laid back for me.  (They badly needed a producer who constantly yelled “Let’s do another take, but this time PLAY WITH SOME F*CKING ENERGY!” at them.)

But even a blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while, and the Grateful Dead wrote so many songs that it’s almost a statistical certainty that a few of them would turn out to be good songs.

“Truckin’” (which was released on American Beauty in 1970) is probably the best of the Dead’s songs.  The 12/8 time signature gives the song a lot more rhythmic drive than the typical Dead song, and the lyrics reflect the zeitgeist as well as any song of that era.

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Did you know that the Grateful Dead performed “Truckin’” in concert a total of 520 times – making it the eighth-most performed Dead song ever?

If we were talking about any band other than the Grateful Dead, I would find it absolutely astonishing that were people out there who tabulated every live performance of every Dead song.  (I’m a little OCD myself, but knowing exactly how many times “Truckin’” was performed in concert, and how that song stacked up against other Dead songs when it came to live-performance frequency is a clear indication of OCD squared . . . maybe OCD cubed.)

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If you want to better understand what “Truckin’” is all about, click here and you’ll be taken to a webpage that provides an exhaustive (not to mention exhausting) prolegomenon to that song’s lyrics.

For example, you’ll learn that the most famous line from the song – “What a long strange trip it’s been” (which Dead fans abbreviate to “WALSTIB”) – is used in the titles of scientific articles that appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal and also in a volume of Advances in the Astronautical Sciences.

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Click here to listen to “Truckin’.”

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.

Jefferson Airplane – "We Can Be Together" (1969)

Up against the wall!

Up against the wall, motherf*ckers!

High school teachers fall into one of two basic categories: cool and uncool.

When I was a high school student, most of our teachers were uncool – only a few were cool or semi-cool.

All the cool teachers at my school were male.  I don’t think that was unusual back in the day (i.e., the sixties), when male teachers were few and far between.

Female teachers generally went by the book.  They were usually fairly strict and a little standoffish.

Cool student, uncool teacher

We had some extremely uncool male teachers, but the cool ones were pretty approachable.  They were among the younger teachers, and you could kid around with them and talk about sports and TV shows and music.  

If you ever saw one of them outside of school, it might have been at a pizza joint or a bowling alley, and he might have been smoking or drinking a beer.

I don’t remember ever seeing a female teacher wearing anything but a dress – even outside of school.

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The coolest teacher at my high school was the journalism teacher, who also oversaw the school newspaper and yearbook.  

Surprisingly, the music teacher who conducted the orchestra was semi-cool – even though the kids who played in the orchestra were about as uncool as it got.  (A cool bassoonist or French horn player?  No way.) 

Uncool students, uncool teacher

Of course, even a cool teacher’s coolness only went so far.  Cool teachers were teachers first, after all.

For example, I was one of a group of students responsible for printing and selling “spirit ribbons” every Friday when we had a football game.  Spirit ribbons were six-inch-long ribbons in our school colors that had messages like “Beat the [rival school mascot name]!” printed on them.  

Before the game against our crosstown rivals my senior year – we were the Bears, they were the Eagles – we decided to print up a few X-rated ribbons and give them to our friends.  “Pluck the Eagles” was printed on most of the ribbons, but on the rest of them “pluck” was changed to . . . well, you can probably guess.

One of my co-conspirators showed one of the X-rated ribbons to the semi-cool music teacher, who promptly ratted us out to the principal.  That was not cool, but you can hardly expect a teacher with a family to risk his career by concealing the existence of contraband.    

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The journalism teacher was cooler than the music teacher.  He tolerated quite a bit of nonsense, but you couldn’t expect him to turn a blind eye to everything.

Our school’s newspaper and yearbook staffs were housed in a classroom that was adjacent to the offices of the school’s principal and dean of students.

There was a record player in that classroom, and we played LPs by the Beatles, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, and others of their ilk while we worked.

One day, someone brought in the Jefferson Airplane’s brand-new Volunteers album, which had been released in November of our senior year.  

Was that someone me?  I owned the album, so it might have been – but I honestly don’t remember.  (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

In any event, “We Can Be Together” is the first track on that album, and it has plenty of lyrics that would have raised the eyebrows of the powers-that-be of my high school – if they had been paying attention, that is.

To wit:

We are all outlaws in the eyes of America

In order to survive we steal, cheat, lie, forge, hide, and deal

We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young

Here’s another excerpt from the lyrics:

We are forces of chaos and anarchy

Everything they say we are, we are

And we are very proud of ourselves

But adults in the sixties tended not to pay attention to the lyrics of the rock songs to unless those lyrics just absolutely hit them over the head.

A sober Grace Slick

“Up against the wall, motherf*cker!” did just that.  When Grace Slick crooned that line about three and a half minutes into the song, the journalism teacher – who was a big guy – jumped up from his desk, got to our record player in no time flat, and swatted the tone arm clean off Volunteers.

No one ever tried to play the album again.  As irresponsible and clueless as we were, we knew a line that shouldn’t be crossed when we saw one.

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Click here to listen to “We Could Be Together.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Led Zeppelin – "Communication Breakdown" (1969)

I don't know what it is that I like about you

But I like it a lot!

If anyone ever asks you what 2 or 3 lines means when it gives the appellation “stick of dynamite” to a record, you tell them to listen to Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” – which just might be the ne plus ultra of stick-of-dynamite records.

One author who has written extensively about heavy metal music called “Communication Breakdown” the first metal song.  I think it’s more of a precursor of punk than a precursor of metal.

But whether you think it’s metal or punk or something else, there can be no argument that “Communication Breakdown” belongs in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADES” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.

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Whoever decided to position “Communication Breakdown” after “Black Mountain Side” on side two of Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut album –presumably Jimmy Page, who produced the album – was a fookin’ genius.  

“Black Mountain Side” is a short instrumental featuring Page on acoustic guitar and Viram Jasani on tabla – or Indian bongo drums.  The track meanders around for about two minutes, lulling the listener into a very relaxed state of mind.

Tabla

You expect “Black Mountain Side” to fade away, but instead it ends somewhat abruptly.  After a brief pause, the inimitable Page downstroke guitar riff that defines “Communication Breakdown” grabs the half-asleep listener by the throat and screams “WAKE THE F*CK UP!”  Before we know what’s happened, we are off to the races, holding on for dear life.

A lot of Led Zeppelin songs were inspired by other people’s music.  (While I say “inspired by,” others would say “stolen from.”)  

But “Communication Breakdown” seems to have been created entirely by Jimmy Page – first came that downstroke riff, and the rest of the song followed.

Speaking of that riff, Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone has said that he developed his downstroke guitar style by playing “Communication Breakdown” over and over.

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I noticed something for the first time while listening to “Communication Breakdown” tonight.

The introductory Page guitar riff that kicks the song off is eight measures long.  

Next comes the first verse, which is 16 bars long, and the chorus, which is eight bars long.  

The second verse and chorus are also 16 and eight bars long, respectively.

After the second chorus, there’s a brief pause, followed by a Page guitar solo.  You would expect that instrumental break to be 16 measures long – like the verses.

But it’s only 14 bars long.  Which means that the chorus that follows the instrumental break starts two measures before you’re expecting it.  It’s like getting into a car and having the driver goose the accelerator before you’ve gotten your seatbelt fastened.

Ending the instrumental break two measures before you’re expecting it to end has the effect of propelling the song forward, giving it momentum that it wouldn’t have had if Page had stuck to the 16-bar/eight-bar structure.

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You may have noticed that I’ve inducted three songs from the first Led Zeppelin album into the 2 or 3 lines album tracks hall of fame in as many years.

That’s no accident, boys and girls.  That album is that good – certainly the best debut rock album of all time, and arguably the best classic rock album period.

I’d say it’s better than even money that there will be a Led Zeppelin song in next year’s group of inductees.  (Maybe from a different album – we’ll see.)

Click here to listen to “Communication Breakdown.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Rolling Stones – "Stray Cat Blues" (1968)

It's no hanging matter 

It's no capital crime 

[NOTE: "Stray Cat Blues" was a shocking record when it was released in 1968, but I don't remember anyone making a fuss about it back then.  Today, of course, no record company would touch it with a ten-foot pole.  In the post that appears below – which originally appeared in 2013 – I argue that it's a perfectly conceived and executed work of art despite being morally reprehensible.  And I continue to hold that point of view, although I sure as hell wouldn't shout it from the rooftops today – I'd feel much safer speaking it sotto voce.  That's because times have changed since 2013, and not entirely for the better.  In 1968, my generation believed in freedom of expression.  But the younger generation seems to believe in that only when it's the right kind of expression.]

Here's an item you can stick in your "truth is stranger than fiction" file.  Bill Wyman, the longtime bass guitarist for the Rolling Stones, was 52 when he married the 18-year-old Mandy Smith in 1989.  They had been "dating" since she was 13 and he was 47.

Wyman and his young bride

Wyman and Smith split up after a couple of years.  But just before their divorce became final in 1993, Wyman's son from his first marriage married Smith's mother.  Stephen Wyman was 30 when he married his mother-in-law's mother, Patsy Smith, who was 46.

That meant that Stephen was Mandy's stepson and stepfather.  It also means that Stephen was his own grandfather.  (You can click here for an explanation of that statement.)

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That story isn't a bad lead-in for our discussion of "Stray Cat Blues," which is perhaps the most amoral song in the history of rock and roll.  

The singer of that song doesn't care a whit about the line that separates right and wrong, although he does care about the delineation between a mere felony and a capital crime.  (He's willing to risk the first, but not the second.)

Maybe I'm amoral to some degree as well because I think "Stray Cat Blues" is a great song – a work of art, if you will – despite its being entirely reprehensible from a moral point of view.

It's arguably the most perfectly conceived and executed song the Rolling Stones ever recorded.  The lyrics and the music cut like a knife.

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Today, Mick Jagger is almost 70 years old, and has four grandchildren.  Like Paul McCartney and Elton John, he even has a knighthood.

Mick's come a long way since "Stray Cat Blues" was released on the Rolling Stones' 1968 album, Beggars Banquet, which was their ninth U.S. studio album.  He was only 25 years old at the time, and it is doubtful that having grandchildren and being knighted had entered his mind.

Mick Jagger is the ultimate rock frontman.  One of his biographers has written that no other performer (even the young Elvis Presley) exerted a power that was "so wholly and disturbingly physical."  That author went on to say that "the only point concerning Mick Jagger's influence over 'young people' that doctors and psychologists agreed on was that it wasn't, under any circumstances, fundamentally harmless."

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"Stray Cat Blues" is a shocking song in part because it sounds like it's based on experience more than imagination.  

The song begins with singer promising a young groupie that "there'll be a feast" if she comes upstairs and joins him in his boudoir – what he doesn't disclose to her is that he'll be the diner at that feast, and she'll be the main course.

"I can see that you're 15 years old," he says unapologetically.  "No, I don't want your I.D."

Since 1885, the age of consent in the UK has been 16.  Since an honest belief that one's sexual partner was 16 or older may be a defense to a charge of statutory rape, perhaps the singer doesn't want to see the girl's I.D. so he can later claim ignorance of her true age.  

But I'm guessing that the singer doesn't want to see the girl's I.D. because he wants to believe she is 15 even if she's not.  The prospect of having sex with an underage girl adds a frisson of excitement to the illicit encounter.

After the singer entices the 15-year-old his bed, he raises the emotional ante by dragging her mother into the picture: "I bet your momma don't know you can scratch like that," he taunts her.

The girl not only scratches, but also screams, spits, and bites.  But that probably just excites the singer more.  We are talking about Mick Jagger, after all – given all the groupies he's had at this point, he was probably a bit jaded.  (Bill Wyman, who was the least charismatic member of the Stones, claimed to have had sex with over 1000 women.  Surely Mick outdid Wyman.)

But he's still not satisfied.  He tells the girl to bring her friend upstairs to join them.  "If she's so wild, then she can join in, too," he croons.  After all, "it's no hanging matter . . . it's no capital crime."

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What would happen if a mainstream pop star released a song today that depicted a sexual encounter with a couple of 15-year-old girls?  I think it's safe to say that Walmart stores sure as hell wouldn't stock that CD.  And I shudder to think how many politicians (Republicans and Democrats alike) would be elbowing their way to the nearest microphone so they could condemn the singer.  

I was 16 when this record was released, and I don't remember much of a fuss being made about it.  The song may have been condemned in a few sermons or small-town newspaper editorials, but I guarantee you there would be a hundred times more outrage today.

I'm not sure which is worse – the words of the song, or the undisguised glee in Jagger's voice as he anticipates the debauchery to come.  Sure, "Stray Cat Blues" is just a record, and I doubt that anyone was inspired to become a sex offender as a result of hearing it.  But it is about as creepy as rock 'n' roll gets.

If the studio version of the song isn't bad enough, listen to the live recording of the song that is included on the Stones' 1970 concert album, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!  In the performance that was recorded for that album, Mick changed "I can see that you're 15 years old" to "I can see that you're 13 years old."

Even so, it's still "no hanging matter."  Capital punishment was abolished across the board in the UK some time ago.  And while the laws of a few American states provided for the death penalty in certain cases involving the rape of a child, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that a state could not execute a child rapist unless the victim had also been murdered. 

According to the majority opinion in that case, a death sentence for one who rapes but does not kill a child is "cruel and unusual punishment," and therefore unconstitutional.

Click here to listen to "Stray Cat Blues."

Click here to buy the song from Amazon: