“Great record, a lot of angst in it. We were certainly feeling a lot of pressure to come up with the second installment in our saga. It was written around touring and all the pressures of that. That was our first exposure to the actual nuts and bolts of what it was like to be recording artists. Once you’ve actually made a record and have had it released, there’s a lot of angst there and I think that’s reflected in the music – there’s a lot of tension.”
– Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser
“The second record was a blur. We did it in about two or three days. And I remember I screwed up a drum fill in ‘Hot Rails to Hell.’ So I overdubbed the whole drum track from start to finish, and of course I didn’t have my old drums to listen to either, just the guitar. It’s a wild track. It’s really loose, and it was like one take.”
– Albert Bouchard
both quotes from Agents of Fortune: The
Blue Oyster Cult Story (Martin Popoff, 2016)
I would be remiss if I let the day pass without saying anything about Tyranny and Mutation, the second long play from Long Island’s Blue Öyster Cult, released on this date 50 years ago. Born out of the blitz of touring that followed the band’s self-titled debut in ’72, Tyranny and Mutation is big and weird and far too busy for its own damn good. It also might be my favorite album… not just from the BÖC catalog, but from anyone.
A dig through my vinyl crates will check that math out. I own four copies of this on vinyl alone, including a pair of first-run pressings (one of them the elusive quad mix), with a fifth on the way. That doesn’t include the copy I have in digital hi-res, the pair of CD reissues I grew up with, or the cassette of it I ran into the ground. That last point is key. I don’t just own a lot of copies of Tyranny and Mutation… somehow I manage to listen to them. All of them. This one is in rotation a lot, and I find it creeping in between the wealth of new listening I do at least a couple of times a month.
But why this album? That’s a little harder to shake.
I did a lot of general band-geek shit as a kid. I was in the school concert band from junior high until I graduated, in the jazz band for the last four of those years, took elective music theory courses, and somehow had enough bandwidth left to play horrible five-string bass in a misguided alternative rock outfit (don’t ask – our recordings are, to the benefit of all mankind, lost). Somewhere somehow in the middle of all that Blue Öyster Cult became my band. I fished for their CDs at the local Camelot Music and an increasingly barren Circuit City, cut their tracks to tape for friends, and was just generally insufferable about them in the way teenagers are usually insufferable about things. I even dug a trio of old LPs out of a dusty thrift store crate and ran them through one of my aunts’ nigh-derelict turntables. I’m sure they sounded as awful as the speakers I blasted them on, but who cares. Those records are lost, long since melted in my parents’ attic. I still miss them.
Sometime after high school the Öyster boys and I lost touch. I don’t really know why. Times change, I guess, and tastes change with them. I skipped college. I got jobs, got into Nine Inch Nails and neoclassical, got the hell out of my hometown and got married. Tyranny and Mutation was nowhere to be found in that time. In retrospect I probably could have used it. But the CDs got sunburned and broken and went out with the rest of the garbage during one of our half dozen apartment moves. I miss those, too.
Cut ahead a few years. My wife got a job in tech (she has since recovered), and we moved to San Francisco, right off Haight, into an apartment that cost us a good used car a month to rent. Those were strange times, aye, and in those strange times the boys and I were brought together again. Six months after we landed in Haight the plague years hit. My wife and I were sitting in an Indonesian place (Lime Tree for those curious. Hit is up. It’s fucking great.), our phones buzzed and the NBA was cancelled. One of us said, “I guess this is fucking serious.” For the next year and a half we queued for groceries and fretted over toilet paper and were shocked at the beleaguered insanity of this country and the world at large, and our entire lives were packed within a three hundred square foot second story apartment with an ant problem and a $35k per year price tag.
To be direct, I started to lose it. My problems with bipolar disorder did not begin during the pandemic, but they were certainly amplified by it, and to a degree that become terrifying to me. What once was manageable was suddenly anything but. At the worst I became alien to myself, unfixed, unrecognizable, with little recourse but to curl up on a cold laminate floor and wait for my brain to kick back into the familiar. Like I said, they were strange times. (And for anyone reading who has found themselves in similarly strange times… It’s scary, and it’s awful, and I feel you. Help is awesome, and it’s out there, and you should absolutely try to get it. ~weltraumbesty)
Around the same time, and in no way as a cope (for Covid lockdowns and my mental illness and my loud, inescapable neighbors), I got deep into buying and playing records. Like… obsessive deep. Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve accumulated around six hundred of them, not including a significant pile of 7″ singles, and a small horde of tables and cartridges with which to play them. It was, to be perfectly honest, a problem, one clearly driven by my stress and mania, though I am eternally grateful that I did not settle on a more destructive preoccupation. The positive offshoot of all this is that I started to listen to a lot of music, most of it entirely new to me. I got into classic gangsta rap and cloud hop and post punk and electro pop and thrash and death and West Coast stoner rock and god knows what else, which was as richly rewarding as you might expect.
At the height of that mania I rediscovered Blue Öyster Cult, and I also rediscovered Tyranny and Mutation.
Tyranny and Mutation is not a particularly well regarded album, even from the Cult’s own catalog, and it’s not really difficult to see why. It’s a messy kind of a record, a real tangle of styles and influences that actively tries and largely succeeds at being abrasive and unapproachable. This is supposed to be dangerous music after all, leather clad and full of guitar distortion and chants of “Lucifer the light!” It must have fit the bill well enough at the time. The band certainly played the part of transgressive rockers, draped as they were in the trappings of occult fascism for their early cavalcade of live performances. Never mind that it was all a work, perpetrated for the kind of shock publicity you’d expect from a label pitching the band as a domestic answer to Black Sabbath. The band grew tired of the schtick quickly enough, dropping it well before achieving mainstream success with 1976’s platinum seller Agents of Fortune, but some of the reputation must have stuck. As late as 2001 my assistant high school band director was shocked to find me trading cassettes of their stuff with friends, and made a fervent effort to sway me from their “devil music”.
If he were to listen to it I suspect he’d have found this album, at least, to be more irritating than it is damnable. Early Blue Öyster Cult has a certain structural aggressiveness to it, a fact of which Tyranny and Mutation is highly emblematic. The album is all hard angles and staccato grooves and bright, crunchy electric guitar, its accessibility compromised by an incredibly busy stereo production (this was, after all, one of Columbia’s inaugural quadraphonic efforts) that, rife as it is with dropped notes and boozy pseudo-synchronization, can border on the unprofessional. And that’s without considering the album’s slate of more or less forgotten B sides, a comparatively downtempo selection of weird-out tracks that are steeped in obscure lyricism and prone to off-beat stylistic diversions.
To be short, Tyranny and Mutation is a strange fucking album.
It’s also fucking great, an album that sparks with experimental energy and verve in a way that no other album by BÖC does. Tyranny and Mutation blisters and bruises and boogies and bops. Its staccato guitars duet and fight and slice like razors at either extreme of the stereo channels while the mixer overloads with track on track on track of bass and synth and drums. It’s a tactile tour de force that flirts with half a million musical genres, from the inscrutable masturbation-as-ritual hard bop proto-speed epic 7 Screaming Diz-Busters to the hefty gothic doom-and-gloom triptych Wings Wetted Down to the drugged-out and disturbingly affirmational psych-out O.D.’d on Life Itself.
And on and on. Teen Archer is a lyrically reductive and dizzying bit of psych-rock while The Red & the Black refines prior album cut I’m on the Lamb but I ain’t no Sheep into a classic hard rock showstopper. Its raucous wall-of-sound opener is brutal, iconic, a classic bit of metal musicianship still worthy of homage, and a hell of a way to jumpstart a record. Hot Rails to Hell delights in its surf-boogie blasphemies while Baby Ice Dog lurks, sensually suggestive and elusively jazzy, bookended with a set of baying dogs (“Freeze on!“). All along the way the cuts pile atop one another, impatient and intractable, until Mistress of the Salmon Salt (Quicklime Girl), a deliciously grim closer that dabbles in occult urban legend and diabolism.
All that’s fantastic, of course, and certainly part and parcel of why I love the thing so much. But it goes beyond that, to something more immediately personal. When I look back to that tiny fucking apartment and see myself waiting there, low and troubled on that fucking floor, I also see myself reaching for my earbuds and, for whatever reason, listening to this album. Tyranny and Mutation didn’t fix me by any means. To suggest that would be absurd. But somewhere in its abstract angularities and emotional vacillations and shear overwhelming texture I was able to find a bit of myself, and at a time when, reasonably or not (definitely not!), I genuinely felt like what was me might be lost forever. I am very happy that the worst of those strange days appear to be behind me. My love for this record remains.
Happy 50th Tyranny and Mutation.
