How Blue Öyster Cult laid out the archetype for band-groupie relations with ‘Goin’ Through the Motions’
By 1978, Blue Öyster Cult were a decade into their existence but about a million miles from where they’d started.
Once an experimental psych-rock outfit appreciated by the critics but far too strange to sell records, they were now the faces of mainstream, laser-show, arena-rock, having been propelled into the role by radio staples like ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ and ‘Godzilla’.
Frontman Eric Bloom was pleased with the success, but less thrilled with some of the more annoying consequences of it. Those aforementioned laser beams, for example, were such a major part of Blue Öyster Cult’s stage show that they came under federal investigation for posing a potential threat to the safety of young concert-goers.
“I used to have laser-beam optical fibre bracelets, where I could shoot lasers out of my hands on stage,” Bloom bemoaned to the Baltimore Sun, explaining how he’d been forced to retire the bracelets on the off-chance he fell off the stage and ended up blinding some kid.
Bloom was also displeased about his band routinely being chucked into the “heavy metal” category, noting, “To me, a heavy metal group is like Black Sabbath,” explaining that most metal bands don’t have much of a sense of humour, “I think we lighten up a lot on it, and we do stuff that is tongue-in-cheek. There’s a lot of cynicism, there are a lot of inside jokes to the stuff we do.”
One example of Blue Öyster Cult’s cynical sense of humour, perhaps, can be found on the first single from their 1977 record Spectres, titled ‘Goin’ Through the Motions’. Co-written with Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, this matter-of-fact detailing of the relationship between rock star and groupie didn’t resonate with radio listeners for some reason, with Bloom later admitting that it “really flopped”, a fact made easier to stomach by the subsequent success of ‘Godzilla’.
From a 21st-century perspective, ‘Goin’ Through the Motions’ sounds like a 1970s rock and roll cliché right out of Almost Famous. Bloom has described it as the story of “a typical backstage romance”, but arguably, it also paints the average Blue Öyster Cult groupie as someone out to exploit the band, rather than the other way around, with lines like: “Staying with you gave us something to do / I almost thought it was true for a while / ‘Cause there’s love in your lies / You’re so thinly disguised / You couldn’t tell right from wrong if you tried”.
If this song truly was intended to be “tongue-in-cheek”, as the ridiculous ‘Godzilla’ certainly was, you wouldn’t know it from listening to the members of Blue Öyster Cult in 1978. Speaking to the Muskegon Chronicle that summer, guitarist Joe Bouchard said groupies were “good for your ego; knowing girls are right next to you, outside the dressing room, the audience and your hotel”.
“The person with the largest amount of groupies is Rod Stewart,” Bouchard continued, as if he were talking about record sales, “We do worse than he does according to number, unfortunately, but we do get more than, say, Bachman Turner Overdrive.” There’s certainly a subtle thread of comedy detectable in there, but it’s hard to pinpoint where the actual satire might be lurking.
To be fair, the concept of the rock and roll groupie had existed long before Blue Öyster Cult even formed, but as opinions slowly began to change around the nature of these relationships and the power dynamic therein, ‘Goin’ Through the Motions’ has become something of an interesting museum piece, an artifact of the attitudes of the late ‘70s, when laser beams were still laser beams, and a rockstar could still sing about being sad that his teenage one-night-stands didn’t really love him.
