The Story Behind The Song: Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘Veteran of the Psychic Wars’
In the mid-1970s, New York’s Blue Öyster Cult were riding high in the charts. Enjoying the enormous success of Agents of Fortune‘s mammoth ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ hit and the following year’s garage stomper ‘Godzilla’, core members Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom had burst into a heavy prog corner populated by the likes of Rush, Rainbow or Styx as hard rock’s much cooler and funnier sibling. Yet, an ebb in commercial success and a flirtation with glossier production looked to spell the band drifting away from their former glories.
Their old creative flame was rekindled for 1981’s Fire of Unknown Origin. Boasting a much-needed Top 40 hit with ‘Burnin’ for You’, Blue Öyster Cult added a slathering of shimmering keyboards to their rock strut and fantasy lyricism, pushing their trusty proto-punk sound to a new MTV climate without compromising their riff attack. It worked, their eighth LP effort peaking at 24 on the Billboard 200 and striking Gold in US album sales.
Fire of Unknown Origin‘s songwriting inspiration had been informed by their association with the sci-fi animated feature Heavy Metal. An adaptation of the long-running comic book from National Lampoon Inc, Heavy Metal presented an episodic anthology of various buxom warriors and gruff anti-heroes and their adventures across far-flung alien landscapes, dystopian metropolises, and cosmic space outer reaches. In keeping with the comic’s adolescent target audience, the tales told all enthusiastically feature gratuitous levels of violence and sexuality.
It was also notable for its time-capsule soundtrack. Wobbling on a strange intersection of hard rock and new wave, bands as disparate as Devo and Grand Funk Railroad all smattered its cult LP, dropped a month before the film’s theatrical release. Heard before the ‘Harry Canyon’ section, based on Moebius’ The Long Tomorrow and detailing the futuristic New York cabbie Harry’s exploits involving the film’s mysterious Loc-Nar orb and the criminal underworld’s pursuit, one of Blue Öyster Cult’s finest cuts can be heard during the construction site interlude when an alien picks up the green, glowing orb and fatally disintegrates in its dangerous radiations.
Ironically, the Blue Öyster Cult number selected for the film wasn’t intended for the feature. While ‘Heavy Metal: The Black and Silver’ and ‘Vengeance (The Pact)’ were written with Heavy Metal in mind, the latter lyrically summarising the ‘Taarna’ segment’s plot, producer and future Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman opted for ‘Veteran of the Psychic Wars’ in the movie’s soundtrack, serving zero conceptual or narrative connection but no less saturated with evocative sci-fi imagery courtesy of Elric of Melniboné series author and graphic novelist Michael Moorcock.
Pulsing with martial percussion, cinematic synths and eerie strings, ‘Veteran of the Psychic Wars’ presents a comic book vignette of a war-weary cosmic warrior shellshocked and driven to futility in a world of eternal conflict. The Psychic War soldier is rooted in Moorcock’s lofty concept of The Eternal Champion that features across his wieldy oeuvre, a heroic figure of almost elemental force appointed by some higher power and assigned to ensure balance is upheld throughout the “Multiverse”, leaning his thumbs on the scales of law and chaos as is necessary yet often never quite knowing quite which way he’s steering the world, much to his own inner turmoil.
Such fantasy fodder had been heard before in rock. A frequent collaborator with space psychonauts Hawkwind, Moorcock’s ‘Black Corridor’ and ‘Sonic Attack’ was read aloud by Robert Calvert on 1973’s seminal Space Ritual live LP, and ‘Standing at the Edge’ even contained the line “…veteran of a Thousand Psychic Wars” from 1975’s Warrior on the Edge of Time, a record that conceptually immersed itself in The Eternal Champion’s lore and mythos.
It could have been a ponderous bore, but Blue Öyster Cult wrapped Moorcock’s fantastical visions with gripping rock heft and chromatic, interstellar groove that would stand as their final roll of sci-fi pop marvel. A highlight of their body of work and the jewel in Heavy Metal‘s coveted soundtrack crown, ‘Veteran of the Psychic Wars’ sincerely illustrates the hopeless musings of a weathered futuristic mercenary wandering the ruins of a conflict whose meaning and belligerents have become long forgotten, taking an extra dimension of pertinence in an age of hawkish NeoCon interventions and Middle-Eastern permawars.
