The band Patti Smith said had “the most heart”
Nothing that Patti Smith ever made was supposed to be for the intense musical dexterity every time she played.
She loved the idea of playing like her idols like Jimi Hendrix, but the lion’s share of all her greatest songs heavily revolved around the passion that she was putting into every single song rather than focusing on whether every note sounded absolutely perfect in the mix. She was more than willing to work her ass off if it meant having the right performance, and a lot of her favourite acts held themselves to the same standard whenever they performed.
After all, Smith was a poet before anything else, and she was going to get a message through long before she decided to make pristine rock and roll records. There are many pieces of albums like Horses and Easter that are more than a little bit rough around the edges, and yet it doesn’t matter because you can hear her and her band absolutely going for it whenever they throw themselves into songs like ‘Gloria’. But it’s not like she was alone when she first crash-landed in the New York scene.
The Velvet Underground had already been looking to tear down the conventional means of rock and roll songs, and Bob Dylan was putting poetry into rock and roll ever since he released ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. But when looking through some of the more straight ahead rock bands of the time, Blue Oyster Cult was at least willing to go the extra mile to add a bit more artsiness into their music than everyone else.
Most rock bands around that time would have been trying to copy the likes of Led Zeppelin or The Stones, but Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom were looking to do something different. They had created a mood on their first handful of albums, and with some donated lyrics from Smith, they were making the modern equivalent to goth music without having to put on a single swipe of eye makeup.
That sound would become a fashion later, but at the time, Smith felt that Blue Oyster Cult were one of the few bands that seemed to be making music for all the right reasons, saying, “I like the Blue Oyster Cult. I don’t like the way Eric Bloom dresses. He’s a lousy dresser. And they ain’t physically — except for my boyfriend — they ain’t the best looking band in the world. But they got the most stamina and the most heart, and they’ve lived like dogs.”
And when looking through their back catalogue, they have earned their place as one of the defining bands of that era. Agents of Fortune and Fire of Unknown Origin are celebrated for a reason, but even when looking at their early work, their black and white period features some of the most underrated rock and roll tunes to come out of that decade, especially on songs like ‘Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll’.
In fact, there’s a lot of pieces of their sound that actually make them look like a strange cross between Black Sabbath and The Doors. They had their moodier sections that made them fall more in line with what Jim Morrison and co had been doing years before, but even if they didn’t have the same massive riffs that Tony Iommi did, they could certainly hold their own when they created a sense of atmosphere that no one else could replicate.
And for all of the atmospheric epics that Smith put into her best records, it’s not hard to see why she would have appreciated BOC from the moment she saw them. They didn’t care if their music wasn’t going to be the biggest thing in the world, so they might as well take a chance and make the best rock and roll they could whenever they strap on their guitars.
