The Wild Cards, one of Orange County’s most highly regarded rock bands, is about to start work on the album it hopes will be its calling card to national success. There’s nothing Bon Jovi-esque about it.” “If by some wild stretch of the imagination it has a hit, I don’t know what will happen. “It’s more of a throwback to the ‘70s, a much more scaled down, back-to-rock ‘n’ roll type of thing,” Bloom said. The three longtime members have been joined by a new rhythm section.Īn album called “Imaginos” is due out in June, Bloom said, although it is made up of material written and recorded some time ago. But offers for bookings continued to come in, Bloom said, and the band regrouped for a July tour of Europe and some club dates late in the year around New York.Īn invitation to visit Greece with Blue Oyster Cult brought a third original member, keyboard player Allen Lanier, back into the band after a two-year absence, and he decided to re-enlist full time. Buck (lead guitarist Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser) and I decided to semi-retire from Blue Oyster Cult” and pursue other interests. I don’t think we played more than three weeks the whole year. “We’re not as intense as when we were rowdy teen-agers. In a phone interview from his New York home, singer Eric Bloom said Tuesday that Blue Oyster Cult performed little in 1987. “Club Ninja,” a 1986 album, was mostly bland heavy metal. It was the high-water mark for a band that made some dense, satisfyingly crunching blues-inflected albums in the ‘70s, but has lost its focus in the ‘80s.Īfter producing the 1981 hit “Burnin’ for You” in a musical vein similar to “Reaper,” BOC turned to undistinguished, high-gloss power pop in “The Revolution by Night.” The 1983 album bore the production stamp of Bruce Fairbairn, whose credits include “Loverboy,” Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet” and the latest Aerosmith album. It just matters that it lifts people up when they hear it.”īlue Oyster Cult may lack the unflagging commercial clout that Kiss has, but it does have at least one song that figures to remain an artistically enduring and enduringly popular rock landmark-the 1976 hit, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” Rooted in myths as old as myth-making itself and as darkly romantic as Shelley or Keats, the song personifies Death as a gentle, beckoning lover seducing his quarry out of the world and into eternity. It doesn’t matter to me at all if people remember it 10 years from now. Simmons, 36, didn’t dispute the suggestion that most fans who bought Kiss albums 10 or 12 years ago when they were teen-agers have outgrown the music.īut, he said, “I don’t think that’s what rock ‘n’ roll is about. It’s sex with a back beat, modern strip music.” I think people are fooling themselves (when they ask for adult themes from rock). But I don’t want to hear music that brings me down. “It doesn’t mean I ignore the other realities of life. Simmons believes that the best rock ‘n’ roll should serve the pleasure principle and ignore the intellect. Kiss made a quick about-face-including removing the greasepaint from its collective face in 1982-and has merrily continued on, racking up gold and platinum sales with heavy-rock albums that are long on guitar solos and sing-along choruses and short on lyrical maturity. “It was a terrible disaster,” Simmons said. In short, it had little to offer Kiss’ legion of head-banging fans. The album, “The Elder,” had a symbolic yarn to tell, strings and chorales to embellish the music, and Lou Reed, one of the pre-eminent rock poets, to help with some of the songwriting. That desire led seven years ago to the band’s one great departure from its blunt, bump-and-grind music and its coarse lyrical appeal to adolescent libido and rebellion against adult authority. It matters more what fans think, but ultimately you want to be liked (by the press),” he said. “It matters, and anyone who says it doesn’t is fooling himself. Unlike many rockers who regularly get panned in the press, Simmons doesn’t downplay what he reads about his band, nor does he pretend to ignore it. Most of those sales have been racked up with music built on a single-minded heavy thump, and a single-minded thumping is what Kiss has received from most rock critics. ![]() ![]() But before long, Kiss was established as a headlining draw in its own right, launching a career that, according to the band’s own figures, has topped the 50-million mark in worldwide record sales. It was the first of many times in the early days that headlining bands would refuse to share the bill with Kiss and its spectacle of makeup, props and pyrotechnics, Simmons said.
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