Journal of Dracula Studies 1 (1999)
[David F Hallett is currently a Doctoral
candidate in English at the University of Ottawa. J Robin Martin, a Canadian
TSD member, writes regularly about film. Both took undergraduate degrees at
Memorial University of Newfoundland.]
“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls must dive below.”
— John Dryden, All for Love
(prologue)
Perhaps
the most dominant gothic literary motif is that of the vampire. Emerging in the 19th century, the vampire, or
the Undead, has survived to saturate all media of popular culture in the 20th
century. The Undead, in an evolving mythology, continue to stalk the pages of
contemporary fiction and the screens of our cinemas, even materializing like
Stoker’s Dracula as “specks floating in the rays” (90) on the pixels of our
televisions. Rock music too, as much a creation of the 20th century as the
literary vampire was of the 19th, has been bitten by the lure and lore of the
Undead, not only adding its own variations to the mythos but also reflecting
the perception of the vampire in other forms of mass media, both critiquing and
drawing inspiration from it.
The
Blue Öyster Cult is conspicuous by its absence from the existing surveys of
images of the vampire in rock music. Amongst its large oeuvre, the Blue Öyster Cult has a
number of vampire-related songs -- some explicit, many more oblique. The band
has, over a career nearing thirty years, consistently explored in their lyrics
what comparative literature specialist Roger Shattuck calls forbidden
knowledge. Their songs of the Undead form part of a larger canvas that
demonstrates humanity’s capacity for darkness. Their literary antecedents
include the foundations of the Gothic, with direct allusions to Shelley’s Frankenstein,
and contemporary speculative fiction, including actual collaboration with
writers such as Michael Moorcock, Eric Von Lustbader, John Shirley and Jim
Carroll. Songs from the band’s canon have found their way to the screen in such
horror films as Halloween (1978), Heavy Metal (1981), Stephen King’s
The Stand (1994), The Frighteners (1995) and the 1992 feature Bad Channels—for
which the band wrote the original score. In addition to writing for the movies,
the band has also frequently written about them, displaying a fascination with
pop culture and the way in which human attitudes are affected and reflected by
our chosen entertainment.
The
Blue Öyster Cult exists within an American cultural tradition of
‘nay-saying,’ a tradition rooted in the impulse which led the Puritan founders
to first board the Mayflower.
However, the band’s contribution to the panorama of American cautionary
creativity is rarely recognized for three reasons. Firstly, they are a rock group. Despite the existence of forums such as The
Journal of Popular Culture, scholarship frequently assumes “the popular” is
not a subject for academic analysis. Secondly, they are not a one-issue group.
Because their principal concern is the human propensity for darkness, they
resist easy classification -- a ‘shortcoming’ as far as many critical
perspectives are concerned. In harmony with forebears such as Edgar Allan Poe
and Franz Kafka, the Blue Öyster Cult delights in ambiguity. Songs are
open to interpretation and debate, resisting discourses that pretend definitive
readings to be possible (or even desirable). Their oeuvre, like that of Franz
Kafka, “validates a thousand keys and authorizes none” (Lynch & Rampton
494). Finally, their preferred subject matter is “forbidden.” Various
bodies of “forbidden knowledge” are proscribed because of the discomfort they
evoke: their very existence inspires denial. The bulk of the Blue Öyster Cult’s
catalogue suggests to the listener willing to confront the message that all the
bizarre, terrifying, despicable, or merely inconsistent things that we see “out
there” are a mirror reflection. There is no ‘them,’ just us. As the title of one of the band’s
later songs suggests, “I Am the One You Warned Me Of.” That monster, mad
scientist, addict, mutation, vampire -- it is not outside but inside: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
II
“...there are things that you know not, but that you shall know, and
bless me for knowing, though they are not pleasant things.” — Van Helsing (Dracula 250)
Extant
criticism of “forbidden knowledge” as it is manifest in rock music tends to
lump together artists and interests which should be distinguished from one
another. This criticism often assumes that the presentation of an idea equals
embracing and promoting that idea. Nowhere more than in discourses of
“Satanism,” such criticism usually seems to believe that rock musicians and
writers are incapable of writing in character voices or of examining subjects
in an ironic or even a detached tone. As rock critic Jonathan Cott wrote in a
profile of Randy Newman (himself frequently on the receiving end of astigmatic
criticism), “listeners often imagine that the person impersonating a character
in a song is equal to the person singing it” (488). “The whole idea of a song
is a real situation,” says Newman himself (Cott 490), but the voice of the song
is not necessarily the voice of the singer. Similarly, the observation and
recording of perceived reality is not automatically promotion of it. Were
Shakespeare subjected to similar “analysis,” he would be seen to promote
witchcraft, murder, suicide, deception, and British intervention in Scottish
politics -- all that only in Macbeth.
Regrettably,
the presentation of a character, perspective, or emotion in a rock song is
often unquestioningly accepted as confessional. The speaker of the words in any
song is understood to be the singer/songwriter in his own persona. When the
Blue Öyster Cult released their song “ME262” (Secret Treaties), sung
from the perspective of a Luftwaffe pilot “in April of ’45,” they were soon
rumored to be Nazis, despite the fact that two of the three songwriters are
Jewish.
In
most treatments of rock music which examine ‘darker’ aspects of the human
imagination, the presence and promotion of ‘demonic’ values is assumed.
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, for example, in her article “The Devil Sings the Blues:
Heavy Metal, Gothic Fiction and ‘Postmodern’ Discourse,” makes two such
undefended assumptions. She joins in her
title two reasonably distinct genres and, further muddying the mix, proposes
the devil as “vocalist,” suggesting a Satanic component that is not, unless one
reads male sexual posturing as inherently Satanic, found in the album she
chooses as exemplar of the rise of “Heavy Metal” -- Led Zeppelin I.
Equally odd is Hinds’ categorization of the Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” as
part of the “overtly Satanic” subdivision of “Metal music” (156). The assertion
apparently equates death with the devil; not to fear death is to worship
Satan.
From
a literalist reading of selected Scriptures, perhaps first filtered through
Milton, it might be possible to construct the argument that humanity was born
sinless, disobeyed explicit instructions designed for its own protection and,
in consequence of its sin (the sin of acquiring forbidden knowledge, one might recall),
must now suffer death. Therefore anyone who accepts death accepts the cause of
it -- Satan and temptation. But this argument is not attempted by Hinds. She
merely asserts that a song about facing the inevitability of one’s own death
with equanimity instead of fear is a satanic song. Even Saint Paul does not equate death with
devil-worship: the wages of sin may well be death (cf. Romans 6:23), but facing
the inevitability of one’s impending death cannot be read as Satanism. If it
were so, the conclusion Christ reaches at Gethsemane would also be
devil-worship (cf. Mark 14:34-36; Luke 22:41-42). Part of the difficulty in any
argument concerning spiritual matters is the importance of faith to belief.
When one begins to debate the role and nature of the devil, one is examining
territory that does not yield to empiricism. The devil can cite Scripture, or
Shakespeare, for his purpose. Faith notwithstanding, however, to call “Don’t
Fear the Reaper” Satanic is at the least a misunderstanding of the song.
Misunderstanding
and/or misrepresentation is one weakness of extant criticism. Complete omission
of significant information is another.
In Susan Kagan’s entry on the vampire in popular music (The Vampire
Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead), some ‘fringe’ groups are catalogued
in detail. While these artists are undeniably part of the spectrum of “vampire
rock” and certainly worth knowing about, other artists, more “mainstream,” are
either mentioned with obvious material elided or not mentioned at all. Alice
Cooper, for example, is cited for “Fresh Blood” but not for his much earlier
song concerning the actor whose “portrayal” of Renfield in the 1931 Dracula
was uncomfortably close to not being acting at all, “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”
[sic]. The Blue Öyster Cult, with three explicit vampire songs and a
host of oblique vampiric allusions, is not mentioned at all.
While
Kagan moves toward workable classification of vampire songs within the rock canon,
several of her five categories are either too broad or simply unnecessary. The
first and second -- those with obvious reference to vampires, and those with
oblique references (417) -- are useful. However, categorizing songs with
“allegedly vampiric” (417) references is redundant. An alleged connection with
a vampire theme must be provoked by at least an oblique reference. This
definition is made no clearer by her scant illustrations. The final two
categories -- music that mentions vampires and music from vampire movie
soundtracks -- are also poorly conceived. The former may be an indicator of the
latitude of the term and concept “vampire” in our popular culture, and, with
the whimsy of Hollywood’s marketing practices, the latter might include any
musical genre from George Jones to the Bee Gees, from Bach’s oratorios to the
hymns of John Wesley. If a song does not
already fit into one of the initial two categories, it is of little use for
scholarship. Accordingly, we have limited our categorization of Blue Öyster Cult
vampire music to the “obvious” and the “oblique.”
III
“Dear, beauteous death! The jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark!”
— Henry Vaughan, The World
Blue
Öyster Cult songs dealing with the vampire mythos tend to be the work of
either Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser or Joe Bouchard, though both Eric Bloom and
Albert Bouchard, together with regular co-writing partners of the band, have
contributed some significant material. Bolle Gregmar, chief officer of the B.Ö.C. fan club,
keeper of The Museum of Cult, and acknowledged by the band members themselves
to be the principal authority on all B.Ö.C. matters, suggests that the frequency
with which Roeser and Joe Bouchard return to the vampire theme is, at least in
part, attributable to the fact that both men were born in early November and
have a fascination with images connected to Hallowe’en. Bouchard and Roeser
share their time of entry into the “real world” with Bram Stoker, and with the
denouement of his Dracula.
Reminiscent
of Jonathan Harker’s slow progression from comfort and confidence, making
memoranda about getting recipes for Mina (28, 30), through the unease he feels
at the moment his coach is overtaken by the calèche in the Borgo Pass (41), to the sheer
terror of finding himself alone at midnight, surrounded by silent wolves (45),
Blue Öyster Cult songs frequently begin with the mundane and build through a
gradual progression of dark imagery toward the revelation of “the skull beneath
the skin.” Donald Roeser’s vampire songs tend to exploit audience expectations
by suggestion, often invoking images associated with vampirism but leaving
sufficient ambiguity to allow other interpretations. Joe Bouchard’s songs are,
as Gregmar suggests, both about and for vampires, thus they tend to
embed even more veiled references to the
practices and needs of the vampire within lyrics that do not, at first
listening, overtly evoke the Undead. Each writer has produced one undisputable
“vampire song” (the pair of tracks which close the 1977 album Spectres)
and Bouchard has buried in virtually everything he has written at least a line
or two which admit interpretation as being relevant to the vampire mythos.
The
transforming capacity of the vampire has been interpreted as symbolic of human
desire to transcend our physical restrictions, as part of the quest for
forbidden knowledge. From the earliest record of the Judeo-Christian myth,
humanity’s problems are traced to our inability to resist the temptation of
forbidden knowledge, or to accept our limits until we have attempted to
transcend them. The consequences of this relentless transgression are also
ambiguous. Many of the Romantic poets
wrote positively of the knowledge to be gained through going beyond society’s
collective and individual boundaries. However, despite William Blake’s
assertion that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell” l.3 ) many have discovered
what was “enough” by pushing to the point of “too much” only to be unable to
use that knowledge. Sometimes, the wisdom discovered is that it would have been
better not to have taken the road of excess.
In Byron’s words: “Sorrow is
knowledge: they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest over the fatal
truth, / The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life” (Manfred I.i.10-12).
Blue Öyster Cult songs habitually build on that paradox: we relentlessly seek
to know more yet we are frequently disturbed, perhaps even destroyed, by the
knowledge we gain.
Joe
Bouchard’s songs, individually- or co-written, are more likely than any other
B.Ö.C. songs to evoke images of the vampire. Bouchard’s “Screams” (Blue
Öyster Cult) has a
night setting and a voice seeking a safe point for seclusion. The second
person, the addressed “you” of the song, is understood to be on the same quest
for a “hole” (or “home”) in which to grow. Yet the seclusion and shelter sought
are not those of conventional safety.
The speaker is clearly not seeking protection in the usual sense -- not,
at least, if the “Satan’s bred trash” of the city will provide adequate cover. The
idea of turning to “big city madness” as shelter suggests a need for anonymity,
or immersion in the mass of humanity. As Jonathan Harker realizes during his
‘education’ in the ways and motivations of the Count, the city has its “teeming
millions” (100); it is good not merely for anonymity, but also for proximity to
fresh supplies. If the speaker is read as one whose needs for shelter are
unconventional, a voice from darkness addressing one of its peers, it is not
difficult to imagine the voice of the song to be that of a vampire seeking both
shelter by day and sustenance by night -- needing anonymity for the simple
reason that, traditionally, a vampire known is a vampire hunted. As Whitley
Streiber suggested in his novel, The Hunger, the Undead survive through
secrecy. Communication is coded and
minimal. A vampire exposed is a vampire at risk, a possible explanation for the
ambiguity found in so many of Bouchard’s lyrics. If we understand the voice of
many of Bouchard’s songs to be that of a vampire, we immediately have a
reason for Bouchard’s characteristic suggestive abstraction. The vampire
proceeds as survival dictates: through riddles, connotation, symbols, ritual --
just as humanity has always dealt with its spirituality.
“Wings
Wetted Down” (Tyranny and Mutation) employs lyrics suggesting the
transmogrification of the vampire; as van Helsing’s lengthy discussion of “the
kind of enemy with which we have to deal” (332-38) suggests, the vampire is
able to “appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to
him” (333), the forms of “nocturnal
predators or nocturnal invaders of our sheltering homes” (Stade v). “Wings
wetted down, [stumble] on the ground,” the song states, but “it all turns
around in the air.” The human body is earthbound, and when the human tracks the
earthbound vampire (in Dracula, the vampire sleeps in consecrated
earth), the human is ascendant. Provided
he can conquer his own desire (cf. Van Helsing’s memorandum, 499-503), the
human can destroy the Undead. Everything reverses when the vampire is airborne.
The song juxtaposes images, linking the mundane to the ‘magical’: “Flights of
black horsemen / soar over churches / pursued by an army / of birds in the
rain.” The unease created by the resultant picture is sustained by a musical
arrangement employing a minor key, distortion and dissonance, and chromatic
intervals.
“Morning
Final” (Agents of Fortune) presents a figure who “cast a burning shadow
on the busy street” and “said he was a junkie.” A “motiveless murder” is
associated with this meandering figure, though it is unclear whether he is the
victim or the perpetrator. The phrase “morning final” is drawn from journalism,
and the song clearly operates on one level as the aural equivalent of the
newspaper, including in the fade-out the voice of a street vendor hawking
papers. But “morning” can also be “final” to the vampire, and the pursuit into
the subway may suggest the tracking of a vampire to its lair. The voice of the
song, which laments in the chorus “After what I read / I can hardly feel my
heart... /my heartbeat” may be understood as the voice of an ordinary New
Yorker reacting to the ubiquity of violence in the media, but may as easily be
heard as the voice of a vampire seeing another of his kind hunted and
destroyed. One also recalls Mina’s reaction to her first reading of Jonathan’s
journal (266) as well as the general importance of text to the comprehension of
the vampire in Stoker’s Dracula -- a narrative composed almost entirely
of secret knowledge: the contents of individual diaries. Those passages which
are not private observations are frequently drawn from newspapers. As well,
just as the subway underlies the city, the idea of the vampire as symbolic of
human sexual desire, suppressed and defined as evil, runs beneath the surface
of the song.
Bouchard’s
later songs employ equally oblique imagery, admitting the possibility of a
vampire theme while refusing to name it explicitly. “Moon Crazy” (Mirrors)
hints at secret rituals and transformation under darkness. Although largely eschewed by Stoker, the moon
plays a significant role in Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), in which Lord
Ruthven is revived from death by the moon’s rays (Melton 409). No doubt
following Polidori’s lead, James Malcolm Rymer employs a similar device in his
serial Varney The Vampyre in the 1840s. Though in the greater canon of
vampire fiction the moon is more frequently associated with the werewolf than
with the vampire, one recalls that the local word Jonathan Harker hears as he
boards the diligence bound for Bukovina he translates as “something that is
either were-wolf or vampire” (36); the two may be considered “blood brothers.”
“Light Years of Love” (The Revolution by
Night) evokes a relationship which seems to be a conventional romance, but
if one reads “light years” as a literal transcending of human limitations, the
presence of the Undead is possible. A line such as “in your arms I can be
anything” continues Bouchard’s habit of allowing for multiple interpretation;
while the rhetoric is common to pop love songs, the line allows interpretation as
a reference to transmogrification assisted by the power of love (cf. “Tam Lin”
for a similar legend). Similarly, the
apocalyptic rhetoric of “When the War
Comes” (Club Ninja) is typical of many pseudo-military splinter groups
of the current era, yet simultaneously reminiscent of Renfield’s habitual
phrasing in talking of his Master. As the listener hears in the final stanza
“the virgins come to set you free / on their lips the life of two,” the echoes
of the first quarter of Stoker’s Dracula are quite clear. “In the
Presence of Another World” (Imaginos) directly evokes the reality of
“forbidden knowledge”: “in the promise of another world /a dreadful knowledge
comes / how even space will modulate / and earthly things be done.” The
Promethean effort is never without consequence and the “Master” who lurks in
the background of the song is aware of “the curse of life eternal” as lived in
this decidedly temporal world. “Your
Master is a monster” (cp. Renfield’s use of “Master” (168) and Mina’s use of
“monster” (275) to describe Count Dracula) repeats throughout the song.
Imaginos
traces the historical, economic, and social forces behind the outbreak of World
War I. Its movement towards cataclysm is, as Harker says of the “ladies’” wing
of Dracula’s castle, “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (77), yet
is also informed by the knowledge that “the war to end all wars” in truth was
merely the foundation for holocaust. We are reminded by this later trio of
Bouchard’s songs of the way in which our supernatural imaginings are figurative
renderings of our natural traumas. What we have achieved in the “real world” is
far more terrifying and damaging than anything our fictions imagine. As Harker
puts it, “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere
‘modernity’ cannot kill” (77). The vampire is a human creation, even if we
often deny what we see of ourselves reflected in it.
IV
“Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all;
and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”
— Van Helsing (Dracula 279)
There
is a trio of songs in the lengthy catalogue of the Cult which deal explicitly
with the vampire, and a further pair which evokes a menacing revenant that could
be -- given other imagery in each song -- a vampire. The latter pair are linked
by the suggestion of a character who exists over a passage of time beyond the
normal human life span.
The
first of these oblique but strongly suggestive songs treats a recurring,
unidentified evil. Donald “Buck Dharma”
Roeser's “Harvest Moon” (Heaven Forbid) is a masterpiece of slow
accumulation. Threatening imagery builds until what at first seems dismissible
as natural “bad luck” becomes decidedly unnatural; the “harvest” becomes more
than merely unearthing vegetables. In “Harvest Moon,” an unnamed “Evil” is tied
to both specific geography and season. The land, settled historically by “the Spaniards,”
who inexplicably “burned the town and fields” before abandoning the area, is host to a cyclic evil presence. As history
(measured presumably in centuries) unwinds and “When the wind turns/ and blows
the leaves from the trees” under the harvest moon, unnatural death befalls
livestock and humans alike. The killing of “sheep and goats” echoes references
in both the literary and historic record of vampirism (Melton xxxv). The song’s
narrator brings the story to the present when he comments:
I sense the darkness clearer
I feel a presence near...
I feel some Evil here
I hear some frightful noises
I don’t go out at night
since Bobrow’s youngest daughter
disappeared from sight
Vampirism is certainly one of several
possible interpretations. The eternal, ageless nature of the “Evil,” the human
and animal victims, and the fear of night and its “harvest moon” follow
traditional literary conventions, even if other aspects of the lyric do not.
But the mythology of the literary vampire has always been malleable, ultimately
governed by the author’s pen.
Also
significant is that the narrative voice is implicated in the continuation of
the problem. Just as the Spaniards burned everything and the Cobys went south,
exchanging farming for fishing, so the narrator repeats “what the people say”
as he sells his farm to a new owner: “long time since there’s been trouble.”
The obvious clash between what is said to the new tenant and what is said to
the listener reminds us, as Blue Öyster Cult songs so often do, that we are
what we are warned against. The “Evil” continues because human response to it,
through centuries, has been to flee, to leave it to someone else, and without
warning.
The
band’s other oblique vampire song strongly suggests the career of an individual
who has slipped the bonds of mortality and time and who is perpetually engaged
in “a harvest of life, a harvest of death.” “Mistress of the Salmon Salt
(Quicklime Girl),” written by Albert Bouchard and Sandy Pearlman, concludes Tyranny
and Mutation with both a clear suggestion of a career of harvesting which
transcends human norms and, possibly, allusions to Dracula. The listener
is introduced to “a girl” who “lurks” in “the garden district” and helps “the
plants grow strong and tall.” The “villagers” call her “quicklime girl.” She sees that what is “ripe and ready to the
eye” is also “rotten somehow to the core.” One infers that the “quicklime girl”
is at the very least facilitating the harvest, and that the vegetation
flourishes in her district for much the same reason that the trees in old urban
cemeteries seem to turn colour later in the fall than do other city trees.
The
song continues with menacing ambiguity. “A harvest of life, a harvest of death
/ One body of life, one body of death” suggests an embrace at once carnal and
carnivorous. The bridge concludes with a 1st-person voice addressing an
unidentified other in tones reminiscent of the First Clown and gravedigger in Hamlet:
“I’ll prepare the quicklime, friend / for your ripe and ready grave,” for “when
you’ve gone and choked to death” (recalling the “strange and horrible
gurgling”of Mrs Westenra in death (151)). The final stanza suggests both the
longevity of the “quicklime girl” and other possible echoes of Stoker’s novel:
It’s springtime now and cares subside,
The planting’s almost done,
And fertile graves, it seems, exist
Within a mile of that juke-joint
Where coastguard crews still take their
leave,
Lying listless in the sun,
And the quicklime girl still plies her
trade:
Reduction of the many from the one.
The repetition of “still” juxtaposed with
the image of the “coastguard crews” on leave and the “juke-joint” suggests an
era well after that evoked earlier by the use of “villagers.” The “coastguard
crews” also echo Mina meeting with the coast guard on duty in Whitby as the Demeter
founders (78-9), a meeting which takes place in a cemetery. Similarly, the quicklime girl’s habit of
lurking “behind the bush” (as repeated in the chorus of the song) recalls the
description of Lucy’s first harvests as “the bloofer lady” (185-7, 208-9).
Of
course the quicklime girl could be interpreted as being nothing more
“supernatural” than a prostitute. But if her actions are interpreted solely in
carnal terms, why is the image of “fertile graves” in close proximity to her
‘workplace’ of importance? What about
the listlessness of the crews who “take their leave”? And how do we understand
“reduction of the many from the one”? The quicklime girl “plies her trade” but
that trade may not be the first one that leaps to many minds. The bridge repeats before the song moves to
its conclusion, introducing subtle changes to the lyric: “A harvest of life, a
harvest of death /Resumes its course each day /As if by schedule ...”
Meanwhile, small creeping and flying creatures turn “as if inclined” to where
the quicklime girl continues her harvest. Again, there is no overt, direct
mention of the vampire, but the song’s rich suggestiveness seems to beg the
interpretation.
Finally,
we turn from the oblique to the obvious. “After Dark” (Fire of Unknown
Origin), “I Love the Night” (Spectres), and “Nosferatu” (Spectres)
allow no ambiguity of interpretation and need no exegetical acrobatics to make
their subject clear. This trio of songs stakes an undeniable claim for the
inclusion of the Blue Öyster Cult in any examination of “vampire
music.”
“After
Dark” (Fire of Unknown Origin) is
the most recent of the band’s explicit vampire songs, and the only major
excursion by songwriter Eric Bloom into vampire territory. “After Dark” shares
with “I Love the Night” the framing device of a narrator initiated into vampirism
by a supposed lover who then, together Undead, will share eternity with him. As
the title implies, the classic motif of restriction to nocturnal activity is
invoked: “After dark -- I see you / After dark-- I feel you /After dark -- I
want you.” The loss of free agency once under the spell of the vampire is
evident in “Long ago and far away I heard your voice / And once I heard you
sing your song I had no choice.” Here again is exemplified the traditional
literary and cinematic characteristic of a vampire’s ability to control a
victim’s will over time and space. The second verse clearly illustrates the
vampiric nature of the piece and further reinforces classical traits attributed
to the Undead: “Of Age there is no question. /Death’s shadow is undone. / We
only need each other /And shelter from the sun.” In the song’s final verse, the
narrator tastes “true salvation” through a “fate ... traced in blood,” both
reiterating his earlier acquisition of eternal life and the means by which he
must insure it.
Possessing
a poetic lyric and an appropriately atmospheric melody, Roeser’s “I Love The
Night” begins in the ruins of a relationship: “That night her kiss told me it
was over.” The narrator then “walked out late into the dark,” where, in “misty
gloom,” he is suddenly confronted with a “lovely lady in white” who remarks:
“Like me I see you’re walking alone/Won’t you please stay?’” The narrator falls
under her spell, unable to “look away.” The intercourse that follows outlines
the inception and character of their relationship.
She said “I love the night.
The day is OK and the sun can be fun
But I live to see those rays slip away...
There’s so much that I can show and give to
you
If you will welcome me tonight.”
No mortal was meant to know such wonder
One look in the mirror told me so.
Come darkness I’ll see her again
As with Stoker’s Dracula, the ability to
exist in daylight is implied, but the vampire’s powers are amplified at night.
Also developed from the traditional mythology are immortality, the importance
of the victim’s will in giving welcome to the vampire, and the absence of any
mirror reflection. Like “After Dark,” “I
Love the Night” is reminiscent of the mythical Roman Lamia and echoes
both Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Lamia.”
At
the centre of both the Blue Öyster Cult’s studio oeuvre and of Joe
Bouchard’s contributions to the band is the song that most overtly deals with
the vampire. “Nosferatu” recapitulates
the Dracula story in lyrics employing, in some cases verbatim, the title
cards used in the early 1970s English re-issue of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu.
The words are set against a characteristic B.Ö.C. musical arrangement, redolent with
menacing minor chords articulated in arpeggio, chromatic intervals, and
accidentals.
The
lyrics of “Nosferatu” are worth reproducing in their entirety. They show how
directly Bouchard (and co-writer Helen Wheels) were influenced by Murnau’s
film. The song pares the plot to its essence, each verse concentrating on a
major plot point of the film.
Deep in the heart of Germany
Lucy clutched her breast in fear
She heard the beat of her lover’s heart
For weeks she raved, in dreams he appeared
From far off Transylvania
Only a woman can break the spell
Pure in heart, who will offer herself to
Nosferatu
The ship pulled in without a sound
The faithful captain long since cold
He kept his log till the bloody end
Last entry read “Rats in the hold.
My crew is dead. I fear the plague.”
Only a woman can break the spell
Pure in heart, who will offer herself ...
Mortal terror reigned
Sickness now then horrible death
Only Lucy knew the truth
And at her window
Nosferatu
So chaste, so calm she gave herself
To the pleasure of her dreaded master
He sucked the precious drops of life
Throughout the long and cold dark night
One last goodbye, he was blinded by light
One last goodbye, he was blinded by love
Blinded by love
He screamed with fear, he’d stayed too long
in her room
The morning sun had come too soon
The spell was broken with a kiss of doom
He vanished into dust and left her all
alone
Only a woman can break the spell
Pure in heart, who will offer herself to
Nosferatu
There is really no argument here to make.
There is no ambiguity about either intent or interpretation. “Nosferatu” is at
once the most overt of the Blue Öyster Cult’s vampire songs and one of the
best examples of the manner in which the various writers in the band habitually
turn to other genres of popular culture -- especially cinema -- for songwriting
inspiration.
V
“He will discredit our mystery.”
— Shakespeare, Measure for Measure III.ii.29
“Nosferatu”
is most significant to our purposes in that it predates most of what Susan
Kagan lists in her survey of vampire music. Omitting the Blue Öyster Cult from
treatment of the vampire as developed in rock music is rather like discussing
Murnau’s film without reference to Stoker’s novel, or like crediting Stoker
himself with the invention of the vampire. The Blue Öyster Cult were making “gothic” rock music
long before many of the bands now famous for the genre began to form. Like
Black Sabbath on the opposite side of the Atlantic, the B.Ö.C. were writing
songs in the early 1970s that were neither lyrically nor musically quite like
what anyone else was doing. While we would not wish to claim the band as the
only fountainhead from which gothic rock derived, nor to suggest that our brief
survey of their vampire-related lyrics is definitive, we do insist that they
deserve a more prominent place than that which has so far been given them --
typified by Hinds’ casual misinterpretation of their best-known song as representing
Satanism in heavy metal.
Blue
Öyster Cult songs discuss forbidden knowledge openly. Their music employs myth
and mystery to challenge the pervasive complacency of human life, to show human
obsessions through our popular culture. David Hume wrote in the mid-eighteenth
century that, as civilization advances, it is soon found “that there is nothing
mysterious or supernatural ... but that all proceeds from the usual Propensity
of Mankind towards the Marvellous” (897). We believe what we choose, and call
what we fear or don’t understand “supernatural.” Hume further suggested that “this
Inclination,” though it may periodically “receive a Check from Sense and
Learning,” will “never be thoroughly extirpated from human Nature” (897). Blue Öyster Cult songs
usually exist in that paradoxical human space between rationality and
superstition, delighting in demonstrating humanity’s “usual Propensity ...
toward the Marvellous” -- as often as not with a critical eye.
Donald Roeser’s most recent song (as of
this writing) provides us with an ending that is also a beginning. Amongst the
principal writers in the band, Roeser is the most persistent and perceptive
observer of the macabre in 20th century popular culture (and, arguably, the
most successful)—a chronicler of the postmodern “dreadful.” With “Godzilla” (Spectres)
and “X-Ray Eyes” (Heaven Forbid), he lightly satirizes the B-Movie
packaging we often demand in the presentation of our fears and foibles without
denigrating the all too real horrors they illustrate: the post-atomic angst and
anguish visited upon Japanese culture in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
that spawned the immortal Gojiro and the Promethean hubris of Ray
Milland’s surgeon in Roger Corman's X ( The Man With X-Ray Eyes) (1963). “Extraterrestrial
Intelligence” (Agents of Fortune) addresses the UFO and alien abduction
phenomena. But perhaps most important of all Roeser’s songs, both for this
brief analysis and for a more comprehensive understanding of the Blue Öyster Cult’s
oeuvre, is “Real World,” from the band's most recent album Heaven Forbid. In “Real World,” Roeser summarizes his 30
years of musically observing our mediated culture. Opening with two verses full of events taken
from the front pages of the tabloids, “Real World” evokes “rains of fish and
rains of frogs” to “arias sung by mongrel dogs” and covers familiar territory
with “disks that stretch into cigars” and its chorus: “something beyond is
reaching out to you.” But as if to punctuate his career in this genre, Roeser
turns in the final verse to the “legitimate” press whose stories reflect our
“empty lives/TV replacing kids and wife/Lives consumed with soapy talk/Lives
lived in fear of taking a walk.” His conclusion
is both the starting and finishing line for the career of the Blue Öyster Cult,
condensed into one emphatic statement: “the real world is bizarre enough for
me.” The song reminds us that all our fears begin with ourselves. “Real World” stands at the end of the 20th
century in close thematic harmony with where Stoker’s Dracula stood at
the end of the 19th: naming the unnameable and reminding the
audience of its own role and responsibility in the creation of all our myths.
Works Cited:
Blake,
William. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” In E Talbot Donaldson et al, eds. The
Norton Anthology of English Literature: Sixth Edition, The Major Authors.
NewYork: Norton, 1996. 1312-23.
Byron,
George Gordon, Lord. “Manfred: a Dramatic Poem.” In David Perkins, ed. English
Romantic Writers. New York: HBJ, 1967. 810-28.
Cott,
Jonathan. “Randy Newman: His Only Hero Was Roy Campanella.” 12 November 1970.
In Ben Fong-Torres, ed. The Rolling
Stone Rock’n’Roll Reader. New York: Bantam, 1974. 487-90.
Hinds,
Elizabeth Jane Wall. “The Devil Sings the Blues: Heavy Metal, Gothic
Fiction and ‘Postmodern’ Discourse.” Journal of Popular Culture. 26.3
(Winter 1992): 151-64.
Hume,
David. “Section X. Of Miracles.” Philosophical Essays Concerning Human
Nature. 1748. In Geoffrey Tillotson, et al, eds. Eighteenth-Century
English Literature. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. 892-903.
Kagan,
Susan. “Music, Vampire.” Melton 417-26.
Keats,
John. John Keats: a selection of his poetry. J.E. Morpurgo, ed.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.
Lynch,
Gerald and David Rampton. “Franz Kafka (1883- 1924).” Short Fiction. 2nd
ed. Toronto: HBJ, 1992. 494.
Melton,
J. Gordon, ed. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead.
Detroit: Visible Ink P, 1994.
Shattuck,
Roger. Forbidden Knowledge: From
Prometheus to Pornography. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
Stade,
George. “Introduction.” Dracula, by Bram Stoker. New York: Bantam Classics, 1981. v-xiv.
Stoker,
Bram. Dracula. 1897. Clive Leatherdale, ed. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Unearthed. Westcliff-on-sea: Desert Island Books, 1998.
Selected
Discography
Blue
Oyster Cult. Blue Oyster Cult. Columbia Records, KC31063, 1972. LP.
---.
Tyranny and Mutation. Columbia Records, KC32017, 1973. LP.
---.
Secret Treaties. Columbia Records, KC32858, 1974. LP.
---.
On Your Feet Or On Your Knees. Live recording. Columbia Records,
PG33371, 1975. LP.
---.
Agents of Fortune. Columbia Records, KC34164, 1976. LP.
---.
Spectres. Columbia Records, JC35019, 1977. LP.
---.
Some Enchanted Evening. Live recording. Columbia Records, JX35563, 1978.
LP.
---.
Mirrors. Columbia Records, JC36009, 1979. LP.
---.
Cultosaurus Erectus. Columbia Records, JC36550, 1980. LP.
---.
Fire of Unknown Origin. Columbia Records, EC37389, 1981. LP.
---.
Extraterrestrial Live. Live recording. Columbia Records, KG37946, 1982.
LP.
---.
Revolution By Night. Columbia Records, FC38947, 1983. LP.
---.
Club Ninja. Columbia Records, FC39979, 1986. LP.
---.
Imaginos. Columbia Records, CK-40618, 1988.
---.
Heaven Forbid. CMC International Records, 0607686241-2, 1998.
“The
Ballad of Dwight Fry.” Alice Cooper. Love it to Death. Warner Bros. Records, WS
1883, 1971. LP.
“Tam
Lin.” Fairport Convention, Liege and
Lief. A&M Records, SP 4257, 1969. LP.
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