By Jeb Wright
Transcribed by Eric Sandberg

Over the years I have done numerous interviews with Joe Bouchard in support of his solo and band efforts. I always sneak in some questions on Blue Oyster Cult…this time; outside of the first question…this sucker was all BÖC!

Enjoy this one as we touch on each album and some of the high points of the amazing Blue Oyster Cult’s career.

Jeb: Before we get into me grilling you about one of my favorite bands, can you tell me what's new coming from you in 2018?

Joe Bouchard: Well let's see...Albert [Bouchard, Joe's brother and B.O.C. co-founder] and I have been playing some acoustic shows and they're going really well. We're doing a show with Magic Dick from The J. Geils Band. We've always loved him. We were friends from a long time ago. He's doing this acoustic show with an Asian-American artist named Shun Ng and it's a perfect fit for what we do.

We're also in rehearsals for recording a new Blue Coupe album. The songs are coming out fantastic. We just played a show this past weekend at a festival in Wisconsin. It was nice to get out of the house.

The main focus is the new Blue Coupe album. We started writing and rehearsing it in April. We usually just get together about once a week and work stuff out with a tape rolling. Then we play it back and see what sticks.

It may be the beginning of next year before the album is done, which is slow compared to how we like to work, but there are a bunch of other things coming up that may slow things down.

My girlfriend is an artist and she is working on a bunch of paintings in 3D so we're working with the New York Stereoscopic Association. They are going to have an art show in Nashville in October which will feature her 3-D paintings and we're going to create a 3-D video for the exhibition.

It's fun to work with artistic people. We also collaborated with a friend of mine writing some music for the Connecticut Ballet. She created the stage backdrop. She also painted the dancer's costumes. It was a wonderful experience.

Jeb: You're way more than just a heavy metal bass player.

JB: Well, I don't know. I'm kind of wondering what I should be doing.

Jeb: That's actually a good segue because, as we talk about your former band, Blue Öyster Cult…you were always on the cutting edge of creativity.

JB: There were a lot of smart guys in there. I just got an email from Donald Roeser [Buck Dharma] today. One of the guys that lived with us in the band house back in the day, who actually co-wrote one of our early songs, "Redeemed" [H. Farkas] wanted to get ahold of Don. I hadn't seen or heard from him in over thirty years but he's still out there and wanted to hook up with BÖC out on the road in San Diego. We still connect once in a while.

Jeb: Is it true that you were the last original member to join BÖC?

JB: Yes. In the summer of 1970, I had graduated from Ithaca College. I had an incredible summer job working in a theater on Martha's Vineyard. I didn't know what I was going to do when the job ended in September.

I got a call in the middle of the night. I was living in a rooming house and at three o’clock in the morning someone said, "You have a phone call." It was Albert. He said, "I need you to come to New York. We need you to play bass because we're going on a tour with Led Zeppelin."

I said "Hell yeah! I'm there! We can go out on the road and become rock stars.”

As things turned out, I got to the band house on Labor Day and said, "OK, I'm ready for the tour!" and they said "Ahhh the tour's not happening."

Led Zeppelin was a band that, with very few exceptions, never had an opening act.

I said, “Well, OK…let's dig in and make some music.”

Of course, that same week the band was fired by Elektra Records. We got kicked off the label and I was so mad because they never gave me a chance. But I said "Were going to keep playing and we're going to make money." As you know, it all worked out.

Jeb: Were you Soft White Underbelly then?

JB: During my college vacations I would go down to the band house and jam with Soft White Underbelly; long extended psychedelic jams. Occasionally, I would book them to play clubs up in Ithaca, so we knew each other pretty well even before I joined the band. Their bass player was Andrew Winters and it just wasn't working out with Andrew so they called me and wanted me to join the band. I had had a little bit of experience playing Latin jazz bass in college for two years. 

I got a Music Education degree from Ithaca College but I didn't know what I was going to do going forward. I didn't want to teach. I put off teaching for eighteen years. It didn't seem to be the right thing at the time. I said "Rock stars just wanna rock!"

It's funny because Albert and I just got a very nice honor from our old high school. They inducted us into their Performing Arts Hall of Fame. The music teachers there were all very nice and Albert and I were part of the music programs at the school which was the basis for the musical stuff we did later.

They asked us "Did you think you were going to make it as a rock star?" and we said "Of course!" That was my trajectory, even in high school. The Music Education degree was merely the fallback position in case things didn't work out I could always teach in a high school or something.

Jeb: At what point did Sandy Pearlman become involved? When did you become Blue Öyster Cult?

JB: Sandy was there way back in the early days of Soft White Underbelly. He met Don [Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser] at a party. He told Don "You're really good. I'm going to organize a band around you, get the people you want, and we'll call it Soft White Underbelly."

Sandy had some connections and probably had a part in getting the deal with Elektra. Sandy was the editor of Crawdaddy, which was a serious music magazine before Rolling Stone existed. Sandy wrote glowing reviews of The Doors which got the attention of the head of Elektra Jac Holzman. That's how they got the deal, but they were never able to make an album that Elektra was happy with and there were also some personality issues. It just wasn't happening with Elektra.

I was keeping up with what was happening with them all throughout my college days. I was expecting the album to come out any time, but it never did. When I got there and we were kicked off the label it was back to square one. We made some nice demos with David Lucas, one of our earliest producers.

We didn't like the first four-song demos so we made a second set about a month later and those started to generate a little interest in the band. Finally, we got the audition for Clive Davis in 1971 and, one year after I joined the band, we signed with Columbia Records. We started making albums and it was very exciting.

Jeb: Legend has it that it wasn't the band or Sandy that came up with the Cross of Krönos. It was actually Bill Gawlick?

JB: Yeah, Bill Gawlick was the artist who did the first two album covers, but I think it was Sandy and Bill that came up with that symbol.

Sandy had all these old books and he pulled one out and showed Bill one of the symbols of Krönos and said "We need a symbol like this for a heavy metal band." Bill took that and adapted it. It is still a very important logo for the band.

Jeb: You guys have to be up there with 'most tattooed logo'.

JB: I've seen a lot of them [laughter]! There are a lot of Alice Cooper tattoos out there…I know that for a fact. It's a commitment.

Jeb: "Before The Kiss (A Redcap)” is one of my favorite songs. I love the rhythm, it's almost a Swing. How does a song like that come together?

JB: The first year I was in the band we played this biker bar called Conry's every week. It was a raunchy hard rock kind of place where you could play anything. We would play Rolling Stones covers and our own originals.

Sandy came up with the lyric which mentioned Conry's Bar. The music came after. It had that riff (hums verse riff) that was a bit of a Jeff Beck style blooze riff. We had recorded the song, but had left the bars where that jazzy bit comes in empty. We didn't have anything for it. I went upstate for a little while I when I came back that jazzy part was added and I was like, "Wow!" Then, Donald added that heavy riff at the end. That was a fun one because it required a lot of trying different things out and it just came together in the studio.

Jeb: The radio song on that first album of course was "Cities on Flame With Rock And Roll" which is still a classic. Even as young guys, did you think "This is the one."

JB: Not really because we didn't orient ourselves toward trying to be commercial. If anything, we tended to make decisions that were anti-commercial. We were crazy!

Jeb: Calling a song "She's As Beautiful as A Foot..."

JB: Yeah right. I thought "Cities On Flame" would do OK and it did great. In fact, it did better than great. It's still a classic. I remember working on that one. We were rehearsing in Johnny Winter's loft in NYC and that's where that song really came together. I remember Donald coming up with the main riff and then adding that sort of rock and roll part in the chorus.

And then you had the big stop, "...with rock and roll." It was metal and rock and roll. I knew we had something there that was going to have some value. You never know, though.

Jeb: There were so many great riffs that Don came up with, from "Transmaniacon MC" to "Stairway To The Stars" that's not even a hard song to play but it's such a cool riff.

JB: Back in the Soft White Underbelly days the riffs he had were kind of light and there was definitely a push from Sandy and our other producer Murray [Krugman] to 'heavy' things up. Shows were getting bigger and more flamboyant at the time so we needed something that would go with a big rock show.

"Cities on Flame," "Stairway to the Stars" and "Before the Kiss" were great songs to play live. And then you had the mellow ballad, "Last Days of May" which was beautiful and was a break from all the real heavy metal stuff. It's kind of a bluesy story song.

Jeb: Did you have the budget to put on big shows?

JB No, we had a used truck that said "Sol's Trucking" on the side. We had one roadie and then I think we splurged and got two roadies.

Jeb: You knew you had made it.

JB: Yeah, we knew we had made it when we had TWO roadies.

We did everything on a shoestring in those days. Sandy would go up to the Columbia offices and find an empty office to make phone calls because we couldn't afford the phone bills.

It wasn't until about the third or fourth album that we went out on tour with Rod Stewart and The Faces. That was a big tour so we had to have everything together for that. Shortly after that "The Reaper" came and we spent all the money we could [laughter]!

Jeb: Who else did you open for on your early tours?

JB: The first one was the Byrds. Not the original Byrds, but the Easy Rider era Byrds with Roger McGuinn, Skip Batten, Gene Parsons and John York, no Crosby, no Hillman. The second tour, though, was the one that changed our world. That was with Alice Cooper.

They had a young audience. The Byrds' audience was an older audience. The Alice Cooper audience was really young, excited and ready for anything. That was definitely a big step up.

After that we went out with Uriah Heep, Bob Seger, Savoy Brown Blues Band, Black Sabbath…We played with all kinds of crazy people like Sly & the Family Stone and Ike & Tina Turner. We'd play with anyone we could.

We played with Big Brother and the Holding Company, post Janis of course. Cathy McDowell was their singer. She was a great singer but it was really tough for them because, who would want to go see them?

There is a great website called Hot Rails to Hull which has a giglopedia of every gig from the very beginning to the present day, 7000 plus gigs.

It was fun. It didn't seem like work because that's what we really wanted to do.

The band now is more financially stable than it's ever been, even in its heyday. I hear it's going well. There are rumors…

Jeb: On the next album [Tyranny And Mutation, 1973] you had what is probably your biggest song...

JB: "Hot Rails to Hell", now that's Richie Castellano's signature song [laughter]! I had to play that song last Sunday and I said "I really appreciate Richie singing it, but this is my song!" I was joking…I'm glad they play it. I can't believe they still play it. They didn't play it for fifteen years and Richie said "Hey, give me something to do."

That was just a stroke of luck, that song. It probably came together in about an hour, lyrics and everything. If I'd known we were going to play it so much I might have worked a little harder on it.

Jeb: Those were the days of vinyl and you could do cool stuff like the "Red" side and the "Black" side. What was the Red and the Black?

JB: It's the color scheme of the Canadian Mounties, which refers back to the song "I'm On the Lamb (But I Ain't No Sheep).” Sandy was a student of military hardware. He liked the contrast of red and black. It was something that had a sort of mystical power to it. 

Jeb: You were Albert's brother but the newest member of the band. Were you ever gun shy? Did you hold back or jump in with both feet?

JB: I definitely jumped in with both feet. They said "We're not going to be doing that psychedelic hippie stuff anymore, we're going to be doing metal. I said "Yeah, sign me up!"

I did a variety of things when I was in college, soul, Latin jazz and I was into the heavier side of The Beatles, like "Helter Skelter" and the first Led Zeppelin album.

The whole thing about the band was that there was a tremendous writing team behind it with Sandy, Richard Meltzer, Patti Smith, David Roter and Helen Wheels, and all the guys in the band were creative.

Alan Lanier…his songs weren't played that much in the live shows, but when we did the tribute show for Alan a couple of years ago we played a whole set of just his songs. It was fantastic, a great set. Much better than most bands that are out there now. It just shows you the depth of the creative team in Blue Öyster Cult.

It was daunting to come up with lyrics that would make it onto an album. It was daunting to say, "OK Donald, you're going to have to play this guitar part."

There was one album, I think, where Alan and I wrote most of it because the other guys were burned out and didn't have anything new. When the A-team slowed down, the B-team would go to work. Bring in the reinforcements.

Jeb: "Astronomy" is a signature tune for you and Albert.

JB: Sandy Pearlman wrote the lyrics for that. He gave those to me and "The clock strikes twelve" was the third line. I said "No, this has got to be the first line of the song". I made a few changes like that but it still came out much like the way Sandy envisioned.

We had a house on the north shore of Long Island and one day I went for a walk on the beach, maybe twenty minutes, and when I came back I had the whole melody in my head. Now Albert has said we had that song for a long time, but I don't think so. It was three or four weeks. That was another miracle.

Everybody had a great time recording it. Alan did a great job on the keyboards on that one and Eric [Bloom] sings his ass off on "Astronomy."

We actually had auditions for who was going to sing it. Sandy was the judge. Since I wrote it, I sang my audition and he said "OK." Then Albert sang it, followed by Eric's version.

Sandy came to me and said "We like Albert's vocals.” I said "What!? I thought I sang it great!" It's probably a good thing we had auditions because Eric said, "Damn it! I'm gonna sing that song!"

It came down to the wire and when we were ready to record it they said Eric's going to sing it. I said "OK, that's fine." It’s funny how that panned out but, of course, he did a great job.

Jeb: I love the bassline on "Career Of Evil".

JB: Oh, thanks. That goes back to a song Albert and I wrote when we were in high school. That version was in a major key and Albert took it and reworked it in a minor key. Yeah…that's a great bassline.  It has a certain chromaticism (hums the notes) to it, very slinky. I'm pretty sure that's all Albert, though and I just followed him and Donald to get that part…I added nothing extra to it. We're actually playing that now in our acoustic set.

Jeb: That must have a great vibe acoustically.

JB: Yeah, it definitely has a vibe and, of course, J.K. Rowling used it for one of her books [under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith] which is going to be a TV series. That was pretty cool. The series has aired in England but not in the US yet. I'm looking forward to seeing it. They use Blue Öyster Cult songs in it. Eric Bloom's name gets mentioned in the script somewhere.

Jeb: I got On Your Feet Or On Your Knees when I was about ten. The cover was kind of ominous and scary with the limo in front of the church and the pictures of you onstage in front of an audience of hooded people was a little scary to a ten year old. My only complaint about that album is that it sounds a bit muddy.

JB: We didn't know what we were doing. I think it's a pretty good representation of the tours we were on in those days. We were pretty low-tech as far as fidelity goes. Sound systems were always blowing up. We didn't really understand the live recording process.

We fixed that later on with the other two live albums. We would actually go in the truck and listened to how things sounded and make adjustments to get a better sound. To be honest, Jack Douglas, who recently worked with us on Blue Coupe, was fresh off working with Aerosmith; he did a tremendous job making it sound clearer than it would have if someone else had mixed it.

He brings the bass out anyway. I just love the way "Last Days of May" sounds on that. I don't remember my bass sounding that good. I really have to give props to Jack Douglas for doing a tremendous mix on that album. We definitely could have done a better job better recording it, though.

Jeb: You did choose a great place to put out a live album as it serves as a bookend to the first three albums. The difference between those albums and Agents Of Fortune is night and day. How did that happen?

JB: We had two years to write the songs for Agents of Fortune. I think that helped a lot. The earlier albums were recorded on the fly at Columbia or other lesser studios but for this one we ended up at the Record Plant which, at the time, was the best studio in New York.

It was inspiring. That's where Jimi Hendrix made Electric Ladyland. It's where John Lennon recorded…so it was good. I'm happy with the sound of that record.

Jeb: I've talked with Buck and Eric in the past and they said that one of the differences creatively was that a lot of songs weren't group efforts and that different people were writing and recording tracks independently.

JB: That's true. "Don't Fear the Reaper" was created on Don's 4-track. It's a great demo. You can hear it right there. You can add all the tinsel you want but you have to have a great core of a song.

I was convinced that it was going to be a big hit. It's another one that has gone well beyond my wildest dreams.

CLICK HERE FOR PART II OF JOE BOUCHARD'S
HOT RAILS TO HISTORY