In 2022, the biggest, littlest band in 70s rock celebrate 50 years of monster riffs and eerie mythology, and a chemistry as volatile as Spinal Tap’s. Godzilla, Nosferatu, Death, Patti Smith and J.K. Rowling all loom large in the tall tale of BLUE ÖYSTER CULT - the band that had the lot: the licks, the leathers, the lyrics and the light show.“ We were not going to mess around,” they teil MAT SNÖW.

Fortunate sons: Blue Öyster Cult (from left) Eric Bloom, Albert Bouchard, Joe Bouchard, Allen Lanier, Donald ’Buck Dharma’ Roeser, Eatons Neck, NY, March 1973.

Photograph: DICK KRAUS

IT’S SUMMER 1970 AND A LONG Island band has to reboot or die.

Surf-rockers as kids; then, as college students in Potsdam, NY, a knock-off of Al Kooper’s Blues Project named The Travesty; since 1967 they’ve been trading as Soft White Underbelly, having pivoted to the West Coast sounds of Jefferson Airplane with a drizzle of Doors and Dead.

Thanks to their well-connected manager-producer, Crawdaddy journalist Sandy Pearlman, the group have a record deal worth $20,000 with the prestigious Elektra label, based on its boss Jac Holzman’s hunch that their handsome lead singer Les Braunstein could be the next Jim Morrison. But Braunstein has itchy feet; he’s had a song recorded by Peter, Paul And Mary, while the band he fronts look increasingly stranded in hippy squalor.

Frontmen have long been a problem area. “Originally we were gonna have Jackson Browne as our lead singer,” remembers drummer Albert Bouchard (imagine that). “He worked with us for a few weeks but he was pretty green so it didn’t work out.”

Otherwise the line-up is almost sturdy. From South-ern landed stock, would-be film editor Allen Lanier plays keyboards and guitar, while on lead guitar is Bouchard’s college buddy and foil since The Travesty, Donald Roeser. Behind the scenes, Pearlman fancies himself another Svengali, dubbing the band after Winston Churchill’s jab at the “soft white underbelly of the Axis” and renaming each member, though only Roeser’s moniker seems to have stuck, as it does to this day: Buck Dharma.

Stung by a bad review in Crawdaddy by future Spring-steen manager Jon Landau, Bouchard had initially bristled at Pearlman’s approach. “Donald writes to me: ‘You know that awful magazine Crawdaddy? One of the writers, Sandy Pearlman, says he’s gonna make me a star.’ I wrote back: ‘Does he have a big cigar?’”

Joining them in the fragrantly run-down band house in the prosperous Long Island suburb of Great Neck is roadie Eric Bloom, owner of a van and PA rig, and, as it happens, the ex-singer of an R&B covers band. Which is lucky, because when a disaffected Braunstein finally quits, Bloom steps up. “We like to promote from within,” chuckles Roeser/Dharma today.

Problem: without Braunstein, Holzman is reluctant to fund a second round of recording for the new line-up, now renamed the Stalk-Forrest Group (finally released in 2001 as St Cecilia: The Elektra Recordings). Second prob-lem: rattled by the threat of police raids on the band house, bassist Andrew Winters has also quit. With his exit goes the band’s only taller human; his replacement is Albert Bouchard’s reassuringly miniature younger brother Joe.

“You had to look good in the group photos,” says Dharma, 5’2”. “Andrew was almost six feet. He had to go!”

Joe Bouchard wonders what he’s gotten into: “I was in the band and that same week they got dropped from Ele-ktra Records – no album, and we’re off the label,” he remembers. “What are we going to do now?”