By Staff
SOUTH BEND, Ind. – I heard Blue Oyster Cult live in college, but March 2 at Time Out Sports Bar was the first time I actually saw them in concert.
The first time in the '70s at Central Michigan University's old Finch Fieldhouse, they were lords of arena rock in the days Kiss opened for them. It took their extensive laser show to penetrate the pot smoke.
I don't think I've ever been to a concert with more haze, so I smiled at leaflets posted around the pool tables that this was a no-smoking show.
I came curious about how you shrink something as assaultive as the furious BOC guitar line into a club-sized space.
Somehow, it worked. It wasn't overpoweringly loud and you couldn't help comparing the caliber of a national brand to what you usually hear in a Michiana bar on a snowy night.
Plus, I didn't hear anyone yell, "More cowbell."
BOC (my shorthand for the Cass County Board of Commissioners, so it was also funny to hear fans chanting it) debuted in 1972.
I liked "(Don't Fear) the Reaper" and "Godzilla," but didn't know much more about the New Yorkers, except my dorm neighbor across the hall was always playing "Agents of Fortune," "On Your Feet and Knees" and "Secret Treaties" and raving about Eric Bloom's sinister lyrics.
They cultivated a reputation as neo-fascist vampires. That seems funny now, too, because their center, the wondrous Donald Roeser, short-haired and pudgy, looks like an accountant at rock and roll fantasy camp.
Until "Buck Dharma" makes his guitar talk.
I've heard some greats in arenas, from Frank Zappa to Keith Richards and the Edge, but Buck never ceases to amaze, and to hear him up-close in such an intimate setting – the only thing I can compare it to was Marshall Crenshaw at Club Soda in Kalamazoo.
Is this Wayne Campbell's basement? Are Mike Myers and Garth going to welcome BOC to "Wayne's World?"
I see why more classic bands seem to be embracing smaller venues.
Opener Steve Foresman concedes no limitation to an acoustic guitar, adroitly covering Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man," Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" and Bob Dylan's 29-verse "Tangled Up in Blue."
I'm sorry Leigh broke her ankle, but grateful Dale Blunier invited me to accompany him to BOC.
Live Earth: A 24-hour concert July 7 will span all seven continents to raise awareness of environmental issues. Besides the first concert ever in Antarctica, promoters selected seven cities: Shanghai, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Washington, D.C. (or New York), London, Johannesburg and an old Buddhist temple in Kyoto.
The concerts will be broadcast in more than 120 counties on NBC and seven U.S. cable networks. Producer Kevin Wall also did Live 8 in 2005. Revenue from the shows goes to Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.
Seriously "Lost": Lostpedia.com launched Sept. 22, 2005, on the first anniversary of the crash of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 in the South Pacific. Web sites can complement such a series by tracking and rehashing clues. This one chronicles every polar-bear sighting. It's a virtual community, with almost 10,000 volunteers editing 2,500 entries, from the Dharma Initiative orientation films to hatch lockdown procedures. Besides the English language site, there are seven international editions.
Quips, quotes and qulunkers: "The nation's capital is a strange new world these days, a place where horrible crises abound, but nothing much gets done and no one seems to mind. Forget about Iraq – who do you like in '08? … The Democrats strode back into town with the air of conquerors and immediately punted on first down when given a chance to do something about Iraq … Like amputees who think they still feel their fingers and toes, the Democrats spent this first debate over Iraq running scared from a Republican attack machine that has been clinically dead for months. Even with the White House's poll numbers in the tank, and with the public roundly disgusted about Iraq, the Democrats still let Tony Snow and the rest of the neocon crew frame the debate on a war they've been consistently wrong about for four solid years. Even this late in the game, and with so much at stake, the Democrats were still far more afraid of looking weak than of doing the wrong thing."
– Matt Taibbi
in the March 8 Rolling Stone
"The 2006 election was a total repudiation of the Karl Rove version of conservatism. (Unless the GOP can reinvent itself and appeal to moderate and independent voters it) may be consigned to where they had been from 1932 until the late 1960s – a distinctly minority party."
– Curtis Gans, director of the non-partisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University
"For the first time since they seized control of the Republican Party more than a quarter century ago, some on the Christian right are talking privately about breaking away from the GOP."
– Robert Dreyfuss
in the March 8 Rolling Stone