Blue Öyster Cult cause a ruckus...as they damn well should...

Unlike our first group of musical hooligans causing a ruckus at the movies, Blue Öyster Cult weren't quite as busy or involved in providing music for movies. The one huge exception is of course their signature tune "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" which has shown up - credited or uncredited - in about three dozen different films and tv shows. So obviously the Ruckus At The Movies: Blue Öyster Cult edition opens with "Reaper". But since everybody already has (or bloody well should have) that one, I decided to include the re-recording the band did for Cult Classics, an album directly inspired by the public's renewed interest in the band after "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was so effectively used in the opening of the 1994 The Stand mini-series. Which, incidentally, was also my first brush with BÖC. 

But the band's other film adventures were more modest in nature and sometimes not entirely successful. They were for example asked to provide some songs for the movie Teachers in 1984, which the band dutifully did, writing three relatively Neanderthal-ian shool-themed songs, rhyming rebel with devil etc. I guess they were the knuckleheads of their class. Anyway, somehow the deal fell through and BÖC weren't featured on the soundtrack that had, among others 38 Special, ZZ Top and...uh...Joe Cocker (?!). The three demos the band recorded for Teachers are of course featured here.and, as said, they're pretty good in a 'dumb but fun' way. Probably about as good as the BÖC were gonna be in 1984 - and the fact that they are only demos probably worked out for the best, as they escape the hideous overproduction of The Revolution By Night and Club Ninja. 

This was, in many ways, the second time the band had invested time, money and effort writing and producing music for a film that then...turned out differently. They had written a couple of songs with the hopes of seeing them included in Heavy Metal - The Film, but none of the specifically prepared songs were picked. Instead, the producers chose "Veteran Of The Psychic Wars", a superb sci-fi song. The rest of the songs landed on Fire Of Unknown Origin and form a sort of mini-album within the album. I included the one most obviously made for Heavy Metal: "Vengeance (The Pact)", which recounts the adventures of one of the main stories of the film, Taarna, which is probably and ironically what got it axed in the first place. Oh, also: it is absolutely kick-ass, one of the best of the Cult from the 80s, when the pickings began to get slimmer. 

And finally, there is the BÖC's one time where they were completely in control of a film's music. Unfortunately it was for a complete turd of a film, a cheap Charles Band sc-fi flick called Bad Channels. Fortunately, the band provided not only two heavy metal song to the soundtrack, but also the entire score. Unfortunately, it was almost all incidental music, broken up into often very short bits and thus not a particularly good listen. Fortunately, the One Buck Guy is not gonna let that pass, so I picked what I thought were the best moment of the score and edited them into three suites extravagantly called "Bad Channels Suite". These should be much more satisfying listens.  

So, it was time to get some BÖC on this here blog, and why not with a listen to them causing a ruckus at the movies...