On Sandy Pearlman, Blue Oyster Cult, and Music To Energize and Motivate You

A Guest Post From Dan Levitin

I first met Howie Klein in 1981. He came to see my band, The Mortals, play at the Mabuhay Gardens. I don't think he liked the show very much, but a few months later, when we had a demo tape, he liked it well enough to play it on his radio show on KUSF. Maybe the studio brought out the best in us. Maybe because the day we recorded it our singer wasn't drunk. Howie and I became friends and for the next ten years we had dinner together frequently. Howie introduced me to exotic foods I had never tried before (Thai, Vietnamese) and ones I had never even heard of (Burmese, which is now my favorite). He also introduced me to his old college friend, Sandy Pearlman. "You'll like each other. Sandy is really smart and he's one of the great rock journalists."

My first thought was that Sandy would write about our band, the way he had written about The Byrds, and that we would become famous. I love the music I make and I consider it a great privilege that I can. And when people hear it, some of them really like it, so I'm always thinking about ways to get it heard. Give me a chance and I'll somehow work it into a conversation. We went out to dinner and Howie was right. (He's always right. It's uncanny.) Sandy and I became fast friends, and develop edour own relationship that would extend for the next thirty years. He mentored me in the recording studio, enlisting my help and nascient judgment on a few album projects. He fronted me free studio time to hone my skills. We attended lectures on neuroscience at Stanford, 15 years before I decided to become a neuroscientist. In the 2000s, I helped get Sandy a job as an Adjunct Professor at my university, McGill, where among other things, he taught a course called "Heavy Metal and Bruckner."

In the late '80s, Sandy was working on his magnum opus, the Blue Oyster Cult album Imaginos, based around a poem he had written many years earlier. Sandy wrote a lot of the lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult (BOC), bringing in imagery from the occult, inspiration from medieval poetry, and references to metaphysics and the cosmos. He had brought this same sensibility to his rock writing, and in fact, he spoke in lofty sentences with wonderfully surprising word choices. Here's one example. When my first book was being published, This Is Your Brain On Music, Sandy read the book in manuscript form and offered to write a burb. This is what Sandy offered:

"Daniel Levitin is a scientist and music professional. He gets to the very crux of the truth-is-beauty equation that the mystery of music represents."

My editor wanted to convey that readers shouldn't be afraid that I would write impenetrable sentences laden with jargon, like they might expect from a scientist. He suggested adding to the end of the burb:

"…but what a great writer."

I told the editor that did not sound like Sandy. I went back to Sandy and he offered up these two gems:

"The words flow as smoothly as blood from Mephistopheles' pen." or

"The words flow as smoothly as wine from the magnum at Bacchus' wake."

That is pure Sandy. And I'll reiterate, he talked spontaneously in those kinds of metaphors. He wrote the way he spoke.

Sandy, circa 1975

Anyway, getting back to the Imaginos record, Sandy and I spent a month in the studio listening to various guitar and vocal takes and choosing the best parts of each one, which we later combined into a composite track. We'd listen to the composite track over several days to ensure that it sounded natural and had a coherent flow, that the narrative seemed uninterrupted. Then we might go back to the original takes and make a few substitutions, a few different choices. Making composites like this is not unusual— most rock and roll records have been made this way for forty years, and even Streisand and Simon and Garfunkel do this. Sandy's and my job was made easier because Buck Dharma, the singer and lead guitarist, was preternaturally good and adopted the same mind state and mental journey when he sang and played so all of the takes sounded coherent, he simply put in whatever variations in melody and rhythm moved him in the moment. Sandy and I also spent hours in the studio listening to previous BOC albums in order to maintain the continuity of the band's musical ethos. This is just a fancy way of saying that for six or eight weeks in 1988 I was listening to a whole lot of Blue Oyster Cult. And thanks to Sandy's generosity, I sang background vocals on that album, and joinred an orchestra of guitar players Sandy put together to create a massive rhythm guitar track.

Driving home one day in my 1978 Toyota Corolla hatchback (the hatchback was good for transporting guitar and bass amps ), I got a song in my head that sounded like the kind of thing BOC would write. I remember reading that Chrissie Hynde had made one of my favorite records, The Pretenders debut album, by locking herself in a room for a month and listening to nothing but Ray Davies records. The brain tosses and turns around the sounds and relates them to other things you've heard across your life. If you're lucky, the brain will deliver up a new piece that is reminiscent of what you've heard before, but that does not replicate it, but instead, expands on it in interesting ways. In the big picture, all music is based on or informed by music the writer has heard before, just as all sentences are informed by sentences you've heard before. I sang the melody of the song into my portable cassette recorder, marked the song BOC I and put it aside. A few days later I came up with another melody, again, duly committing it to cassette, and this time I named it BOC II. I am writing songs all the time, and at that point, I recorded hundreds of ideas for melodies that were not yet songs— no chord progression, no rhythm, sometimes only scattershot words.

Whenever I was in the mood, I'd go back to my old tapes, find a song that I felt like finishing off, and then record it. So it was that in 2006 I found myself at home, in Montreal, where I now had a home studio. Going through my old tapes one day, I rediscovered BOC I and II. As soon as the cassette played for BOC II, I could hear a whole arrangement in my head: the drum beat, the bass line, and I knew exactly what guitar tone I wanted for the electric guitar. (As with Harry Potter's song, you don't choose the song; the song chooses you). I recorded these three parts in about an hour and then listened back. If this was Buck Dharma, I thought, he'd probably harmonize the guitar part. And so I did. I layered on more guitars (Sandy-style) and in about six hours the song was done.

Of the hundred and fifty or so songs I've written, none of them have been for any commercial purpose— I never had a record deal. When I got tired of listening to records and CDs, or tired of what was on the radio, I'd sit down and write what I wanted to hear. Just like with BOC II— it's a combination of what I wanted to hear (or needed to hear) in 1988 and in 2006. BOC II was always special to me because if I was feeling down, it would reliably, every time, cheer me up. It has a motivating, energizing effect on me. Now there are streaming services and I can get my music out for anyone who wants to hear it. I've recorded two albums and released an EP. BOC II just didn't seem to fit the mood of the other records which come from a different mood and mental state, a a state that is equal parts Blue Oyster Cult, Mephistopheles, Baccus and Sandy Pearlman.

Dan and Sandy, Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, 1998