Travel back in time with us to the pre-cable and VCR days when rock bands could only ever be briefly glimpsed on TV on Friday nights, and if you were lucky, you might get to see a full show by a great band. Every week, I will be posting the kind of show that would have made me excited to stay up past 11, at some time between 1976 and 1984. So have a cup of coffee, eat some sugar, connect the audio output of your TV to your hi-fi system and play this Youtube video LOUD!
Blue Oyster Cult, far as I was concerned, were state of the art rock and roll at the end of the 70s. I saw them on a stadium bill in 1978 with AC/DC, Journey, Cheap Trick, and Nugent, and they were, by some distance, the best band of the day. I think of them as the American Sabbath, a certain type of standard bearer for hard rock in the days before heavy metal codified the symbols.
My friend Rich reminded me of a great BOC show from their 1981 tour that we both saw on one of those late-night Friday music programs. For this week’s edition, however, I decided to turn the time machine back a few years, to a complete show from the 1976 tour for Agents Of Fortune. This show, which appears here in amazing quality, has the classic five-piece band, doing material from the first four albums, hamming it up in their first year as arena rockers.
