Lightening Up the Dark Side : Blue Oyster Cult Could Take a Joke--but the Band Survived Anyway

Ear-torturing decibel levels, flash pots and smoke machines. Blackleather jackets, satanic imagery and allusions to death. Beavis and Butt-head would almost certainly walk around sporting Blue Oyster Cult T-shirts were they old enough to remember the group’s heyday.

Among the first of the hard-rock groups to revel in the Gothic side of metal, Blue Oyster Cult, which appears tonight at the Coach House, is forefather of such groups as Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Danzig. But what set the Cult apart from latter-day Lucifer lovers was its essential, satirical nature. While the group’s fascist/hellfire vibe was an integral element of its image, Blue Oyster Cult paid homage to the dark side with tongue firmly in cheek.

“I always felt that the depth of our humor was unappreciated,” guitarist Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser said recently from a Houston motel room.

Roeser, 46, expressed regret at taking on the Dharma pseudonym early in his career, and that most people didn’t get what the band was really all about.

“I think that music fans don’t want too much humor in their music, otherwise bands like the Tubes would have been huge because they were really great,” he said. “People don’t seem to dig it; they don’t want the bands to make fun of what they’re doing. They take it very seriously, which surprises me.

“I like stuff that’s hilarious, myself. People are always asking me, ‘Are you guys really a cult? Are you devil worshipers?’ Of course, we’re not, but people don’t want to hear that.”

In its way, Blue Oyster Cult was equally influential on such groups as the Dictators, the Ramones and Twisted Sister, who added a healthy, campy dose of n’yuk n’yuk to their outrageous, eardrum-busting musings.

But while the Cult was a pioneering group in heavy metal and humor, it’s not often mentioned by contemporary groups as an inspiration. Older groups with currently hipper reputations--Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper, for example--seem to get most of the lip service from today’s metal merchants. Roeser feels the Cult deserves more credit for the areas it pioneered.

“Yeah, I guess I look at BOC as an influence on other bands,” he said. “But we’re the kind of band that, when other bands get asked about influences, the name doesn’t seem to be on the tip of their tongue.”

Formed in Long Island in 1969, Blue Oyster Cult endured a number of record-company rejections under different names before eventually being signed by Columbia in 1971. Its commercial breakthrough came in 1976 with the gold-selling album “Agents of Fortune,” which included the uncharacteristically mellow hit single, “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

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Ten years later, its sound was out of fashion.

“We took a hiatus in the mid-’80s, then we re-formed because we had an offer to go to Greece,” Roeser said of the brief break. “Then we ended up playing some shows in Germany and just sort of fell back into it to make a living.”

The group--now featuring original members Roeser, vocalist Eric Bloom and keyboardist Allen Lanier, along with drummer Chuck Burgi and bassist Jon Rogers--recently released “Cult Classic” on Herald Records, a re-recorded collection of their best-known songs.

“We needed new versions of a couple of our old things,” Roeser explained. “They used the new version of ‘Reaper’ in Stephen King’s miniseries ‘The Stand.’ There’s, like, a statute of limitations when you record for a major label that prevents you from re-recording your songs, but that’s expired. We wanted to own our own versions of the songs. ‘The Reaper,’ ‘Burning for You’ and ‘Godzilla’ sound almost exactly like the originals, the other ones are pretty much the way we do them now.”

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But isn’t Roeser tired of playing the same material after all these years?

“It could be worse,” he said. “ ‘The Reaper’ is actually a good song, even today. For example, how would you like to have to go out and play ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ every night for the rest of your life? That would be torture.”

The Cult is currently finishing up an album of all new material--its first since 1989--for release next summer. Though Roeser remains enthusiastic about the project, he doesn’t rule out a solo career in the future, either.

“This will be the first recording of the band with Chuck and Jon, and it sounds quite a bit different from classic BOC,” he said. “We’ll see if there’s a market for it. I could be in BOC in one form or another for the rest of my life, that would be no problem. We kick more butt now than we did in the arena in the ‘80s. So many bands of our era are sorry shadows of what they once were, whereas our band is more muscular and energetic than it’s ever been. People are surprised at how good we are.

“On the other hand, there’s all sorts of stuff I’d like to do besides this, so we’ll just wait and see what happens.”

* Blue Oyster Cult and A.R.M. play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $18.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.