SOUNDTRACK: BLUE ÖYSTER CULT-Agents of Fortune (1976).
After the release of their first official live album On Your Feet or On Your Knees, it’s unsurprising that the band would put a concert photo on the back cover of this disc (On Your Feet…was their first Top 40 disc).
What is surprising is the piano fueled second track “True Confessions” which is as delicate as the title suggests (Eric Bloom even hits a falsetto note AND there’s a saxophone solo(!)). Combine this with “Debbie Denise” a tender (!) song about lost love (!) and you have quite a tender an un-heavy metal album.
Of course, the disc opens with “This Ain’t the Summer of Love” which is certainly a strong heavy track. But that’s mostly it. There’s a lot more piano/keyboard on “E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)” although the guitars definitely come to the fore during the wailing solos. And then, frequent contributor Patti Smith gets a vocal inclusion “The Revenge of Vera Gemini” (her voice works quite well with the spooky psychedelia of the band). “Sinful Love” is an almost disco-ey dance track (the falsetto backing vocals are weird, to say the least!).
The later songs on the disc sound like 70s rock. There’s rather little heavy metal involved at all. In fact, “Tenderloin” comes close to sounding like Kansas. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just kind of a shock coming from these heavy metal pioneers.
Oh, and I almost forgot, it also contains the biggest BOC song in the universe, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” [When my friend Lar saw a BOC Greatest Hits disc he asked if it was just this song 12 times). Of course, you probably know the song, but if you haven’t heard in a long time, it sounds even better than you remember. I have to assume that that track alone absolved the band of all the mellow tracks on this disc.
The bonus tracks on the remastered edition include a truly bizarro version of “Fire of Unknown Origin” and a demo of “Reaper.”
[READ: February 22, 2010] Crogan’s March
I enjoyed the first book in this series so much that I couldn’t wait for number two. And how lucky for me that it was already available!
The premise of this series is that the Crogan family (who live in contemporary America) are a fairly normal family: happily married, two young kids who squabble a lot, etc. This family aspect of the story bookends the main body of action (their father tells them a story about one of their ancestors to prove a point or make an argument).
In this case, a fight between the boys is summed up by their dad: “Some people believe that everyone should be given the freedom to make their own choice and others that everyone should be held to the same moral standards.” So, let’s hear the story of Peter Crogan, member of the French Foreign Legion circa 1912.
When I was a kid, the foreign legion was this sort of mythical entity. The phrase, “run away and join the foreign legion” seemed to be bandied about a lot as a means of escape. I don’t know why it was, or why it seems to no longer be, but suffice it to say that I haven’t thought about the foreign legion in twenty years.
So, this story about a legionnaire was a welcome surprise from the get go.
This is the first time I’ve actually learned the rules of the foreign legion: you’re in for five years. If you go AWOL, you are imprisoned. And the whole premise of the foreign legion is that it’s for soldiers to fight for France even if they are not French (or even if they are French but couldn’t get into the regular army). You show up and if you are fit, you are accepted, no questions asked about your past. This seems like it shouldn’t work at all: criminals, escapees, questionable characters all banding together, but it seems to.
The strangest part of this story is that a 15 year-old boy joined as well, and he is something of the troop’s pet: they want to look after him as much as they tease him for being so young.
The legion is off to a conflict in the Middle East. Their Sergeant is hard man, who would just as soon make them sit in solitary as give them praise. The troop learns that this sergeant is being replaced by someone else: a man who, it turns out, is a hero of multiple conflicts where he was the only survivor! He is gung ho, excited to fight and gets the men totally psyched.
I loved that later on, the former sergeant leans in to Peter Crogan and points out that if this guy was the only one to have survived, that means that all of the other soldiers in his regimen (soldiers like Crogan) died. That changes things a bit in the men’s minds. Especially when the two sergeants differ drastically on the way to handle an incoming invasion. Things look incredibly bleak for the soldiers, and ultimately end with Crogan in a seemingly hopeless situation.
I enjoyed this book so much. I stayed up far past my bedtime finishing it. I kept wanting to put it down, but the action was so exciting I didn’t dare. I also loved the scene in the cave where the panels are just black. It was a fascinating and very effective way of conveying time’s passing (and I liked that he thanked someone for helping him ink those black panels).
The action was incredibly exciting. And the ending was quite a surprise. I’m not sure if the Crogan kids absorbed the moral, but it was a great tale nonetheless.
This series is simply fantastic. I love everything about it: the story, the history, the dialogue. Everything. This story was certainly darker in tone (a lot more death) than the first, but it wouldn’t have felt as real without it. And I wonder if any of this series is based on Schweizer’s own family tree.
I truly cannot wait for the next book in this series. Due out in 2011 (aggh, at least a year wait!)
For ease of searching I include: Blue Oyster Cult
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