Blue Oyster Cult - BBC Rock Hour, Cobo Hall, Detroit, MI, 12-30-1977

Do I know much about Blue Oyster Cult beyond "Don't Fear the Reaper" (more cowbell and all), "Burnin' for You," "Godzilla," and a few more songs? No. Not yet, at least. But they're a popular rock band that did a concert for the BBC, so it's going on my blog. :)

This bootleg show actually was recorded in Detroit in the USA, not in Britain as these things usually go. It may have been broadcast first by the US radio station KBPH. But for whatever reason there's a version with a BBC DJ introducing the show (the decidedly non-hard rock but omnipresent Brian Matthew), so it counts as a BBC broadcast.

Perhaps the fact the BBC didn't direct the recording of this helps explain that the recording has one serious flaw: the vocals were way too low. Luckily, these days that can be fixed with audio editing programs like X-Minus, so that's what I did. Technically, all the songs should have "[Edit]" in their titles since I edited them all, but that seems unnecessary since it happened to all of them, and you can just read about that here instead. I think it sounds much better now.

1977 was a good year for the BBC to do a show of their music, because their classic "Don't Fear the Reaper" had been released the year before, and "Godzilla" had come out on album just a month before this concert. The rest of their songs are much like a "best of" up until that point, but there's also one cover, Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild."

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 R. U. Ready to Rock (Blue Oyster Cult)
02 E. T. I. [Extra Terrestrial Intelligence] (Blue Oyster Cult)
03 Cities on Flame (Blue Oyster Cult)
04 Hot Rails to Hell (Blue Oyster Cult)
05 Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult)
06 This Ain't the Summer of Love (Blue Oyster Cult)
07 Born to Be Wild (Blue Oyster Cult)
08 Don't Fear the Reaper (Blue Oyster Cult)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15275838/BlueOystC_1977_BBRockHourCoboHall__12-30-1977_atse.zip.html

The cover photo comes from a concert in the Hammersmith Odeon in London, 1977. (That's a bit ironic, since one would think this concert would have been recorded there instead of Detroit.) I took the lettering of the band's name from one of their albums mainly because I'm amused at how incredibly similar it is to the lettering used for the joke heavy metal band Spinal Tap. Both of them even have an umlaut over an unnecessary letter!