venue and it's going to be a good,
solid show, " Bloom notes.
"We wanted to do the DVD at the
Detroit show, but it was going to be too
expensive. Some people have $1 million
to spend on a video. We don't. So
[Detroit's] going to be the dress rehearsal."
Bloom, who considers Detroit to be
one of the nation's finest "meccas of
hard rock," says that it was the intense
energy of Ann Arbor's MC5 that
influenced BOC's cover version of
"Kick Out the Jams"! on its 1978 live
album, Some Enchanted Evening.
Still, he shuns being labeled the
leader of a "heavy metal" band.
"Blue Oyster Cult really isn't a heavy
metal band. We're not monolithic," he
insists. "`(Don't Fear) The Reaper'
certainly isn't metal. And when people
come to see us, just to hear 'The
Reaper,' and they may not know that
much more about us, they usually
walk away wanting to know where
we'll be playing next.
"We do a good show; our musician-
ship is better than it ever has been. We
continue to do shows all over the world,
and we're very good at what we do."
In 1968, Bloom recalls, he had no
idea that he would become a profes-
sional musician when he joined the
band, then known as the Stalk-Forrest
Group.
Describing himself as a Romance-
language major at Hobart College with
"no real goal," he feels that a chance
meeting with his future bandmates at a
Sam Ash music store, where he worked
as an equipment salesman, surrealisti-
cally reshuffled the cards of his life.
"I'm here because of a variety of
stokes of fate that happened to me,"
he says. "I just wound up being at the
right place at the right time when I
joined up with these guys.
"God moves in mysterious ways,
they say, and everything that hap-
pened to me in '68 evolved into my
career, my family, my everything."

Jewish Heritage

Bloom traces his Latvian-Lithuanian
Jewish heritage back to the 1880s,
when his grandfather's large family
came to America to escape the czarist
pogroms.
His parents met and married in the
1920s and the family consisted of
himself and two older sisters. The
Bloom family was Conservative but
did not keep kosher.
Married and the father of two
grown boys in their 20s, Bloom feels
he's done his best to pass spirituality
on to them.

........

"I'm not an everyday practicing Jew,
but inside I know where I came from,"
he says. "Do I go to Friday services?
No, but I don't try to run away from
the fact that I know I am a Jew.
"Both of my sons had bar mitzvahs.
So did I, and just like me they were
brought up a certain way and they'll
have to make their own way through
life. If they find that Judaism is impor-
tant to them, I'm sure that they'll find
a place for it in their lives."

-111PIPINII
.....1.=

Company -

:r ea

Misunderstood

Neither of his offspring thinks of their
father as a larger-than-life rock star,
adds Bloom. Especially one who has
had to dispel rumors of anti-religious
symbolism that's been associated with
Blue Oyster Cult throughout its
career.
Take the band's hook-and-cross
logo, designed by Bill Gawlick. It
debuted on the . band's self-titled first
album and was chosen for its astro-
nomical symbol for Saturn and "meta-
physical, alchemical and mythological
connotations" that combined similari-
ties to some religious symbols.
It appealed to the band because it
seemed to reflect the same intellectual-
ly mysterious elements that went into
the group's songwriting.
But the 1974 album cover of Secret
Treaties, adorned with a sketch of Blue
Oyster Cult in American pilot jackets,
flanking an ME 262 German war
plane, stirred more controversy.
Even today, Bloom feels that flack
from critics and incensed. Jewish back-
lash completely missed the point of
the picture.
"In no way was it glorifying
Nazism," Bloom explains. "It was a
statement about technology. Luckily,
Hitler was so insane that he decided
the ME-262 should be a bomber and
not a jet fighter.
"Thank God he was that crazy. That
was the most sophisticatedly advanced
plane in WWII, and [the Germans]
had it.
"Listen to the lyrics of the song 'ME
262' on that album, which are written
from the perspective of the German
pilot. We didn't have jet planes in
WWII, at all, so it was putting history
into perspective, more than anything
political." ❑

Blue Oyster Cult, with Foghat,
performs 7 p.m. Thursday, June
20, at DTE Energy Music Theatre.
$16.50-$26.50. (248) 645-6666.

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