Sandy Pearlman, Producer, Manager and Lyricist for Blue Öyster Cult, Dies at 72
By JON PARELESJULY 26, 2016
Sandy Pearlman, a producer, lyricist, manager, executive and college professor who was a herald of developments from heavy metal and punk to the digital distribution of music, died on Tuesday in Novato, Calif. He was 72.
He had suffered a debilitating cerebral hemorrhage in December, and died of pneumonia and other complications, Robert Duncan, his longtime friend and conservator, said.
Mr. Pearlman was one of the first serious rock critics, writing and editing for the pioneering rock-culture magazine Crawdaddy. He claimed to have been the first writer to use the phrase “heavy metal” to describe music.
But he was best known as the producer, manager and lyricist for Blue Öyster Cult. He produced and co-produced albums for the band from 1972-1988. With his longtime business partner Murray Krugman, he produced one of the earliest albums considered to be punk rock, “The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!” released in 1975, and he produced the second album by the Clash, “Give ’Em Enough Rope,” in 1978.
Mr. Pearlman was also a founding vice president of eMusic, an early online music store that started in 1998, and he lectured and consulted widely on music in the digital era.
“He was always talking about the future,” Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s longtime lead guitarist, said in an interview. “It wasn’t just what he was going to do in the future, but what the culture would require in the future and how it would change.”
Samuel Clarke Pearlman was born on Aug. 5, 1943, in Rockaway, Queens. He graduated in 1966 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he promoted concerts. He went on to graduate study at Brandeis University.
During his student years he wrote a cycle of poems that grew into a far-reaching alternate-history, science-fiction epic, “The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos.” By 1967 he was also writing for Crawdaddy.
Mr. Pearlman met musicians in Stony Brook, N.Y., who, he decided, could become his idea of a rock band. He named them the Soft White Underbelly (from a Winston Churchill quote); after some personnel changes, Mr. Pearlman renamed them Blue Oyster Cult. (According to the band’s website, its keyboardist, Allen Lanier, added the umlaut to Öyster) Mr. Pearlman also came up with Buck Dharma as a stage name for the band’s lead guitarist, Donald Roeser.
Blue Öyster Cult combined hard rock with concepts out of science-fiction and apocalyptic fantasy and a hint of tongue-in-cheek humor, with songs like “Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll.” Its collaborators on lyrics would eventually include not only Mr. Pearlman, but also Ms. Smith and the novelists Michael Moorcock and Eric Van Lustbader. The band’s audience multiplied with its 1976 album “Agents of Fortune,” which included Mr. Roeser’s song “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper,” a Top 20 hit that became a perennial favorite on soundtracks.
Mr. Pearlman was Black Sabbath’s manager from 1979-1983, and he also managed other bands, among them the Dictators and Romeo Void. In 1981, he began collaborating with Blue Öyster Cult’s drummer, Albert Bouchard, on what was originally supposed to be a concept-album trilogy based on “The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos.” After years of work it emerged as a Blue Öyster Cult album, “Imaginos,” in 1988.
Mr. Pearlman produced the 1984 album “The Medicine Show” by the neo-psychedelic band the Dream Syndicate. The band’s leader, Steve Wynn, later wrote that “Sandy Pearlman drove us to the limit and beyond.”
In 1986 Mr. Pearlman founded his own Alpha & Omega Recording, first in leased space in San Francisco and, since 1991, in San Rafael in Marin County, Calif., with extensive analog and digital equipment. In 1989 he bought the San Francisco new wave and alternative-rock label 415 Records, renaming it Popular Metaphysics.
He was a founding vice president of Goodnoise Corporation, an early company selling MP3 files online, which later changed its name to eMusic.
Mr. Pearlman, who lived in Marin County, had no immediate survivors.
In the 21st century, he became a consultant and professor, exploring how the music business could adapt to the digital era. He was a professor at McGill University in Montreal and then at the University of Toronto. There, he taught and created courses in the departments of music, English, religious studies, law and management. Before his cerebral hemorrhage, he had planned to return to teach at Stony Brook.
Topic: Sandy Pearlman, Producer, Manager and Lyricist for Blue Öyster Cult, Dies at 72 (Read 898 times)
