Band formation Albert Bouchard and
Donald Roeser met in college in 1965 in
Potsdam, New York, and began playing together in several bands, with Roeser on guitarhaving taken it up as physical therapy after breaking his armand Bouchard on drums. The two eventually dropped out of college but continued to play gigs throughout upstate New York, except for a brief stint of Bouchard playing for another band in Chicago. The band that would become the Stalk–Forrest Group was the brainchild of
Sandy Pearlman, a student of
Stony Brook University in Long Island. Pearlman had heard Roeser jam with his band in a common building on the campus of Stony Brook and offered to be their manager. The bandknown as "Soft White Underbelly" in reference to a speech by Winston Churchill regarding Nazi-held Italy during World War IIincluded Bouchard and Roeser, as well as keyboardist
Allen Lanier, bassist Andy Winters, and vocalist and frontman Les Braunstein. Bouchard would retrospectively call Soft White Underbelly's music "more of a
Grateful Dead type thing, [with the band] developing [their] improvisational skills and songwriting abilities," whereas Roeser would credit Pearlman for giving him motivation to play rock on a professional level. The songwriting of the band was largely left to Bouchard; Lanier; Pearlman; and
Richard Meltzer, a rock critic as well as childhood friend and classmate of Pearlman's. Winters also contributed some material, as did Braunstein. Braunstein's talents were increasingly at odds with the band's desired metal direction; tensions also grew with Braunstein taking unnecessary time recording his vocals and insisting on his compositions being recorded. Braunstein was delinquent on payments of his
Volkswagen van, which the band used, and upon its repossession in April 1969 the band turned to
Eric Bloom. Bloom was a classmate of Braunstein's at
Hobart College, and already an acclaimed rock singer in the
Finger Lakes region; having been a stage engineer for the band since November 1968, his position was helped by having a van already paid off and complete with a sound system, as well as dealing drugs to the band. One of the band's supporters in the label was
Jac Holzman, who had attended a show at the Diplomat Hotel. After Braunstein's departure, the group re-recorded the songs in New York with Bloom. The ten-song album was turned in to Elektra completed, mixed and mastered, ready for release, but was rejected. A source of the rift between the label and the band was Braunstein, whom the label liked despite his issues with the band. The band recorded new demos of several of the songs for
Columbia Records in hopes of scoring a record deal; some of these Columbia demos eventually surfaced as bonus tracks on the re-mastered version of the first
Blue Öyster Cult album in 2001. After being rejected by Columbia as well, Pearlman convinced Elektra to give the band another shot, and the group traveled to California in February 1970 to begin reworking and re-recording the songs for a full-length album release. Meanwhile, the band had changed its name to Oaxaca, and would soon change it again to the Stalk–Forrest Group; the latter name being inspired by Chinese food. By the time of the California sessions, however, Elektra distrusted the band and believed it was using the label for moneythe band had received $70,000 ($ in 2021) at this pointand, not liking the final album, ended the contract. Pearlman made a final effort to release a single for Elektra, who sent out representative Don Galucci to New York to record it. Winters decided to abandon the band in favor of his work and failed to appear at this point, leading to his replacement by Bouchard's brother
Joe. The band decided to release "What is Quicksand?", despite Galucci's suggestion to release the less-psychedelic "Gil Blanco County" instead. Pearlman also did not want to release the album during the summer so delayed Holzman a track listing; in retrospect, however, Pearlman was of the opinion that the label did not like the album no matter the other factors straining the relationship.
Subsequent history of Blue Öyster Cult With its lineup solidified, the band continued to cycle through such names as "the Santos Sisters", and continued to try getting a record deal.
Murray Krugman, a product manager for Columbia, had rejected the band twice previously, but had come around to the idea that Columbia needed an answer to Warner's
Black Sabbath, promising Pearlman a contract if the band could change its music to that effect. Pearlman and Krugman rehearsed with the band for around a month to create the appropriate music. Nevertheless, the band still did not have a name. The band renamed themselves
Blue Öyster Cult, and finally secured a solid recording contract with Columbia in Fall 1971.
Bootlegs and official release The recordings surfaced as a bootleg in the late 1990s. Confusingly, the bootleg was titled
Curse of the Hidden Mirrors, after a song on the Elektra album, but
Curse of the Hidden Mirror was eventually used as the title of a Blue Öyster Cult studio album in 2001. The untitled "California" Elektra album was finally released officially in 2001, along with the previously unreleased original '69 sessions, as
St. Cecilia: The Elektra Recordings by
Rhino Entertainment in a limited, numbered edition of 5000 copies. It is now out of print. This same release was reissued in 2013 by
Wounded Bird Records and is also now out of print. Inferior "bootleg" versions of the album with a shuffled track listing are available as grey-area releases, such as
St. Cecilia: The California Album on Radioactive Records (not the real Radioactive label, but a grey area label using the same name). These releases are not made from the original master tapes like the Rhino/Wounded Bird release. ==Music==