Joe Bouchard is best known as the original bassist for Blue Oyster Cult and can be heard on nearly all of the band’s classic recordings. He also has a prolific solo career and is about to release a new record American Rocker. Joe recently took some time to talk about this record and his colorful history!
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStarws Conversation with Joe Bouchard –
On the nostalgic feel of American Rocker – I didn’t plan it out that way, but when I got to the end and I started putting all the pieces together, I said, “Yeah, this is the story of the 70s for me”. I was young and we were on tour, and every night was fantastic, even the small towns, especially the small towns, because you were the special event, you were the event of the month, if not the year, every time we rolled into town and it would be six, seven nights a week. It didn’t seem that much work at the time, right now, I don’t know how I would do that, but it was fantastic, it was really fantastic. That vibe and the energy of that time I tried to get into that, a lot of these tracks on American Rocker rock. It’s time, it’s time for some real rock there’s not enough of that. 1:00

On the history behind some of the songs – “Conspiracy” was all brand new, “Hounds of Hell” was all brand, literally brand new. “Hounds of Hell”, I just had that E-min6 chord, the dark, very dark chord and I started like, “I gotta get something with this chord in it”, and the next thing you know, the groove is happening. I didn’t know what I was gonna do with it, and then I decided, well, I’ll just do a recitation and then have a singing chorus, recitation, singing chorus. Structurally, it was all making sense. It kinda took me back to my days on the farm. I grew up on a farm in Upstate New York, and there are certain nights when the moon would be full and you’d hear all the animals out in the back woods, and I’m thinking, “The hounds of hell, why not make this really, really dark and mysterious?” Then because of the pandemic, we’re binge-watching these crime dramas and guys in prison, so I felt like I was locked in prison and that added to the spirit of it too. Not only the spooky-ness of the fields and the trees and the woods but also just that feeling of being cooped up and just waiting on the call, the call from the lawyer, he’s gonna call the Governor, I’ll get a reprieve. I guess that’s how songs are made up, I don’t know. Usually, I have a lyricist. I’ve had quite a few collaborators over the last solo albums, and even back in the Blue Oyster Cult days with Helen Wheels, who’s on this album too, but that one just flowed right out there. It’s like, “Yeah, I can see this”. I had to make a few little tweaks when I got to the end, but that’s one of my very favorites on the album, and it has a darkness. I know I’ve done even more Blue Oyster Cult-type songs in the past. I try not doing it on this one, I really wanted it to be about me, more than anything. It’s the most I’ve ever put into an album. I wrote all the music for all the songs, two of the songs have outside lyricists, John Shirley, who is a science fiction writer, and he has written most of the lyrics for the later day Blue Oyster Cult on the last three albums they’ve done. We’ve just become friends over the last couple of years, and he sends me stuff, it’s amazing. So I put one of his songs on this thing called “Devil’s In The Details”. That one he sent for a song that I wrote for an earlier album, but it didn’t fit. It’s just one of those things you never know what’s gonna work, and if it fits, it fits. If it doesn’t, you have to acquit, you quit. I say you quit and don’t do that one and save it for another day, and that one rolled out pretty good. “Conspiracy” was actually a different song that I had. It was a great track, but I played it for my girlfriend, and she said, “No, you can’t sing that”. I tried to do these things by myself alone in this room right here, this is just me. Sometimes I consult with Albert, my brother, as we have since we were 10 years old, about all kinds of things. Even now we have a manager too strange in the middle of the pandemic, Albert and I got signed by a manager. Out of the blue, he says, “I wanna be your manager”. I talked to him for a couple of days, we did a deal, and then he got us a deal with this record label for distribution. He said, “I want you guys to start your own custom label, Rockheart Records”. So we started a label in the middle of the pandemic, and it’s doing great, especially the Imaginos records. They’re good, and I’m helping Albert with the third installment of the Imaginos saga. It’s intense. I love the sequel, Imaginos 2, it’s really good. I think he pushed the envelope there and he’s pushing it even further in the next one, but that’s another story, another interview. E I have a notebook, it’s actually a computer program where I put all kinds of things, the swamp of crazy, it’s in the news, you can’t get away from it. Then I started thinking about all of these conspiracies like oh my God, my head aches, you. They’ve been around for years since the Kennedy assassination, but I thought I would just lean on that, not get too political, but it’s very current, and maybe I’ll make a nice video out of that one too. 2:32
On having Mickey Curry play on the record – Well, this is pre-pandemic, and we, myself and my girlfriend, go to open mics, and there’s one in a little town next to us, just across the river. So we go over there and we’d be jamming around and Joan, my partner said, “Oh, here’s my friend Todd and Todd plays the flute”. So I was talking to Todd and he said, “Let’s play some Jethro Tull”. I’ll learn “Locomotive Breath”, and we’ll do Jethro Tull. He played it a couple of times. Come to find out, this guy is Todd Curry, Mickey’s brother. So I’m saying to myself, “Man, I really need a drummer from my album, and I don’t need a flute player, I can pass on the flute”, and so Todd said, “I’ll give Mickey a call and we’ll set that up”. Come to find out, Mickey lives like 10 miles from me in the next town over. He’s got his favorite studio. One of his oldest friends in Connecticut has a studio in West Haven, and we go in there and a beautiful room for drums, big high ceilings, and he gets that sound. I love working with Mickey. Albert, of course is a great drummer. Mickey says to me, “Why don’t you use Albert?” Well, I’ve used him a lot. Then Albert says, “Mickey is my favorite drummer”, and then Mickey says, “Albert is my favorite drummer”. So on this particular record, I sent a couple of the tracks to Albert, he says, “You need a little something on this song and you need a little something on that song”, so I said, “Oh yeah, why don’t you just come up with something if I don’t like it, I’ll just not use it”, but he came up with a heck of a cowbell part (on) “My Way Is The Highway”. Mickey says, “That the whole old track is amazing because of that cowbell”. Can’t get away from it. 9:18
On the comfort level of joining BOC with his brother already in the band – Through my whole college career, when I would have a break, and college vacations were pretty generous, I was at Ithaca College studying music, and during my breaks from college, I would go to the band house and live there for a week. I guess I slept on the couch somewhere. They had a house on Long Island. Nice, rambling, Tudor in a very nice neighborhood. We were the scourge of that neighborhood. No, don’t go looking for it. They tore it down, they build a McMansion there, but yeah, that was really good. So they all knew me. In fact, when they came up, they were doing a tour of upstate New York, and I booked them a couple of shows, one in Ithica. They would be up there and I sit in with them, they slept on my couch in my fraternity house. So yeah, I felt very comfortable, but also I love the idea that it was a real good songwriting team. Sandy Perlman, Richard Meltzer, and all the guys in the band wrote music and they had high standards. They weren’t gonna put out commercial crap. Sandy being a journalist, was one of the founders of Crawdaddy magazine. He knew a lot of the record company people in New York because of his work with the magazine. But it was kind of strange because I’ve always done all different types of music, and I had commercial bands, I played in the soul band, I played in a Latin jazz band. So I had a pretty wide range of things that I’d like to do, but those guys said, “No, we are not doing James Taylor, we’re not doing Carly Simon”, and whatever was the pop stuff of the day, we wanted to be different. And I said, “Oh, fine with me. I’m on board”. When Sandy said, “I think that sort of hippy-dippy stuff that you were playing, the Soft White Underbelly thing was more of a West Coast, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, that kind of band”. The first thing he did, he took me down to Staten Island to see Black Sabbath on their first tour. He said, “Check this out. This is what’s gonna be happening”. I said, “Fine with me. It sounds good to me”. The first Black Sabbath album definitely influenced in that direction. Since I didn’t have any baggage from the early days of making California kind of music, we’re gonna make the harder edge stuff, and that was fine with me. I enjoyed it, and it’s paid off. The catalog just is evergreen, it is still more popular than it was even now. Maybe it was because of Sandy’s influence and keeping the bar high. The stuff we recorded, like “Hot Rails To Hell”, I didn’t know if that was any good at all. I scribbled something down in my book, I came in, and I just said, “Here guys”, and played it as fast as I could. Sandy comes in and he says, “Wow, that sounds like hot rods to hell”. There was a movie called “Hot Rods To Hell” and then we’re talking about it and laughing, “How about “Hot Rails To Hell”?” Everybody liked that. That was Sandy’s idea, the “Hot Rails To Hell” thing. Totally random, a song like that would pop out. 12:19
On staying in the band after his brother left – I had a good time until I didn’t. So for about five years, we had a couple of different drummers, I loved working with Rick Downey, and Jimmy Wilcox, Thommy Price. Thommy Price played on the albums. But these other guys were our touring drummers, and I loved it. I still loved it. The dynamic changed a lot. Albert has a real knack for arrangement and did a lot of the arranging and we didn’t really understand that, we figured we’ll just do it ourselves, but there’s just something about his approach to arranging that had a lot to do with those early albums. We soldiered on and there’s some nice, really nice tracks, but when you have that magic of that songwriting team, Allen (Lanier) was out of the band, then he was back in the band. Also, the times changed, so I mean, it’s really hard for a band that was solidified in the 70s to reinvent themselves for the 80s, you got your grunge, you got your hip hop, you got disco, you got all these things, and one day you’re hot and the next day you’re not. 17:39
On his relationship with the guys in BOC today – It’s pretty good. I sent them six songs that they could consider or not. I know there’s one that Donald (Roeser) said he really liked, but as it worked out, they decided to incorporate more of the band, the touring band now into the album. I agree with that, they came out with a great album. “That Was Me”, fantastic track and performance, Eric (Bloom’s) singing great. So that’s okay they didn’t use my songs and I used them myself, I think they came out great. The song called “She’s a Legend” was a John Shirley one. They passed on my stuff and that’s okay. 19:41
On the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and if he’d play with BOC should they get in – Sure, sure, I would gladly accept. Albert, and I played at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame probably five or six times. Dennis Dunaway, who we work with is a member. You don’t really play gigs at the Hall, but he had a book event, and there was another movie, an Alice Cooper movie event, so we ended up playing with the School of Rock Band there, was fun. Every time we go there, they say, “You guys are definitely gonna be in. They’re changing the business structure, and we got you covered”. Well, fine, but it’s a problem thing. The problem is we’re such a weird band, and we proudly wear that on our sleeve. This is the weird band, not your Journeys, are they in? Ok, so…you know what I mean. We proudly are definitely on the weird side, if we had cranked out as many hits as Elton John, Elton Cult. I was talking to somebody and I said, “Hey, how about one year, just for one year, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame gets a long list, and we’re usually down in the bottom third, so why not just induct all the people on the bottom third and get it over with, and they can go back to the way it was. Just for one year”. See, there’s a way out of this. No more controversy. When it first started, it was so perfect because all of those legends really needed to be in. It was easy. Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys. But now it gets harder because there are some weird ones like us. One of these years we’ll have Ted Nugent, Blue Oyster Cult, Styx, REO, all the bands are used to play with. 22:18