The Symbol Remains is Blue Öyster Cult's first studio release since 2001's Curse of the Hidden Mirror making it the longest gap between the band's studio albums.
Five of the fourteen tracks have lyrics by John Shirley. Two have had videos released:
The album entered the Billboard 200 album chart at No. 192, making it their first album to chart in
the United States since Imaginos in August 1988. The title comes from a lyric on Blue Öyster Cult's
1983 LP The Revolution By Night in song “Shadow Of California." See John Shirley & Blue Öyster Cult for more about
his association with the band.
Escape From Gravity
Escape From Gravity is an album of
all new original music by John Shirley and Jerry King with artwork by Dan Sauer of Jackanapes Press and additional paintings by
Dave Newhouse of the Muffins.
Horror, sci-fi and cyberpunk legend John Shirley has teamed with guitar ace and musical dynamo Jerry King
(guitarist and songwriter for the bands Moon X and Cloud Over Jupiter) for a third album. Like the previous Shirley/King collaborations,
this album fearlessly explores mind-bending themes with virtuoso arrangements… Shirley’s weird stories, lyrics and vocals will combine with Jerry King’s music to melt your brain!
Escape from Gravity is a progressive, poetic collaboration between John Shirley and Jerry King,
incorporating the talents of many other musicians including Dave Newhouse of the Muffins and solo artist Pete Zolli.
The album is musical alchemy, fusing rock, outsider music, jazz energy, recitation of John Shirley’s lyrics and dark
rhyming poems and Jerry King’s bold-stroke, oblique, guitar-inflected music; at one moment rocking, at another flying into alternate dimensions of sonic being.
Shirley’s lyrics and poetry question consensus existential reality, establishing an alternate ontology, offering seemingly impossible
escapes from the dilemma of life as we know it, warning of dangers on the path to freedom.
Screaming Geezers
Shirley's band Screaming Geezers is a "Pacific Northwest supergroup”,
with a sound drawing on such influences as Social Distortion, the Iggy and the Stooges, Clutch and All Them Witches.
The Screaming Geezers have been played/interviewed on KBOO FM and XRAY FM in Portland. John Shirley’s bandmates are Alec Burton from The Confidentials, on drums;
Jimi Haskett from Theater of Sheep and many other projects; and bassist Mark Sten from the Oblivion Seekers and King Bee. The band is available for bookings. (See their website for more info.)
Album Notes: Dark poetry riding on the hot current of progressive rock, alt jazz, and pure musical creativity:
John Shirley—vocalist and lyricist—collaborates with Jerry King, respected progressive guitarist and
multi-instrumentalist songwriter. Superb musicians from the Lizardz and other wild projects collaborated with
Jerry and John to create Spaceship Landing in a Cemetery, an album that takes us
from death to transcendence; from the dark night of the soul into the light of inner freedom. John's lyrics have
been compared to Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen and Don Roeser; Jerry King's untethered guitar and compositional power has been
compared to King Crimson and other prog greats.
* * *
And I'll Burn Like a Vampire in the Sun, recorded in 2016 with guitarist-composer 064 Freeman (Artichokes, Process, Seething Brunswicks, Funkadelicatessen) . The EP includes bonus
instrumental versions of two of the songs. The players included Bill Sparks (Seething Brunswicks) on baritone and tenor sax, Darren Potter (Funkadelicatessen) on drums, Jim Lynch on bass and Craig "Bonzo" Bonner (Bankrupt Sugar Daddies, The Boobs) on organ; 064 played guitars (including baritone guitar) and produced the recording. The songs:
The 2016 EP, Mountain of Skullz,
includes three tracks from Red Star, covers of Iggy Pop & the Stooges and Lou Reed, and the original version of "Sonic Fingers."
Mountain of Skullz
200,000 Homeless Children
TV Eye
White Light White Heat
Sonic Fingers (Original-Version)
Panther Pit
The double album Broken
Mirror Glass: The Anthology 1978-2012 was issued in 2013 by Infrarot and includes thirty songs—in chronological order—from more than three decades of musical work by
Shirley. A digital version was re-issued in April 2016 by Black October Records and is available for download through
Bandcamp.
Information about John Shirley's 1996 album Red Star with the Panther Moderns is available on its own page
Shirley's lyric credits for other bands include eighteen songs recorded by Blue Öyster Cult. Please see the Blue Öyster Cult
page for details.
"Johnny Paranoid" performed by The Screaming Geezers in June 2013 John Shirley opens the ceremonies at LitPunk 2, in San Francisco
at the Makeout Room, Friday, April 2, 2010 with "John the Revalator"
≈
The Music in the Sentence
By John Shirley
(Originally posted April 21, 2016, on SFSignal)
I was scarcely more than a boy when I attended the Clarion Writer's Workshop in Seattle. One of the
instructors was Harlan Ellison, and being a fan of Ellison's I was on edge with excitement, even
more like a cat on hot bricks than usual. In those days I was wildly callow, the very soul of
impulsiveness. One night I dropped acid—and I dropped down on Ellison, just missing him, from the
boughs of a tree as he walked underneath. After the necessary fulmination, Harlan let it go. He put
up with me, he said, because I "heard the music in the sentence". You either heard the music in
prose, he told us, or you didn't.
I've been singing lead in rock bands for more than thirty years. I still write songs, sing, and
perform. Tracks I recorded from 1978 to 2012 are found in the Broken Mirror Glass collection from Black October Records.
John Shirley (right) and the band Obsession in the Eighties
You see, for years, writing science fiction and fantasy was
mostly my day job. Music was my real life, then–first punk rock, then something I called "futuristic
funk" and then a post-industrial sound. I wrote paperback novels chiefly to support the band. Book
advances paid for rehearsal rooms, bought hamburgers for players, paid for studio time to work up
demos, paid for gas to the gig. Music made me feel good–otherwise, I was bad at feeling good. I
signed a record deal, made a record, played at CBGB and the Pyramid, and crashed through the china
shop of my youth. The rock scene was powder keg volatility and I was always flicking lit matches;
it's possible I'd be dead now, if I'd taken a certain deal at CBS records...
Then I became the father
of twin boys, and the responsibility eased me away from bands–and away from drugs. I felt a genuine
grief in letting rock'n'roll be displaced from the center of my life, and wrote about the feeling of
loss, transposed into a near-future cyberpunk setting, in the story "A Walk Through Beirut".
Fortunately, I love science fiction. But music kept cropping up in my books. My novel City Come
A-Walkin' was set in a futuristic rock club, featuring a character inspired by Patti Smith. A
near-future rocker features prominently in the Eclipse volume of my cyberpunk trilogy, A Song Called
Youth. The sf novel I'm writing now, Stormland, doesn't involve rock characters, but it has its own
soundtrack, in my mind, including "Black Planet" by the Sisters of Mercy.
For me, writing prose has always been intertwined with music, while writing a song—for most
anyone—involves storytelling. Rare is the song which doesn't tell a story. Often the story is hinted
at; you can infer a great deal from the lyrics of "Mack the Knife". Sometimes, as in Dylan's "All
Along the Watchtower", it's a view from on high, a whole dramatic landscape revealed. Other times,
as in many a Lou Reed song–"Street Hassle", say–an entire story is told, with a beginning, middle,
and end. Every country-western song tells a story, as do most rock songs. There's a clear-cut scene
playing theatrically out in "Honky Tonk Women". And I do hear the music in prose. When I give a live
reading of a story, I hit the rhythms of the sentences hard, I explore resonance, like the vibration
at the heart of music; at key moments I ring the emotional bells of the imagery.
When I write, I usually listen to music; it might be Stravinsky, it might be John Coltrane, it might
be Savages, it might be Blue Öyster Cult–I have written the lyrics for eighteen songs recorded
by that band–or it might be Motorhead. I don't find it distracting–music embeds me in the energetic
fields of the writing, and somehow makes it come alive for me...
PUNK
"Basically punk music saved my ass. It gave me an alternative identity to the tortured and unacceptable one I'd sewn raggedly together."—John Shirley
John Shirley remembers punk rock's rude awakening in Portland well.
"People were afraid civilization was creaking to an end," says Shirley, who led the bands Terror
Wrist and SadoNation during Portland's first punk insurgency..."The town was hostile," Shirley
recalls. "I mean, people were just getting used to hippies."
As the '70s wheezed to an end, the larger musical world had already absorbed punk's meteor strike. But the disaffected children of a
depressed, third-tier West Coast timber town were just getting started. With '60s idealism long gone
rancid, punk's blaring sound and willfully obnoxious aesthetics found fertile soil in Oregon. "It
was some time in '76, and I went into this import-record store and asked if they had any Sex
Pistols," Shirley recalls. "And the guys working there just looked at each other and said, 'My God,
another one!' People had been coming in all day, asking about this British band they'd never heard
of. "What happened was, Parade magazine ran an article warning parents about this stuff called 'punk
rock.' To me that was like, they're warning parents? Must have."
"We were just sort of trying this
on for size," Shirley says. "You know the early punk thing where people would spit on bands? If you
look at videos from that era, you can see people sort of tentatively spitting. It was like that."
"Our scene was small," he says. "But for some people, that was all there was. For a few, it was that
or suicide, y'know?"
It was Winter of 1978. Mark Sten, John Shirley and others began putting shows on around town. Corboy
saw Shirley perform with the band Terror Wrist. Corboy approached John to listen to some songs he
had written. The two set a time to play. Mark Sten was on drums, and Dave Propp, bass. Corboy said
he wanted to call the new group Sado-Nation.
Another seminal figure in the local [Portland] alternative music scene was John Shirley. An avid
connoisseur of the budding DIY ethic related to the new music sensibility emanating from the United
Kingdom, Shirley, along with Mark Sten, opened the first punk venue in Portland, the Revenge Club,
in 1977. Shortly thereafter, Shirley formed one of the first punk bands in town, Terror Wrist...
[Following a] Ramones concert in late 1977, countless local musicians were inspired to form
bands. One of the first bands from that renaissance to break out was Dave Corboy's SadoNation.
Minnesota-born Corboy, began playing in rock bands in 1963 at the age of fourteen. After migrating
to the Bay area in the late '60s, he continued to play in a variety of rock bands until 1973, when
he migrated to Portland to attend art school. Corboy continued his schooling through 1977, when the
call of rock and roll lured him back to the stage. Inspired by John Shirley's songs with Terror
Wrist, Corboy was prompted to launch his own band, when Shirley's subsequent band, The Monitors,
broke up. With Mark Sten (this time playing drums) and bassist Dave Propp, Corboy and Shirley broke
new ground with SadoNation. John Shirley left SadoNation late in early 1980 to pursue a writing
career in New York City... [and] was replaced as vocalist for Sado Nation by Leesa Nation...
"My song with Obsession, 'I Am Electricity,' is about a guy who's combined cyberpunk
connectivity with a transcendant state of semimadness to become part of the electrical grid around him."—John Shirley
John Shirley on vocals with Obssession
During the 1980s, Shirley continued as a musician while living in New York
City and Paris, France. Shirley fronted the post-punk funk-rock band
Obsession [featuring guitarist Sync66 (Chris Cunningham) and Bassist
Jerry Antonias (aka Jerry Agony)] who recorded for
Celluloid Records.
"I almost signed with the elder John Hammond who had a subsidiary label at Columbia," shirley has said. "I didn't know who he was. He was this old man who
looked like Gary Moore telling me to get rid of my band and work with the guys he wanted me to work with. No way! And I thought that he would come crawling back.
Then, he had a stroke, so I blew my shot. John Hammond wanted to record me, but I blew it. This was the guy who discovered Dylan and Springsteen.
You don't get another chance like that."
[All Rights Reserved. Content © John Shirley]
