Blue Oyster Cult Reunion at Winter NAMM

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Published on Thursday, 26 February 2015 00:00

Written by Frank J. Pasquale

As part of our preparations to get ready for Winter NAMM, I sent out emails to all of our friends and PCG family in the industry to let them know where we would be located in hopes of getting a chance to hook up with them if they happened to be at the show this year. 
One of the emails that I sent out was to our good friend Eric Bloom from Blue Oyster Cult. Eric and I had become friends in the summer of 2014 when we took some PCG guitars to the BOC show in Warsaw Indiana that was part of their summer tour.  We hung out for the after the show and began dialog about some custom guitars and we had stayed in touch ever since.

I sent Eric and email a week before the show to let him know we would be there and he responded immediately with a slight panic in the tone of his email. It seems that BOC was set to do a show at the Anaheim Hilton as part of the NAMM extracurricular activities and he was intending to use some borrowed gear including an SG guitar borrowed from Gibson Guitars. However his contact at Gibson had suddenly become incognito and would not return any of his calls or emails for weeks.

I had known about some upheaval with the Gibson universe lately due to some severe corporate restructuring. This restructuring had included some major changes to production standards as well as a huge 35% increase in the overall cost of everything with a Gibson name on it. Add to this the rumors that longtime Gibson Signature Artist and advocate Zakk Wylde was rumored to have started his own line of Wylde Audio Gear (Which by the time of this writing is no longer a rumor but a very odd reality) and I began to wonder if the Gibson world was indeed beginning to implode.
Since he could no longer rely on his Gibson contacts and time was dwindling down to prep for the show, Eric asked if he could once again use some of our guitars and without hesitation we agreed to supply him with whatever he needed.

 
As fate would have it Gibson did come through at the 11th hour and a new contact was established for Eric so he indeed did get to play the coveted Gibson SG that he has become known for using for the last 30 years.   He called me let me know the day before the show that he wouldn’t need my guitars and thanked me being there to help him out when he needed it.

 
This had all taken place through phone calls and emails because let’s face it, that’s how business is done nowadays.  Now typically this is where this kind of story would end because the reality of NAMM is that you are constantly “in motion” for 4 straight days. There is always somewhere to be or someone to meet or something to demo. There are no “free moments” at NAMM and I knew that Eric would be swamped with a million things to do while he was there and that the odds of us being in the same place at the same time were not likely unless it was well planned. But as I stated before in my previous blog article about BOC, there is no one in this industry with more class than Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma. http://pasqualecustomguitars.com/pasquales-perspective/68-blue-oyster-cult-summer-2014

Not only was Eric grateful for the opportunity to use our guitars but he was classy enough to come by the Nordstrand pickups booth with the entire band and check out our guitars and hang out for a while.

He and Buck came by the booth and met the Nordstrand crew and jammed on some of our guitars and just treated us all like longtime family.  It was indeed a great time.

Sometimes you get caught up in the “hype” of rock stardom and begin to think that somehow your heroes are untouchable and disassociated from the realities of life. There certainly are those cases of people who thrive on being “larger than life”. They base their value on being “better than you”and NAMM is the worst place to experience this because there are more egos on that floor than there are amplifiers.  But this isn’t the case with Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma. These are two rock legends with more class than most people will ever know and I am grateful to be associated with them.

Rock on