Stalk-Forrest Group, "St. Cecilia: The Elektra Recordings" (Rhino Handmade, 2001)

For the casual music fan, the story of Blue Oyster Cult begins in 1976, the year the oddly named band hit the Top 15 with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," a throwback to '60s psychedelia that nevertheless managed to climb charts that were becoming overrun with disco.

The real story starts a decade before that, when a couple of aspiring musicians named Donald Roeser and Albert Bouchard formed a band to play the hits of the day. Their music took a sharp left turn after they started collaborating with a pair of writers for a fledgling magazine called Crawdaddy. Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer also liked to write lyrics - obtuse, seemingly randomly selected patterns of words - that lent itself to the more experimental attitude of the late '60s.

Eventually, a lineup solidified around Roeser, Bouchard, keyboardist Allen Lanier and bass player Andrew Winters, with the band taking the name Soft White Underbelly, Meltzer and Pearlman supplying the lyrics. Who was singing the words was somewhat of a crapshoot; a Jim Morrison somewhat-alike named Mark Braunstein filled the bill long enough for the Underbelly to draw the attention of Elektra Records, which also happened to be the label of Morrison's Doors.

The rest of the band didn't quite see eye-to-eye with Braunstein, and when he departed, the Soft White boys decided to give road manager Eric Bloom a try at the microphone. Then came a name change, to Oaxaca (maybe they also considered Michouacan?), and a recording session in New York City. Things didn't go well there, and another session took place in Los Angeles in early 1970, followed by yet another name change, to Stalk-Forrest Group.

Most of the music on those two sessions didn't see the light of day until three decades later, when the speciality label Rhino Handmade issued them under the Stalk-Forest name for an album called "St. Cecilia: The Elektra Recordings." The limited-edition CD offers a fascinating listen to a band in transition, more in line with the free-form music of the '60s than they heavier material it would record the following year after changing the name one more time, to Blue Oyster Cult.

Only one of the Oaxaca/Stalk-Forrest songs, "I'm On the Lamb," would surface with BOC, on its debut album and later as a reworked version called "The Red and the Black." The rest of the songs faded into obscurity, which might not be that surprising: Lyrically, they're far from accessible, even considering the era in which they were recorded. Consider these words in the "St. Cecilia" opener, "What Is Quickand?":

"Right back in Tokyo/ With a tough encircled hand/Thousand vultures smokio/Cigareet with a seegar band."

Guess you had to be there ...

The overall sound isn't far removed from the early Blue Oyster Cult recordings, though not quite as heavy and leaning more toward the improvisational bands on which Soft White Underbelly had built somewhat of a reputation. The best of those are on the compilation's two longest songs, "A Fact About Sneakers" and the title track. Both feature the usual nonsensical lyrics - "Sneakers" at one point references the British band Spooky Tooth - before careening into instrumental breaks that are based on a single chord. The SFG (I hate acronyms, but what the heck) manages to make the jams interesting, though, with Roeser's guitar weaving around Lanier's keyboard fills and Winters' fluid bass.

In the next incarnation of the band, Roeser (aka Buck Dharma) would become known as one of the early guitar heroes of the burgeoning heavy metal scene, but he always has displayed the ability to play very melodic runs. The improvisations of "St. Cecilia" show he already had developed the touch that places his sound among the more distinctive of rock guitarists.

Because "St. Cecilia" is culled from two sessions, most of the songs appear in two different versions. The exception is "Bonomo's Turkish Taffy" (the titles are obscure, too), which the band didn't bother to record in L.A. It's a rather peppy organ-driven number with a lead vocal by Buck (at least, it sounds like him), singing lyrics along the lines of "Chicken necks, what the heck, why should I get out of bed for that?" Why, indeed?

According to the CD's liner notes, Elektra pressed a single of "What Is Quicksand?" backed with a song called "Arthur Comics," which "may have been sent out to radio stations across the country, even as the band received an official telegram from Elektra announcing that they'd been dropped from the label's roster."

But the band pressed on, with Albert's brother Joe Bouchard taking over for the fired Winters, and the following year Columbia Records took a chance on the newly christened Blue Oyster Cult, the name taken from - naturally enough - a Pearlman poem.

Half a decade later came "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and immortality. But the story had to start somewhere.