Music / Secret Treaties

The band next to their tour "bus", an Me 262. There are some color pictures on the rear sleeve.

Rossignol's curious, albeit simply titled book, 'The Origins of a World War', spoke in terms of 'secret treaties', drawn up between the Ambassadors from Plutonia and Desdinova the foreign minister. These treaties founded a secret science from the stars. Astronomy. The career of evil.

Secret Treaties is the third studio album by American hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult, released in 1974. It is their last LP cover to have a minimal monochrome design (with touches of red) and has been dubbed the third part of the "red, white, and black" trilogy of albums.

Preceded by the LP Tyranny and Mutation (1973) and followed by the live double-LP On Your Feet or On Your Knees (1975). Their next studio album was Agents of Fortune (1976).

Tracklist:

Side One:

1. "Career of Evil"
2. "Subhuman"
3. "Dominance and Submission"
4. "ME 262"

Side Two:

1. "Cagey Cretins"
2. "Harvester of Eyes"
3. "Danube Waves"^note 27 seconds of borrowed music. See below under "Sampling"
4. "Flaming Telepaths"
5. "Astronomy"

Tropes forced to submit to dominant guitar work include:

• Ace Pilot: The "Willi" named in "ME-262" could be Willi Steinhoff, a Luftwaffe ace who became the first to score five kills in this plane; despite hideous burns in a crash-landing, he survived the war to succeed Herman Goering as commander-in-chief of the new West German Luftwaffe.
  • "Willy" could also be Willy Messerschmitt, whose firm produced the Messerschmitt Me 262 and who designed several other fighter planes.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Implied between Suzie and Wild Charles in "Dominance and Submission".
• Card-Carrying Villain: The narrator of "Career of Evil".
• Cool Plane: You're allowed one guess. "ME-262".
• Double Standard: Rape, Male on Male: Strongly implied to have happened to the narrator of "Dominance and Submission".
• Eldritch Location: The Four Winds Bar from "Astronomy", which exists "behind the clock" (outside time), and can not be found on a map. It's the "nexus of the crisis" and "origin of storms". Its bizarre physical proportions are described, with some doors barred and others only letting people in. Susie and Carrie find themselves at the bar despite the lack of directions, and come face to face with Desdinova.
• Epic Rocking: "Astronomy" is 6:28. Later recordings of this song would expand the length further.
• Evil Gloating: The entirety of "Career of Evil" is the singer bragging about all the evil deeds he gets away with.
• The Grim Reaper: Take a close look at the rather anorexic-looking pilot in the cockpit of the ME-262 on the cover.
• Inn Between the Worlds: The Four Winds Bar is such a strange place, poised outside space and time where the Four Winds meet.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: The children's music box tune that links "Harvester of Eyes" to "Flaming Telepaths".
• Jail Bait Wait: What may be happening to the narrator of "Dominance and Submission" (their gender is unspecified) as three people wait in a car and the clock ticks towards midnight.
  It will be time.
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Harvester of Eyes" is a catchy upbeat number about a Serial Killer who takes his victims' eyes as souvenirs and stores them in jars.
• More Dakka: "ME-262" is a hymn of praise to the power of the first combat jet fighter. Its armament is specifically referred to as "great silver slugs, eager to feed".
• No Ending: Employed on "Flaming Telepaths":
  and the joke's on you...and the joke's on you...and the joke's on you...and the jo—
• No Social Skills: The maladjusted nerd protagonist of "Cagey Cretins".
• Pillar of Light: The laser show developed for live gigs after this album. The lasers generally switched to full power on the line in Astronomy that goes
  Call me Desdinova! Eternal Light!
• Progressive Rock: A borderline example. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is the highest rated of BÖC's albums on Prog Archives.
• Rock Opera: The songs on the album were originally intended to be part of Imaginos, a rock opera about a man given superhuman powers by alien gods in exchange for becoming their servant and causing wars and destruction, which fell through and was eventually released in a fragmentary form in 1988. "Astronomy" and "Subhuman" (retitled "Blue Öyster Cult") were re-recorded for that album.
• Safe, Sane, and Consensual: The alternative reading of "Dominance and Submission" is that it's about wholly consenting BDSM practices involving three people, two men and a woman.
• Sampling: The segment between "Harvester of Eyes" and "Flaming Telepaths" was a short piece of classical music arranged for a music box, sampled from an unlabelled recording in the possession of the band's sound engineer. The band and the engineer both liked it, so they included it as a Throw It In!. The composer was unknown until 2017, when a dance professor named Nona Monahin identified it as an arrangement of an 1880 waltz by Iosef Ivanovici entitled "Danube Waves". The original source of the recording is still unknown.
• Shout-Out: Aleister Crowley's occultism is alluded to in "Astronomy".
• Siamese Twin Songs: Basically every song transition on the album, with the exception of the gap between sides.
• Skeleton Crew: Take a close look at the pilot in the Me-262 jet fighter on the front cover.
• Patti Smith; a long time associate of the band, she wrote "Career of Evil" for this LP.
• Step Up to the Microphone: Drummer Albert Bouchard sings "Dominance and Submission" by himself and duets with singer Eric Bloom on "Career of Evil". Albert, bassist brother Joe, and Bloom all sing on "Cagey Cretins".
  • Subverted with Buck Dharma: this is the only BOC album in which he doesn't Step Up to the Microphone
• Sunglasses at Night: Charles, the sinister protagonist of "Dominance and Submission".
• Three-Way Sex: "Dominance and Submission"—the song's narrator, Suzie, and
  Wild Charles—the one they call her brother!
• Tick Tock Tune: "Astronony" is a subtle example, with the steady drum bit throughout the early verses simulating the ticking of a clock, a recurring motif in the lyrics.
• Villain Song: "Career of Evil"; "Harvester of Eyes". In fact, one could argue the whole album is about different forms of evil, from the potential rapist Charles, to a Luftwaffe pilot, and Desdinova, the cause of wars.
• When the Clock Strikes Twelve: The first lyric of "Astronomy", which is then echoed halfway through.

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