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Give ’em enough cowbell: Sandy Pearlman at the Tip

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As one of the first real rock critics, for Crawdaddy, the first real rock magazine, he invented heavy metal — or was the first to apply that phrase to music. As producer and manager of the Blue Öyster Cult — a band he helped assemble and that was named for one of his poems — he put the umlaut into rock and then put the cowbell into “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” satirized by Christopher Walken on SNL. As producer, he oversaw the recording of the first Clash album released in the US, Give ’em Enough Rope. As manager, he guided Black Sabbath in the Dio years, putting them together with BÖC for “Black &; Blue,” the first double-headliner rock tour. As both producer and manager of the Dictators, whose first album preceded the Ramones by more than a year, he pioneered punk. As producer of Dream Syndicate, he pioneered LA’s Paisley Underground. As a lyricist, he contributed dozens of songs to Blue Öyster Cult records, including the epic poem-cycle that became their Imaginos album. He was president of 415 Records, home to Romeo Void and Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, among others, and founding vice-president of the alt rock website, e-music.com. Today he is a professor at McGill University in Montreal and a sometime visiting lecturer on the future of music at Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, SXSW and, on February 25, 2011, at Duncan/Channon’s own insitute of higher learning, the Tip.