By Spencer Ackerman

Blue Öyster Cult gave a lot to rock. The music was a blend of eerie metal, sci-fi, evil and the occasional jazz chord. They wrote songs with names like "She’s As Beautiful as a Foot" and "Hot Rails to Hell," and they meant it. They took their six-string machismo seriously enough to list "stun guitar" as an instrument on albums. By the mid-1970s, BÖC was one of the best selling bands of the era.

But to grasp all the band gave rock you can’t just focus on their attitude or their songs. You need to take note of two little dots perched over the "O" in "Öyster." Feast your eyes, ladies and gentlemen, for Blue Öyster Cult brought the umlaut to metal. From that moment on, rock had a mocking shorthand for the high-octane power of the bar chord—and for what the lifestyle's detractors would call its proto-fascist impulses.

Was the umlaut a big deal? Dude, ever heard of Motörhead? Or Mötley Crüe? Or Hüsker Dü? How about Queensrÿche? Umlauts all around. Spinal Tap, the ultimate metal act, had the temerity, and comic genius, to slap an umlaut over the "n" in its name. As Spinal Tap's Nigel St. Hubbins sagely observed, the umlaut is a glimpse into the soul of a band: "It's like a pair of eyes. You're looking at the umlaut, and it's looking at you."

Never mind that rockdots, as they’re known, typically make no grammatical sense. ("The umlaut over the "y" has haunted us for years," said Queensrÿche’s Geoff Tate. "We spent eleven years trying to explain how to pronounce it.") Considering the umlaut’s Teutonic associations, the weird part, of course, is that the brain trust of BÖC was dominated by Jews: Queens-bred lead singer Eric Bloom and manager Sandy Pearlman, the legendary producer and Crawdaddy critic. Other tribesman might have been uncomfortable with the twin dots of Germanic fury perched atop their name. Bloom never had a problem with it

"We certainly started something," he says, in a phone interview.

The marriage of umlaut and rock began innocently enough. When the band signed to Columbia in 1970, they had some name trouble: After scrapping their early Soft White Underbelly tag, Pearlman understandably had second thoughts about the newly-adopted handle, the Stalk-Forrest Group. For little seeming reason, he threw out an idea: Blue Öyster Cult. For even less seeming reason, keyboardist (and gentile) Allen Lanier decided that the name was missing a certain oomph that only a Teutonic diacritical device would provide.

BÖC didn’t end the Germanic shtick with the umlaut and eventually this landed the band in trouble. In 1974, to promote Secret Treaties, the group designed an ad to match the cover art's aviation motif. Blue Öyster Cult were dressed in World War II-era bomber jackets and shown psyching themselves up for an air raid mission, presumably over Berlin on behalf of Uncle Sam. The band, its management and Columbia all thought the design was clever, but Gerry Rothberg, the owner of Circus magazine, surprised all involved by refusing to run it. A bewildered Pearlman quickly learned that Rothberg had flipped out, thinking BÖC were "depicting some sort of pro-German thing," as Bloom recalls.

Rothberg wasn’t exactly imaging things. The plane on the cover of Treaties is an ME 262, a German jet deployed during World War Two by the Third Reich. And the album had a song called "ME 262," which was a first-person narration by a Nazi fighter pilot as he readies himself to attack an English fleet. The lyrics are bizarrely sympathetic to the pilot. ("Must these Englishmen live that I might die?" the pilot asks, over and over.) The Cult were clearly partaking in a hoary rock and roll tradition: striving for shock value. They just were doing it in a particularly imbecilic way. In Germany, which has strict anti-hate laws, Treaties was actually banned.

Circus was a premier outlet for rock news, so Bloom, Pearlman and co-producer Murray Krugman immediately took Rothberg to lunch to make nice. Here’s where BÖC’s Jewish roots helped out.

"We said, 'Look, we're wearing American uniforms,'" Bloom says. "And he gave us a whole diatribe about the six million and how we have to do more [to commemorate the Holocaust] and never again and et cetera. We agreed with him and said, 'Listen, you have to understand, that's not where we're coming from—look at the ad: we're wearing American uniforms! We're attacking Germany in the ad!' So he said somebody had whispered in his ear that we were all some sort of neo-Nazis. We told him he's out of his mind—here's Krugman, Pearlman and Bloom sitting here with him, saying he's out of his mind! So he promised to lighten up."

Crisis averted, Secret Treaties became a critical favorite and put BOC on the map—clearing the decks for "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" two years later, which brought the band its first of several gold records.

Punk rock arrived and as far as some critics were concerned that was the end of the Cult. Gushing over the arrival of "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols" in 1977, then-Washington Post writer Kenneth Turan sneered at "thudding thumpers like the decadent, mass-marketed Kiss and Blue Öyster Cult."

But BÖC doesn’t fit very easily in a list of brain-dead dino-rockers. No less a tastemaker than Lester Bangs called the Cult "the thinking man's heavy metal band." And even if punk's apostles in the music press derided the group, its creative vanguard knew better. Pearlman produced the Clash's 1978 album Give 'Em Enough Rope. "They loved the sound of '(Don't Fear) The Reaper' and they loved 'Godzilla,'" Pearlman once explained. "They were just fascinated by the sound of those records."

Very few umlauted bands had ties to highbrow punks, either. But odd as it sounds, BÖC was tight with none other than Patti Smith. Pearlman was friendly in the late 60s with the then-unknown poet, who would pal around with BÔC (then still calling itself Soft White Underbelly) at the famed New York hangout Steve Paul's Scene. "There was talk of us being her backing band, but we got our deal first," Bloom recalls. And even though Smith's primal howl would soon be timelessly paired with Lenny Kaye's nails-on-chalkboard guitar, she was a frequent collaborator with BÖC, penning lyrics for tracks like "The Revenge of Vera Gemini" from Agents of Fortune. Ties between Smith and BÔC ran deeper than just mutual respect as songwriters: She fell in love with Lanier, and for about six years in the 1970s the couple shared an Eighth Street apartment.

The Cult's streak of hits petered out in the mid 80s as the group parted ways with Pearlman and went through numerous lineup changes. (Their big brush with the charts came with "Burning For You" off 1981's Fire of Unknown Origin.) But BÖC—anchored by Bloom, Lanier and guitarist Buck Dharma—never broke up, and the band still caters to a core fan base through new records, touring for 90 to 100 shows every year. In March BÖC soldiered through nine consecutive West Coast dates from San Diego up to Tacoma.

Not that the band's contemporary impact is limited to a niche audience. BÖC songs have been covered by bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Metallica, Belle & Sebastian, Elliot Smith and R.E.M., who did a version of "Reaper." The music—and the umlaut—live on.

Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning national-security journalist, author of Reign of Terror, and writes the Forever Wars newsletter.