ME-262

1974: Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath have risen like the Saturn rocket - a tower of thrust and antigravity combustion. They have left the sphere of earth and burned up in reentry.

1974: Blue Oyster Cult’s third album, called Secret Treaties, confirms them as inheritors of the scorched metal crown. Eight songs, eight spells: Career of Evil, Subhuman, Dominance and Submission, ME-262, Cagey Cretins, Harvester of Eyes, Flaming Telepaths, Astronomy.

The album cover shows the band gathered around a German fighter jet, the ME-262, which was sent into the skies as the Reich crumbled and the last days loomed near. A sky-shark, with two tapered jet capsules slung under the wings, with the Kronos symbol on the tail fin where a swastika might have been. A thing of beauty and terror, twice as fast as any Allied airplane, a metallic predator, a oceanic creature liberated from the sea to shoot down bombers which hang “dependent from the sky, like some heavy metal fruit.”

On the cover, the band wears shades, capes and black leather. One holds four German police dogs on straining leashes. On the back cover, the same airplane, but no human figures, only four dead dogs lying spatters of black blood.

On the inner sleeve, a quote that makes reference to Origins of a World War. “These treaties founded a secret science from the stars. Astronomy.”

Also on the slick inner jacket another image, this one in color, of the band and the jet fighter. But the background is different, a scene from a World War spaghetti western. Long shadows on the yellow desert sand, a Mexican church, shadowy men with sombreros, thick mustaches and rifles. And a German shark plane transmuted from Westphalia to Almeria in southern Spain, where all the great Italo-American cowboy films were shot.

And on the disc itself, the song “ME-262,” a hymn to the Lufftwaffe’s secret weapons, to heroes of the last battle.

Singing: “Hitler’s on the phone from Berlin, saying ‘Boy, I’m gonna make you a star.’” Guitar riffs and air raid sirens, rock and roll microsoft word.