A few years later, I stumbled upon a record in my friend's collection: 1980's Cultosaurus Erectus by rockin' Long Island, New York band Blue Oyster Cult. The lead track, entitled Black Blade, contained lyrics that caught my attention; this was the story of Elric and his supernatural sword Stormbringer! With lyrics penned by originator Moorcock himself and the extremely cool riffs and atmospherics of BOC, the song sings as loudly as Stormbringer as it extinguishes lives and captures souls. Fun stuff!
The connection between music and literature wasn't lost on me until this moment, either. Earlier on, I noticed the Led Zeppelin link to Tolkien's Middle Earth books. Many of Zep's songs are either explicitly or implicitly about Hobbit adventures: Misty Mountain Hop, Over the Hills and Far Away, The Battle of Evermore, and Ramble On.
Then there was fantasy/sci-fi geek Neil Peart of Rush, who wrote many albums worth of imaginative songs. Peart, an avid reader, was often inspired by literary works as he conjured up lyrics for songs such as: Anthem and 2112 (both based on work by author Ayn Rand); Xanadu (Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem); Cygnus X-1 (Cervantes' Don Quixote); Red Barchetta (A Nice Morning Drive, by Richard Foster); Limelight (Shakespeare's As You Like It); Losing It (For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway); Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, sort of); and last but not least, The Necromancer and Rivendell (J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings).
Speaking of Tolkien (again), we certainly can't forget The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, by the one and only Leonard Nimoy (Spock on Star Trek). I urge you one and all to check it out on YouTube (look for the video with Nimoy in Spock haircut, accompanied by 60's pixie chicks). A true curiosity.
Heavy metal gods Iron Maiden have made a living out of borrowing concepts from writers and poets for their pummeling music. Some of their best-known epics based on written works are: Children of the Damned (ideas originated by author John Wyndham); The Trooper (based on a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson); To Tame a Land (James Herbert's Dune); Rime of the Ancient Mariner (lifted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem); Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (a novel by Alan Sillitoe); Stranger in a Strange Land (a book by author Robert Heinlein); Lord of the Flies (William Golding); and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley). And those are just the tip of the iceberg for these bookworm rockers.
Starship Trooper is both a song and a novel, the former by progressive rockers Yes and the latter by sci-fi novelist Robert Heinlein.
And David Bowie's Space Oddity was a product of his viewing of the Stanley Kubrick film classic 2001: A Space Odyssey... as if that needed explaining.
Bassist and singer for Motorhead, Lemmy Kilminster wrote the song Bomber with the war novel of the same name by Len Deighton in mind. I can respect that since I'm a Deighton fan... and Lemmy ain't so bad, either.
Cream's rock classic Tales of Brave Ulysses was based on Homer's epic poem The Odyssey. I read the translated book a couple of years ago, so I can say that is heavy, heady stuff, both the poem and the Cream song.
Then there is Metallica, who cloaked several of their early songs in the cryptic doom and mystique of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The most obvious examples are Call of Ktulu and The Thing That Should Not Be. And let's not forget their thundering adaptation of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.
I know I'm just scraping the surface where it comes to music meeting literature. It would be an immense task to find every literary reference in music. So I just skimmed through my music collection and pulled down albums that I immediately knew contained interpretations of the published word. I'm sure... well, I hope... music fans the world over have been impelled by such imaginative songs to search out and read the books that influenced their favourite musicians.
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