Bitter Blood Street Theatre was a performance art troupe-slash-acid rock band formed at Cincinnati's University in 1969 and active through the 1970s and disbanded by 1980. Their music was a swirling dervish of bong-hitting psychedelia with slashing hard rock guitars and a penchant for exotic instrumentation, including a few saw solos.
The band was colorful kooks in Kiss-style masks, draped in capes and/or dominatrix outfits, and the ‘street theatre’ bit involved exactly that: extras culled from the local freak scene who would perform on stage with the band, or in the audience, or out on the sidewalk in front of the club. Performances would range from a guy in a wheelchair calmly eating live locusts out of a cigar box, to flashers showing their private bits to whoever caught their eye. The band played with all the heavy hitters of the era and the area, from The MC5 to Alice Cooper (who, some believe, nicked a thing or two from Bitter’s stage performance), but never made any headway beyond Ohio’s borders. Anyway, they had the chance to open for such acts as the Allman Brothers, Joe Cocker, Mountain, Savoy Brown, MC5, Frigid Pink, and Dr. John. In 1975, the band was briefly part of the Columbia Records roster, but the exec who signed them was reportedly fired the same day, and the band was unceremoniously dropped.
They did manage to eke out one single in ’75, but the band broke up soon after, morphing into a still-active ‘fringe-rock’ outfit, Blacklight Braille. In the late 70s, BBST mainman Tom Owen was able to cobble together the band’s various demo tracks and release them as a two-volume anthology. Both are now considered minor masterpieces of 70s weird-psyche. Sadly, no vintage footage of the band has surfaced yet, so we are left to imagine what it might be like to catch these pioneering maniacs live.
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