On one hand, the massive pop-culture adoption and widespread use in media is the dream PR and promotional success story that (almost) anyone would want for their song. To be honest, that trajectory seems like it’s here to stay. “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” was a hit: from the day it was released, through the writing of these words. Then touring the UK until 1 March.Is it an optimistic take on the inevitability of death, or a glorification of suicide? Is the “sound” exemplary of Blue Öyster Cult’s music, or is it an anomaly that deviates from the style of their discography? Will the timeless quality of its production continue to fool new listeners into thinking the song was recorded “just yesterday,” or will future remasters need more cowbell? In the middle of a car review, along with some stuff about acceleration, it suddenly said: “What this car needs is more cowbell.”īlue Öyster Cult play the University of East Anglia, Norwich, on 21 February. I was reading Autoweek, an American car magazine. It’s something I get asked about all the time. Saturday Night Live did a hilarious skit about us called More Cowbell and the phrase has since become part of the English language. None of us can quite remember who played it.
It was obvious we didn’t have a clue what was going on, but it was funny – and certainly didn’t stop the song being a hit.ĭon’t Fear the Reaper has a cowbell all the way through it, which is quite unusual. We stood there like idiots, blowing it on national television. So when it came to the middle section, it just wasn’t there. What we didn’t know was that they were going to use the single version. We’d never done lip sync before but figured that we didn’t need to rehearse since we knew the song so well.
BLUE YSTER CULT DONT FEAR THE REAPER TV
Shortly after it came out, we landed a slot on the Merv Griffin TV show, a popular talk show. The original version, however, had a totally different – and very long – middle section that was cut out for the single. Now the phrase 'more cowbell' has become a part of the language It was very close to how the finished thing sounded. Donald brought Reaper to rehearsals on a demo he’d recorded himself. But by 1976, when Reaper came out, we all had home studios and would write on our own. Everyone would pitch in, either in the basement or the living room, meaning songs were written en masse. When we started the band, we all lived in one house in Long Island, New York. People ask: “Don’t you wish you had more songs as popular as that one?” I don’t see it like that.
It’s become the song that we’re most known for. I want it played at my funeral on a loop. I wonder how many people have been buried to it. At concerts, we tend to dedicate it to people who have recently passed on, musicians and such. The song’s really about accepting the inevitability of death. I didn’t research it – and it turned out that I was about 100,000 out. The line “40,000 men and women every day” was my wild guess about how many people in the world die daily.
“Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity,” I sang, but I wasn’t suggesting that people kill themselves to find out what it’s like. I sang about Romeo and Juliet as an example of a couple who have successfully gone to the other dimension, but I got a lot of grief over it because everyone thought I was promoting suicide. I imagined a couple: one of them dies but is able to come back for her lover, and they go to this other place no one knows about. The line '40,000 men and women every day' was a wild guess about how many people in the world die. Don’t Fear the Reaper is basically a love song that imagines there is something after death and that, once in a while, you can bridge that gap to the other side. I was 22 and had just been diagnosed with an irregular heart condition, which got me thinking about dying young. The riff actually came first and the opening lines – “All our times have come / Here but now they’re gone” – just spun into my head fully formed.
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