Although we’d always written as an ensemble before, everyone always brought in their ideas and kicked them around. Don’s always been a good engineer and his home demos always sounded slicker than anyone else’s. That changed the way we wrote because we all brought in songs with much more realised arrangements than previously.Įric Bloom: The four-tracks gave everyone a chance to write on their own. Now we could record multiple parts one on top of the other, the way it’s done in a studio. It was definitely coincident with the appearance of multi-track home recorders on their doorstep.Īlbert Bouchard: Everybody got Teac four-track tape recorders. “…Reaper” was a watershed in the development of their song writing. Rarely did any of them write by themselves before this. Sandy Pearlman: I thought it was trans-awesome. I know both Alan Lanier and I thought it was a bit light compared to our earlier work. Some people thought it was real soft.Įric Bloom: I remember hearing Don’s demo and thinking it was a good song, but it wasn’t really like anything else we’d done before. This sounds like it could be a hit record.” Not everybody in the band was on board right away. Two weeks later we were out on the road and Donald played me the demo. I came up with a guitar lick and the first two lines of the lyric in about five minutes.Īlbert Bouchard: The first time I heard it was May of 1975, and Donald called me up and said, “I got this new riff,” and played it for me over the phone. And who really played cowbell remains a point of contention within the band itself…ĭonald “Buck Dharma” Roeser: A lot of my strongest stuff is like automatic writing. Walken’s pleas for “more cowbell!” made the sketch a massive hit and gave the song a new lease of life. In 2000, Will Ferrell debuted a Saturday Night Live sketch parodying “…Reaper”’s recording, with Christopher Walken as a producer and Ferrell as fictional band member, Gene Frankel.
#BLUE OYSTER CULT DONT FEAR THE REAPER TV#
“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” reached No 12 on the Billboard charts in America and has become a regular fixture in horror movies and TV shows like Hallowe’en, True Blood and Supernatural. “Each one after that doubled the sales again, but we didn’t have a gold record until 1975.” “Our first record sold 100,000 copies in the first year,” says Dharma. But despite such storied friends – and Pearlman’s ambitious plans to present Blue Öyster Cult as America’s answer to Black Sabbath – the band remained very much a cult concern. Along the way, they found admirers and collaborators in Patti Smith, Michael Moorcock, Stephen King and rock critic Richard Meltzer.
They started out in 1967 in Long Island as Soft White Underbelly the name change came in 1970, thanks to producer-manager Sandy Pearlman. Instances of record burning aside, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” nevertheless transformed Blue Öyster Cult’s career. Diagnosed with an irregular heart rhythm, he was “contemplating my own mortality, and I thought, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be great, even if you died, that your love would survive?’” The reason? Many misinterpreted the song as being about suicide – something Dharma dismisses. There was a public outcry.”ĭharma – aka Donald Roeser – is telling Uncut about the backlash that greeted the band’s 1976 breakthrough single, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”. “Were church leaders taking our records and burning them? Yeah. “We got tarred with the whole devilry thing,” remembers Blue Öyster Cult’s singer Buck Dharma.
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