(Don't Fear) The Reaper

Album

Come Away with Me

Label

Columbia Records

Genre

Psychedelic Rock

Composer(s)

Donald Roeser

Entered Chart

Jul 31, 1976

Peak Date

Nov 6, 1976

Released

July 1976

Recorded

1975

Catalog #

Columbia 10384

B-Side

Tattoo Vampire

"(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was written and sung by Blue Öyster Cult's lead guitarist, Donald Roeser, also known as Buck Dharma. It was rumored to be about suicide, but it actually deals with the inevitability of death and the belief that we should not fear it. When Dharma wrote it, he was thinking about what would happen if he died at a young age and if he would be reunited with loved ones in the afterlife. Dharma was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat, which got him thinking about his mortality and inspired the song. "I thought I was going to maybe not live that long," he said in a Songfacts interview. "I had been diagnosed with a heart condition, and your mind starts running away with you - especially when you're young-ish. So, that's why I wrote the story. It's imagining you can survive death in terms of your spirit. Your spirit will prevail." Buck Dharma described this as "a love song where the love transcends the actual physical existence of the partners." He was taken aback when he learned that many listeners heard it as a song encouraging suicide; it advocates courage in the face of death but in no way suggests we should actively bring it about. In his Songfacts interview, he explained: "It's not about suicide, although people kind of get that from the Romeo and Juliet reference. But BÖC's lyrics have always been... not obtuse, but deep. They're certainly open to interpretation, and everybody seems to have their own thoughts about what stuff means. We purposely let people do that - draw their own conclusions from the lyric." Blue Öyster Cult was considered a "cult" band, somewhere in the realm of heavy metal with complex and often baffling lyrics dealing with the supernatural. Those inside the cult took the time to understand that like Black Sabbath, BÖC combined outstanding musicianship with fantasy lyrics, and they weren't for everyone. Most music critics appreciated the band, and some worked for them: Their manager/producer Sandy Pearlman wrote for the music magazine Crawdaddy!, as did Richard Meltzer, who contributed some lyrics to the Cult. Patti Smith (yes, that Patti Smith) even wrote some lyrics for the band when she was better known as a music journalist than a musician (she was BÖC keyboard player Allen Lanier's girlfriend). Signed to Columbia Records, their first three albums sold a few hundred thousand each, but with no hit singles. "Don't Fear The Reaper" changed all that. Released as the lead single from their fourth album, Agents Of Fortune, it exposed them to a much wider audience, which was good for business but bad for art. On their next album, Spectres, they felt pressure to write another hit, and the results were disappointing. "The Cult is never destined to be successful at a format," Buck Dharma said in a 1980 interview with NME. "To be a singles band you have to win the casual buyer." Their resurgence came in 1981 with the MTV hit "Burnin' For You," but "Reaper" will always be their defining song. Some of the lyrics were inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet. In Shakespeare's play, Romeo swallows poison when he believes Juliet is dead. Juliet responds by taking her own life. This led many people to believe the song was about suicide, but Dharma was using Romeo and Juliet as an example of a couple who had faith that they would be together after their death. Regarding the lyric, "40,000 men and women every day," Dharma was guessing at the number of people who died every day. He underestimated: At the time, about 135,000 people died each day worldwide. An April 8, 2000 Saturday Night Live skit with Christopher Walken made fun of the overreaching cowbell in this song. In the skit, the band would get upset when Will Ferrell would play the bell too loud, but Walken kept calling for "more cowbell." In the skit, Walken plays a super-producer named Bruce Dickinson, whom the band respects enough to put up with his cowbell antics. There really is a Bruce Dickinson (besides the Iron Maiden lead singer), but he didn't produce "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" - that was David Lucas, who also brought us the General Electric "we bring good things to life" and the AT&T "reach out and touch someone" jingles. Dickinson is an archivist who works on album reissues, which means gathering master tapes to ensure the best sound quality. He is credited as the reissue producer on a later version of the album, which apparently is how he was named in the sketch. When Lucas and Dickinson both appeared on the Just My Show podcast, Lucas explained that the cowbell was his idea, as the song "needed some momentum." He grabbed a cowbell from a nearby recording studio and "just played four on the floor... not hard to do." He found out about the SNL skit when a friend instant messaged him as it was airing. Dickinson says he's always felt a little funny about getting the producer role in the famous skit, but it has made life more interesting. Said Dickinson, "I work with Iggy Pop on a lot of stuff and a lot of times when he calls and I pick up the phone, he goes 'More cowbell!'" Is the cowbell in this song really that loud? It depends on how you're listening to the song. On a home stereo system, it's pretty unobtrusive, but radio stations compress their signals, and when cowbell gets compressed, it pops out in the mix. Buck Dharma is very proud of this song and has never tired of playing it over the years. And he laughed just as hard as the rest of us when SNL did their "More Cowbell" send-up. "It's really funny," Dharma told us. "The band had no idea it was coming, either. It was quite a surprise and phenomenal in its endurance and the way it's worked its way into the culture. If the cowbell has been at all an annoyance for Blue Öyster Cult, it's got to be 10 times worse for Christopher Walken! So, I'm riding that horse in the direction it's going." Blue Öyster Cult released their last album in 2001, but continued touring with core members Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom. When Songfacts spoke with Bloom in 2016, he said he still enjoyed performing this song, but he's a little more ambivalent about the "More Cowbell" skit. "I saw it live on my TV in my house, and did not know it was going to be on, so I was more shocked than amused when it was on," he said. "I certainly see the humor after it was on. It certainly has legs - it has become part of Americana at this point. Somebody brings it up to me on a regular basis." This has been used in several horror movies, including Halloween, The Frighteners and Scream (the version used in Scream is an acoustic cover by Gus Black). It was also used in a very non-horror capacity in the party scene of the Disney movie Miracle, which is about the US Hockey team beating the USSR at the 1980 Olympic Games. >> A Long Island band, Blue Öyster Cult got very little attention in the UK until "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was released as a single there in 1978, earning them a substantial following. Stephen King quoted some of the lyrics to this song in the epigraph of his 1978 novel The Stand, in which 99.9% of the US population is killed by a manmade disease called "Superflu." King got one line wrong, writing "come on Mary" instead of "come on baby." It is also used in the 1994 miniseries adaptation during a montage showing the corpses of those who had been killed by the disease. King often quotes songs in the beginning of his books - Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" and Bob Dylan's "Shelter From the Storm" are also quoted in The Stand. >> Blue Öyster Cult released a new version of this song on their 1994 album Cult Classics, which contains remakes of some of their most popular songs. The Goo Goo Dolls recorded a punk rock version for their 1987 debut album with bassist Robby Takac on lead vocals. "We like to 'take the piss' out of classic songs," Takac explained. "We thought it was funny to play 'Don't Fear The Reaper' five times as fast, and cut out everything but the three-chord structure. To me, that is hilarious. But it also allowed us to work on cover songs that fit what we did. Then we 'put the piss' back in them, if we will. So instead of making fun of them, we made them our own." This was used on 12 Monkeys in the season 1 episode "Divine Move." Cole, a time traveler trying to undo a deadly plague, plays it on a bar's jukebox as he and his partner discuss their next move.

All our times have come
Here but now they're gone
Seasons don't fear the reaper
Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain
We can be like they are

Come on, baby (don't fear the reaper)
Baby, take my hand (don't fear the reaper)
We'll be able to fly (don't fear the reaper)
Baby, I'm your man

La, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la

Valentine is done
Here but now they're gone
Romeo and Juliet
Are together in eternity (Romeo and Juliet)
40,000 men and women everyday (like Romeo and Juliet)
40,000 men and women everyday (redefine happiness)
Another 40,000 coming everyday (we can be like they are)

Come on, baby (don't fear the reaper)
Baby, take my hand (don't fear the reaper)
We'll be able to fly (don't fear the reaper)
Baby, I'm your man

La, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la

Love of two is one
Here but now they're gone
Came the last night of sadness
And it was clear she couldn't go on

Then the door was open and the wind appeared
The candles blew and then disappeared
The curtains flew and then he appeared
Saying don't be afraid

Come on, baby (and she had no fear)
And she ran to him (then they started to fly)
They looked backward and said goodbye (she had become like they are)
She had taken his hand (she had become like they are)
Come on, baby (don't fear the reaper)