(Don’t Fear) The Reaper

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," and if you are a Zoo Freak who has been riding with THE ZOO for a while, you already know this one does not need an introduction. Blue Öyster Cult cut it for Agents of Fortune in 1976, and Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser wrote it, sang it, and laid down those guitar lines that still sound like a headlight coming around a long curve. The single climbed to number 12 in the States and put the band in the British top 20 for the first and last time. The album went platinum. That is the chart talk. The better story is how a Long Island guitar player ended up writing a song that people have been arguing about for half a century.

Buck has told the tale plenty of times, and he has never wavered on the point that gets folks sideways. He was not writing a suicide note. A doctor had told him he had a heart irregularity, and being young and suddenly aware of the clock, he started thinking about what happens when the body gives out. The picture he settled on was a couple finding each other again on the other side. Love holds. Death is real, but it is not the end of the story. The Romeo and Juliet lines are about that reunion, not about a pact to check out early. He has said the misreading appalls him, and he will correct it every time somebody brings it up. The Cult always left the door open for listeners to draw their own map, which is why the argument never quite dies.

That "forty thousand men and women every day" figure was a guess. Buck did not have a census bureau on the nightstand. He was ballparking how many people leave the world in a day, and then imagining another forty thousand coming back in, the population turning over while the life force stays in circulation. Seasons do not fear the reaper, nor the wind, the sun, or the rain. We can be like they are. It is a hippie thought dressed up in a black leather jacket, which is about as Blue Öyster Cult as a sentence gets.

The music came first in pieces. The riff is crosspicked, with the open G ringing on the upstroke so the thing spins while the other notes move around it. He has said the rest of the song took about eight weeks, working out the story, the payoff, and where the bridge belonged. A home demo from 1975 already had the bones. The band knew when a song wanted to exist. Producer David Lucas, the real studio hand and not the fictional character from a television sketch, is the one who suggested the cowbell. It sits back in the track, just loud enough that a comedian would hear it decades later and build a whole bit around it.

That bit landed on Saturday Night Live in April 2000, with Will Ferrell sweating through a too-small shirt and Christopher Walken demanding more cowbell from a producer named Bruce Dickinson. The sketch turned a deep album cut into a catchphrase. Buck has said he loved it. The band found it funny. Walken has spent the years since hearing strangers yell the line at him, which is a different kind of curse. The song was already loose in the culture before any of that. John Carpenter used it in Halloween in 1978, playing while two friends sit in a Monte Carlo with no idea what is coming up the street. Stephen King set it as an epigraph in The Stand and misheard "Come on, baby" as "Come on, Mary." It has turned up in everything from The Frighteners to Zombieland, sometimes in cover form, sometimes as itself. Buck has said he feels blessed to have written one song like it, and that he would happily take five more.

A couple of other myths are worth parking. Patti Smith does not sing on "Reaper." She did write with the band, and she is on Agents of Fortune, on "The Revenge of Vera Gemini" and the Albert Bouchard collaboration "Debbie Denise," but the voices behind Buck on the hit are the band. Another story that checks out is the one about Sting. Buck went backstage at a Police show, and Sting owned up to lifting the rhythm, changing the melody so it was a variation rather than a copy. Buck told him he was welcome to it. He has said the plagiarism lawsuits of later years bother him, because as far as he is concerned the good ideas have all been passed around before.

The band that cut this record did not arrive fully formed with an umlaut and a chrome logo. In 1967, at Stony Brook on Long Island, rock critic Sandy Pearlman overheard a jam in a communal house and offered to manage the players and write with them. The group called itself Soft White Underbelly. Donald Roeser was on guitar. Albert Bouchard was on drums after the original drummer moved on. Allen Lanier handled keyboards. Andrew Winters played bass. Les Braunstein sang. Pearlman's friend and fellow critic Richard Meltzer pitched in on lyrics, the kind that ran from fantasy poetry to lines so dumb they were perfect for a rock song. Elektra signed them and then shelved the album. A bad review of a Fillmore East show pushed Pearlman to change the name, first to Oaxaca, then to the Stalk-Forrest Group. There was even a brief turn as the Santos Sisters. Stage names got handed out. Only Buck Dharma stuck.

Eric Bloom came in sideways. He had been hired as an acoustic engineer and road hand, and the band knew him from around the Sam Ash store in Hempstead. Lanier rode with him to an upstate gig, heard old tapes of Bloom singing with a college band, and the job of lead vocalist opened up. Winters eventually gave way to Albert's brother Joe on bass. New York jingle writer David Lucas caught a show, cut four demos at his Warehouse studio, and those tapes helped Pearlman get the renamed band in front of Clive Davis at Columbia. The contract landed in 1971. The name Blue Öyster Cult came out of Pearlman's private mythology, a poem about a secret order guiding history, and the umlaut was there to look heavy on a poster. Pearlman liked to say he had a hand in coining the phrase heavy metal. The first three Columbia albums, Blue Öyster Cult, Tyranny and Mutation, and Secret Treaties, built a following among people who wanted riffs and riddles in the same song. Agents of Fortune was the one that opened the door to everybody else, because Buck had finally written a hook the whole highway could sing.

The Cult are still out there, with Buck and Eric Bloom at the center of a later lineup, and they have been marking the fiftieth year of this song on the road. If you want the source, the official home is Blue Öyster Cult, where the live history still closes nights with the track from Agents of Fortune. Their official Facebook page is Blue Öyster Cult, the official Instagram is BLUE ÖYSTER CULT, and the official account on X is realBLUEOYSTER CULT. Longtime fans still gather at the Hot Rails archive, where old reviews of Agents of Fortune sit next to the band's tangled early history, and the active Blue Oyster Cult B.O.C. Fans group keeps the set lists, the photos, and the arguments going. Spin it again, Zoo Freaks. Seasons do not fear the reaper. Neither does this station.