"(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is a song by American rock band Blue Öyster Cult from the 1976 album Agents of Fortune. The song, written and sung by lead guitarist Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser, deals with eternal love and the inevitability of death.[4] Dharma wrote the song while picturing an early death for himself.
Released as an edited single (omitting the slow building interlude in the original), the song is Blue Öyster Cult's highest chart success, reaching #7 in Cash Box and #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1976. Critical reception was positive and in December 2003 "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was listed at number 405 on Rolling Stone's list of the top 500 songs of all time.[5]
Background
"I felt that I had just achieved some kind of resonance with the psychology of people when I came up with that, I was actually kind of appalled when I first realized that some people were seeing it as an advertisement for suicide or something that was not my intention at all. It is, like, not to be afraid of [death] (as opposed to actively bring it about). It's basically a love song where the love transcends the actual physical existence of the partners."
The song is about the inevitability of death and the foolishness of fearing it, and was written when Dharma was thinking about what would happen if he died at a young age.[6] Lyrics such as "Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity" have led many listeners to interpret the song to be about a murder–suicide pact, but Dharma says the song is about eternal love.[7][4] He used Romeo and Juliet as an example of a couple who wanted to be together in the afterlife.[8] He guessed that "40,000 men and women" died each day (from all causes), and the figure was used several times in the lyrics, but it is about 100,000 too low.[9]
Composition and recording
"(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was written and sung by Dharma and produced by David Lucas, Murray Krugman, and Sandy Pearlman.[10] The song's distinctive guitar riff is built on the I-bVII-bVI chord progression in A minor.[11] The riff was recorded with Krugman's Gibson ES-175 guitar, which was run through a Music Man 410 combo amplifier, and Dharma's vocals were captured with a TelefunkenU47 tube microphone. The guitar solo and guitar rhythm sections were recorded in one take, while a four-track tape machine amplified them on the recording. Sound engineer Shelly Yakus remembers piecing together the separate vocals, guitar and rhythm section into a master track, with the overdubbing occurring in that order.[12]
Mojo described its creation: "'Guys, this is it!' engineer Shelly Yakus announced at the end of the first take. 'The legendary once-in-a-lifetime groove!' ... What evolved in the studio was the extended solo section; it took them nearly as long to edit the five-minute track down to manageable length as it did to record it."[13]
The song features the cowbell percussion instrument overdubbed on the original recording.[4] Bassist Joe Bouchard remembered the producer requesting that his brother, drummer Albert Bouchard, play the cowbell: "Albert thought he was crazy. But he put all this tape around a cowbell and played it. It really pulled the track together."[14] However, producer David Lucas says that he played it,[15] and bandmember Eric Bloom says he did.[16]
Reception
The song was on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 20 weeks, reaching number 12 for the weeks of November 6 and November 13, 1976.[17] It was the band’s highest-charting U.S. song and helped Agents of Fortune reach number 29 on the Billboard 200.[18] "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" charted even higher in Canada, peaking at number 7.[19] The single edit was released in the UK in July 1976 (CBS 4483) but failed to chart. The unedited album version was released as a single (CBS 6333) in May 1978, where it reached number 16 on the UK Singles Chart.[20]
The song received critical acclaim. Record World said that "An 'Eight Miles High' guitar line is complemented by smooth vocals."[21]Denise Sullivan of AllMusic praised the song's "gentle vocals and virtuoso guitar" and "haunting middle break which delivers the listener straight back to the heart of the song once the thunder is finished".[22] Nathan Beckett called it the band’s "masterpiece" and compared the vocals to the Beach Boys.[23] Writing for PopMatters, James Mann called it a "landmark, genre-defining masterpiece" that was "as grand and emotional as American rock and roll ever got".[24]Pitchfork also called the song a masterpiece.[25]
The band The Spiritual Machines made a cover of the song. There was a longer version released in a single in 2016, and a slightly shorter version split into two parts that was released in 2017. The song was also used in trailer for the 2019 Video Game Vampyr.[36]
Accolades
In 1976 Rolling Stone named "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" the song of the year,[10] and in 2004 the magazine placed the song 397th on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time";[37] the 2010 version of the list moved it down to 405th.[10] In 1997 Mojo listed the song as the 80th-best single of all time,[38] while Q ranked it 404th in its 2003 countdown of the "1001 Best Songs Ever."[39]
When The Guardian released its unranked list of "1000 Songs Everyone Must Hear" in 2009, the song was included. The publication wrote that the song's charm "lies in the disjuncture between its gothic storyline and the sprightly, Byrdsian guitar line that carries it."[7] In his book The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, rock critic Dave Marsh ranked the song 997th.[40]
The song was memorialized in the April 2000 Saturday Night Live comedy sketch "More Cowbell".[4] The six-minute sketch presents a fictionalized version of the recording of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" on an episode of VH1's Behind the Music.Will Ferrell wrote the sketch and played Gene Frenkle, a cowbell player. "Legendary" producer Bruce Dickinson, played by Christopher Walken, asked Frenkle to "really explore the studio space" and up the ante on his cowbell playing. The rest of the band is visibly annoyed by Frenkle, but Dickinson tells everyone, "I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!" Buck Dharma said that the sketch was fantastic and he never gets tired of it[14] but also lamented that it made the song lose its "creepy" vibe for some time.[41]
The 1994 film The Stoned Age features the song when a character calls it "a pussy song" despite being performed by Blue Oyster Cult.[51]
The 2022 horror film X by A24 has the song playing on the protagonists' van radio at the film's climactic midpoint. The slasher nature of the scene, as well as the film's setting in 1979, suggests an intentional homage by director Ti West to Halloween.[52]
The song was featured in the starting tracklist of the rhythm game Rock Band.[53]
Variations of the song are used throughout the 2021 video game Returnal: the vocal melody played on a piano appears as a key memory of the protagonist, an expansion of that theme is played on an organ by one of the bosses, and the original song appears unaltered in a flashback sequence.[54]
The 2006 video game Prey features the song playing on a jukebox as Jen's bar is attacked.[55][56]
^Jurek, Thom. "Agents of Fortune - Blue Öyster Cult". AllMusic. Retrieved March 21, 2019. The album yielded the band's biggest single with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," a multi-textured, deeply melodic soft rock song with psychedelic overtones.
^Targoff, Ramie (Fall 2012). "Mortal Love: Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and the Practice of Joint Burial". Representations. 120 (1): 17–38. doi:10.1525/rep.2012.120.1.17.
^"RPM Top Singles". RPM. 26 (7). RPM Music Publications Ltd. November 13, 1976. Archived from the original on November 1, 2014. Retrieved August 2, 2012.
^The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (May 22, 2014). "Will Ferrell and Chad Smith Drum-Off"(Video upload). The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on YouTube. Google, Inc. Archived from the original on December 12, 2021. Retrieved May 27, 2014.
