Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser, singer/guitarist/songwriter
Blue Öyster Cult were a cult band. We wrote romantic songs with historically based themes. We were happy in our niche and certainly never thought of ourselves as a pop group. At first, I thought Don’t Fear the Reaper would be played on album-oriented radio, like all our other songs. I never dreamed it would become such a famous song, or that the riff would be played by every kid trying out a guitar in a shop.
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. I was 22 and had just been diagnosed with an irregular heart condition, which got me thinking about dying young. 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 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. 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. “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.
The line “40,000 men and women every day” was my wild guess about how many people in the world die daily. I didn’t research it – and it turned out that I was about 100,000 out. But I just needed a number I could sing.
The song’s really about accepting the inevitability of death. At concerts, we tend to dedicate it to people who have recently passed on, musicians and such. I wonder how many people have been buried to it. I want it played at my funeral on a loop. It’s become the song that we’re most known for. People ask: “Don’t you wish you had more songs as popular as that one?” I don’t see it like that. I’m fortunate to have just one.
Eric Bloom, guitarist
When we started the band, we all lived in one house in Long Island, New York. Everyone would pitch in, either in the basement or the living room, meaning songs were written en masse. But by 1976, when Reaper came out, we all had home studios and would write on our own. Donald brought Reaper to rehearsals on a demo he’d recorded himself. It was very close to how the finished thing sounded.
The original version, however, had a totally different – and very long – middle section that was cut out for the single. Shortly after it came out, we landed a slot on the Merv Griffin TV show, a popular talk show. We’d never done lip sync before but figured that we didn’t need to rehearse since we knew the song so well. What we didn’t know was that they were going to use the single version. So when it came to the middle section, it just wasn’t there. We stood there like idiots, blowing it on national television. 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.
Don’t Fear the Reaper has a cowbell all the way through it, which is quite unusual. None of us can quite remember who played it. Saturday Night Live did a hilarious skit about us called More Cowbell and the phrase has since become part of the English language. It’s something I get asked about all the time. I was reading Autoweek, an American car magazine. In the middle of a car review, along with some stuff about acceleration, it suddenly said: “What this car needs is more cowbell.”
• Blue Öyster Cult play the University of East Anglia, Norwich, on 21 February. Then touring the UK until 1 March.
