This week's introduction comes with a bit of a twist--I most definitely remember the song from its release when I was in high school in the seventies, but I don't remember really liking or disliking the song. My second introduction came in the nineties when I saw the movie The Stoned Age on a cable movie channel, in which this week's tune plays a major role. It's one of those movies that's so bad it's actually good, and because of the song's prominence in the movie I became a fan. Through the years, my appreciation for it has grown as have so many other songs from the decade of my musical awakening....
Blue Oyster Cult formed in 1967 at Stony Brook University in Long Island as the Soft White Underbelly. They spent several years playing local gigs and eventually became a popular local band. In 1968 they signed with Elektra and released a couple of albums without much success. In 1969 the band had a bad review of one of their shows and their manager changed their name to Blue Oyster Cult. In 1971 they switched to Columbia Records and began their ascent to stardom. They would have a string of hit records through the early eighties before time and tide caught up with them. They took a hiatus in 1986 but reformed in 1987 and have been a working band ever since, albeit with numerous lineup changes (guitarist Buck Dharma and lead vocalist Eric Bloom have been the only constants). For their career, BOC has released sixteen studio albums (their highest charting hit #24), ten live albums (one hit #22), twenty-one (!) compilations, and thirty-two singles (with two hitting the top forty). They've sold over twenty-five million records and released their latest album just last year.
Fun Fact: The band got its name from the poetry of its initial manager (from 1967 to 1995), rock critic Sandy Pearlman. Pearlman had a cycle in which there was a group of aliens called Blue Oyster Cult who secretly guided earth's history, hence the band's name.
Fun Fact 2: BOC had a veritable Who's Who helping write their lyrics through the years. In addition to Pearlman, rock critic Richard Meltzler, Punk Goddess Patti Smith, poet and musician Jim Carroll, and science fiction writers Michael Moorcock, Eric Van Lustbader, and John Shirley all helped pen lyrics for BOC songs.
"(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was released in 1976 from their fourth album, the rather snoopily entitled Agents of Fortune. The single would hit #12 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100, while the album would peak at #29 on the Billboard 200. In addition, the song was ranked at #405 on Rolling Stone's list of the five hundred best songs of all-time.
Much like last week's tune, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" has so much to like about it that it's almost impossible to fit into a paragraph. Buck Dharma's tale of a young couple broaching the other side (he said the song came from imagining himself dying early) opens with some ominous (and unforgettable) guitars and proceeds to blow our minds from there. Dharma's lyrics are (once again) not your usual top forty fare (even invoking the deaths of Romeo and Juliet), and I love how each line in the chorus opens with the backing vocals before Dharma sings his line (not sure I've heard it done this way before but might have?). The band is incredible throughout, but none more so than in the instrumental break which sounds like a symphonic orchestra kicking out the jams (may have stolen that line from another song...). And I almost forgot the simple by wondrous la la las. As I've noted a time of two here before, every now and again a very talented band has a moment of sheer greatness in a song or album, and this was the song for Blue Oyster Cult. In a word: stunning.
Lyric Sheet: "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...
[Note: Dharma guesstimated that forty thousand people die every day but was about a hundred thousand short of the actual total.]
Enjoy:
Fuck Donald Trump
Peace,
emaycee
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