And in the lyrics, was answering himself, which was sort of an innovation. I said, “Oh, you took that riff and put it in A minor.” A week later, he gave me a cassette that I played on my Walkman, and he’d put a beautiful minor melody over the top of that blank canvas of a modal background. I recorded it, because I knew it was good.īouchard: In the fall of ’75, Don called me and said, “I wrote this riff, I think it’s pretty cool.” He played it for me, and I thought it sounded a little bit like “Teen Archer”. Roeser: It started with just the guitar riff, the iconic guitar riff. Here’s the story of the only rock classic inspired by cardiac arrhythmia. To understand the undying appeal of “Reaper” on the occasion of its 45 th anniversary, GQ talked to Don Roeser, whose stage name is Buck Dharma, his ex-bandmate Albert Bouchard, Saturday Night Live cast members, a cowbell specialist, and more than a dozen musicians who’ve covered the song – plus one who tried, but couldn’t. It’s been slowed down beautifully by Denmark + Winter, and sped up by the Goo Goo Dolls, who played the 5:08 song in a snappy 2:17. There’s a short list of hard rock songs that are beloved even by people who hate hard rock: “Back in Black,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Runnin’ With the Devil,” and “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” It was also said to be one of Gary Gilmore’s favorite songs, which scans in terms of chronology: the song reached #12 on the Billboard singles chart in November 1976, two months before Gilmore was executed. America’s red, white, and blue bicentennial was dotted with gothic black. As Ken Tucker noted in a Rolling Stone review of Agents of Fortune, the album that included “Reaper,” they also put “less emphasis on absurd, crypto-intellectual rambling.” The album even had sax solos, for Lucifer’s sake! Coincidentally (or not), it was released two weeks after the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire. “Reaper” and the word meme even share a year of birth, 1976.īy 1976, Blue Öyster Cult was focusing more on hooks and melodies, which had never seemed important to them. But it had already been in the bloodstream of pop culture for three decades. In April 2000, Saturday Night Live’s “I need more cowbell!” sketch, starring host Christopher Walken as producer Bruce Dickinson, and cast members Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Parnell, and Horatio Sanz as Blue Öyster Cult, turned the song into a ubiquitous one-liner and eventually a Twitter meme. And an assortment of bands has covered it in a catalog of styles: country “Reaper,” blues “Reaper,” punk “Reaper,” dance club “Reaper,” and even two-identical-twins-play-it-on-harps “Reaper.” Few songs have ever been this durable and flexible. Every few years, it turns up in another Hollywood movie-usually the scary ones. An industry source estimates that it generated more than $637,000 in revenue in 2020, not including from album sales. Last year, it had 50,000 spins on terrestrial and satellite radio. It became a hit 45 years ago but has never disappeared from pop culture. “Reaper” narrates the tale of a couple who are “together in eternity,” and the song seems eternal as well. Many A minor songs are so familiar, we’ll mention them only by title: “Angie,” “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Smooth Operator,” “Rhiannon,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” “It’s Too Late,” and the most A minor of A minor songs, Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” A song written in A minor has an unstable and unsettling presence, a weight, an undertow. You may not know the key of A minor when you hear it, but you certainly feel it.
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