About the Song
“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” is a song by American rock band Blue Öyster Cult from the band’s 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. 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 was Blue Öyster Cult’s highest chart success, reaching #7 in Cash Box and #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1976.
The song features prominent use of the cowbell percussion instrument, overdubbed on the original recording. Bassist Joe Bouchard remembered the producer requesting 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.” However, producer David Lucas says that he played it,[13] a claim supported by bandmember Eric Bloom
The song was memorialized in the April 2000 Saturday Night Live comedy sketch “More Cowbell”. 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, an overweight 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.