Louder AAA
In 2012 Prog asked Blue Öyster Cult’s Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom how they felt about being regarded as a prog band, about the level of success they’d achieved, and their opinions on being immortalised in the Saturday Night Live sketch More Cowbell.
Just how brilliantly individual Blue Öyster Cult could be is obvious on perhaps their most celebrated song, the 1976 hit (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. Written by guitarist Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser, it includes a Latino-spiced jazz-rock section that takes the track beyond usual confines of a chart success. And even the lyrical imagery is slightly left-of-centre.
“It was partially inspired by Romeo And Juliet,” recalls Dharma. “I was thinking about the concept of an eternal love, one that transcends the borders of death.
“While the original riff and idea for the song just came to me, when I sat down and analysed what I’d done it was clear that I’d been subconsciously thinking of the way a band like Jethro Tull or King Crimson would tackle the composition.
“I wanted it to be so much more than a pop hit. I felt it needed the imprint of having a depth to it. I don’t believe it would have been so enduring if it had just been a throwaway composition.”
The song was so huge and intriguing that it captured a new audience’s imagination in 2000 when it was spoofed on US comedy show Saturday Night Live. In a sketch known as More Cowbell written by Will Ferrell, guest host Christopher Walken plays fictional producer Bruce Dickinson, who constantly demands that BÖC add more cowbell to Reaper, while the members become increasingly upset about it. The scene regularly appears in top 10 SNL sketch lists and Walken has admitted to feeling overcast by the line, “Guess what! I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!”
It’s long been claimed that BÖC were less than amused by the skit, and that they somehow felt their intellectual integrity had been compromised. But vocalist/guitarist Eric Bloom refutes this. “We all thought it was hilarious!” he asserts. “And to this day I love watching it. The problem is that we’re seen as being humourless – which is nonsense. We enjoy having a laugh, even at our own expense.”
“When we suddenly found ourselves being portrayed as hating what SNL did, I related to the way Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Yes were treated,” says Dharma. “They were all thought to be too self-absorbed and full of their own importance – and that was never true.
“Like those guys, people didn’t want to admit that Blue Öyster Cult had any sense of humour. But come on: how could you ever take songs like Godzilla or Joan Crawford seriously? We were parodying; poking fun.”
Bloom has never been fully comfortable with how his band have been described over the years, although he can live with “thinking man’s metal band,” and accepts they can be seen as progressive too. He believes that the band’s relationship with prog comes with a desire to never stand still.
“We’ve never wanted to repeat ourselves,” he reflects. “Sometimes that shot us in the foot commercially – if we’d been prepared to get into the habit of using a successful musical formula, we might have been a lot bigger. But that would have gone against everything we stood for. What would be the creative point of just writing the same songs over and over again?
“We’ve always wanted to set our imaginations free, to allow ideas to take the shape they demand, and to let the music flow. If that means a song like Astronomy being over six minutes long, then that’s the way it has to be.”
He continues: “We were lucky that in our very early days we got the chance to tour with The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Their joy in getting fully involved with the music and extending compositions onstage did have a bearing on the way our career had developed.
“Do we regret not selling many more albums? No. Ask a band like King Crimson whether they’d sacrifice what they achieved musically for a few more million sales, and you know what answer you’d get. The same is true of us. If we’d stuck to one dimension, we’d probably be long forgotten.”
