![]() Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, now there are links to point you to where you can watch some of these gems.Ī vintage photo of the band was shown, taken at a bar mitzvah they'd played in 1970 for show producer Joel Gallin. If you have any further appearances and can provide accurate broadcast information, please contact us for addition to this list. This feature was first published in Classic Rock issue 84.This is not a complete list of BÖC's television appearances, but does include the majority of their television appearances. Some bands’ signature songs make me cringe, ours doesn’t.” I still enjoy playing it, and it doesn’t bother me that we’re still obliged to do so night after night. “I’m highly amused at the way it has rippled out into popular culture. “Its appearance in The Simpsons was one of this band’s proudest moments,” he chuckles. Had the song not been a hit and helped Blue Öyster Cult to become successful, there’s every chance I’d have gone down the engineering or production side of music. It’s kinda hard to say if we’d still be having this conversation now had I not. Has Roeser ever wondered how life might have been different had he not written it? In later years, … Reaper was used in the closing credits for The Simpsons, was quoted in Stephen King’s book The Stand, and its use of cowbell was even lampooned on hit US TV show Saturday Night Live. In the Bible Belt, those kind of people did sometimes start to get the wrong impression of what we were saying.” “Right from the start we’d purposely cultivated a dark and mysterious persona. “Our image certainly didn’t help,” Roeser chuckles. Nevertheless, some people were only too willing to embrace the song’s more sinister connotations, and for a while Blue Öyster Cult found their concerts picketed by placard-wielding do-gooders accusing them of doing the Devil’s work. “That’s the description I’d prefer to use.” “To me, the mood of the music is eerie,” Roeser offers. ![]() In other words, the population turns over but all of these life forces never truly go away.”ĭespite the above, it would be unfair to call … Reaper depressing or morbid. “Forty grand leaving, and then coming back again, every day. The song’s crucial line: ‘ Forty thousand men and women every day’ was a ball-park figure of how many people Roeser believed would pass away in any given 24 hours: “I had no way of knowing the exact numbers for sure, it was just guesstimate on my part.”Īnd the following reference: ‘ Another forty thousand every day – we can be like they are’ alluded to spirits being reborn in earthly form to replace those that had died? “And Patti Smith was in our circle at the time,” he adds, “but she didn’t sing on that particular track.” My general health is good again now, but the incident definitely provided me with some timely food for thought. “Of course, it did cause me to start pondering my own mortality. “I wasn’t what you’d call close to death, but a doctor did diagnose that I had a heart condition,” he says of that illness. The other is that Patti Smith supplies backing vocals on it. One is that an almost fatal health scare of his own had given him the idea for it. Roeser also puts paid to another couple of persistent myths surrounding … Reaper. “It’s not necessarily about suicide, but of course the Romeo and Juliet part was what made people believe that had inspired the song.” “They’re just a couple whose love – you assume – survives suicide,” he explains. With its lyrical reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet being ‘ together in eternity’, it’s easy to see why people might assume the song is about a suicide pact.
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