Reaper guitar riff: a borrowed ES-175 and a one-pass solo
Buck Dharma recorded the Reaper guitar riff, the opening figure of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," on a borrowed Gibson ES-175 played through a Music Man 410 combo. Guitar Player reports that the guitar belonged to producer Murray Krugman. The one-pass performance belonged to a different part of the record: Dharma played the leads on his own 1969 Gibson SG. "Usually, I comp my leads, but the 'Reaper' solo just flew," he says. "One pass and I had it."
The riff came first. Guitar Player says the song began to take shape in 1975, after Dharma bought a TEAC four-track recorder to help him write. As soon as he had the machine, he plugged his guitar in direct and started playing. "It just came right out of me," he says. Guitar World names the machine as a TEAC 340S reel-to-reel recorder, breakthrough technology at the time, since overdubbing was not possible outside a recording studio. "I was noodling around, and the riff just occurred to me. I recorded it and immediately began working on the song," he told Guitar World. The first two lines of the lyric arrived at the same time.
The Reaper guitar riff has a specific technique. "It's a crosspicked riff," Dharma says. "The open G is played on the upstroke, and it just spins out while the other parts move." The rest of the song took longer. He told Guitar Player it took eight weeks to figure out the story, the payoff, and where the bridge would go, while in the Guitar World interview he put the work at about six weeks. The demo he made then is, in his words, "pretty much the way the band recorded it."
The lyric came from a worry. Songfacts reports that Dharma wrote the song after being diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat, which led him to think about mortality: "I thought I was going to maybe not live that long." He describes it as "a love song where the love transcends the actual physical existence of the partners," and said it is "not about suicide," though he acknowledged that the Romeo and Juliet reference led people to that reading. He told Guitar Player the premise was a couple reunited on another plane of existence after one of them dies: "there is something after death, you didn't have to fear it, and love could stay strong."
The band and its producers, Sandy Pearlman, Murray Krugman, and David Lucas, liked the demo. Dharma remembers only one reservation: it was not as heavy as the band's other material, but the group was eclectic, so they decided to record it. The sessions took place at New York City's Record Plant. The band stayed close to Dharma's demo arrangement and trimmed only a few bars in select spots. "They played beautifully and put a real sheen on it," he says.
The cowbell was an afterthought. Dharma says it was not on the demo and was not recorded with the band; Lucas, "a famous jingles guy," came up with it. Songfacts quotes Lucas as saying the song "needed some momentum" and that he "just played four on the floor" with a cowbell he grabbed from a nearby studio. When Saturday Night Live parodied the sessions on April 8, 2000, with Christopher Walken calling for "more cowbell," Dharma says the band "had no idea it was coming." He told Guitar World he was not bothered by the skit: "Frankly, we never took ourselves too seriously as artists."
Blue Öyster Cult had no hit before it. Guitar World explains that the group began as Soft White Underbelly around Stony Brook University in Suffolk County, New York, and names Dharma, Eric Bloom, Allen Lanier, Joe Bouchard, and Albert Bouchard as the lineup behind its string of albums in the 1970s and 1980s. Pearlman, a Crawdaddy rock critic, took the band into recording studios and pitched them as "America's answer to Black Sabbath," a promotional angle Dharma says was never a guiding principle. Columbia Records signed the group to a seven-record deal. "We didn't have a hit single until (Don't Fear) the Reaper on our fourth record," he says.
The song gave them a larger audience. Guitar Player says it turned the Long Island quintet into arena headliners and propelled the fourth album, Agents of Fortune, to Platinum status. Songfacts lists it as the lead single from the 1976 album and adds that a UK single release in 1978 built a substantial following there. The band did not expect that reach. "I thought, especially when the band recorded it, that it would be a strong FM cut," Dharma told Guitar World. "I didn't know it was going to cross over to AM, which was pop radio." FM stations started picking it up, he told Guitar Player, and Columbia got records out once it took off. Songfacts says the follow-up album, Spectres, was considered disappointing, and the comeback hit came in 1981 with "Burnin' For You."
Guitar Player reports that the single edit, aimed at AM radio, removed the guitar break in the middle. Dharma was not terribly enthused: "The full version is much more dramatic. I prefer people hear it that way."
Other musicians have borrowed from the Reaper guitar riff. Dharma told Guitar Player that Sting owned up to taking the rhythm of the Police's 1979 hit "Message in a Bottle" from it. "He kept the rhythm, but he changed the melody around, so it wasn't a real steal," Dharma said. Songfacts adds that Stephen King used its lyrics as an epigraph in The Stand in 1978 and that the Goo Goo Dolls recorded a punk version for their 1987 debut. Dharma also praises a cover by Big Country.
- Guitar Player, How Buck Dharma wrote (Don't Fear) The Reaper — www.guitarplayer.com
- Guitar World, Buck Dharma tells the Blue Oyster Cult story — www.guitarworld.com
- Songfacts, (Don't Fear) The Reaper — www.songfacts.com