Listening to this set in the car today I was especially taken by one particular choice. “This song is for Tom,” announces Jeff Tweedy and there’s a nice little moment of suspense (What’s it gonna be? What’s it gonna be?) just before he uncoils the hypnotic opening guitar riff of Blue Öyster Cult's 1976 hit single "(Don't Fear) The Reaper".
Wilco’s faithfully eerie version
of the tune struck a nerve in me somehow. They do it straight, without any
implied tongue-in-cheekiness. And yeah, thank God, because it seems to me that the
perception of this song has been distorted through the years in ways that do
not do it justice. If people don’t associate it with whatever horror movie it
was last used in (Halloween was the first, that '94 TV version of The Stand the most effective) then they often perceive it as just another ready-made classic
rock standby – merely one among thousands of others by the likes of .38
Special, Head East, Foghat, etc. Or more likely, they think of it as the set-up
to an admittedly hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch.
But the song deserves better,
dammit. Seriously, next time you hear it, pay special attention, because it’s a
fucking classic. As a record – a three-minute slab of sound that uses words,
rhythm and melody to convey an otherwise inexpressible feeling – it’s one of
the finest, most effective moments in the rock and roll canon, on par with
“Ticket To Ride” or “September Girls” or “When Doves Cry” or whatever you think
of as the high water marks of rock singledom.
The song is an anomaly even within
the Blue Öyster Cult catalog. Prior to 1976 they were a very good heavy rock
band, especially adept at mixing churning riffs with sci-fi/horror mythology.
Maybe they were a little more literate that your average hard rock combo –
Patti Smith and rock critic Richard Meltzer contributed lyrics – but even if they had come up with three excellent hard rock albums (and they had) there was still nothing in their pre-’76 repetoire that suggested they might come up with a Song For The Ages.
And that’s what it is. All those swirling, windswept guitar patterns and chilly vibes - the track simply isn’t like
much of anything else, especially anything on top forty radio in the mid-seventies. Comparisons to The Byrds aren’t inaccurate, that winding
repetitive riff is very similar to “So You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Star” and
the vocals have the same hushed, haunted tone as “Eight Miles High”. But there
isn’t a twelve-string guitar within earshot, and if there is a hint of the
American folk tradition that Roger McGuinn’s crew were so in thrall to, it’s only in the sense of foreboding and the acceptance of death’s
inevitability that runs through Old Weird American songs like “The Coo Coo Bird”. Otherwise it
stands outside barriers of time or circumstance, even those of the transitional
dayglo-to-punk year 1976.
BÖC would follow up their big hit
with an album, Spectres, that only partially attempted to replicate the sound of "Reaper". The song titles give clues: "I Love The Night", "Celestial The Queen", "Nosferatu". But the album's biggest hit was "Godzilla", a return to heavy riffage that stands alongside the band's later "Burnin' For You" as one of those classic rock readymade standbys you can hear about forty times if you drive cross-country for a couple days listening to nothing but classic rock radio. (Which I actually did once. Whitesnake's horrid "Here I Go Again" was the big winner repetition-wise.)
All of that other BÖC music is worthwhile, in its way, even if Wilco won't be covering any of those songs anytime soon. But hey, they came up with one indelible moment, and isn't that enough? Just because a band only produces one masterpiece is no reason to relegate that band and its finest accomplishment to the ghetto of "More cowbell!"
All of that other BÖC music is worthwhile, in its way, even if Wilco won't be covering any of those songs anytime soon. But hey, they came up with one indelible moment, and isn't that enough? Just because a band only produces one masterpiece is no reason to relegate that band and its finest accomplishment to the ghetto of "More cowbell!"
