Growing up, I hated the song '(Don't Fear) The Reaper'! I truly hated it. Therefore, I purposely avoided Blue Öyster Cult albums the way superstitious kids avoid cracks in the sidewalk.
However, a few years back my never-ending search for great music finally brought me to their doorstep. I'd already figured out that Patti Smith was too real to be denied and once I found out that she'd spent a fair amount of time with BOC, I began looking for their early stuff.
The 1976 album Agents of Fortune, which does have '(Don't Fear) The Reaper', features Smith on backing-vocals on the song 'The Revenge of Vera Gemini' as well as several bracing rockers like 'This Ain't the Summer of Love' and 'Sinful Love'. Despite dealing with the age-old themes of love and loss, these songs also talk of the changing political and social landscapes across America and signal the coming musical changes that punk would bring.
Well worth a look for any of my fellow naysayers. I've officially converted!
... "I love you like sin, but I won't be your pigeon!"
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For years 'Don't fear...' was a cool rock some with some fun guitar licks for me. When I read THE STAND for the first time, and read the lyrics the way they were woven into the beginning of the novel, I just found it to be pure genius. Probably a combination of reading great lyrics and having my mind painting a picture of a pre-apocolyptic world with super-disease and death...the song just seemed to take on a much darker mood, and tone, than it every had before for me. It had nothing to do with religious symbolism, more than it had to do with age old struggle of good vs. evil, really, really awful evil.
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