My Top 1000 Songs #899: (Don't Fear) The Reaper

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

To be honest, I totally dread when I hit these overplayed classic rock chestnuts on the list. They feel almost like obligatory inclusions that feel a little too pedestrian--c'mon, why not sub it out for another Pavement or Guided By Voices track?--and, frankly, it's kinda boring.

Boring!

Still, this was a hit single when I was 10, all the way back in 1976, and it just seemed really cool at the time, a little more interesting and mysterious than most of what I was hearing on the Top 40 radio station. And the songs that rock your world at 10 are hard to shake. Kinda like "Bohemian Rhapsody" a year earlier, just as I was discovering pop music, it felt more sophisticated than the other chart hits, whetting my pre-teen appetite for music that went a little deeper than the other hits getting airplay. Plus, when I bought my first guitar a few years later, it was fun to play along with.

Of course, decades of classic rock saturation, not to mention one of the best-known SNL skits ever, have rendered it one of those songs hard to imagine ever deliberately cueing up on the stereo. (And I can't say I'm much of a Blue Oyster Cult fan beyond a couple of the childhood singles.) But if I'm stuck listening to FM radio and this comes on, it's one of those tracks I'll have to wait out before flipping. Even if it's impossible not to be more attuned to the cowbell than one would like to be.

Live 1981:

Covered by New Zealand band The Mutton Birds: