![]() The Summer of 1980 Black and Blue Concert at the Lebanon Valley Speedway is legendary. There were around twenty thousand people there, and other people who didn't head out ASAP like we had told us it got worse. I remember seeing a bunch of guys trying to flip over a police car. My friends and I looked at each other and decided to leave. People in the the crowd began pushing and shoving each other, some throwing punches. The crowd somehow just seemed different, chaotic. I can't recall what started the riot, I was only 17, drunk and stoned on weed. I saw most of the Sabbath set, they played first. They played the Lebanon Valley Speedway located roughly a 40 minute drive ESE of Albany New York, almost at the Massachusetts's border in the Berkshires. However, the second time was the Black and Blue tour, BOC was the blue, Sabbath was the Black. Maryann from Outer Banks, North Carolina, United StatesI was 16 yrs old when I saw BOC the first time in Glens Falls, NY they were headlining.I always thought that the Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt movie, MEET JOE BLACK, should have found a way for the BRAD PITT character in that film to have this song playing in the background as he’s walking down the street with him sort of hearing it and subtly smiling (Pitt plays the grim reaper himself, DEATH, in that film). Duderonomy from AustraliaOne of THE ALL TIME GREAT CLASSIC ROCK guitar riffs EVER!.Said Dickinson, "I work with Iggy Pop on a lot of stuff and a lot of times when he calls and I pick up the phone, he goes 'More cowbell!'" not hard to do." He found out about the SNL skit when a friend instant messaged him as it was airing.ĭickinson says he's always felt a little funny about getting the producer role in the famous skit, but it has made life more interesting. When Lucas and Dickinson both appeared on the Just My Show podcast, Lucas explained that the cowbell was his idea, as the song "needed some momentum." He grabbed a cowbell from a nearby recording studio and "just played four on the floor. He is credited as the reissue producer on a later version of the album, which apparently is how he was named in the sketch. Dickinson is an archivist who works on album reissues, which means gathering master tapes to ensure the best sound quality. There really is a Bruce Dickinson (besides the Iron Maiden lead singer), but he didn't produce "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" - that was David Lucas, who also brought us the General Electric "we bring good things to life" and the AT&T "reach out and touch someone" jingles. In the skit, Walken plays a super-producer named Bruce Dickinson, whom the band respects enough to put up with his cowbell antics. In the skit, the band would get upset when Will Ferrell would play the bell too loud, but Walken kept calling for "more cowbell." Their resurgence came in 1981 with the MTV hit " Burnin' For You," but "Reaper" will always be their defining song.Īn ApSaturday Night Live skit with Christopher Walken made fun of the overreaching cowbell in this song. "To be a singles band you have to win the casual buyer." "The Cult is never destined to be successful at a format," Buck Dharma said in a 1980 interview with NME. ![]() ![]() On their next album, Spectres, they felt pressure to write another hit, and the results were disappointing. Released as the lead single from their fourth album, Agents Of Fortune, it exposed them to a much wider audience, which was good for business but bad for art. "Don't Fear The Reaper" changed all that. Signed to Columbia Records, their first three albums sold a few hundred thousand each, but with no hit singles. Patti Smith (yes, that Patti Smith) even wrote some lyrics for the band when she was better known as a music journalist than a musician (she was BÖC keyboard player Allen Lanier's girlfriend). Most music critics appreciated the band, and some worked for them: Their manager/producer Sandy Pearlman wrote for the music magazine Crawdaddy!, as did Richard Meltzer, who contributed some lyrics to the Cult. Those inside the cult took the time to understand that like Black Sabbath, BÖC combined outstanding musicianship with fantasy lyrics, and they weren't for everyone. Blue Öyster Cult was considered a "cult" band, somewhere in the realm of heavy metal with complex and often baffling lyrics dealing with the supernatural.
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