“More cowbell!” Buck Dharma reveals the origins of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” and four other Blue Öyster Cult classics.
BY GARY GRAFF
GUITAR WAS A “third time’s the charm” proposition for Blue Öyster Cult co-founder Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser. The Queens, New York, native started out playing accordion when he was nine years old before switching to drums a year later “when I realized the accordion wasn’t hip,” he says. That lasted for a few years until he broke his wrist playing basketball. “When I got my cast on,” Roeser recalls, “my brother had gotten a Stella acoustic guitar for Christmas, and I started playing that. I was a junior in high school and knew a drummer who was better than me, so I started playing lead guitar, teaching myself by ear. I never looked back.”
For 57 years — since Blue Öyster Cult’s origins as Soft White Underbelly in 1967 — Roeser has played lead guitar for BOC and served as one of its chief songwriters and occasional lead vocalist. He laughs as he describes the band’s longevity — “unexpected” is his word of choice — but the band has a body of 14 studio albums and a clutch of songs that remain classic-rock standards. The group also earned some pop-culture fame when it was immortalized in Saturday Night Live’s “More Cowbell” sketch during the show’s April 8, 2000, broadcast.
“What we’ve had to offer throughout the ride was the point of view of the participants,” Roeser says. That includes the five original members — Roeser, co-guitarist Eric Bloom, keyboardist Allen Lanier, bassist Joe Bouchard and his brother, drummer Albert — as well as producer Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer, both of whom served as the group’s main lyricists. “So what you got was an amalgam of that mixture,” he continues, “and over the years we’ve always pretty much just been ourselves. ’Cause any time we were conscious of fashion or trends, I think it was to our detriment. We’ve always done best just doing what we do.”
That encompasses a wide range of styles. Over a nearly six-decade career, Blue Öyster Cult have blended clever intellectualism with sophisticated humor, shredding as a multi-guitar monster (late co-founder Lanier also played rhythm and lead) while maintaining a strong melodic discipline. The group could rock out with “Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll” or “Hot Rails to He
