October awakens from its year-long slumber, slowly stretching slithering tendrils of darkness across the land to steal the breath of summer, and so begins the season for spooks and specters and all manner of supernatural shenanigans.

So begins the song of the Blue Öyster Cult.

They first played together back in the late 1960s as students at Stony Brook University in New York. A classmate named Sandy Pearlman overheard them practicing and took on management and booking, even going so far as to help with writing the occasional lyric. The group started their professional journey as Soft White Underbelly, but after a bad gig they changed their name at Pearlman’s insistence (something they had to do a few times), eventually landing on Blue Öyster Cult in 1971.

Playing an idiosyncratic brand of hard rock and proto-metal (with tongue sometimes firmly in cheek), the group slowly built an audience and climbed up the charts. With song titles like “Hot Rails To Hell, “Career Of Evil,” and “Dominance And Submission,” they weren’t exactly everybody’s cup of tea. Their tea was more like a shot of cheap whiskey. Thrown in your face.

For 1976’s Agents Of Fortune, Blue Öyster Cult still traded in darkness, but they polished their sound with a radio-friendly sheen and a new emphasis on hooks. The gods of music love hooks, and they will reward you justly.

Guitarist Buck Dharma was sitting around one day, contemplating the idea of dying young (pretty natural thoughts for one living a rock and roll lifestyle), which led him — naturally — to think of Romeo and Juliet and a love lasting beyond this mortal plane. No need to fear the afterlife when a bond of the heart transcends space and time, and Dharma set about writing lyrics to a song he called “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.”

(With no access to death statistics, Dharma had to guess the number of people per day who shuffled off this mortal coil at The Reaper’s behest — a guess, he later learned, which comprised approximately a third of the actual total.)

The band rocked into the studio, laid down the guitar tracks in one take, threw on a couple of overdubs, and completed the song in virtually no time at all. Otherworldly assistance, mayhap?

Released as a single in the summer of 1976, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” didn’t scare off listeners, who turned the song into Blue Öyster Cult’s biggest hit, just missing the Top 10 in the US. You can hear it on classic rock radio every day and remains a favorite for TV and movie soundtracks featuring the scary and supernatural. It’s the sound of the season.

So take my hand, we’ll be able to fly….. with Blue Öyster Cult.

This song, of course, provided the impetus for the famous “More Cowbell” sketch on Saturday Night Live. Unsurprisingly, no one from 1976 agrees on who actually played the prominent cowbell that runs throughout the track. Two band members and one of the producers all claim credit.