By Jeff Copperthite:

Good evening to you, and welcome to your newest addition to The Laptop Sessions library!  It’s Jeff here bringing you a somewhat surprising song.  One can make the argument that we have not covered a band like this on this site.  But I hope that, if you never have heard of Blue Oyster Cult before (BOC), that you will enjoy this cover video.

BOC is the topic today (another new band!  I guess we had like New Bands 3.0 this week or something) and I have a great song by them from 1974.  Now if you don’t know who this band is, I will tell you a song that will instantly make you say “oh that’s who you’re talking about” – that song is “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”.  Yeah, they wrote that song.  It was also the same song that was being portrayed as recorded in an SNL sketch, where the now famous line was uttered by Christopher Walken – “needs more cowbell”.

Well, tonight I am not covering that song – but I am learning how to play it and I will be recording it before the year is out (may save it for a Thumpin’ Thursday – it is an awesome song).

Today I have a song from their 1974 album “Secret Treaties” titled “Astronomy”.  This song has a nice soft feel to it, and a completely kickass solo from their lead guitarist Buck Dharma.  Eric Bloom is their lead singer, and I discovered I can emulate his voice quite well.  Therefore, you’ll notice that my voice is a little different in this session.

I was introduced to this song because I heard a version of this song by Metallica from their 1998 covers album “Garage, Inc.”.  I decided I wanted to stay true to the original BOC version, so if you’re comparing this cover to the Metallica cover, you will notice quite a few differences between them.

For the performance, I tend to be a bit more “forgiving” of myself when the song is long.  This song’s recorded version clocks in at nearly 7 minutes.  I cut out a lot of the last “solo” time so that I would not have to play near-perfect guitar for 7 minutes.  The arpeggiated parts that I play in the song are not as clean as i’d like them to be.  But if I ever wanted to finish recording this video and upload it on time, I had to allow a minor glitch here and there.  I actually think this is one of my better singing performances, however.  I hope you feel the same way.

I am glad I was able to bring a new band your way this evening, and on Monday, i’ve got another new band – heck, let’s make it 4 new bands in a row by me by making next week’s Thumpin’ Thursday a new band as well!

Tomorrow Jim will return to his library of cover songs and lay another on us.  Come back for that – you know I will!

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, Jeff’s acoustic cover song music videos are no longer on YouTube, but we decided to keep his cover song blog posts up.  We figured these music blog entries would be good for posterity’s sake and because Jeff always gave such insightful posts each Session.  We hope to see Jeff’s impressive catalog of acoustic rock songs here on the Laptop Sessions cover songs and original music blog again in the future.  But, for now, please make sure to check-out hundreds of other acoustic cover songs from all of your favorite bands here on the Laptop Sessions music blog!