Pearlman was also an excellent journalist back in the day for Creem magazine (also the home of Lester Bangs). But, he will be forever remembered for asking for "more cowbell" for the greatest song ever written about suicide.
The song was not about suicide.
Don Roeser [Buck Dharma] has explained this, ad nauseum.
“”(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” is a song by the rock band Blue Öyster Cult from their 1976 album, Agents of Fortune. It was written and sung by the band’s lead guitarist, Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, and is built around Dharma’s guitar riff that opens the song and reappears throughout. The edited single version was Blue Öyster Cult’s biggest US hit, reaching #12 on the American charts in November 1976.[1] The song remains a staple tune on classic rock radio playlists. In 1997, Mojo magazine ranked “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” at #80 in the “100 Greatest Singles of All Time”. Rolling Stone magazine voted the song “Best Rock Single” of 1976 and in 2004 the magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” ranked it at #397.[2] The reaper is a reference to the Grim Reaper, a traditional personification of death in European-based folklore. Lyrics such as “Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity” have led many listeners to interpret the song to be about a murder-suicide pact, but Dharma says the song is about eternal love, death:[3]
“ I felt that I had just achieved some kind of resonance with the psychology of people when I came up with that, I was actually kind of appalled when I first realized that some people were seeing it as an advertisement for suicide or something that was not my intention at all. It is, like, not to be afraid of it (as opposed to actively bring it about). It’s basically a love song where the love transcends the actual physical existence of the partners.”
And Pearlman had no part in the after-thought addition of cowbell to the song.
“Fact is, there is a cowbell on “Reaper.” If you listen closely to it on oldies radio, you can make it out in the background. But it was an afterthought. The song was recorded without it, and was added as an overdub at the last minute. According to former BOC bassist Joe Bouchard, an unnamed producer asked his brother, drummer Albert Bouchard, to play the cowbell after the fact. “Albert thought he was crazy,” Bouchard told the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press in 2000. “But he put all this tape around a cowbell and played it. It really pulled the track together.”