Songfacts®:

• This is a love song, as only Blue Öyster Cult could write. The cryptic lyrics are about a man who has tried three times to break off a relationship, only to come back to his lover each time. The song ends with the man vowing that "the fourth time around is the last time around," leaving the listener to draw his or her own conclusion as to whether it will turn out any differently.
• This was the last of five Blue Öyster Cult songs with a lyric from Patti Smith (the band's guitarist, Buck Dharma, wrote the music and sang lead). Smith had not yet released her first solo album when she started contributing lyrics to the band, which welcomed various associates - often music journalists - to offer them up. Smith and BÖC keyboard player Allen Lanier dated for a while, but by the early '80s, they had broken up and she had married Fred "Sonic" Smith and had her first child. The "Shooting Shark" lyric is one of her few musical endeavors in the '80s.
  
  "I think it could have been autobiographical, but I can't speak to it," Buck Dharma told Songfacts. "I found that lyric probably four or five years after it had been submitted to us. Patti used to write and we would sometimes just take her poetry books, take writing out of there and set it to music."
• The bass player on this song was session musician Randy Jackson, who went on to become a prominent A&R man and, most famously, a judge on American Idol.
• Fittingly enough, this song coincided with the band's "jumping the shark" - the start of their gradual decline. This single and the album it came from, The Revolution By Night, were only modestly successful commercially. Several lineup changes followed, including a brief reunion of the band's original roster, but Blue Oyster Cult could never recapture the commercial success they enjoyed during the 1970s.
• The Revölution by Night album was produced by Bruce Fairbairn, who went on to produce several Aerosmith albums.
• The album title, like the name of the band itself, is properly rendered with an umlaut over the first letter "o". Blue Oyster Cult was one of the first bands to use the so-called "heavy-metal umlaut," a gimmick famously parodied by the fictional band Spinal Tap, who put the umlaut over a consonant. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Joshua - La Crosse, WI
• The band made a video for this song that was directed by Francis Delia. In the clip, Buck Dharma visits a shaman and becomes delusional, with lots of strange hallucinations. At one point, he grabs a woman who turns out to be a goat.