April 5, 2000 was a momentous day in comedy historical past. That evening, “Saturday Night time Stay” paid tribute to Blue Oyster Cult’s 1976 jam “(Don’t Worry) The Reaper” and one iconic little bit of percussion.
The cowbell.
The hit music, a latter-day little bit of psychedelia, infamously had a repeated cowbell on the observe. Within the sketch, which after all anybody studying this has seen, Christopher Walken‘s supposedly legendary producer “Bruce Dickerson” retains beseeching cowbell participant Gene Frenkle (Will Ferrell, in a too-tight shirt) to play extra emphatically: “I gotta a fever, and the one prescription is extra cowbell.”
In Peacock’s “SNL 50: Past Saturday Night time” docuseries (through the New York Put up), Ferrell, who wrote the “Extra Cowbell” sketch, opens up about how a lot Walken has come to resent the ubiquity of it. All of it got here out when Ferrell visited Walken when the actor was showing in Martin McDonagh’s “A Behanding in Spokane” on Broadway in 2010.
“I went to see [Walken] backstage, and he’s like, ‘You already know, you’ve ruined my life… each present, individuals deliver cowbells for the curtain name and bang them,” Ferrell mentioned. “It’s fairly disconcerting.’”
For what it’s value, Walken didn’t seem within the installment of “SNL 50: Past Saturday Night time” centered on “Extra Cowbell.” However he has individually mentioned, “I don’t perceive why it follows me round prefer it does…. It’s sort of run its course.”
Jimmy Fallon, who, bearded and spaced out performed one of many Oyster Cult band members, elaborated that the extremity of the sketch was actually pushed within the dwell, on-air efficiency far past something that they had tried within the costume rehearsal. “[Walken] upped his recreation,” Fallon added. “He was virtually doing an impersonation of Christopher Walken. He was speaking like how no human being would speak, ever.”
For Ferrell, the sketch emerged organically from ruminations he’d had for the reason that music got here out. “I had the thought at the same time as a child, ‘What’s the lifetime of the man taking part in the cowbell?’ I assume that was germinating for many years in my head.”
So far as the unique observe is anxious, there are conflicting accounts of who really performed the cowbell, which was overdubbed into the recording. A minimum of two members of the band, in addition to the producer David Lucas, declare that they performed it. However lead guitarist and band co-founder Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser is a fan of “Extra Cowbell.”
“All of us thought it was phenomenal,” Roeser advised the Washington Put up in 2005. “We’re enormous Christopher Walken followers. I’ve in all probability seen it 20 instances and I’m nonetheless not uninterested in it.”