Oh Yes, There Was More Cowbell …
Filling Christopher Walken’s prescription for Cowbell Fever in an unexpected way
The musical cowbell does not hang on a cow, and it does not have a clapper on the inside to make it sound. It is most commonly placed on a stand, or held in the hand, of someone in a salsa band. They hit it with a stick, to make that hollow click.
But for a few glorious years the cowbell did get featured in rock and roll drum kits. It was made to hide its native syncopation and instead exclusively pound out the beat — the 1,2,3,4 — if you will.
The clapper-less cowbell somehow made its way from specialized Latin percussion kits used in salsa to rock and pop in the 1960s. The Rolling Stones’ producer Jimmy Miller clanked out the downbeat on Honky Tonk Women (#1, 1969). Blues rockin’ band Mountain hit the charts at #21 in 1970 with Mississippi Queen. Grand Funk Railroad tore that hotel down in We’re An American Band (#1, 1973).
War’s Low Rider (#7, #1 R&B, 1975) finally broke the downbeat barrier with a syncopated pattern played on the cow bell, but then War was a Latin band.
Christopher Walken famously portrayed circa 1976 silk baseball jacket wearing super producer Bruce Dickinson on Saturday Night Live. Dickinson explained that he had a fever, and there was only one prescription, More Cowbell! It was funny because it seemed like a weak suggestion, and rock songs with cowbell were no longer novel. Also because Blue Oyster Cult were portrayed as having a fanatical full time cowbell player, who was, in the mind of the boss producer, the key to their Don’t Fear The Reaper (#12, 1976). But while the rock cowbell era was coming to a close in the mid-seventies scene portrayed in the skit, there would indeed be plenty more cowbell to come.
A New Cowbell Rings Out
When the late sixties to mid-seventies cowbell explosion eventually stopped exploding, soon a new cowbell, one that you couldn’t hit with a stick, would ring out — this time in R&B songs. The new cowbell didn’t come from around a cow’s neck, it came from deep inside the contemporary drum machine.
I hope it doesn’t surprise you that nobody bought a drum machine for the cowbell sound. The cowbell was a bonus that you got with the beat box.
Drum machines had huge advantages. Non-drummers could make drum tracks. You didn’t have to record all the drum sounds at once; you could layer them one at a time, because a drum machine was like having a mini drum recording studio. You didn’t have to find a drummer and then spend hours having a recording engineer mic his drums before anyone else could play a note. You could put the whole drum part together before you even got to the studio. Some of these boxes could also be programmed to quantize, meaning to correct, your sloppy rhythm if you couldn’t actually keep a beat.
But once you got that new drum machine out of the package and hooked it up, you were gonna find that cowbell sound. R&B producers like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Russell Simmons, and Narada Michael Walden found that new sound, and added a welcome new wrinkle: the cowbell didn’t have to just play 1,2,3,4 anymore.
The expensive Linn drum machine (around $3000 list price in 1982–1985) came the closest to the real thing, with more bass depth. The Linn used samples of real drums, so it was made to be a high-quality substitute.
The more affordable Roland TR-808 (around $1200), created sounds digitally, and wasn’t really trying to fool anyone. It was a tool for a new age of electronic music. The TR-808 cowbell made a higher pitched, pinging sound. While it didn’t really sound like the real thing, it was trying to be a cowbell, and that try produced a unique sound that was new, and like the real cowbell, could break through the mix.
Both drum machines, and others, were used to make dance-oriented R&B in the 80's. Once these sounds appeared on a few hits, they were bound to be heard to infinity in the copycat world of radio-friendly 1980's R&B, filling the prescription for Cowbell Fever in an entirely unexpected way.
Electronic Cowbell Super Hits
YouTube playlist below …
- Planet Rock, Afrika Bambaataa (#48, #4 R&B, 1982)
- Just Be Good To Me, S.O.S Band (#55, #2 R&B, 1983)
- Meeting in the Ladies Room, Klymaxx (#59, #4 US R&B, 1985)
- I’ve Got a Crush on You, The Jets (#3, #4 R&B, 1986) (intro only)
- The Rain, Oran “Juice” Jones (#9,#1 R&B, 1986)
- I Wanna Dance With Somebody Who Loves Me, Whitney Houston (#1, #2 R&B, 1987)
