When it comes to the most famous use of a cowbell as a musical instrument, ever since the iconic “More Cowbell” sketch on Saturday Night Live, there’s really only one answer: Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper.”
That said, there might not actually be any cowbell on the song at all.
An episode of the new documentary series SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night gets into the making of the iconic sketch. In it, there’s some debate from people involved in the track, and David Lucas, one of the song’s producers, says (via Entertainment Weekly), “I knew it needed something. It needed momentum. And the fact of the matter was this was a song about death. Oncoming death. It needed a heartbeat: cowbell. I go get the cowbell, I come back. Nobody said anything for 20 years. But suddenly, after Will’s sketch, everybody remembered doing it! I did it. I played it on the record.”
That said, Murray Krugman, another one of the song’s producers, dropped a bombshell, saying:
“I don’t even remember whether Lucas or [former Blue Öyster Cult drummer Albert Bouchard] played it, but the irony here, the headline here: I don’t think it’s a cowbell. It had that hollow sound of a woodblock, whereas a cowbell has a really shrill metal top-end sound.”
Meanwhile, Bouchard admits that the SNL sketch really isn’t all that far off from how the making of the song actually happened, saying, “When I saw the skit, I thought, ‘How did they even hear the cowbell? How did they even know it was there?’ And then to come up with this thing about, ‘Should it be in there or should it not be in there’ — that’s exactly what happened! We actually had that debate at the time.”
