If you consult the Farmer’s Almanac, you know that today was a most auspicious day to castrate an animal. And you know what that means … we need MORE cowbell! Recently I was privy to a rather ex post facto debate over Blue Oyster Cult’s heavy use of cowbell, and whether or not it had an unfavourable correlation with cowbell usage in subsequent music production. Such an uncertainty inevitably led to my own investigation and although I found no answer to this question, I did learn that some very personally relevant and excellent songs employ cowbell and I didn’t even know it. Here are some such discoveries:

Apparently, a young Portland resident named Austin Giles owns the world’s largest cowbell, and was unsurprisingly evicted last year for multiple cowbell-related noise violations. This might happen to you if you choose Phish’s 46 Days for your nightly cacophonic cowbell fix, or are madly preparing yourself for the band’s TWO shows at Bonnaroo this year. Math says that 2 Phish shows = 2 x the face-melting, and math don’t lie.

Of course, Deee-Lite’s ‘Groove is in the Heart’ is not my own great discovery, but I had never realized that the song’s enduring sass was so heavily indebted to cowbell. Groove is clearly not in the heart, nor Deeelite’s seizure-inducing onesie; nay, groove is in the cowbell, and when accented with slide-whistle, groove is out of control!

Deee-Lite – Groove is in the Heart

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I have also noticed that cowbell frequently thinks itself important enough to replace intelligible lyrics, though perhaps The Rapture’s ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ is not the best example, The Rapture being a band that regularly fills album holes with onomatopoeic dither.

The Rapture – House of Jealous Lovers

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Finally, if you’re like me and own a pair of East Coast lobster mittens purchased from Jennifer’s of Nova Scotia, you’ve definitely rocked out to the B-52’s ‘Rock Lobster’ while snap-snapping along with some awesome cowbell. Celebrating lobster with cowbell – that’s some fine animal fusion.

B52s – Rock Lobster

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