voodoochild.org

wednesday 28-jan-04 5:42 pm

Well it's good to see this come to a speedy resolution. Imagine if we had to wait 15 years...Gosh, that'd be awful.

friday 09-jan-04 5:14 pm

Some good friends of mine bought me a subscription to Guitar One magazine (or they will have once they mail the subscription card in). Anyway, they bought the first issue (January 2004) off the newsstand to give me. I came across one of the greatest articles ever, which I will display here without express written consent of the original author (Robert Cherry):

top 10 cowbell classics

The problem with today's rock music? As Christopher Walken famously implored Blue Oyster Cult in a Saturday Night Live skit, "I got a fever. And the only prescription is ... more cowbell." Laugh if you will, but most jokes are funny because they bear a mint of truth. That signature clonk, thok, and/or t-tonk can mean the difference between a good rock song and a great one.

10. "Dance the Night Away", Van Halen - Hands up - has anyone ever danced to Van Halen? Sober? Me neither. But Alex did his best to flood discos with his limber wrist work here. Hard to tell, but I think he was expecting us to samba.

9. "Hair of the Dog", Nazareth - "Now you're messing with a ... sonofabitch!" Whew, don't tangle with that guy - he not only hates his mom, but he's brandishing a cowbell. Sweet falsetto on the chorus there, tough guy.

8. "We're Not Gonna Take It", Twisted Sister - Again, nothing says "hasta la vista, baby" like cowbell. Which is why Ah-nold recently adopted this fist-shaker as his gubernatorial campaign song. Either that or he thought aligning himself with heavy-metal drag queens would help win the female vote.

7. "Low Rider", War - The one and only time you want to hear a clunking sound beneath the hood of your ride, low or otherwise.

6. "Working for the Weekend", Loverboy - You know it's quittin' time when you hear the clang of a cowbell - at least in Canada, apparently. Perhaps these Canucks worked on a dairy farm before milking the big time. Just picture it: Mike Reno herding Betsy in his red leather trousers and headband, dreaming of hot girls in love...

5. "Evil Ways", Santana - The cowbell has its origins in Latin percussion, so it's no surprise that a Santana tune would feature one of the more musical applications of the instrument, as opposed to, say, using it to conceal a weak rhythm track.

4. "We're an American Band", Grand Funk Railroad - "They said, 'Come on, dudes, let's get it on.'" No time for a second take, then. Just throw on some cowbell. No one will notice.

3. "Mississippi Queen", Mountain - The virtuosio cowbell performance on this composition provides a signature lead-in while retaining a certain stylistic verisimilitude that, in other words, rocks like a freaky Mississippi queen. You know what I mean?

2. "Honky Tonk Woman", Rolling Stones - Tonk-tonk t-tonk, tonk... Maybe it's conditioning: Like Pavlov's dog, rock fans hear the 'bell and involuntarily begin to salivate. Nice one, Charlie.

1. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper", Blue Oyster Cult - Contrary to the SNL skit, it was "stun" guitarist Eric Bloom, not the fictional Gene Frenkle, who "explored the studio space" with his cowbell. The thinking man's hard-rock group were doubtless making a clever literary allusion with their choice in percussion, as in "Ask not for whom the [cow] bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Or maybe they just wanted to peg the kickass-ometer.

P.S. www.ineedmorecowbell.com is a great domain name. I wish I had thought of it.

monday 29-dec-03 11:15 pm

sentence of the week

From http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-nflrdp&prov=ap&t

At Green Bay, Wis., Ahman Green reeled off a 98-yard touchdown run and Brett Favre completed a hard week in which he buried his father to lead the Packers.

I knew that football players were a dedicated group of people who are always supposed to put their team ahead of theirselves, but...I don't know. Burying your own father just to win a game? Sounds a little severe to me.