‘SNL’s More Cowbell Sketch Nearly Starred Norm Macdonald
Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary celebration continues to inspire a slew ancillary promotional products including a new “immersive” SNL experience inside Rockefeller Center — which may or may not consist of forcing fans to wait outside Lorne Michaels’ office for nine hours straight.
This week we’re also getting SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, a four-part docuseries that delves into the show’s cocaine-addled history.
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Bizarrely, an entire episode, literally a quarter of the series, is dedicated to a single sketch. No, not “Fart Face.” It’s a granular examination of “More Cowbell,” the classic 2000 sketch that chronicled the fictional backstage drama surrounding the recording of Blue Oyster Cult’s 1976 banger “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.”
It’s hard to imagine the sketch without host Christopher Walken playing the part of producer Bruce Dickinson — incidentally, the real Dickinson wasn’t a legendary record producer at all, just a “mid-level manager at Columbia Records” whose name appeared on a Blue Oyster Cult greatest hits CD, which an SNL intern mistakenly sourced.
Walken’s unique phrasing of the titular phrase has undoubtedly become iconic, so much so that Walken once told Will Ferrell that fans of the sketch had ruined his life with incessant cowbell references.
But as Parade recently noted, SNL50 recounts how Walken very nearly wasn’t the star of the sketch. Ferrell, who also wrote the sketch, claimed that it had been “germinating for decades” in his mind, but it was originally about a “wood block” not a cowbell. It was first pitched much earlier in SNL’s 25th season, for the episode hosted by Norm Macdonald (Seth Meyers has claimed that the sketch was submitted “over seven times before making the show”).
According to Susan Morrison’s New Yorker profile of Lorne Michaels, a version featuring Macdonald in the Walken role was rehearsed, but ultimately dropped from the show. Ferrell once described how Macdonald’s version of the sketch actually “played pretty well” at the table read. But Michaels clearly didn’t get the joke, asking Ferrell, “Oh, is that a famous part of that song?”
The writers responded: “No – that’s why it’s funny.” But the whole thing “died in committee.”
So Ferrell hung on to the sketch. While he didn’t bring it back for any of the guest hosts that immediately followed Macdonald’s show, such as Garth Brooks, Jennifer Aniston and Danny DeVito, when Walken hosted, he rewrote it specifically to fit the Dead Zone star’s voice. “He gave it that special sauce,” Ferrell concluded.
Given that quote, it’s shocking that the NBC store isn’t selling official “SNL50 Christopher Walken Special Sauce” for $59.95 a bottle.
