I was in my teens before I realized that a cowbell originally dangled
from the neck of an actual cow. Did I finally encounter a cow
with its mini-gong swaying under its rawhide neck, or did
I see one in a John Wayne or Gabby Haze movie, or on one
of the ubiquitous cowboy TV series of childhood:
Roy Rogers, Sky King, Gene Autry?
Before my enlightenment a cowbell was, to me, the obnoxious tinny rattle
that some athlete’s mother brought to one of our football games
and shook whenever our quarterback, Mike Barrett, hit Ace Evans
with one of his infrequently completed bombs during the perpetual
losing seasons endured by the St. Mary’s Gaeles in Cheyenne.
I put cowbells in the same category as other irritating noisemakers like those
straw horns that made awful noises as they unraveled when you blew through
them at some miscreant’s birthday party or that goofy thing you’d spin that
sounded like a ratchet.
A cowbell came mounted on my first gold spackled cheap Japanese drum kit.
There wasn’t much of a place for the cowbell in sixties rock but I played it
on You Can’t Do That by The Beatles and Honkey Talk Woman by the Stones—
never connecting it with anything but an outdated prop that added rhythm to a song.
I was a callow city boy far removed from the truth of what gave me milk,
what trod on the dust of dairy farms, and the white health squirted into pails
eventually transformed into cream and butter.
We are held hostage by our upbringing and the lacunae it inevitably creates.
A cowbell clanged of dung, dun, and dirty callused hands—what high school
football, asphalt, and amplifiers took for granted and left behind.
