Christopher Walken Told Will Ferrell ‘More Cowbell’ Sketch on ‘SNL’ Had ‘Ruined My Life’

April 5, 2000 was a momentous day in comedy history. That night, “Saturday Night Live” paid tribute to Blue Oyster Cult’s 1976 jam “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” and one iconic bit of percussion.

The cowbell.

The hit song, a latter-day bit of psychedelia, infamously had a repeated cowbell on the track. In the sketch, which of course anyone reading this has seen, Christopher Walken‘s supposedly legendary producer “Bruce Dickerson” keeps beseeching cowbell player Gene Frenkle (Will Ferrell, in a too-tight shirt) to play more emphatically: “I gotta a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.”

In Peacock’s “SNL 50: Beyond Saturday Night” docuseries (via the New York Post), Ferrell, who wrote the “More Cowbell” sketch, opens up about how much Walken has come to resent the ubiquity of it. It all came out when Ferrell visited Walken when the actor was appearing in Martin McDonagh’s “A Behanding in Spokane” on Broadway in 2010.

“I went to see [Walken] backstage, and he’s like, ‘You know, you’ve ruined my life… every show, people bring cowbells for the curtain call and bang them,” Ferrell said. “It’s quite disconcerting.'”

For what it’s worth, Walken did not appear in the installment of “SNL 50: Beyond Saturday Night” focused on “More Cowbell.” But he has separately said, “I don’t understand why it follows me around like it does…. It’s kind of run its course.”

Jimmy Fallon, who, bearded and spaced out played one of the Oyster Cult band members, elaborated that the extremity of the sketch was really pushed in the live, on-air performance far beyond anything they had attempted in the dress rehearsal. “[Walken] upped his game,” Fallon added. “He was almost doing an impersonation of Christopher Walken. He was talking like how no human being would talk, ever.” 

For Ferrell, the sketch emerged organically from ruminations he’d had since the song came out. “I had the thought even as a kid, ‘What is the life of the guy playing the cowbell?’ I guess that was germinating for decades in my head.” 

As far as the original track is concerned, there are conflicting accounts of who actually played the cowbell, which was overdubbed into the recording. At least two members of the band, as well as the producer David Lucas, claim that they played it. But lead guitarist and band co-founder Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser is a fan of “More Cowbell.”

“We all thought it was phenomenal,” Roeser told the Washington Post in 2005. “We’re huge Christopher Walken fans. I’ve probably seen it 20 times and I’m still not tired of it.”