Never underestimate the tambourine player

[Pilgrim]

Don't know where this was posted...but at least the guy has ambitions!

[Grog]

 

[doombass]

I suppose it's a birthday prank or similar but still funny. I especially like the effort to misspell the instrument in question. 

[uwe]

Start small, but think big.

[lowend1]

Eddie Brigati is putting a band together?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNJbVFW5Pw&ab_channel=TheEdSullivanShow

[uwe]

Good percussion can be the key to success.





I hear the cowbell fine (he even changes from quarter notes to eighth notes at one point) on the original track AND IT SOUNDS GREAT. Gives the track a nice chugging feel and I always identified it with a ticking clock



- in line with the reassuringly fatalist message of the song. 

[uwe]

Speaking of tambourine playing ... I love how it sets in here at 4:30 towards the end of the track and picks up in notes at 4:40, my favorite part in the whole song, small detail, great effect! 

[doombass]

Too bad they did'nt get to keep their predecessor, a master of small rhythm instuments. He kept an arsenal. Skip to 2:48 and he goes from cowbell to something I don't even know the name of. That's how Deep Purple formed you know. Rod Evans put an ad up like the one above. Too bad for them he outgrew them, adding lots more to the tambourine playing, like singing for example.

[Dave W]

Never could understand why the "more cowbell" skit was supposed to be funny. One of the dumbest SNL skits of that era.

[uwe]

On a humor level, it quickly overstayed its welcome, I agree. And it ridiculed a great song with a somber-melancholic vibe. BÖC took it in good humor though and didn't become a whining Winger complaining that Beavis & Butthead ruined their career.

Doomie, Captin Beyond always had an appetite for self-destruction AND percussion, my guess is that their initial drummer and co-mastermind Bobby Caldwell liked added percussion, but as he had to concentrate on real drums live, someone else had to do it (though the Englishman wasn't especially adept at it). By their second album, they had Guille Garcia (from an Englishman to a Cuban, definitely a rhythmic improvement) on congas/timbales/percussion (who would go on to play with Chicago)



PLUS Marty Rodriguez on drums & backing vocals (Caldwell having joined Derringer though he would return for later Captain Beyond line-ups). Captain Beyond's excellent second album Sufficiently Breathless had enough percussion on it/was rhythm-drenched enough to put any Santana record to shame:



Underrated band. I like Evans' work with them better than what he did with DP Mk I.  But a genre label like Capricorn was definitely the wrong record company for them, anybody expecting something akin to Southern Rock from this Iron Butterfly/Johnny Winter/Deep Purple spin-off, could only be confused. Thanks to Rod Evans' voice they didn't even sound American, much less Southern.

Those two Captain Beyond albums with Evans rate among the strongest and most interesting material recorded by any ex-DP while on leave from the mothership.

[lowend1]

Never could understand why the "more cowbell" skit was supposed to be funny. One of the dumbest SNL skits of that era.

The majority of SNL skits weren't/aren't funny - they rely on repetition to create a meme, essentially. Remember when people were running around yelling "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, chips - No Coke, Pepsi!"? The truly funny ones were few and far between. One of my all-time favorites:

[Dave W]

Good point. 

But there was educational content. I learned all about astronomy from Father Sarducci.

[westen44]

I thought the early stuff with Eddie Murphy on SNL was funny.  But I saw him perform in person and he wasn't funny at all.  Whatever was going on in SNL, it looks like he really needed the writers. 

[uwe]

I liked some of it.



These days of course, that skit wouldn't be allowed, cultural appropriation!

[Pilgrim]

Let's not forget SNLs intellectual peak: