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Letter of Recommendation

Letter of Recommendation: Egg Shakers

Playing the egg shaker isn’t about glory; it’s about connection.Credit...Andrew B. Myers for The New York Times. Prop stylist: Randi Brookman Harris.

We give babies rattles because babies understand abandon, because they’re not too proud or complicated yet to shake those rattles hard and feel free. I’m no baby; I’m a man, with two small children of my own. But last fall, I got an egg shaker, and I’ve enjoyed putting on records and playing egg shaker along with them ever since. It’s an outlet, a release — like air guitar, but with one key difference. I am making noise.

You’ve seen egg shakers before. They’re small, hand-held percussion instruments: ovules of hard plastic or wood filled with mysterious pellets (‘‘nontoxic steel shot,’’ says the manufacturer of mine) that clatter around inside. As a designed object, I think, the egg shaker is underappreciated. In your hand, it has the sleek, inevitable feel of an Apple product; it’s like an analog, Paleolithic iPod with unlimited music inside.

There don’t appear to be any obvious, landmark egg-shaker performances in the annals of rock ’n’ roll — nothing like that ‘‘Sunshine of Your Love’’ riff, which all teenage guitarists learn, or even ‘‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,’’ which I imagine is the go-to track for beginning cowbellers. One drummer I asked could not think of a single record with a standout egg-shaker performance, even after several days of mulling it over; all that came to mind, he confessed, was some locally famous figure in the Eugene, Ore., music scene during the ’90s, who would turn up at shows with glitter all over his face, playing an egg shaker loudly in the crowd. Others mentioned Santana’s ‘‘Oye Como Va.’’ Surely there’s an egg shaker in there, they said. But it’s hard to pick out from all the other percussion, like a handful of sand blowing around a beach. Another musician pointed me to Steely Dan’s ‘‘Do It Again,’’ but it turned out to be a pair of maracas, which I consider less refined: two ungainly red tubes of Oscar Mayer, compared with the egg shaker’s fine charcuterie.

My favorite album to play egg shaker to is the Band’s ‘‘Live at the Academy of Music, 1971.’’ It’s this particular style of underproduced, raggedy rock that seems to work best: music that feels as if it may tear away from the metronome at any minute — thus leaving me a nice, fat space in the rhythm to slide in with my egg shaker and really make a difference. That’s the whole joy of playing egg shaker, after all: being able to turn my head and imagine I’m onstage, giving one of those stink-faced, digging-it nods to the drummer. It’s a modest rock-star fantasy — not about glory, but about connectedness; the feeling of making a small but constant contribution to the machinery of a larger whole.

This hit home when, recently, I tried playing egg shaker to the latest Taylor Swift album. It was very unsatisfying. The tracks were all so perfectly textured and tightly fused together; all I could do was play on top of the music, instead of inside it. On the other hand, get a load of the Band, with their fury of twang and jangle and notes splattering out of a Wurlitzer like tracers of lard from a hot pan — all that noise careening precariously around the downbeat, like a pub full of drunks slurring half-remembered lines of iambic pentameter. Plenty of room for me and my egg shaker — not a chance to pilot the plane through that turbulence, or even co-pilot it, but just to be one whirring turbine blade in an engine somewhere on the wing.

‘‘Live at the Academy of Music, 1971’’ is full of good egg-shaker opportunities: ‘‘The Shape I’m In,’’ ‘‘This Wheel’s on Fire,’’ ‘‘Stage Fright.’’ In fact, it was while playing egg shaker to ‘‘Stage Fright’’ in my kitchen one night last winter that something really clicked for me. It was the kind of ordinary evening that, in five or 10 years, when my kids are older and have less time for me, I expect to look back on warmly but that, at the time, was tinged with a kind of low-grade loneliness. As I remember it, my wife was working late and I’d just given my daughters their dinner. They were happily eating it, sort of, and I was standing by the stove, playing a little egg shaker.

I reached another level with the egg shaker that night — not in my technical proficiency but in terms of the intensity of my connection with the instrument. It was during the last half of the song, when everyone in the Band is playing as hard as they can, seemingly at the feverish edge of their abilities. All that sound was tumbling down on me, and my little egg shaker like a collapsing building, except, floating above it, the wholesome, perfectly enunciated and occasionally close-to-breaking voice of the bassist, Rick Danko — an Ontario farm boy turned rock star, I later read, who was only allowed to sing lead occasionally and wasn’t exactly up to the task (‘‘a nervous, tremulous voice’’ was how one critic described it). And here’s what he was singing: ‘‘See the man with the stage fright/Just standing up there to give it all his might/And he got caught in the spotlight/But when we get to the end/He wants to start all over again.’’

That is, he was singing about the very kind of trying that his warbling voice embodied, about suppressing the terror you feel when faced with responsibilities you can’t entirely fathom and trying to stay steady, steady enough that you might even wind up enjoying that role. It was all happening in my kitchen — all that sound — and I was there, somewhere, too, shaking in the corner by the stove: an inconspicuous center that, by shaking, just might hold.

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of ‘‘Wild Ones’’ and ‘‘American Hippopotamus.’’

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Egg Shakers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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