Golden Earring

“Radar Love” is one of those hits that are both a blessing and a curse for any band with progressive ambitions. It is right up there with the best American and British classic rock songs of the Seventies and probably the best known song of Golden Earring; probably also the best known, most famous Dutch rock band ever.   

“Radar Love” broke the band in the USA, and internationally, in a big way and, on radio airplay alone, must be a good little earner for the songwriters. On the other hand it is probably the only Golden Earring tune most casual fans know and expect to hear at every gig.  It is also not even very typical of their general style of progressive hard rock. In the latter vein “Ce Soir (Kill Me),” for example, ranks as every bit as powerful and memorable.

The “best of” collection Earring’s Believing (1976) was my introduction to a representative selection of songs from the albums Eight Miles High (1969) to To The Hilt (1976.) The tunes are mostly progressive hard rock songs that, to my mind, would put Golden Earing in the same kind of category as Blue Oyster Cult of being a heavy band that was not just dumb heavy metal at all but put a premium on writing good, intelligent songs.

I wanted Earring’s Believing primarily because it had “Radar Love” but that was not the only Earring tune I knew at the time. In the early Seventies I had heard a couple of Earring tracks on the Saturday late night progressive rock show presented on the English Service of the SABC. The particular Golden Earring song that had caught my ear was “The Road Swallowed Her Name” with the opening line ‘Sitting down here and feeling annoyed…’ the song title and opening line were both equally off-kilter brilliant and strange, just what one would expect of a European rock band.  I also think I’d heard “She Flies On Strange Things” or perhaps “I’m Gonna Send My Pigeons To The Sky.”  All of these songs fall into the category of what counted as progressive rock in those days, or sounded like it, and this must have been why the SABC radio host, who was well into Genesis, Yes, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Airto Moreira, and others of that ilk, was allowed to play rock. It was not simply mindless pop but music of serious artistic intent and integrity with a premium placed on musicianship of the highest standard. I was just a kid at the time and listened to the radio show because it was real, and interesting, alternative, to the typical contemporary pop music I heard on Springbok Radio  or Radio Good Hope.

Earring’s Believing did not have “The Road Swallowed Her Name” but it did have plenty of other good songs I had not heard before, like “Landing,”  “All Day Watcher,” “Candy’s Going Bad,” “Sleepwalking” and “Tons of Time.” There was also the oddity of a pop narrative called “Buddy Joe” that (retrospectively) very much sounds like the inspiration for the Cape Town band McCully Workshop’s hit “The Buccaneer.”

The collection of songs emphasized that the Dutch had a quirky sense of what big rock should sound like, slightly odd English-as-second-language but overall rocked pretty hard.

Matters rested there. I never bought another Golden Earring record for many years. The two albums I knew well, at least from seeing the album covers in my local record store, were Eight Miles High and Moontan, from which “Radar Love” was pulled as hit single. I never bought the records because it seemed like a risky venture on a band I did not know relay well and also because the semi-naked figure of an exotic dancer on the Moontan cover would not have been welcome in my household, if I could have plucked up the courage to buy the thing.

It was probably only in the mid-Eighties, after 1983, that I found the 1970 album Golden Earring (apparently also known as Wall of Dolls from the cover photograph of the otherwise untitled album where the band members posed against a background of a wall full of dolls) in some discount bin.  I bought it for that reason, and because “I’m Gonna Send My Pigeons To The Sky” was on it. Golden Earring shows off the band in its early progressive phase with deeply philosophical lyrics commenting on the human condition.

From the late Seventies and into the Eighties Golden Earring shifted gear to become a typical, or so I was led to believe by record reviews, big rock act of the era, far removed from the quirky progressive style of the Seventies and I was under the impression that Golden Earing had decided, perhaps influenced by the prospects of continuing career in the USA, to cast their lot with the likes of Def Leppard, Foreigner, Asia, Europe, and other such MOR acts. Since I was not at all interested in the other bands this also suggested that I would not want to spend money on contemporary Golden Earring albums and I can say for the record that I have almost no idea of what any of these later records sound like and I pretty much still have no compelling reason to investigate them.

In the early years of the 21st century I found, shortly after each other, CDs of the USA version of Moontan, with a slightly different track listing and with a completely different, sanitized, cover than the original, UK and European version I was familiar with, and a compilation of well-known, early Earring tracks.  This compilation did not replicate Earring’s Believing and did not have “The Road Swallowed Her Name” either.

Fast track about 10 years to April 2015 when I found some video clips of Golden Earring shows from 1975 (Winterland, San Francisco), 1982 (RockPalast) and 2007, that piqued my interest in the band’s back catalogue from the era the tracks on Earring’s Believing were culled. Pretty much the entire Golden Earring catalogue is available on iTunes and one of the things I did was simply to look for the songs I remembered from Earring’s Believing and eventually buying them individually for a playlist I called “Earing’s Believing.”

My playlist did not follow the set list of the record I was trying to replicate and included “The Road Swallowed Her Name,” which was not on the record.  I then also googled the actual Earring’s Believing album, that I had thought was not available as a CD, and was not on iTunes, and found a reference to it as well as a track listing.  My memory had served me well, though this official track listing refers to a song *”God Bless The Day”), by the earlier version of the band, called the Golden Earrings, that I did not buy and do not really recollect from the record either though I suppose it was on it. Perhaps I should see if I can find it, and buy it too for inclusion on the playlist, for reasons of absolute authenticity.

 Moontan, the parent album of “Radar Love,”” also has “Candy’s Going Bad” but is otherwise firmly fixed in that progressive hard rock pattern with two tracks exceeding 9 minutes, two tracks exceeding 6 minutes and the remaining 2 tracks each longer than 4 minutes. The mixture of instrumental inventiveness and dexterity, solid tunes and masterful vocals serve to make the album seem shorter than it is. The songs are hook driven and rocking. Moontan deserves a reputation as a classic rock album of the mid-Seventies.

I’ve now also watched a documentary made by a Dutch filmmaker, probably in 1969 and during the time the band was recording the tracks for Eight Miles High, that shows off Golden Earring as a bunch of hippie rockers with ambitions to be successful beyond their homeland. George Kooymans seems to be forever playing guitar and singing songs at every opportunity and is the most articulate member of the band, albeit in Dutch. There is a long section showing the band setting up for a gig in a tent somewhere, with Barry Hay (vocalist and flautist) and Kooymans jamming on flute and acoustic guitar respectively on the banks of a narrow canal and then the band performing to an enthusiastic audience with plenty of freeform jamming. None of the tunes, except for the title track of the album, are familiar to me.  I suppose much of the type of footage would have been typical of any band of the era but the live footage in particular gives one an insight on how rock music was approached back then when the rigid divide between pop; and rock was still of recent invention and the role of tock musician as artist deserving of serous attention and special treatment was still quite novel. Rock was a young man’s game and, as the cliché had it, none of them expected to make thirty or forty years’ worth of career out of it.

Apparently Golden Earring, still with the four guys who made Moontan, is very active and plays about 200 gigs a year, mostly in Europe and possibly on the very lucrative classic rock circuit in the USA.  And each night the audience wants to he4ar “Radar Love.”

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was probably not the first “White” American blues band though I do not really know of anyone else that could be classified as their contemporary back in the mid-Sixties. The Blues Project had elements of blues but also elements of psychedelia and pop. There was The Rising Sons featuring Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, but it was never a “name band” in the way the Paul Butterfield band was. There were many White blues musicians, of course, although most of them laboured in obscurity until the blues informed the late Sixties and many of the new generation of San Francisco bands. There simply was no blues band as well known and influential as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. It was also one of the first integrated bands of its time, with a Black bassist and a Black drummer to provide the engine room backbeat that is so important to making the blues swing and not plod. The tow lead instrumentalists were Butterfield on harp and vocals and the quite astonishingly talented and passionate Michael Bloomfield on lead guitar. Elvin Bishop played second guitar and Mark Naftalin played keyboards.

The band was good but at the time Bloomfield was the breakout star and all-round blues guitar genius at a time when blues guitarists were just starting to make names for themselves as virtuosos and not merely as part of the ensemble. That Bloomfield was damn good is indisputable.  Both Bloomfield and Eric Clapton were the consummate sidemen to older Black bluesmen on whose records they played.

My introduction to Bloomfield was as backing musician for Bob Dylan on “Like A Rolling Stone,” and for a number of other blues artists. I was suitably impressed. Then I bought The Band Kept Playing, the reunited Electric Flag’s album from 1974, and was still impressed with Bloomfield’s playing though he was not as central as he might have been. At the very least Bloomfield was the one highlight of an otherwise pretty mediocre album Much later I bought the CD of East-West (1966), the second album by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which is particularly important for Bloomfield’s “epochal” instrumental title track that combined blues with Eastern raga modes.

It was many years before I actually bought The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (1965) album and, in quick succession, The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw (1967), the third album, recorded without Michael Bloomfield and the original rhythm section, and with Elvin Bishop in ascension as lead guitarist.

It is quite instructive to listen to the debut and third albums back to back as it gives one a good idea of the progression in blues the band made. On the debut Bloomfield is the lead guitarist; on the third album it is Elvin Bishop, who is good and quite tasteful but not with the same brilliance as Bloomfield. Also, the first band was a basic Southside of Chicago ensemble and by the third record a three-piece horn section has been added, which gives more of e Westside or even Memphis sound. Not quite the big band riffing of early BB King or T-Bone Walker but not far off. There is also a difference in the rhythm section that makes this album much more of a soul blues album than the hard blues of the debut.

The debut album is tough blues with the exciting, incisive guitar work of Bloomfield as the shining star of the show although Butterfield’s harp virtuosity is not far behind. By the third album the sound is mellower, soul-inflected and bluesy rather than hard blues.

Butterfield had not gone progressive yet.  Like John Mayall he moved away from the blues into a jazzier field, as if jazz is the more demanding, challenging and more artistic music, whereas it is trite that blues is the wellspring of jazz as much as it is the bedrock of so much rock music.

After several back to back comparative listens, I must admit that Pigboy Crabshaw, although different in sound, is by no means a distant second to the debut album. The band is on top of its game on both albums and both Butterfield and Bishop play superbly.

Until his death in 1980 Michael Bloomfield followed a tortuous and obscure path for the most part once he left Paul Butterfield, and either stuck to solo gig or got roped in, no doubt persuaded by big money, in all manner of superstar projects and reunions which he enlivened with his stellar guitar playing but probably was never wholly committed to. Elvin Bishop had a kind of southern funk career in the Seventies, with a hit or two, and then settled into the life of a blues elder. Paul Butterfield followed a long career path with many diversions until he, too died and is probably rated as one of the best blues harp players of his generation, and as much a populariser of blues to White American audiences as John Mayall as to white British audi3nces, with many stellar sidemen passing through his bands.

I love the blues and if my focus has generally been on the Southside downhome electric style of the Fifties, I am also keen on the mid- to late Sixties’ “modern” version of the genre of the younger generation of bluesman (by now very much the older generation) who absorbed contemporary soul and pop influences along with the ancient tropes. Paul Butterfield Blues Band fits into this period and notion and is of a piece with the Black blues scene albeit that, being a (mostly) White band it automatically appealed to the broader White audience to which so many of the older Black guys became heroes when the Black audience was moving away from blues to soul and funk, feeling that blues was too primitive and old-fashioned for them.  Musicians like Butterfield and Bloomfield brought attention to blues, preserved the old traditions but also pushed blues forward and innovated, in a way that had always been part of the folk process of blues.  For this the Paul Butterfield Blues Band should be lauded.  They also released some really good albums that are well worth listening to if you are a blues aficionado.

Wattstax

Wattstax is a 1973 documentary about the concert of the same name that took place in the Los Angeles Coliseum in August 1972 to commemorate the Watts riots of 1966 that served to give White American society notice that the Blacks were not the contented, happy-go-lucky folk of White imagination.

Quite a lot of the dialogue in the movie is about the  position of Black people in American society after those riots, which were replicated in other parts of the US such as Detroit, and the conclusion is that some things have improved, some have degenerated and some have stayed the same. 

Stax Records, the premier independent soul music label of the Sixties and early Seventies, obviously thought the riots worth celebrating anyhow, even if it were only a publicity stunt for its artists.

I remember seeing the double album of music from the event at Sygma Records and always kind of yearned to own it, though my main interest was in the inclusion of Albert King amongst the artists who performed and not so much the other acts who were only names to me. It seems that the acts that played at the event were those Stax acts that had hits at the time, hence the flavour of the festival as one big PR exercise, despite the presence of the Reverend Jesse Jackson as MC.

I have now watched the movie and I must say I am not unhappy anymore that I never owned the album of the event because by and large the brand of Seventies pop soul funk on display ain’t my cup of tea, smacking too much of major show business enterprise and not so much of the deep soul grit of the Sixties soul acts on the Stax label. Perhaps it is a sign of the increasing sophistication of the genre or just the overwhelming pop ambition of the label that had to have commercial success in order to survive, but the music in the movie is curiously flat and seems to lack energy.

There are parallels to the Woodstock movie though Woodstock celebrated White counter culture and not a race riot. Woodstock took place in the verdant countryside and Wattstax took place in an urban environment, which is probably a pretty apt comparison of the diverging worldviews of the respective groups.

One somewhat sardonically amusing similarity is the contrasting scenes of stage construction. In the Woodstock movie a team of hippie carpenters erect a massive wooden stage in the bucolic scenic beauty of upstate New York. In Wattstax, White, longhaired construction workers erect scaffolding for the stage in the middle of a football field.

The most obvious difference is that there are no hippies and no White hip, groovy cultural reference in Watts. Musical performances are separated by scenes of mostly a group of Black guys, and some women, discussing the experiences of their life and some scenes of a Richard Pryor routine on his experiences of Black life. Basically, being Black in the USA is not a particularly wonderful experience if you are on the wrong side of White ire.  Then, also, the Black males are kind of bragging on themselves and the Black women, although one or two praise Black men, have a much more cynical attitude towards their men than the men would appreciate.

None of this is new to me now; I’ve read enough about the Black experience in the USA and have seen enough documentary material that echoes and repeats the same kind of things. In a way these opinions almost seem scripted, as if the speakers are acting out a stereotype of Black male views, at least from that time.  Another example of this is the various views on blues. When blues are defined, the definition is the over familiar one. The young dudes are not interested in the blues anymore; the older men still have a fondness for the music of their youth.

The most interesting and intriguing aspect of the movie, for me anyhow, and in the light of watching quite a bit of documentary material of Black cultural life in the late Sixties and early Seventies, is of the fashions in clothes and hairstyles prevailing at the time. Forty years later Black, or now African-American, fashion has a completely different look than the old-school dandyism and Afri-centric looks of the time. The men wear big hats, and some of those hats are seriously big, and flared trousers, sleeveless vests, polo necks, suede jackets, Africanised loose coats, and so on. The hair is big, majorly big. The “natural,” more commonly known as the Afro, is the reigning style of the young and hip. It may be that the filmmaker selected as many Afro wearing interviewees as possible, but ii is palpably, abundantly clear that the Afro was a hairstyle of choice amongst the younger generation where the older generation stuck with the familiar derivations on the “process” and similar. I must confess, especially on young beautiful Black women, that the Afro is a sexy style,  that huge round bush of hair that much have been a bitch to style in the mornings after you got out of bed. I would imagine that the African nature of the style was as mythical as many of the Black yearnings for the home continent where Blacks may have been free but not necessarily prosperous, but the visual impact of it particularly in the street scenes of Watts, does give the otherworldly effect, a differentiation from White society, that was intended by the style and the general ;philosophy and ideology of Africanistion that emerged after the Watts riots with Black power and increasing awareness of African-Americans as a people with a history and a culture that went far beyond the distorted White imposed culture of slavery days.

The movie concentrates on the street life of Watts and for this reason it seems that it was not a very upmarket neighbourhood, or even simply middle class. The streets look congested, the building somewhat faded away and dilapidated.  Watts is a place time forgot and this is why the riots happened and seven years later it does indeed seem  that not much has changed. The various speakers, many of whom hang out in a barbershop, are not identified and one does not know what they do for a living; for all the viewer knows, these articulate people are artists in their own right or maybe they live on welfare.  They talk street. They must be from the street.  

As a primer on Black consciousness and expression in Watts in 1972 the movie succeeds to a degree. As a documentary of the music, it does not have much power. Most of the acts get one tune apiece. Only the Staple Singers, Rufus Thomas and Isaac Hayes, the headliner of the event, are afforded more than that  single solitary song in the movie. This is why there is little sense of a lively, vibrant and exciting musical celebration. The emphasis seems to be on the narrations of Black experience  rather than the music. The blues is discussed a little bit but otherwise the talking heads have no comments on the artists appearing at the Stax event or even the event itself, as if the interviews were conducted for a different reason altogether.

I am satisfied that I’ve seen the movie at last. Unlike Woodstock, though, Wattstax is not a movie I’ll watch over and over again. There is too little music and the non-musical interludes are not interesting enough to bear repeating. Wattstax is a sociological and ethnological record of a time and a place and is invaluable for that. It can be research material for a treatise on African-American thought and discourse of the times and, perhaps in a peripheral way, be s frozen moment in time of Black popular music. It is not very entertaining at all and for a movie celebrating soul music, that is a big let down and a serious flaw.

The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground has been called the most influential band of the last 50 years, more so than the Beatles or Rolling Stones who caused a bit of a rock revolution in the United States. The conventional wisdom is that very few people paid attention to the Velvet Underground albums when they were released and yet just about everyone of those who did pay attention somehow formed a band or became part of a band that had  ingested and digested the influences of this band, and took its lessons further into punk, post  punk and beyond.  Along with the MC5 and The stooges,  The Velvet Underground was namedropped as a hug, seminal and significant influence on many of the punks, post punks and New Wave musicians of the UK punk revolution that took flight in 1976.

Initially the Velvet Underground moved within the sphere  of influence  of Andy Warhol and the New York art crowd and would as such probably have been no more than a high art project rather than a proper pop group. If one listens to songs like "Femme Fatale", "There She Goes" and "All Tomorrow's Parties" there seems to have been no reason, with some record company support and radio airplay, why any or all of these tunes would not have been major pop hits, currently to be found on any number of anthologies of hits from the Sixties rather than languishing in the comparative obscurity of cult affection. These songs are from the debut album and the rest of the songs are experimental, with "Waiting for the Man" and "Heroin" being overtly about drugs and "Venus in Furs" being about off-kilter sexuality. not necessarily a comfortable mix on a pop-album and this may be why the band did not get the mainstream attention and exposure it surely deserved. I would imagine that Lou Reed, at the very least, was seriously interested in making it big in the world of popular entertainment. He had, after all started his career in music as staff writer for a minor New York rock and roll label.

John Cale was the avant garde, classically trained, experimental spirit of the group, as counterfoil to Reed's pop instincts and this is perhaps why the first album juxtaposes the pop songs with the noise tunes such as "Black Angel's Death Song" and  "European Son" and the insistent thrash riff of "Waiting for the Man." One can imagine the Velvet Underground providing the soundtrack for "art" movies or art happenings and poetry readings. A stage is a stage and a gig is a gig and for the Velvet Underground the Warhol connection was worth the publicity but may have been the death knell as well give the relative obscurity of the Warhol entourage and its effect on mainstream art in the Sixties because mainstream culture did not think of Warhol as much more than a joke and this would not have been helpful for a sustainable career in music. Rock critics liked the Velvets and Lou Reed could manage to parlay this approval it to a solo career that was equally storied and approved by the scene makers and taste makers of the significant rock press.

"Black Angel's Death Song" sounds a lot like a Bob Dylan parody and "European Son" has the rave up guitar freak out that would have made it a great tune to play at Happenings and underground parties and Lou Reed speaks the lyrics in a bit of a trade mark delivery that also adumbrates the entire Lulu album he recorded with Metallica in about 2011. It is, to my mind, a weakness of the debut album that the Velvets guitar sound is just so insipid. If the band had a proper producer he might have beefed up the riffs considerably, as one can sense the mailed fist in the, um, velvet cloth of the jangly sounding performances that must have been one of the inspirations for the Eighties bands who were so much in thrall to that Velvet Underground blue print. Lou Reed should record a version of "European Son" with Metallica. That collaboration would surely highlight the power of the inherent rave up. The Velvet Underground were not so radically different from other bands around at the time, except maybe for the subject matter of the songs, and could have been much more of a proper rock band if they had turned up the amps in the studio.

It is apparent from the Velvet Underground albums that followed on the debut, the band is truly a pop band reaching towards popular acceptance and commercial success and has left the weirdness and noise behind. Most of the later great songs like "Rock and Roll," "Lisa Says" or "Sweet Jane" are remarkably quiet musically speaking with the effect of the songs being the lyrics.

Lou Reed managed to wrote songs that sometimes seem very banal in their matter of fact narratives yet hide deeper truths about the world he lived in and the demi monde of the New York of the Seventies. When one pays careful attention to what Reed says about that scene, it seems to be very similar to what I would imagine Berlin was like in the Twenties.

A lot of pop music is transparently aspirational and anodyne for that reason. The practitioners may have originated in poverty and deprivation but they have no intention of telling us about those bad times whereas Springsteen, as another example, does not necessarily share his teenage home life with us but tells us the stories of the people he knew back then and of the working class people who need championing. In his way Reed is very much the bard of the New York underbelly. The Beatles wrote beautiful but ultimately impersonal love songs. Perhaps Reed's tales are as impersonal though the characters seem a lot more real than the saccharine protagonist of Paul McCartney's best-known tunes.  

On reflection the Velvet Underground also had a great deal of influence on the jangly indie pop bands in the UK in the mid to late Eighties who made a pop sound that sometimes seemed twee beyond belief and yet often had quite strong rhythm sections to anchor the guitar filigrees and wispy tunes. In this respect  it was the quiet sound, and no so much the way the songs were played,  that these Eighties  bands adopted. Twenty years later, in the 21^st century, the highbrow garage band concept to the Velvet Underground became a major influence again. Generation after generation there will be someone, or many ones, who will rediscover the Velvet Underground and be inspired by the combination of rough, noisy guitars, pop tunes and darkly subversive lyrics.  It is a heady mixture that will continue to please and satisfy as long as rock and roll exists.