The members of Golden Earring are helping raise money for the ALS Foundation of the Netherlands

[highplainsdem]

As I mentioned in my thread for George Kooymans' birthday a week ago

https://democraticunderground.com/103471740

George -- their founder, songwriter and lead guitarist -- was diagnosed with ALS a little over a year ago.

Here's an article, in Dutch, about an auction for the ALS Foundation starting in hours and running a week -- use Google Translate to get their English version of the page:

https://www.soundz.nl/gesigneerde-golden-earring-portretten-onder-de-hamer-opbrengst-voor-als

I'm sure this auction will be well out of my price range, but thought I'd mention it here in case anyone reading this, or any friends of theirs who are Golden Earring fans, might be interested, especially since the auction proceeds will go for such a good cause.

That article also has a fairly recent photo of George. I don't recall seeing any other photos of him the last couple of years, and I was glad to see he's looking well there still, despite the diagnosis. ALS can progress at different rates, and the only person I've known who developed ALS, an online friend I corresponded with for several months in the 1980s, lived only a couple of years after the diagnosis, suffering a really steep decline though he was only in his late 40s when diagnosed.

I hope that with enough funding -- and luck -- a cure for the disease can be found soon. It's such a cruel disease. My friend's work had included coaching boys' basketball, and he continued to coach for a while from a wheelchair but then lost the ability to speak. George Kooymans managed to found a band that had worldwide success and stayed together for 60 years and was still creating new music, with no plans to retire until he was diagnosed with ALS. I can't imagine what it must be like to have been able to play guitar that well, then start to lose that ability.

So I hope this auction raises a lot of money.


I'd been checking online to see if George's birthday, which last year was celebrated with radio stations and church bells all over the Netherlands playing "Radar Love," would have any similar events this year. As far as I can tell there weren't any.

But the YouTube channel for the Dutch TV show TopPop did post a 1985 video of the band performing "Twilight Zone" -- one of the songs where George takes the lead vocal most of the time, and one of his solo compositions:

[summer_in_TX]

1. I blame them for my hearing loss.

They opened for Procul Harem at the Houston Astrodome. They were so loud that having my fingers embedded in my ears

Eventually I abandoned my boyfriend and found a bathroom to hangout in until it was safe.

[highplainsdem]

2. I'm so sorry. A lot of rock music fans, and musicians (including one of my brothers), lost

Last edited Sat Mar 19, 2022, 11:19 AM - Edit history (1)

some hearing due to music that was way too loud.

But in the case of the concert you saw with Golden Earring and Procol Harum, part of the problem might have been an audience that was too small for the venue, which would have made the sound problem worse.

I did some googling, couldn't find anything about Procol Harum and Golden Earring ever being at the Astrodome, but did find a number of websites about their concert at the Houston Coliseum in July of 1974 (so I'm guessing that's the one you mean), when both Golden Earring and Poco opened for Procol Harum, but the audience was surprisingly small.

The fewer people in any enclosed space, the louder sounds will be. That's because the human body absorbs sound, dampening the sound, lowering the reverb volume. So what might have been a tolerable volume if the Coliseum was packed was much too loud with only a fraction of the possible audience there.

Poco and Procol Harum would have had time to make adjustments after Golden Earring opened the concert. But apparently even Procol Harum hadn't been able to adjust enough, since one review mentioned the drums drowning out everything else. From what I understand, bass and drums would have been particularly loud without enough people in a large enclosed venue.

I looked for but didn't find any review of that concert mentioning Golden Earring being too loud (didn't find any, but I found only three reviews of that 1974 concert). I also did some quick googling and found a few pages on various sites where fans mentioned them as the loudest concert they could recall, at other venues, but a lot of other bands got more mentions, and when I looked for lists of "loudest bands" and "loudest concerts" they didn't show up on any of those.

But that night at the Coliseum was unfortunate in terms of acoustics.

Here are links to the three concert reviews I could find, transcribed on Procol Harum's website. The headline for the first revew was Poco, Earring Little Help: Procol Harum Battles Cavernous Coliseum and the second review mentions the "thunderous" drums that drowned out everyone else in the band:

https://procolharum.com/ph-houston_740703_b.htm

https://procolharum.com/ph-houston_740703-c.htm

https://procolharum.com/ph-houston_740703.htm


Editing to add, re what the first review there said about how the audience in the Coliseum that night could "almost" have filled the adjacent Music Hall -- I just checked Wikipedia and the Music Hall was less than a quarter the size of the Coliseum. So the Coliseum was 80% empty, which would have meant much more reverb volume than if the concert had sold out.

[summer_in_TX]

3. That's right, I'd forgotten about it being in the Houston Coliseum

And I forgot Poco played too. Can’t remember if I got out of the bathroom in time to hear them.

You’re right about small crowd size for the venue, but I didn’t put that together with the pain I experienced from the volume. Very interesting!

Thank you!

[highplainsdem]

4. You're welcome! And again, I'm very sorry you suffered that hearing loss.

[summer_in_TX]

5. Thank you!

It could be worse. I'm just at the point of needing to get my hearing assessed.

But for the many years I taught in classrooms with a lot of voices, some rooms with poor acoustics, it was noticeable how often I mistook what someone said.