Golden Earring - The Road Swallowed Her Name (1971 studio track + live, 2007)

[highplainsdem]

Last edited Fri Aug 26, 2022, 10:50 PM - Edit history (1)

From their 1971 album, Seven Tears.

Editing to add a live performance I'd missed earlier when checking YouTube. This was from December 2007, in the Dutch town of Kerkrade. Part of the first verse is missing in this video, and the sound quality isn't the best, but I love the energy in this performance of an old song, and the audience response. And wow, that outro...

[bahboo]

1. hints of 21st Century Schizoid Man....

had never heard of this band. Would've listened back in the day...

[highplainsdem]

2. I'm guessing you're familiar with their 1973 hit "Radar Love" and their

1982 hit "Twilight Zone." But this Dutch group had a long string of hit singles and albums in Europe, especially in the Netherlands. The first version of the band started in 1961, and the lineup you see for that cover of Seven Tears was together from 1970 through 2021. They broke up early last year only because lead guitarist and founder George Kooymans had been diagnosed with ALS.

I just posted the hit single from this album in another thread here: https://democraticunderground.com/103481008 .

I've posted a lot of their music here, and I compiled a list of links a couple of weeks ago for another DUer who wouldn't have been able to search the forum for those thread titles (unfortunately only Star members can use that search feature, but Star memberships are for any size donation, and the extra search features, including the Advanced Search in the upper right corner of every page under the Google search, are really useful at times).

Here's a link to the post with that list of posts with some of Golden Earring's music:

https://democraticunderground.com/103480101#post2


Re what you said about "21st Century Schizoid Man" - I can hear those hints, too, though that hadn't occurred to me before, and I've never seen that mentioned by any Golden Earring fan discussing the album in any discussion I've run across online. Bands had so many influences then.

I ran across a web page the other day with a readers' poll done by NME (Britain's New Music Express) at the end of 1973 that had "Radar Love" as the top non-British single and Golden Earring as the most promising non-British artist. But the band's musical influences and styles were so diverse that they weren't easy to market in the US, and they didn't like doing long tours. They also got censored by MTV and weren't happy about that.

Jimi Hendrix tried to hire their bass player. The Who wanted their drummer, Cesar Zuiderwijk. All of them have had side projects with some success, and George Kooymans has helped a lot of other artists' careers with his songwriting and producing. They're so popular and respected in the Netherlands that on March 11 of last year, George's birthday, just weeks after the news about his illness and the Earring disbanding, both radio stations and church bells all over the Netherlands played "Radar Love" at the same time, at rush hour (and of course fans did, too).

[bahboo]

3. thx for all this interesting info...

not familiar with the group at all, so I'll check some of this out...

[highplainsdem]

4. You're very welcome! If you're a prog-rock fan, you might especially like

"Vanilla Queen," from their classic 1973 album Moontan (which also included "Radar Love" ):

https://www.democraticunderground.com/103467845

Live at Winterland in 1975:

[ProfessorGAC]

5. That's A Cool One

Nice, straight-ahead rocker.
He really has a good rock voice!

[highplainsdem]

6. Barry Hay was a great addition to the band. Much better than

their previous lead singer, and more of a showman. I don't think he was as good a musician as the other three (I'm counting Cesar, the drummer who joined them in 1970, a few years after Barry joined), but he didn't need to be.

Barry cowrote some of their best songs with guitarist George Kooymans, too, though he hadn't done much songwriting by the time this album came out. George had cowritten many of their early songs with bass player Rinus Gerritsen, including 1968's Miracle Mirror, their first album with Barry as lead singer. Then for a few albums George and Rinus wrote songs separately - I haven't seen anything about why they stopped writing together - with most of the tracks written by George. 15 of 19 tracks for On The Double, the other 4 written by Rinus. 3 of the 4 original tracks for Eight Miles High. And 6 of the 9 tracks for their self-titled Golden Earring album, with one song by Barry, another by Barry amd Rinus, and the first song cowritten by Barry and George, "Big Tree, Blue Sea," which they re-recorded for Moontan in 1973. This song and the other one from Seven Tears that I linked to above were written by George, along with three other tracks on the album, which also had one song written by Barry and one cowritten by Barry and Rinus. The next album, 1972's Together, had 7 songs by George and just one by Barry.

And then 1973's Moontan was ALL songs cowritten by Barry and George, except for two songs John Fenton, a British friend of theirs at Track Records, helped them write.

And after that Barry and George cowrote almost all their songs -- the main exception being "Twilight Zone," which George wrote and had originally planned to use for a solo album.


Editing after checking a website with their Dutch chart history. Their earliest singles were all cowritten by George and Rinus, then from late 1968 through late 1972, the last single before "Radar Love," all the singles had been written by George. 8 of those 9 singles written by George reached the Top 10 on the Dutch charts. And then there was that complete switch to cowriting with Barry.

[highplainsdem]

7. I've edited the OP to add a live performance from 2007.