I would appreciate some of DU's good vibes or

[highplainsdem]

132. There was a great interview with Boudewijn de Groot mentioning George in a

Belgian newspaper a couple of weeks ago, and that made me aware how close their friendship has been.

https://nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20230919_95634751
Archive page at https://archive.ph/IozBZ

It's a lovely, rambling interview done by a longtime fan of Boudewijn's who's also a journalist, and it must have been a fun interview to do. Boudewijn, who's 79, arrived at a terrace (cafe, I think) in Haarlem in the Netherlands, dressed in a floral shirt and salmon-colored shorts, in a great mood and with his eyes sparkling after what's described as a "short" bike ride from Heemstede (which is at least a few miles away, possibly several miles depending on location in each town, and only in the Netherlands, where almost everyone cycles, would this be considered a short bike ride, or be a likely way for a legendary pop and folk star who's nearly 80 to arrive for an interview - arriving exactly on time, which is also very Dutch).

The focus of the interview was a new 528-page book with Boudewijn commenting on every song he's recorded or collaborated on during his very long career. I don't think it's available in English, but wish it were, since it would be a great read.

Boudewijn did a lot of reminiscing during the interview, including about Antwerp, with the Belgian journalist asking him about the times he'd been there. And that involved not just a lot of shows he did there - including one in the late Sixties when he was so stoned he couldn't remember the lyrics to his own songs beyond the first lines, so he finally told the audience he couldn't do it and just left and the furious organizer refused to pay him - but longer stays.

I hear from your Antwerp contemporaries that in the 1960s things were not nearly as fast as in Amsterdam, for example. Can you compare the two?

Amsterdam came pretty close to what happened in San Francisco. Antwerp and Ghent less so. That had a lot to do with the way the BOB (Special Investigation Brigade, ed.) acted with you. In Amsterdam we were occasionally approached by police officers, but everything was much more pleasant. For example, the Vondelpark was a tolerance zone, where you could smoke cannabis without any problems. You never saw police in tents like Paradiso or Fantasia either. While in Antwerp you rarely saw hippies gathering together on the streets, perhaps for fear of being arrested. They mainly sat in their bars, often near Conscienceplein. By the way, one of those cafes was called De Kroeg. I remember that place well, because I often went there to play shuffleboard. That was extremely popular there. You regularly had to wait your turn before you could get to work.

-snip-

You even lived in Antwerp for a while.

Yes, a few months with Evelien, my girlfriend at the time. That was in the Lange Altaarstraat. The house actually belonged to a friend of Evelien, an artist. He made assemblages on canvas with parts of clothesless toy dolls. The first day we walked around there, we saw these creepy works of art hanging everywhere. But then we hadn't been to that one room yet, where there were boxes full of doll parts. That was a really scary experience. I referred to Evelien in the song It's raining in Antwerp, on Achter glas. When I wrote that song, I was staying at the apartment of George Kooymans (from Golden Earring and Strange Kostgangers, ed.) on the Waalsekaai. On a rainy day I looked out over the city and immediately thought of the song Il pleut sur Nantes by Barbara. I then sat down and wrote the text in one go. That's how it usually happens, and that's how it should be with me. Only with very intimate songs, such as Anamorphosis about my father, does it become a matter of toiling and grinding. It was certainly wonderful living in Antwerp during those months. A carefree life of smoking weed and playing shuffleboard.

Unfortunately the article doesn't say exactly when Boudewijn was staying in George's apartment in Antwerp. But that song, Het Regent In Antwerpen, is on Boudewijn's album Achter Glas (Behind Glass), which was released in April 2015. But all I could learn from.reading the Dutch Wikipedia page on the album was that Boudewijn had written the songs for it over a period of several years.

Even if it was written only months before the album's release, though, it still shows George and Boudewijn were good enough friends even before they formed Vreemde Kostgangers, their supergroup trio with Henny Vrienten, that George was happy to let Boudewijn stay at his Antwerp apartment.

I hadn't even known George had an apartment in Antwerp - which is less than an hour by car from his country estate in Belgium, between Rijkevorsel and the Dutch border - though I had read he always had an apartment in the Netherlands.

Here's that lovely song: