Golden Earring, bluesier than usual and with (and without) an extra guitarist - Leather [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Unlike some of my other favorite bands, Golden Earring didn't start with blues rock, but this song from the late '70s shows they could manage it as well as they managed hard rock, progressive rock, and pop-rock.

The extra guitarist is the brilliant Dutch guitarist Eelco Gelling, who had recorded with the band earlier, adding slide guitar to "Radar Love" on their classic Moontan album. He joined the band for a couple of years in the late '70s, as keyboardist Robert Jan Stips was with GE at times.

They were doing this song live by 1977, but didn't record it till 1978, and they continued adding it to their setlist at times for years, though the album it was on wasn't very successful, even in the Netherlands, by their usual standards there. They'd turned to Jimmy Iovine to produce the album, and it ended up being the most expensive album they'd ever recorded, but Iovine was wrong for their sound, and they went back to producing their own albums most of the time.

AllMusic sometimes gets stuff really wrong, but I think they were right with these comments on the album:

https://www.allmusic.com/album/grab-it-for-a-second-mw0000462439

On Grab It for a Second, Golden Earring continued in the straightforward hard rock direction they started with 1977's Contraband. They also went for a more radio-friendly sound by teaming up with producer Jimmy Iovine, who polished their sound to a new level of slickness and also fleshed out the group's sound with session musicians like percussionist Jimmy Maelen. The result is an album that rocks hard, but loses sight of the band's personality. ... The one rocker that stands out from this pack is "Leather," a cheeky ode to sadomasochism built on a distinctive and powerful dual-guitar riff.

About those lyrics...that was Barry Hay taking the band in the wrong direction, something he did again and again, trying to be outrageous with lyrics and album titles and artwork. Even getting censored/banned didn't seem to make Barry rethink what he was doing. And although guitarist George Kooymans, who wrote almost all the band's music and wrote some of their lyrics ("Twilight Zone," IMO their best song ever, was George's work alone), is considered by many including journalists to be the leader of the band, he always rejected that label and said they didn't have a leader, that they all just had particular roles in the band. Barry was the best singer they'd ever had, and maybe George valued that enough to ignore Barry's bad choices getting them in commercial trouble sometimes.

So the best song on that album, the one that should have been the single, had lyrics that weren't exactly radio-friendly. Sigh.

I still like the song, especially the 7-minute performance at a concert in August of 1977. The guys were enjoying the song a lot, and even George and Rinus (Gerritsen, the bass player) looked happier than usual. (Eelco Gelling seems off in his own world, but that's great slide guitar.) So that's the first video below. The second one is audio only, the 5-minute studio version. From what I've read online, a lot of GE fans don't care for the studio version, much prefer the live versions. The third video is from the German TV show RockPalast in 1982, years after Gelling had left, but with George's great guitar work showing they really hadn't needed Gelling anyway.