RIP George Kooymans (Golden Earring)

[Thenop]

Such sad news again, passed on at 77. He suffered from ALS the last few years but was doing OK last I heard.

What a shame. I loved Golden Earring, and he is a huge part of that being the main songwriter. Everyone knows Radar Love and Twilight Zone, and those are great songs. But the deep cuts were fantastic as well. They did classic rock really well, and moved into more artsy terrority, with To the Hilt as a personal favourite album.

However, I think Mad Love's Comin' might be a top 3 Earring song for me.

His singing voice was wonderful as well, often supprting Hay in the higher regions. And every now and then he wrote a song just for himself to sing and play. Lovely, and a fitting tribute, only 6 years ago at age 71 - no dubs, full on live:

I guess this one hits closer to home, and feels like a gutpunch.

Thanks for the music and so much more George.

[Slim]

Just heard about this now and was about to start a thread. Sad to hear. Very good player, listened to them a lot in my late teens.

[Thenop]

I have always had a soft spot for the band, and as an extension of that, George's solowork. There really wasn't anything he couldn't have done in the Earring, it was for the largest part his musical vehicle, but in the last years of his life he did something 'new'.

He met 2 other Dutch musicians of some stature (over here) that had spent their life beginning as popsinger: Henny Vrienten with Doe Maar, a hugely popular Dutch band in the early 80s
Boudewijn de Groot that was part of the late 60s hippie movement, that sang fantasy and countrytales of the lwolands, interspersed with the ever so popular protest movement of back when

They called themselves Vreemde Kostgangers, which I have no idea how to translate into English but would be something like a poetic translation of Weird Guests. I am sure there's a better term for it.

They did 3 albums, in Dutch, of which the last one released in 2023, 2 years well into his ailment. One of the others (Vrienten) had passed the year before: cancer.

All three albums share a certain lightheartedness, but also a sense of knwoing this is the fall, or even near winter of their careers and even lives. The lightheartedness prevails in a Kooymans' penned song like Fender Strat in which he sings of all the women he had, but actually at the end of the day he preferes his musical instrument, and out of all of those, his Fender Strat is his favourite. It is a bluesrock organ driven heavier set tune, with some nice guitar licks following the choruses. He sings it himself of course, in Dutch, but because of the fact he sang in American (I am deliberately not saying English, his intonation and timing is very USA style after singing songs for nearly 60 years) I find it an interesting thing to listen to.

If you have a few minutes, and even if you don't understand what he literally says, here's the song.