![]() I liked “Twilight Zone” just fine, a great radio hit, but for me, Golden Earring got kicked to the curb – albeit gently, with some respect and regret – not long after punk rock crashed our world. If you know just two songs, that’s the other one. Skip forward a few years – well, six – and then came the other bona fide US hit, “Twilight Zone” from Cut. And then, the two subsequent LPs, Switch (1975) and To the Hilt (1976), which both hit the mark. (It was later boringly repackaged.) Eerie hard rock with some sexy, but unsettling story-songs and fantastic long instrumental jams. ![]() There was a painting of an emotive nude woman in a blue headdress on the cover – well, the first edition at least. Moontan, the group’s ninth album, was A-level all the way and the only one to turn gold in the United States. Hay was not an original he replaced Frans Krassenburg in 1968. I’m using past tense here for the band, but I could have used present tense right up through 2021, because it was the same four guys since 1970. 1 in its native land and top ten most everywhere else. I got no hint from the song or anything on the album it came from, Moontan, but, yes, Golden Earring was Dutch and “Radar Love” went No. (Well, it was called the Tornados then it didn’t become Golden Earring, sometimes The Golden Earring, until 1967.) The band was formed by Kooymans in The Hague in 1961 at age 13. I was too young to know or care, but Lee’s music must have caught the ears of these young guys. What was on the radio? “The radio’s playing some forgotten song, Brenda Lee’s ‘Coming on Strong.’” Lee is a country-rockabilly-pop singer, and her song, “Coming On Strong,” hit No. Here, the lonely driver had some psychic connection to his girlfriend and he was headed her way, guided by this strange radar love aura, speeding through the deep dark night and into early morning – “It’s half past 4 and I’m shifting gear.” With the radio on, like the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner.” Just the first few notes of that song takes me right back there. We did, we did! Funny, the shit you remember. “You wanna go faster?!” yelled the carny. Round and round we went, higher and higher. The song also, memorably, blasted out that summer of ‘74 on the Himalaya ride at the Bangor (Maine) State Fair. I’m singing right along with Hay: “ I’ve been drivin’ all night, my hands wet on the wheel/There’s a voice in my head that drives my heel” and then later, “Last car to pass and here I go!/And the line of cars goes down real slow.” Zoom-zoom-zoom. I’d just gotten my driver’s license and this was the ultimate driving song. “We were sort of sons of The Who,” Hay once said.) (Golden Earring later recorded on The Who’s Track label and toured with them. There was a certain Deep Purple-ly vibe to it – “Highway Star” or “Speed King” – as well and Deep Purple was, at the time, my favorite band. Hay and Kooymans, along with bassist Marinus Gerritsen and drummer Cesar Zuiderwijk, put me right in the driver’s seat. All of it limned with undercurrent of otherworldliness, maybe spookiness. The ominous opening plucked guitar strings, the chugging drums and bass line, the drama-to-come, the multiple crescendos, a surprise guest brass section blasting in. ![]() Guitarist George Kooymans, who turns 75 March 11, and singer Barry Hay, were the usual Earring tag-team and they wrote “Radar Love.” Music first, words later, as usual. Ash Wednesday etc.) And covered by Ministry (with whisper-to-a-growl vox from Al Jourgenson on the Cover Up album), by U2 (on the PopMart tour), White Lion and, of course, by R.E.M. ![]() If you weren’t that age then and there, I’m sure Golden Earring entered your rock world at some point retroactively, because the song that ear-wormed its way into my brain nearly a half-century ago was later placed in many a movie (Baby Driver, Wayne’s World 2. Whatever this strange thing called radar love was, you dug it. Golden Earring entered my world – and yours if you were a teenage hard rock fan and AM Top 40 radio devotee in the spring of 1974 – at the same time and over the same platform. This may come as a shock to some classic rock fans, but there was more to Golden Earring than “Radar Love.”Įven if I didn’t know it at the time, for me, that song was a gateway drug. George Kooymans of Golden Earring turns 75 today (Image: Wikipedia)
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