George Kooymans - founder, lead guitarist and main songwriter of Golden Earring - is 75 today

[highplainsdem]

Cross-post from Music Appreciation.


I hope he's been having as good a day as possible when he's battling ALS.

NPO Radio 2 in the Netherlands has a new article about all the other artists George has helped over the years by writing and/or producing hits for them. I posted about that in a new message in the Lounge topic asking for vibes/prayers for him as he fights ALS:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10181674319#post100

Last year's message about his birthday, which explains how he was honored across the Netherlands in March 2021, honored along with Golden Earring, just weeks after the diagnosis was announced and Golden Earring disbanded:

https://democraticunderground.com/103471740

I posted a bit more about the tributes on 3/11/2021 in reply 68 in the Lounge thread, posted last October, showing some tweets from that day:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10181674319#post68

Twilight Zone - which was written by George alone - though by this time he'd usually had lead singer Barry Hay, whose first language was English, writing the lyrics, after years of George writing Golden Earring's early hits by himself. This was at a concert a couple of months before they recorded the song and decided on a final title.

Twenty years after Radar Love was recorded, a concert on the beach near the Hague for hundreds of thousands of fans. This is a song that had been a Top 10 hit in the Netherlands a couple of years earlier:

At what turned out to be Golden Earring's last concert, November 16, 2019 - last because Covid hit before their spring tour could start, and then George was diagnosed with ALS in late 2020 - and since this is a video from a fan, uploaded to YouTube within hours, you can hear how great they still sounded live:

It's a shame most people remember Golden Earring only for "Radar Love" and have no idea how much the kid who founded the first version of the band when he was only 13 - after first teaching the kid who'd become Golden Earring's bass player (and George's brother-in-law) to play guitar - went on to contribute to music over six decades,