Although the news that George Kooymans passed away last week did not come entirely unexpectedly, as his ALS diagnosis had been public since 2021, it has left the Dutch music community in considerable grief. Golden Earring is arguably the biggest rock band ever to come out of the Netherlands, with ‘Radar Love’ being well-known all over the world, while ‘Twilight Zone’ and a few others were minor international hits as well. Kooymans was the driving force behind the band, writing most of their songs, and his vocal interplay with lead singer Bary Hay being an unmistakable trademark of the band.

In the years leading up to his ALS diagnosis, Kooymans had been exploring a larger number of musical avenues than ever. He formed a rootsy duo with American guitarist Frank Carillo, and explored folk rock with Dutch lyrics with the band Vreemde Kostgangers, which he formed with singer/songwriter Boudewijn de Groot and singer/bassist Henny Vrienten of pop phenomenon Doe Maar, who himself passed away in 2022.

When I was offered an interview with Kooymans in support of ‘Mirage’, the 2022 album by Kooymans & Carillo, I was surprised that he was even doing interviews. This was a year after the news that he suffered from ALS was made public, and the man on the other side of the phone was enthusiastic and still had his typical The Hague sense of humor. “Listening to music and talking to music isn’t quite as exhausting as talking about politics or whatever”, he said. “As long as I can talk, I should be able to pull this off.”

A Feeling of Togetherness

“I haven’t played guitar in about a year”, was Kooymans’ understandable admission. “Two fingers of my picking hand are completely paralyzed right now. It’s not my thumb and my index finger, but it is difficult to pick things up with that hand as a result. I can pick things up with my left hand, but the fingers on that hand are crooked. So really, trying to play guitar with it is too much of a hassle right now.”

And yet, Kooymans did find the time to finish ‘Mirage’ with Carillo. “That’s also because we had already been working on it for a while already. And we were very content with the songs we had written for it. It felt like an improvement over the first cd (‘On Location’, 2010). There is more of a feeling of togetherness in it, and that the songs make sense. To be fair, that could be a coincidence, because that is what we aimed for with the previous cd as well, but sometimes it just works better for one song, or one album, than the other.

I got the diagnosis in 2020, but we were already working on finishing things, before the diagnosis would actually come into play. Nearly everything was done by then. I have recorded two songs with Rinus (Gerritsen, Golden Earring’s bassist) and Dave Menkehorst (drummer) here in my own studio after that though: ‘Crystal Cracking’ and the Eddie Seville song ‘Ticket to Heaven’. But we did that live, so that went rather quickly.

Of course, there are always things to be done when you think you are finished. At some point, I noticed that I couldn’t use my fingers like I wanted them to, or at least not hold my pick anymore. That’s what made me think: now I really need to get to work, because I have no idea how much longer I will be able to do it. So that’s when I decided I needed to speed up the process a bit. The last things I did in terms of playing the guitar has been for Vreemde Kostgangers.”

A Case of Demoitis

“Overall, ‘Mirage’ is actually kind of a demo-like album. For the title track and a few other songs, I use my own basic set-up with EZdrummer – very simple parts, because I’m not much of a programmer. That’s what I make a song to, and then at some point, John (Sonneveld, producer) will come over, and he programs the drums in a way that sounds amazing, as if a real drummer had actually played it.

So that demo feel has been there from the very beginning. We have recorded things in the kitchen with an iPhone. In the beginning of ‘Where the Devil Won’t Go’, for example, you can hear a wailing voice. That’s just me behind pots and pans, while Frank is playing a rhythm guitar part. We copied that to Pro Tools and started building from there.

The problem with demos, and I think every musician will recognize this, is the fact that they have a certain vibe, a certain feel, that you will look for when you are recording it for real. That’s part of the problem of these modern techniques. Back in the day, you would rehearse the song until you knew it well, record it, and once it was on tape, there was very little you could do to improve or repair things.

It’s a case of demoitis, really. The fear that you’re never going to surpass your demo. Fortunately, it’s quite easy to record your demo into Pro Tools or whatever you use these days, and you have that to fall back on. Back when I still recorded demos on a TEAC 8-track, we also sometimes copied things to the final tracks at Wisseloord Studios. Simply because we thought it sounded awesome on the demos.”

A Nice Little Track

A remarkable inclusion on ‘Mirage’ is the song ‘Seasons’, which Kooymans wrote for the progressive rock band Earth and Fire and eventually became their debut single. It became one of Earth and Fire’s biggest hits, climbing to number two on the Dutch charts. “When we toured with Vreemde Kostgangers, we would always play a few old songs from our own repertoires”, he says. “And since I didn’t have any Dutch-language repertoire, I would usually take an old Earring song that I had sung on my own in those days.

When we started the new tour, I had to go looking for a different song. I ended up picking ‘Seasons’, because I always thought it was a nice little track, and made a different arrangement out of it. We played that one about ten times, after which it was done due to corona and, of course, some other bad things.”

No Set Plans

“We had been working on ‘Mirage’ since around 2014 or 2015, and that is why I didn’t keep any notes, which is something I’m quite bad at anyway. Sometimes, I would jot down some things in Pro Tools, like microphones or plug-ins that I had been using. But I haven’t done any of that with the guitar. I know that I recorded most of my electric parts on my Les Paul and Frank used a Gretsch a lot of the time.

My pedalboard that I use live, I have lying around in my studio, and why would I not use it, right? I also used a Kemper and my Hook amplifier that I use live as well. I have set things up in a way that I can put my amplifier in the garage and crank it up, and there’s a long speaker cable running to my control room. That makes it easy to turn on the amplifier and switch speakers in the garage, all without any bleed. It’s really cool. And sure, a long speaker cable might not be ideal for the pointiness of the sound, but who complains about that? Haha!

The twelve-string guitar on ‘Mirage’ is the F# minor version of Leo Kottke’s signature guitar. I’ve been using that a lot anyway. I really like the way that one sounds. It’s tuned low, so it’s got quite a heavy sound. I think I may have tuned it half a note down for a few songs. It sounds great. Most of the other acoustic parts are my Taylor, and Frank may have used my Gibson J-200.

At some point, there are so many guitars lying around, and you try this and that, and when you don’t write anything down, you end up not knowing which is which at some point. But it’s about the songs anyway. Accountancy is somebody else’s job.

Same with the guitar solos: we just did that the way it happened. We had no set plans. I made a version of ‘Den of Thieves’ that I wasn’t entirely happy with. So I made another version, and that wasn’t it either. The whole time I thought: the lyrics are great, the melody is as well, so let’s send it to Frank. Here, you do something for a change, haha! That’s when he came up with this version, and I loved it.”

An edited version of this interview appeared in Gitarist 377 (August 2022)