Music

Henny Vrienten 1948 — 2022

Published on May 1, 2022Leave a comment

Last Monday Henny Vrienten, frontman of the Dutch pop group Doe Maar, passed away and with him a little bit of my youth.

If you’re not Dutch, you’ll likely have never heard of him or Doe Maar, so it may be hard to understand how insanely popular the band was from 1981 to 1984. Every single was a hit, every album went paltinum and every concert had thousands of teenage girls screaming their heads of. Comparing it to Beatlemania would be an understatement. When the band announced they would stop it was the first item on the main television news broadcast that day. I was not even ten when they split up, but I had the buttons, the pink/green scarf and everything. Everybody in my primary school was a fan, not just the girls, the boys too. If you were a child in the early eighties, Doe Maar was the sound track to your youth.

In hindsight the popularity of Doe Maar is utterly bizarre. This wasn’t a manufactured hype, but something that sponteneously erupted at a time the band had almost decided to quit already. Doe Maar was founded in 1978 by a group of musicians in their late twenties, each with a history of playing in other bands; when Vrienten joined in 1980 he was already thirty. Their first hit with him as singer, sinds een Dag of Twee, was about him how strange it was to be falling in love again when you’re thirtytwo. Hardly the stuff that makes teenyboppers swoon. Furthermore their record company at the time had so little faith in them it had shelved their second album. It was only by accident that Dutch radio diskjockeys started playing the single and promoting the album, but it was enough to start the Doe Maar hype. From that point onwards they would become the most popular Dutch band of all times.

What made Doe Maar’s success even more improbable was that at the time, serious Dutch pop music was just not done. Sure, there were people singing in Dutch, but these tended to be either serious folk singer types, or people from the light entertainment world. But if you wanted to be taken seriously as a pop or rock musician, you had to sing in English. Doe Maar never did this. In fact, they’d made their debut on the legendary compilation album Uitholling Overdwars (1979), put out by the Stichting Popmuziek Nederland to promote Dutch language pop music, which also included several other groups that would make it big in the early eighties alongside Doe Maar. That may be Doe Maar’s biggest legacy, making Dutch language pop music respectable and relevant. What made Vrienten’s singing also important was the distinctive Brabant accent in his voice, rather than using the somewhat artificial standard Dutch of your usual light entertainment singer. ‘Provincial’ voices were rarely heard until then, unless in purely regional bands with little national appeal.

What made this small revolution possible was of course punk. The D.I.Y. aesthetic and attitude of punk rock meant there was space to break with the established traditions of ‘serious’ rock and all over Europe you saw bands move away from English towards their own language; most well known being the Neue Deutsche Welle movement of the same time. Nevertheless Doe Maar was never a punk rock group, even if some of the songs on their first eponymous were at least punk in style, like Wees Niet Bang Voor Mijn Lul. No, the secret sauce of Doe Maar’s success was something else entirely: ska and reggea. While on that first album it was all a bit Kinks’ Apeman style parody including dubious accents, from when Vrienten joined Doe Maar it was taken seriously. As a bass player Vrienten himself contributed a lot to the new Doe Maar sound. He even produced an actual dub version of their third album, Doe de Dub in 1982.

I can still remember the frustration and sadness of Doe Maar just deciding to stop at the height of their fame. It was the only thing we talked about on the playground next day: why did they have to stop, why now, why. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it was the best decision they could’ve made at the time. That popularity must’ve been incredibly scary, night after night seeing 13 and 14 year old girls screaming themselves hoarse at you to the point of fainting. Vrienten himself had said that he feared that one day it would all go horribly wrong and somebody would be killed in the crushes that happened during their concerts. The pressure of so much popularity didn’t help relationships within the band itself either and when Doe Maar realised they could just …stop, it must’ve come as a relief.

At the time Doe Maar quit, Vrienten had already brought out his first solo record. Post-Doe Maar he would not only record, but start a new career as a writer of movie music, having been one of the two composers within Doe Maar as well. Movies and musicals would be the main focus of his music, but he also featured in various side projects with other famous Dutch musicians over the years. Doe Maar itself would re-unite in 2000, just as the generation of teenyboppers that were their fans in the early eighties were now in their thirties themselves. It was never quite the same as before, but they did release a new studio album and held regular new tours ever since. In fact, Vrienten’s illness led to the cancellation of their last tour, which would’ve been held last year.

Dit was alles.

Conventional wisdom and Jethro Tull

Published on March 1, 2022Leave a comment

Reinder Dijkhuis makes a good observation in his ranking of allJethro Tull/Ian Anderson albums:

[…]the conventional wisdom is kind of a distillation of the experiences of many people over time. They like a band or artist because of certain things that appear musically, or because of the contributions of certain players, and the best records according to their combined experiences are the ones that most resemble those musical elements or most prominently feature those contributions. If you’re new to a band that’s been around for half a century, the conventional wisdom is useful knowledge. Another way of putting it is that only someone who does not like Jethro Tull at all would put Under Wraps at the top and Aqualung at the bottom, and what use is that to anyone? Also, the arcs of most artists’ careers follow predictable patterns, from a rapid evolution at the start, to an imperial phase in which they cannot do wrong, to variously, unpopular experimentation, stagnation and/or decline, with a late-career resurgence appearing in only some cases. It is worth showing new listeners which albums in a long catalog belong to which phase.

Conventional wisdom can be very wrong of course, especially in the here and now, and you always have to check your source’s biases, but he’s not wrong. Especially now that rock’s dead, or dead enough that turf battles over what’s proper rock or what instruments should be allowed in rock or whatever no longer matter. Best of lists used to be weapons wielded by publications like Rolling Stone and critics like Lester Bruce to determine a rock pantheon and judge who was worthy of entering it. Who, but for already aged baby boomers still cares about that? After decades of critical evaluation and re-evaluation most of the gems have been shifted out for any given long running rock band. You’re unlikely to discover anything new or upsetting in reconsidering the oeuvre of a band like Jethro Tull.

Not that Reinder doesn’t try and succeed in coming up with a list that has some conventional wisdom bucking surprises. The bottom of the list is as expected, the top not so much. The usual story about Tull is that it took a couple of albums to get the sound right, moving from fairly standard late sixties (prog) rock into something more unique slowly over the first three before bursting into perfection with Aqualung. That was followed up by the magnus opus that’s Thick as a Brick, with the rest of the seventies albums being attempts to keep up that high standard, not always succeeding. From there it’s the long slide into irrelevance that most big seventies bands faced moving into the eighties and the coasting on the past post-millennium of any that survived this long. Reinder’s list puts some nuances on this simplified story and makes the case for some less often considered albums and while I don’t necessarily agree, his arguments are at least interesting.

Now then, did you know that Tull had another album out this year? The first since 2003? I didn’t and I consider myself a fan. Turns out I’m more a fan of some of the albums, with the rest categorised as yep, that’s some more Jethro Tull indeed for better or worse. I couldn’t do this sort of exercise. For me the top two (Thick as a Brick, Aqualung) would be clear, I could properly make a top five, but the rest is just more Jethro Tull with no great feelings about them one way or another. I discovered Jethro Tull as a band thanks to an old boss at a chipshop I worked in as a student selling his collection of LPs which included Thick as a Brick (as well as Dark Side of the Moon), playing it out of curiosity knowning nothing about it other than that prog rock was just silly dinosaur music. I got the best of Jethro Tull as my introduction to it and that’s why everything else was just more of the same, but different.

Ultimately Reinder’s list does what such lists should do: send me back to listen to more Jethro Tull.

Jacula – from shock comic to glam rock

Published on November 23, 2021Leave a comment

It’s 1974, you’re a Dutch glam rock band and you want to be different: what do you do? You take your inspiration from the pulpiest of pulp comics and create a hit out of it:

Jacula was originally a Italian fumetti comics series, published from 1969 to 1982, translated into Dutch from 1973 to 1978. Fumettie are cheap, pocket sized black and white comics printed on the worst grade of paper. Cheap and disposable entertainment, full of lurid sex and violence, made by anonymous and interchangeable writers and artists, with nothing to recommend them. Jacula is a bog standard example. Set in the 19th century, Jacula is the “queen of vampires” and travels all over the world, fighting other vampires and getting involved in horror situations, with of course at least one or two sex scenes per story. While over time there has been a re-appreciation of the fumetti, with the realisation that at least some of those anonymous creators were genuinely good at their work, I can’t say Jacula would excite anybody, at least not the issues published in Dutch. The stories are plodding, the artwork is pedestrian and there’s little to shock, no edgier than a Hammer Horror movie.

A selection of gory and sexy Jacula covers

It probably sold thanks to its covers. Always better than the interior artwork, with a big helping of bare tits and the occassional bloke’s arse, lots of blood and horror, they’re doing a good job selling the much more staid interior. Maybe that’s what inspired Dutch glam rock band Lemming to create songs of it and from Lucifera, a similar series. Not bad songs either. They fit in well with that groovy age of seventies horror, that also included the fumetti that inspired them, as well as the various low budget horror movies filmed cheaply in central Europe. Watching this clip now gives me an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. These sort of cheap shlock comics are no longer being published in the Netherlands and even in Italy itself seems to be mostly gone. As for the band, they released one album in 1975, disbanded sometime in the seventies, reunited in 2002 and released one more album in 2008.

Larnell Lewis is sickenly talented

Published on March 17, 2021Leave a comment

Michel is right. It’s unbelievable how talented Larnell Lewis is, that he can learn to play the drums to this song in the time it took him to fly to the studio:

The first I heard about Snarky Puppy too. It reminds me of Pierre Moerlen’s version of Gong, especially their first two albums, Gazeuse! (1976) and Expresso II (1978), fusion/jazz rock with lots of mellow brass, piano and bongos. Not the most innovative music in the world in 2021, but gorgous nonetheless. Certainly deserving to be listened to in more detail.

And, sickening as it is watching Larnell Lewis hearing “Enter Sandman” for the first time and immediately nailing the drums when you yourself struggled for three years learning to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on the guitar —badly–, you can’t deny the man’s talent. Not just in being able to play a song perfectly after hearing it once, but also in how he breaks it down beforehand while listening to it.

Eddie van Halen — Rocking Ramona

Published on October 7, 2020Leave a comment

With the news today that Eddie van Halen has passed away and it apparantly being news that he was Asian-American by way of his mother, I was reminded of the 1991 Rockin’ Ramona documentary. As you know Bob, Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony until 1948 and marriages between Dutch and Indonesian people were not uncommon. After independence a lot of these people came to the Netherlands, where they were usually called “Indo”, both used as a slur and a name some people of mixed Dutch/Indonesian background adopted for themselves. The post-war Netherlands was fairly …whitebread until long into the sixties and when rock ‘n roll hit in the mid-fifties it was mostly second generation Indo people who started the first generation of Dutch rock bands. Eddie van Halen’s rockstar career fits right in, though he was slightly more successful than most. Slightly.

Hans Heijnen’s documentary is sadly only available in Dutch, but if you speak the language it’s a great overview of that first generation of Indo rock bands, who popularised the music both in the Netherlands as abroad, especially West-Germany. As is often the case with people of colour, they were mostly ignored once white bands took over and never quite got the success or critical acclaim they deserved. But with Eddie and Alex van Halen finding worldwide success in their own band on a scale any regular Dutch band can only dream about, some justice has been served…