Golden Earring (1969)įor a band most casual music fans in the States know for approximately two songs - 1973’s “Radar Love” and 1982’s “Twilight Zone” - the Netherlands’ Golden Earring had the kind of career that seems almost unbelievable in its length and breadth. Here’s how it made it beyond the Summer Of Love, and across dozens of summers afterwards. For a song so deeply associated with psychedelic rock that it’s regularly cited as the movement’s origin point, “Eight Miles High” found purchase anywhere that a band either felt like spiralling out into the exosphere with improvisation or needed a melodic, instant-hook pop classic to filter through their sensibilities. The funny thing about “Eight Miles High,” in fact, is that it wound up being interpreted through the lens of nearly every single subgenre of rock music from metal to UK indie - including hardcore punk, of course, in the form of Hüsker Dü’s peerless cover (more on which is below here’s where I note that the passing of Grant Hart is what spurred this edition of Gotcha Covered in the first place).
(Well, OK, maybe a little about drugs, but more significantly about homesick alienation in the middle of a crowd.) And while there’s been some custody disputes over who actually contributed what to the song - the late Gene Clark, shortly to leave the band, claimed majority authorship, while Roger McGuinn and David Crosby later claimed they simply finished his first draft - at this point it feels like one of those songs that wound up belonging to any succession of artists who found a way to take it through - and past - its proto-psychedelic origins.
For a song that’s been so often reduced to ’60s Montage Cliche #00001B ( Note: Please use only in case of rights restrictions for the Youngbloods’ “Get Together”), the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” is still something of a miracle - a successful translation of avant-garde jazz into pop music, a harmonic convergence where every singer and player is at their best, and a song that actually feels more resonant when you discover it’s not about drugs.
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