Slack Gang | “The Lost Recordings From 1973”

Ed van der Meer, previously covered in It’s Psychedelic Baby! with his story about his bizarre solo-project Surprieze, started his musical career with his blues band Slack Gang.

---

Ed recently gave me a CD with demo recordings by Slack Gang from 1973, when they moved from being a blues band to a unique sounding Floydian progressive rock band. I reached out to Klemen Breznikar with the music and fortunately he was just as enthusiastic about the music as I was and is willing to share it with the world on his website. The CD contains 3 studio-recordings and 3 live-recordings. The tracks don’t have titles, but Ed told me “the listeners can decide for themselves what the titles should be”. A solo-album by Ed van der Meer will be released soon as well!

Here is a story from Ed to go with the Slack Gang tracks.

Here is the story about the pop-period from Slack Gang from my perspective. I, Ed van der Meer, started the blues project named Slack Gang in Breda in 1966. I was 19 years old and the others were around 16 years old. Being the singer and harmonica-player, I could determine the setlist. We were successful for 3 years with local gigs and also one performance in Paradiso in Amsterdam in 1968. The other members were still going to school and moved out of town.

The band carried on with Roel Röring as their singer and with Hubert Bredt on bass guitar and Dick van Ouwerkerk on guitar, they wrote their own songs, in the style of Pink Floyd. Toon Plasman on keyboards offered a great creative contribution to the band. Wim Jacobs, a modest person, turned out to be a very talented drummer. I thought the changes in the band made sense and I enjoyed their music. I contributed to visions about their sound and was a sort of a band coach and manager, providing them with gigs, in Paradiso for example. I view the recordings that have survived, partially as my accomplishment.

They rehearsed every week but they also had to focus on their education. I reached out to Boudewijn de Groot, a famous poetic singer-songwriter, who also worked in a studio. I invited him to a gig in Delft, and after that we received an invitation for a recording session in a professional studio in Hilversum. The recordings made during that session got rejected by the record company, and we received a copy of the recordings that we made. These are the recordings that have been published now, together with some live recordings that were made during a gig in Het Turfschip in Breda and a gig in Eindhoven. For all those years, nothing happened with these recordings.

In 1974, the band continued on a farmyard just across the Belgian border, they had their own studio over there and changed their name to Fruit. There was also a line-up change. Roel remained the singer, Ruud Englebert became bassist, later on he played with Herman Brood. Toon Plasman remained the keyboard-player. Dick van Ouwerkerk, who also plays on the recordings, left the band and was replaced by Marc Anders, an English guitarist.

Jac van Poppel, the violin player who also played on my solo-project Surprieze, also played with Slack Gang and made a big contribution to the recordings. He gave the band a special sound and atmosphere as a “hippie-undergound” band.

In Meerle (Belgium) the band continued in 1974 with drummer Jaap Vreenegoor and sound engineer and sax player Hans Meier. They rehearsed and recorded with a Teac 4-track tape recorder, those recordings were released on CD around 2005 under the name ‘Fruit’. Fruit stayed on that farmyard until around 1978-79.Apart from the recordings by Boudewijn de Groot from 1973 that have been published now, Slack Gang didn’t make any recordings in the years 1968-1973.

I am very happy with these recordings because they represent the atmosphere from that time very well. It sounds like “the sixties”. What they have done later is also very creative, but you will hear that music at a later moment. I’m more impressed by these Slack Gang recordings, but that’s a personal thing. A lot of photos from that period have survived as well. Bands from Brabant were not taken so seriously, it used to be like that and it is still the case today.

In The Netherlands you have the 2 provinces North and South Holland and Utrecht and underneath the big rivers lies the catholic province of Noord-Brabant, and Limburg. Cities in Holland like The Hague, Amsterdam and Hilversum, where the media-world is located, were the centre of the business, and still are. There is a lot of good music in other areas of the country, Noord-Brabant, Limburg, Gelderland, Twente and also in the northern provinces, Friesland and Groningen, but radio and television focused mainly on The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht.

“You’ll have to deal with that.” Despite that, I happened to see a tv-broadcast from the province of Zeeland yesterday about ‘Concert at Sea’. Two hours of present-day, progressive music, with about 60.000 visitors. Everything’s coming up roses, as Barend Kemper always says. He, as a 25 year old, observes the same things as I do. Age doesn’t make that much of a difference for that matter. I’m happy with the contact that I have with Barend, who is also sympathetic with the sixties, thanks!

The Hague led the way when it came to music. In the early sixties, there were a lot of Indo-Rock bands that had a progressive contribution to the instrumental Rock and Roll-era. They played a lot in Germany for American soldiers, especially in Hamburg. There was also Indo-Rock in Breda, I witnessed that when I was about 13-14 years old. After the Indo-Rock era, there were a lot of Beat bands like Earth and Fire, Q65, The Golden Earrings, Sandy Coast and Shocking Blue. From 1957 until 1967, The Hague was also the place to be when it came to youth culture, after that, Amsterdam became the hottest city, with “Paradiso” and “De Melkweg” as music venues for youth, it is still like that today.

Kind regards,
Ed (Adriaan) van der Meer

Note: All music and text is written by Slack Gang | All photo and music are copyrighted by their respective copyright owners, and are subject to use for INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY!

---

Surprieze – ‘Zeer Oude Klanken En Heel Nieuwe Geluiden’ | “Very obscure Dutch free-impro psych”