And Not Think About the Empty Day

The Shocking Blue — "Hot Sand" (1969)

Hey, JTL readers!

By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be off at the beach, enjoying a few days’ vacation after a really intense couple of months. So, don’t be surprised if you don’t see another post from me until next week, as my batteries are in serious need of a recharge. But hey, please use this time — especially if you’re a relative newcomer to this Substack — to dig around the JTL archive, where nearly 100 evergreen and highly entertaining music-related posts await your perusal.

Also, I’d like to once again thank all of you who have chosen to become paid subscribers to Jagged Time Lapse. Your support is tremendously appreciated and truly puts gas in my tank, both literally and figuratively. Recent posts accessible only to paid JTL subscribers have included my interviews with such legends as Donovan, Smokey Robinson and the late, great Robbie Robertson, as well as musings on that Rod Stewart rumor, and the latest excerpt from my musical-memoir-in-progess. And if you wanna join in the extra fun, a mere $5 a month (or the bargain price of $50 a year) is all it takes to get you the JTL all-access pass.

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But as long as I’m at the beach, let’s talk about a great beach song — though one that has nothing at all to do with surfing, swimming or getting a suntan…

Most Americans, if they know The Shocking Blue at all, know them for “Venus,” the Dutch band’s worldwide chart-topping smash from 1969. It’s a perfect single in many ways — and I’m guessing it’s probably the only song to be covered by both Tom Jones and Bananarama — but I’ve long preferred “Hot Sand,” the single’s psych-tinged, hard-rocking B-side.

Formed in The Hague in 1967 by guitarist Robbie van Leeuwen, formerly of “Nederbeat” stars The Motions, The Shocking Blue were an intriguing and at times frustrating group. Their catalog is fairly deep — they made nine studio albums, eight of them with lead singer Mariska Veres — but their material was maddeningly inconsistent, with their singles and long-players alike veering from bubblegum to country to blues to psychedelia to heavy rock with decidedly mixed results. They do have several blasts of pure brilliance to their credit, though, including “Send Me a Postcard,” “Inkpot,” “Venus,” “Long and Lonesome Road,” and my personal favorite, “Hot Sand”.

For me, The Shocking Blue were at their best when their songs made the most of the power and darkness in Veres’ incredible voice. She really did sound like “the goddess on the mountaintop” in “Venus,” but on “Hot Sand” she comes across as more of a crazed succubus, or maybe even an avenging valkyrie. There’s something terrifyingly urgent and sinister in her singing from the moment the needle first hits the groove.

Summer day is over/And darkness comes with mighty wings

The seagull’s head is tired/And when he’s tired then he sings

You’ve stayed on the beach by yourself to bask in the beauty of the sunset, when all of a sudden you realize that you’re no longer alone — there’s a dark, mysterious woman gliding meaningfully towards you over the hot sand. She’s muttering something incomprehensible about a seagull’s head, and giving off seriously witchy vibes; you know you probably shouldn’t engage, but somehow you can’t pull yourself away. Maybe it’s her exotic beauty and curvaceous form; maybe it’s her charming, English-as-a-second-language pronunciation of “tired” as “tie-red,” or the way that an invisible electric sitar seems to somehow echo her every statement. But by the time she starts talking about “making love on the hot sand… together with you,” you’re already under her spell and enthusiastically singing “Yeah yeah yeah!” right along with her.

Something has her seriously agitated, however; you try to plant a kiss on her during the song’s second verse, but she doesn’t notice because she’s too busy obsessing over finding a place to stay — “Some place where I can rest and not think about the empty day,” she ominously intones, as if her daily wait for darkness to fall is almost too much to bear. You’re getting creeped out and thinking you should probably split, but then she brings up the prospect of “making love on the hot sand” again, this time in a seductively vulnerable whisper. The electric sitar casts an additional spell with a halting but weirdly alluring solo, and so you decide to sit tight and see what happens in the third verse.

Bad move, buddy. That sound in your ear, that low, insistent moan of “Uh-UH-Uh” now audible under her vocals? That’s the battle song of her seaweed-draped army of the undead, who are now rising up from the ocean floor to do her evil bidding. And as their foul stench hits your nostrils and their rotted fingers stretch out in your direction, you realize that you’re completely fucked… and not at all in the way you’d been anticipating.

We used to cover “Hot Sand” in Lava Sutra, the band I was in from 1989 to 1993. I learned about the song from Bob, our bass player, who’d grown up hearing it on his family’s jukebox. Nirvana had already covered “Love Buzz” by then, but — lest you think we were blatantly copying Nirvana — I don’t think any of us knew at the time that “Love Buzz” was a Shocking Blue song; their catalog wasn’t the easiest to draw a bead on back then.

In any case, I still think “Hot Sand” is the better song — the power chords, the driving groove, the dramatic pauses, the kick-ass drum fills, the electric sitar filigrees and that formidable Mariska Veres vocal all add up to a classic cut in my book. We unfortunately never recorded our version, which was a popular fixture of our shows for a few years, but this cover of the song by Australia’s Screaming Tribesmen (which I just discovered as I was writing this) isn’t too far off from how we approached it.

Despite its superiority to most of the cuts in the Shocking Blue catalog, “Hot Sand” somehow never made its way on to any of the band’s albums. Until it started popping up years later on various Shocking Blue compilations, it existed only on the B-side of “Venus,” where it waited impatiently for darkness to fall — or at least for the unsuspecting listener to flip the single over. It deserved better.

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