Introduction: LIVIN' BLUES AND THE NEDERBLUES BOOM: A VINYL ODYSSEY THROUGH THE LOWLANDS
So picture this: It’s the early 1970s in the Netherlands. The North Sea winds are howling, the streets of Den Haag are littered with empty pils flesjes, and in some smoke-filled kroeg a band is trying to sound like Muddy Waters while accidentally inventing their own beast of a genre: nederblues.
And in that storm of fuzzed-out riffs and beer-stained vocals, Livin’ Blues stumble out of the Hague like scrappy streetfighters who traded fists for guitars. These guys weren’t interested in imitating the British blues elite — no, they wanted to out-sweat them. The result? A sound that’s too dirty for the BBC and too soulful for the stoned German tourists who bought their records in cramped Amsterdam winkels.
Livin’ Blues: The Hague’s Dirty Gift
Their 1969 debut, Hell’s Session, wasn’t just a record — it was a manifesto scribbled in distortion. By 1970 they dropped Wang Dang Doodle, a track that clawed its way into Europe’s underground jukeboxes, the kind of thing you’d hear blasting from a jukebox in a Rotterdam havenbar at 2 a.m. with sailors pounding tafelbier.
Then came Bamboozle (1972), the album where the Hague scene went international in spirit, if not in charts. Pressed on Philips, these slabs of wax were cut heavy, sounding like they were mastered with a cigarette dangling off the engineer’s lip. Flip one over and you’ll find the grooves worn down from decades in some diehard fan’s platenkast.
Cuby + Blizzards: The Northern Preachers
But if Livin’ Blues were the bruisers of nederblues, then Cuby + Blizzards from Drenthe were the preachers. They didn’t come from a bustling city scene but from the quiet north, which gave their music a raw, melancholic edge. Albums like Groeten Uit Grollo (1967, still spinning in the early ’70s) captured the Dutch countryside’s muddy soul.
Brainbox and the Psychedelic Crossroads
Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, Brainbox were bending blues into something trippier. Jan Akkerman, before his Focus fame, ripped guitar solos that sounded like they were beamed straight out of a UFO landing on Dam Square. Their records straddle blues-rock and prog, perfect for listeners who like their nederblues with a cosmic edge.
Barrelhouse: Haarlem’s Secret Weapon
By 1974, when the first wave of Dutch blues should’ve been fading, Haarlem’s Barrelhouse rolled in with piano-driven swagger and female vocals. Suddenly, nederblues wasn’t just sweaty men in denim but something wider, cooler, and more dangerously alive.
The Bintangs: Beverwijk’s Wild Dogs
And then there were the Bintangs, blasting out of Beverwijk like wild dogs who’d chewed their way through every Chuck Berry riff they could find. They were older than most of the Hague kids, already cutting singles in the ’60s, but by the early ’70s their raw R&B-into-blues-rock style gave them a cult status.
Listen to tracks like Ridin’ on the L & N and you’ll hear the sound of Dutch barrooms shaking to their foundation. The Bintangs weren’t polished, they weren’t slick — they were pure energy, the kind of band that made you spill your bier and didn’t care. Their longevity, still playing decades later, is proof that nederblues wasn’t just a fad — it had teeth, and the Bintangs were its bite marks.
Conclusion: Nederblues Never Died
The Dutch blues-rock scene of the early 1970s wasn’t about polish or Billboard charts. It was about a bunch of stubborn kids from Den Haag, Assen, Haarlem, and Beverwijk who decided that the blues wasn’t some foreign import — it was something you could spill into the North Sea air and make your own.
So the next time you dig through a dusty bak at a record fair in Utrecht and spot L.B. Boogie on a Philips label, don’t think twice. Grab it, slap it on your draaitafel, and let the ghosts of nederblues howl through your speakers.
