The very first song that Johannes “Hans” Bouwens wrote together with Jan Visser in 1969 became a global hit. Hans Bouwens? Well, he is better known under the name George Baker. Has the penny not dropped yet? Then it will certainly help if you listen to this song: “Little Green Bag” … pling, now the penny has dropped! The piece is a timeless earworm and probably also familiar to a younger audience since film director Quentin Tarantino used it at the beginning of his film “Reservoir Dogs” (1992).
Musical turning point
Now, your interest is piqued, right? How did Hans Bouwens get into music and why did he suddenly become George Baker, who soon reached a worldwide audience with countless songs? Born in 1944, Hans Bouwens initially just says “Well …” over the phone … and then tells his story in a calm, modest tone. “I was about 13 years old. And then I discovered Elvis. I thought to myself, that’s what I want to do. But I couldn’t play the guitar. So, I borrowed an old guitar from a neighbour and taught myself how to play.”
Then Hans Bouwens also began to sing – “that was my real start as a musician”. However, it was not only Elvis Presley’s singing style that fascinated and influenced him, but also his movements and, of course, the effect of the music. “Rock’n’roll was revolutionary at the time” – and obviously very contagious. At the age of 15, Hans Bouwens was in his first band of several to come that performed rock’n’roll classics by greats such as Elvis, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.
The main difficulty for Dutch bands at the time was that the regular radio stations didn’t play that kind of music. “Only the pirate radio station Veronica, located on a ship in the North Sea, broadcast such music, including music by new and Dutch bands. That was a great opportunity for us.” In 1967, Hans Bouwens joined the band Soul Invention, which played songs by relevant stars such as Otis Redding and Sam & Dave – “sometimes seven days a week”.
A lick becomes a hit
Their career took off in 1969 when Soul Invention received an offer from a record company to record three songs in a studio. Hans Bouwens remembers: “One evening we sat together during a rehearsal and improvised. The basis was a lick that our bassist Jan Visser had been playing over and over again for days. After about two hours, we had created ‘Little Green Bag’; the first song I wrote together with Jan Visser. To my surprise, it became a global hit. “That was the best start you could wish for as a songwriter.” The words to the music just came to him, he said in another interview. Producer Richard de Bois then recorded the piece properly and tightened it up. When he first heard the song on the radio, he was still working in a lemonade factory.
“Little Green Bag” was very promising, but no longer had much to do with classic soul, so a name change was the obvious step to take. As Hans Bouwens took centre stage with the vocals, he took over the name George Baker and the band was renamed George Baker Selection. On the internet, there are stories in circulation that the name George Baker goes back to the English actor of the same name, who played various characters in two James Bond films. Hans Bouwens: Yes, this actor does exist. However, I found the name earlier in a cheap crime film and thought: that’s a nice name.”
Another rather astonishing fact was that “Little Green Bag” and other songs from the George Baker Selection also became hits in the USA, something continental European bands rarely achieve to this day. However, Hans Bouwens does not believe that these songs have an “American sound”, “even though most people actually thought that we came from the USA”. But “Little Green Bag” simply sounded different to most recordings at the time, not least because part of it was recorded in a cellar and therefore had a special reverb sound. Numerous cover versions of “Little Green Bag” have been released since then, but Hans Bouwens is particularly proud of those by Tom Jones, his second singing idol alongside Elvis.
Own song material
This success increased the pressure to create more of his own music for records and concerts. Hans Bouwens began to write “a lot of songs”; to date, he is said to have written over 600. Another reason was that “we earned practically no money in the first year because we had unfavourable contracts. From the second year onwards, the economic situation improved considerably, partly because the George Baker Selection often performed live four to five times a week.
“I wrote my songs in between all these gigs. It was very hard for me because I always got home very late after the concerts and got up again at 10 o’clock in the morning. I had breakfast and started writing songs. At around 4 p.m., we were back on the road for the next gig.” He simply didn’t have time for an excessive rock’n’roll life, he says with a laugh.
The white dove
Hans Bouwens achieved his greatest success in 1975 with “Paloma Blanca”. “I had a small studio back then. One day I picked up a recorder there and started playing, even though I can’t play the instrument very well. And then I suddenly had a kind of dream of ‘Paloma Blanca’, heard the intro and the melody.” However, he had the idea for the title long before he wrote the song: “I read it on a billboard in Spain”. So, everything suddenly came together. He recorded a demo of the song, for which he also played guitar and bass and hinted at the drums. What was special about it, however, was that as a singer he initially regarded the piece as an instrumental. “But then everyone around me said: ‘That is a lovely song, you have to sing it.’”
Hans Bouwens was persuaded and began to write the lyrics. “The rest is history, you might think. In fact, our record company at the time didn’t want to release the song because they thought it wasn’t worth anything. But the German music manager Siegfried ‘Siggi’ Loch said after just one and a half minutes of listening: ‘This is going to be a great hit in Germany.’ He was right. The global breakthrough of ‘Paloma Blanca’ began in Germany.”
Reasons for success
This raises the question of where Hans Bouwens sees the reasons for this success. “I think it’s down to both the lyrics and the music. It has an unusually long intro and contains two modulations. But I also think that the sound and the arrangement contributed a lot to its special character, because songs sounded different in the mid-1970s.” In the 1990s, “Paloma Blanca” and “Little Green Bag” became hits again, thanks to countless cover versions, their use in commercials and the rise of Quentin Tarantino, which in turn led to the rediscovery of his debut film with the intro song.
Apart from these two hits, is there another song that Hans Bouwens himself is particularly proud of? “Yes, I love the song ‘(Fly Away) Little Paraquayo’, which is about the old story of a South American Indian who became a slave and is then freed.” It is therefore no coincidence that many of his songs have a Spanish or South American influence, be it in the lyrics or in the music. “I am actually united with South American culture. I have read many books about the history of South America and I like the music, especially Paraguayan and Mexican music. And I still listen to a lot of this music.”
The importance of copyright
Hans Bouwens emphasises the importance of copyright in the interview. “It’s very, very, very important because it compensates me for the use of my compositions and texts. When I started out as a musician, I knew nothing about it. Fortunately, a record company manager later explained how it worked to me, because back then there was no internet or anything like that where you could easily obtain information.” From 1970, he became interested in copyright laws and registered his songs, hiring a lawyer for complicated matters.
At the end of the 1970s, he moved to SUISA. “I had a copyright conflict and moved to Spain. That’s why I thought it best to change the collective management organisation for copyright as well. I read somewhere that SUISA was good. And I still think that a small company is an advantage because you are more likely to be recognised by its employees. That’s how I became a member of SUISA.” And he still is, and not just because he is satisfied with their work: “I feel at home at SUISA, somehow at home too, even though I’ve long since moved back to the Netherlands.”
He also believes that SUISA has adapted well to the new situation of digital streaming platforms as far as possible. “However, the income from streaming is very low. I think that this has to change.” He considers himself to be an old man who can still remember the much higher revenues that one could once generate with CDs and vinyl.
www.georgebaker.com Official website
