When the First Lady Facepalms

Night Flight’s “Take Off to European Rock” — which originally aired on April 14, 1984, and is now streaming on Night Flight Plus — features the uncensored version of Golden Earring’s “When the Lady Smiles,” which also briefly aired in an edited form on MTV before being dropped by the network completely due to content. The song caused unexpected controversy again in 2008, when it was played at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally.

Dutch band Golden Earring only had a few hits in America in comparison to their larger following overseas, but when they had stateside success, they always made a big impression, along with raised eyebrows.

The cover for their 1973 breakout album Moontan, which featured their first U.S. chart hit “Candy’s Going Bad” and their smash followup “Radar Love,” originally featured a naked dancer on the front and a naked butt shot of lead singer Barry Hay interlocked with a similarly-posed model in a hazmat suit.

While this has remained the standard in all other countries, in the U.S. it was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a generic, less inflammatory cover.

In 1982, their album Cut delivered their biggest American hit, “Twilight Zone.” The song reached #10 on the singles chart, and #1 on the AOR tracks chart. Much of that success was credited to its compelling video, directed by Dick Maas, starring Hay as a spy beset by pursuing enemies and sexy inquisitors.

Though MTV put the video in heavy rotation, they also made edits to the content, optically cropping out a topless lady assassin, and removing frames of Hay being injected with a syringe and then reacting in pain.

Golden Earring reunited with Maas to make the video for their 1984 single “When the Lady Smiles,” from their subsequent album N.E.W.S. While the song was a hit in other parts of the world, reaching #1 in the Netherlands and #3 in Canada, it only reached #76 in America, and in a reversal of their previous fortune, the video was cited as the reason for the single’s lack of popularity in the U.S.

“When the Lady Smiles” portrays Hay as a disturbed man who hallucinates a beautiful redhead — played by model Sandra van Echten — inhabiting the bodies of ordinary women he meets in public.

In his delusional state, what he thinks are welcome passionate encounters with his fantasy woman are revealed to be unhinged attacks on terrified victims.

The man is put on trial and sentenced to a Grand Guignol-esque lobotomy, which features the return of the sultry dancers from “Twilight Zone” as nurses.

Founding member and bassist Rinus Gerritsen remembered the production for the band’s The Devil Made Us Do It DVD compilation (translated from Dutch):

“Here we pulled out all the stops with Dick Maas as far as the story goes; Acting, costume changes, Monty Python-style humor…The wife of our truck driver wanted to play the old nun who was molested in the train.”

Many were not amused by the video, especially MTV. Scenes of Echten as the nun having her habit ripped to reveal a red bra, of Hay’s brain matter being tossed to a hungry dog by a drunken doctor, and other violent images were ordered removed.

Even after cuts were made, the clip was only aired after midnight, and disappeared from the network shortly after.

The censored version of video that aired on MTV and other video shows

Decades later in 2008, at a New Year’s Day rally for Hillary Clinton in Cedar Falls, Iowa, the candidate was late for her appearance. Campaign staffers played music to placate the crowd as they waited. Among familiar hits like “I’m a Believer” and “9 to 5” was “When the Lady Smiles.”

Initially, most in attendance paid no notice, since it was not a well-known song to them. However, Ron Linker, a Dutch reporter at the rally, definitely remembered the song and the attendant notoriety, and in his coverage of the event, asked incredulously if anyone in Clinton’s organization had ever seen the video.

Netherlands media picked up the story, which led to lots of amused reactions.

Dutch humor website lachvandedag.com posted a photoshopped image in response to the story reading: “I have that Golden Earring clip and checked it once again, and indeed; the role of the nun … that was her …”

In weird timing, the incident happened just as the legendary porn film Deep Throat was about to be broadcast on Netherlands public television despite political objections, leading to wild tabloid coverage of both events.

De Pers covering “When The Lady Smiles” while DAG covers Deep Throat (photo courtesy of Jeroen Mirck)

The news reached English-language websites like Boing Boing and Daily Kos, who also mused about the Clinton camp’s lack of awareness of its checkered history.

When the band found out from a stateside fan about the song being played, they too were surprised, and their manager replied, “There’s been no contact between Clinton’s team and us. But no doubt we’ll receive royalties.”

While they have not since matched the highs of “Twilight Zone” or the shock value of “When the Lady Smiles,” both artists have enjoyed career longevity.

Golden Earring recent marked their 50th anniversary as a band, putting out their last album in 2012.

Dick Maas would be best known for directing the ‘80s killer elevator movie The Lift, as well as a 2001 English-language remake The Shaft, with Naomi Watts.

That being said, to the best of our knowledge, not a single candidate for public office of any political party has attempted to use Golden Earring’s music ever since. Nobody wants to go that deep into the Twilight Zone!

See the uncensored version of “When the Lady Smiles” along with rare videos from Nina Hagen, Yello, Chagrin D’Amour and more in Night Flight’s “Take Off to European Rock,” available now on Night Flight Plus!

(This essay was originally written for Night Flight Plus. It has been recreated in the style it was presented in at the site, and matched to its original date of publication. Tremendous thanks to Stuart Shapiro and Bryan Thomas for the platform.)

On the Border of Nod

When my parents divorced, I essentially had the same custody arrangement from I was 7 years old until I moved out of Cincinnati and went to college: I visited my dad on Tuesday nights, spent Friday nights with him, came back to my mom's on Saturday at 6 prompt. Any variations had to be cleared with her in advance, and had better be good to get her to agree to it.

By high school, both my parents had cable, but my dad sprung for the pay channels. So on Friday nights at my dad's house, if I wasn't lucky enough to find out about a party, which was often, I stayed up late, kept the volume low so as not to keep my dad up, and either watched movies, or kept the VCR on pause to tape my favorite videos of the day, maybe a snippet of a sitcom rerun, or a particularly good trailer on the Viewer's Choice preview channel (at the time, they ran real trailers instead of the crappy short promos they would eventually create to push the pay-per-view movies). Also, for a long while, WGN in Chicago would run an hour-long "TWILIGHT ZONE" episode at 1:30 a.m., followed by a half-hour episode at 2:30 a.m., and I would try to stay up for those. It was on a typical Friday night that I first stumbled across my decades-long obsession, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE FABULOUS STAINS, on USA Network's "NIGHT FLIGHT" program.

Amidst all of this, something I strangely remember with much fondness would be the nights that I would temporarily zonk out in front of the TV and reawaken, sometimes after 3 a.m. If I was watching those "TWILIGHT ZONE" reruns, in my netherzone of consciousness and sleep, I created intriguing "new" episodes in my head from the snippets of visual and audio that I could recall. Or marvel at some of the truly bizarre programs or movies that were on that late, because back then there really was a difference; not like now when the same informercials run on every channel. I instinctively knew after 3 I should really be in bed, especially if I wanted to be up at an hour that my father would not berate me for being a lazy sod for waking up at, but on those nights I was discovering the alternate world of the middle of the night. Dubbed Eurotrash sex comedies on Showtime After Hours. "RAT PATROL" reruns. Joe Franklin.

I had a room upstairs that was not wired for cable, but I did have a component stereo. So I would turn on the radio, again low enough not to wake anyone, and sleep with it on. And again, in dreams I conjured up incredible music videos for the songs that filled my sleep. A slow-motion Sam Peckinpah massacre scored to Lionel Richie's "Hello." Heavy petting with an unrequited high-school crush atop a bank of washing machines in a junkyard to Smokey Robinson's "Shop Around."

As an arrested adolescent now who often sees strands of daylight by the time I go to bed, I miss that time of innocence and forbidden pleasure. I try sleeping with my TV or a CD playing sometimes, but it's not the same like it was before.

This past night as I drove home from a late night gathering, "Wishing" by A Flock of Seagulls came on the radio. I had seen the video many times when ths song was first released, but it was on one of those Friday night 3 a.m. reawakenings that I really "watched" the video and "got" the song and it became truly beloved. I think it was the earnest juxtapositions of computers and isolation and space and the great void by journeyman director and frequent Seagulls collaborator Tony Van Den Ende with those simple lyrics of longing that resonated. It was the middle of the night, I was by myself, and my similarly earnest and simple self identified with feeling like being alone in the middle of nowhere, gazing at eternity.



As a jittery Christian, I aspire to an afterlife and reincarnation, and that my life's work will be exemplary enough to reach that ascended state. As a pragmatic realist, I prepare for the likelihood that there is nothing after death; at best, maybe the electrodes in my brain will go a little while longer after my body conks and it will be like one last, good dream.

But in either case, it would be nice if I could know that one day, I will be 15 again, taking the pieces of the pop culture that intrigue me, and creating my own visions around them as I had before. I wouldn't spend my life just wishing...