A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

This episode is part of Pledgeweek 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week, I'm posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey. There's a story we've seen a lot in one way or another in the podcast, and we're going to see a lot more.

roughly the story goes a skiffle group evolves into an R&B group evolves into a beat group but then after some moderate amount of success the beat group loses half its members they reinvent themselves as a

psychedelic or progressive band with new members replacing the old but keep the old beat group's name at least for a while that's the story behind for example both the moody blues and the move with some slight variations. And it's also the story of Procol Haram, sort of, but only sort of, because the actual

story of Procalharum involves the psychedelic group getting a new name, but then one by one getting the members of the Beat Group back in, and that process started before their first single had even dropped off number one in the charts. The roots of Procolharum stretch back to 1957, when a skiffle group called the Electrics formed in Southend-on-Sea, a seaside town about 40 miles from London. The electrics consisted of John Howard, Dave Lewis, Graham Derek, Gary Brooker and Adrian Baggaly, all playing the usual skiffle combination of instruments,

but at some point they renamed themselves the Coasters after the American Vocal Group. Brooker moved from guitar to piano, and they started playing rock and roll hits, mostly those of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. The Coasters became fairly well known in the town, but then they entered a Battle of the Bands Contest. They didn't win, but the promoter of the contest had an idea.

He was going to form a supergroup consisting of several of the best members of the non-winning bands and managed them. That band, which became the Paramounts, had lead singer Bob Scott, guitarist Robin Trower, and bass player Chris Copping from the Raiders, and drummer Mick Brownlee from Mickey Law and the Outlaws.

They wanted to get him Brooker on piano, but of course Brooker was still in the coasters and didn't particularly want to quit them. When Trower phoned Brooker up to ask him to come to a rehearsal of the new group, Brooker explained that he was meant to be playing a gig with the coasters the same night as the rehearsal, and Trower claimed to have spoken to the lead singer of the coasters and been told it would be all right.

This happened every week for several weeks, until the coasters decided that Brooker didn't really want to be in the group anymore, while Brooker in turn assumed that the coasters didn't want him, so he ended up being in the Paramount's full time. Scott soon left the group, and Brooker took over as lead singer. Trow's father owned a cafe, and the group turned the cellar of the cafe into their own nightclub, which they called the Shades.

They stocked the jukebox with R&B records owned by a record-collective friend of theirs, and started turning their own repertual. more in an R&B direction, particularly playing the songs of Bobby Blue Bland and Ray Charles. Their biggest number was Charles' Sticks and Stones. The group went through a couple of line-up changes. Copping quit the band to go to university in 1963 and was replaced by Graham Derek from the coasters. While when the group decided to go professional, Brownlee quit,

as he needed a secure job and remained a bricklayer. So he was replaced by B.J. Wilson, who the group found through an added melody maker. While the group weren't themselves mods, the shades soon became South End's premier mod hangout, and the Paramounts found an enthusiastic audience among R&B aficionados. Their big break came when, in mid-1963,

they played a support slot for the Rolling Stones, whose first single, Come On, had just been released. The Stones come along and run it to it and wreck it. Come on. To this means my baby party, come on. I can't get started. Come on. I can't afford to check it.

I wish somebody come along and run it to it and wreck it. Everything is wrong. The Stones were hugely impressed with the Paramounts, to the extent that in early 1964, Keith Richards told Melodymaker, there are two groups in this country that deserve a mention. Wayne Fontana and the mindbenders are good, and so are the Paramounts,

one of the best groups to come up for a long time. They similarly named the Paramounts as one of their favourite groups during a press conference when they visited the US for the first time. But more importantly than they're talking the group up to the press, the Stones recommended them to promoters. As the Stones became big,

they moved on from playing small club gigs to large theatres and ballrooms, and they told the promoters of those club gigs that the Paramounts would be a worthwhile replacement act for them. Soon the Paramounts were playing the same network of small blues clubs that the Stones had dominated, and they quickly got signed to a record deal with Parlophone, releasing their first single, a version of the Coast of Poison Ivy, which made number 35 in the charts.

The group were a bit hesitant about having covered one of their American idols, whose music they felt was sacrosanct, and they were similarly uncomfortable about their follow-up, a version of Thurston Harris's Little Bitty Pretty One. That didn't follow their debut into the charts, and they didn't think it was particularly representative of their live sound. They were happier with the session they played backing a Larry Parns artist, Duffy Power. They thought Power's version of Moe's Parchman Farm, on which they backed him,

came the closest to their live sound. And indeed it is one of the better early British R&B records. Though, other than Trowah's brief guitar solo, it just replicates Allison's record very closely. The group's next two singles failed to chart, and the group were doing badly enough that Wilson quit for a while to go and join Jimmy Powell and the Dimensions, though he soon returned. But they were getting steady work on package tours.

In particular, they got a lot of work on tours with Sandy Shaw, who liked their playing a lot and hired them to back her during her part of the show, as well as doing support slots on their own. Shaw was at the time in the middle of a string of massive hits like Always Something There to Remind Me. The group were impressive enough on these shows that they were picked up by NEMS, who started promoting them more widely as Sandy Shaw's backing group, but they started to realise that they weren't playing the kind of music they wanted to be making anymore. They weren't Sandy Shaw's backing group, they were an R&B band.

Their final single was a P.F. Sloan and Steve Barry song. You never had it so good. After releasing that, they supported the Beatles on what turned out to be their last ever UK tour, and then split up, having been dropped by their record label, and discovering the music they were playing, simply wasn't what they wanted to be doing. Brooker decided that rather than form another band, he was going to try to become a songwriter.

Towards the end of their career, the Paramounts had been told by their producer Ron Richards that they should start writing their own B-sides, because they would get more money that way, and Brooker had rather taken to writing music. He was introduced by Guy Stevens, and executive at Ireland Records, to Keith Reed,

who had been trying for a while to become a lyricist. Reed had submitted lyrics to Steve Winwood and Jack Bruce, but they've been turned down, though he had collaborated on two songs with the French rock star Michel Polnareff. Brooker and Reid started writing together, with Brooker composing and Reed writing the lyrics. They hit on the first song they thought likely to become a hit

after a party at Stevens' house, where Stephen said to his wife that she looked tired and had turned a whiter shade of pale. Reed came up with the lyric based on that line, while Vooka started noodling around a musical idea inspired by the Hamlet cigar advert, which for decades ran to more or less the same formula, in which something would go horribly wrong, and then the victim would pull out a cigar and smile, as the tagline was read out. If we sail on Columbus, we shall fall off the edge of the world.

The world is round. Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet, the mild cigar from Benson and Hedges. The music used on the adverts was Jacques Lucierge's jazz version of Bach's Air on a G-string. Brooker demoed an early version of the song in 1966, with various session players, including members of Jimmy Powell and the Dimensions, and George Bean and the runners, including B.J. Wilson. Those demos have never been released, but they turned out well enough that Brooker and Reed decided that they needed to form a group. The group, which at this point had no members other than Brooker on piano and vocals and Reed as a non-performing lyricist, was named Procol Harum, after a mishearing of the name of a pedigree cat. The cat was actually called Procull, the Latin for nearby, Harun, Arabic

for Lightbringer. They got in Ray Roya on guitar and David Nights on bass, but were particularly interested in getting a Hammond organ player because they wanted the sound that Bobbittor. Dylan had got on a live version of Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues, which had been released as a B-side and which featured both piano and Hammond. Then they got in look when they saw an ad in Melodymaker from a Hammond player looking for work. The musician in question was Matthew Fisher, who had started on the Vox organ, but had switched to Hammond after the band he was in, had supported the small faces, and he'd been fascinated by Ian McCleggins Hammond. At the time he placed the advert, Fisher was playing with Screaming Lord Such, a pioneer of Shock Rock, who had some of the best backing bands around.

The new group was signed by Denny Cordell on the basis of Brookers' demos before they even had a drummer. The drummer they settled on, Bobby Harrison, actually joined the day before the recording session for their first single, and was disappointed to find that the session drummer, Bill Aden, a jazz musician who had played with everyone from Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames to the Ray Ellington Quartet, but whose principal qualification for the role was that he lived across the road from the studio, had been booked to play on the session. Indeed, there was a lot of confusion at first about who was involved in making the record

that became the hit. The group re-recorded the track at another session shortly afterward, and Harrison played on that, and he thought for several weeks, that the version that got released was the one he'd played on. Meanwhile, while Danny Cordell is credited as the producer, Keith Grant, the engineer on the session, claimed that Cordell wasn't actually present at the session in question at all. Certainly Cordell had a habit of leaving productions to subordinates,

as we saw on the episode on the move, and we'll see again here. But Cordell himself had fairly vivid memories of trying to get Brooker to sound like a psychedelic Percy sledge, pointing out the similarity between the song and Sledgers When a Man Loves a Woman. One big change happened between the recording of the demo and the single version though. Matthew Fisher, the group's new Hammond player, had picked up on the Bach influence in the song

and had come up with an organ solo and intro. That part, rather than Bark's air on a G-string, was inspired by his cantata, Sleepers Awake. Both bark pieces have similar stepwise descending bass melodies at one point, and so the part that Fisher came up with managed to blend elements of both without precisely being either, and became the most distinctive element of the finished record. Fisher later said it was entirely my idea to compose a set solo and give the last two bars a satisfying shape. What I added was a tune of course. I saw a proof of the sheet music and the

first thing I saw was that the first eight bars were my organ solo, and yet at the top of the sheet music, it said, music by Gary Brooker. Suddenly I realised what I had contributed went well beyond the call of duty. Gary was unsympathetic, and I was completely devastated. The group played their first gigs the day the record came out, first playing at Joe Boyd's UFO club, then later that day playing the Speakeasy Club. When the group played Bonnie Dobson's song Morning Jew, which had of course been stolen by Tim Rose, Jimmy Hendricks, who was in the audience, and who of had had a hit with another song plagiarised by Rose, got up on stage, took Knights' bass, turned it upside down, and played a long left-handed. The Speakeasy Club was also where

Paul McCartney first heard the record, in the company of Eric Burden and Keith Moon. McCarney decided it was the best record he'd ever heard, and that night he also met his future wife Linda Eastman for the first time. He later gave her his copy of the record as a momento of their first meeting. The record went to number one in the chart, but the first line-up of the group split, almost as soon as they'd begun. They were sent on a tour of every tiny venue they could be booked into,

as their management wanted to make as much money as possible while they were hot, but Brooker and Fisher in particular resented this, as did Cordell, who saw the tour as taking away time that could be spent in the recording studios. They cancelled those dates and replaced their management with Tony Secunda, and started work on a new album. But after five recording sessions which didn't go well, Brooker and Reid, who controlled the band,

and Cordell, all agreed that they needed to get rid of Roya and Harrison. They got Secunda to do the dirty work for them and sack their guitarist and drummer, and in their place they brought in two former members of the Paramount, Robin Trower and B.J. Wilson. Royer and Harrison were out of the band while the record was still at number one. They sued, trying to get an injunction to stop the rest of the band performing as Procal Haram, as did the former management, and eventually an agreement was reached literally on the courthouse steps, but that brought in further trouble.

When the newspapers revealed that Harrison was expected to be getting £10,000 in royalties from the record, which he hadn't played on. Bill Aden felt rather hard done by, because he had played on the record, and only got the standard session fee of £15 and £15 shillings. He threatened to sue the band as well, but that too was settled out of court. Apparently he got £100 as a bonus. That wouldn't be the last time that a white a shade of pale became the subject of legal trouble, and when it happened later it would be a lot more difficult to settle.

Royeran Harrison went on to form a group called The Freedom, whose first single, Where Will You Be Tonight, has more than a little of the prokulharum sound to it. Meanwhile, the new line-up of the group started work on their first album. Royer and Harrison have later claimed to have played on about three quarters of the album, but the author Henry Scott Irvine, whose book on Focal Harlem is my principal source for this episode, says that he has listened to the sessions they played on

and confirms the recollection of everyone involved that the album was recorded in two 12-hour sessions, more or less as live, with the new line-up of the group. That first album was only issued in mono, as Cordell didn't approve of stereo, as was the single, Homburg, a track which the group admitted in interviews

was sonically very much a whiter shade of pale part two. Hamburg made the top ten, but the album, which didn't have either single on it, didn't chart, though when reissued as a two-for-double album with their third album, A Salty Dog, in a revised track listing, including a whiter shade of pale,

the two for made the top 30 in the UK album chart. Homburg would be their last top 10 single, and they would only have two more top 40 singles ever, a live version of Conquistador in 1972, and Pandora's Box in 1975. Similarly, that two-for issue of their first and third albums would be the only time they would chart in their home country, though they would have six top 40 albums,

in the US, including a live album in 1972 that made number five. That run of moderate-sized US hit albums was largely because of Tony Secunda, who, while they were touring the US, negotiated a five-album deal with ANM to distribute their records in America, which also gave them a much larger budget. But soon after that, the group sacked Secunda. Much as the move had, they got annoyed at his idiosyncratic management style, which in this included things like telling Paris match to piss off when they wanted to do a positive front-page story on the group.

For the group's next album, Sharon-on-brightly, Denny Cordell was again credited as the producer, but at this point he was busy working with his new discovery Joe Cocker. This didn't mean he was not working with Procolharum at all. He got B.J. Wilson to play drums on Cocker's hit version of With a Little Help for My Friends, and both Wilson and Fisher played on Cocker's Just Like a Woman. But as far as

New Clothes, but as far as making actual procal harum records went, the role was left to Glyn Johns, the engineer on the sessions, and to Cordell's assistant, Tony Visconti. The single from Shine On Brightly was quite rightly so, with lyrics written by read about S from Mohawk, a singer with whom he had had a brief affair,

and who had sung briefly with the mothers of invention, but who is now best known for having sung several vocals for Schoolhouse Rock and Sesame Street. Quite rightly so, like almost all the group's singles from this point on, didn't chart. Most of side two of the album was taken up by a long medley called In Held Twasinai,

which Pete Townsend later told the group was one of the inspirations behind Tommy. After recording the second album Fisher quit the group. He was sick of touring and wanted to stay at home more. He was persuaded to rejoin the band on condition that he could produce the next album, which he did. The result, a salty dog, is regarded by fans of the group as their masterpiece. After the tour to promote that album though, Fisher quit the group again, initially on the understanding that he would produce their records and worked with them in the studio, but not be a touring member. However, he quickly

discovered that the group were treating him very differently. He didn't feel like one of the gang anymore, more like a roadie, and the sessions with Fisher producing were abandoned. For the next album, as well as Fisher disappearing, Brooker and Reed decided to sack Dave Knight. Both Knights and Fisher were replaced by one man, Chris Copping. Copping could play both keyboards and bass, so on keyboard-dominated songs he would play Hammond while Trower played bass. On guitar songs Trouwer would play guitar while Copping played bass, and on songs that needed both, Copping would play a keyboard bass with his left hand,

like Ray Manzarek did with the doors. And so by late 1969, a little over two years after a whiter shade of pale, Gary Brooker was the only performing band member on that single still in the band. Other than Keith Reed, who never performed, but was counted as a band member for writing all the lyrics, all the members of Procalharum were now former members of the Paramounts, and the group's fourth album was titled Home, because they felt like they were coming home again. However, over the next eight years, the group went through several more line-up changes, and their album sales slowly diminished.

The group split up in 1977, but Brooker, Fisher, Reed and Trower, reunited for an album in 1991. Trower soon quit again, but Fisher and Brooker continued touring together and working with Reader's lyricist until 2004, when Fisher finally sued Brooker and Reed for a co-writing credit on a whiter shade of pale. The initial ruling on that lawsuit

was that the split for the music credit would be 60-40, with Brooker getting 60% and Fisher getting 40, rather than the straight 50-50 split Fisher had been arguing for, but that Fisher would only get royalties from that point on, rather than the backdated royalties he wanted. Brooker appealed, and won on appeal, but then Fisher took the case further to the House of Lords, and the case became the first one ever in which the law lords had been asked to rule on a copyright dispute involving a popular song, and indeed became the only time that ever happened,

as the law lords were replaced by the Supreme Court a few months after they made the final decision. The law lords ruled that the original judgment was correct, and so from that point on, Fisher has been credited as co-composer of the song. Gary Brooker claimed that the legal battle had cost him over a million pounds, and said at one point, if Matthew Fisher's name goes on that song, you can take mine off, though his name has never been removed from it. Procolharum continued as a vehicle for Brooker. At some point, Keith Reed stopped writing with Brooker. The final Procolharum album in 2017 was co-written by Brooker and Pete Brown

while Reed has made two albums with other musicians as the Keith Reed Project. Matthew Fisher now works as a computer programmer. Brooker continued touring as Procalharum until 2019 and he died in 2022. Almost everyone involved in the making of a whiter shade of pale has ended up feeling hard done by. Even Guy Stevens claimed later

that he should have had a credit for inspiring the song with his turn of phrase, and nobody involved seems to have done as well out of it financially as they'd hoped, given the amount Vucker had to spend on legal bills for his fight with Fisher. And despite a career that lasted another 55 years, none of them ever made another record that even came close to the success of their initial hit. But decades later, a whiter shade of pale remains a most played record on British radio ever, and a record that more than any other sums up for many people the summer of 1967,

when for a brief time it seemed the future of music was Hammond organs imitating bark and inscrutable lyrics referencing Chaucer.