Procul Harum found a place in pop history when the English rock band recorded A Whiter Shade of Pale. The rock ballad with an organ theme inspired by J. S. Bach’s Air on a G String continues to be in favour on music streaming services.
Gary Brooker, London-born singer and frontman of Procul Harum, passed away earlier this week and though the song with surreal lyrics — We tripped the light fandango — will remain immortal, the man did his best to keep the band active for almost half a decade, though with a long period of break.
At the first Brit Awards in 1977, it was joint winner (alongside Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody) of the ‘best British pop single 1952-1977’ while in 2009 it was named the most-played song of the last 75 years by UK radio stations.
“Whenever I played it to anyone, it was just me sitting at the piano, and every person thought that it sounded like a hit. So we honestly believed that it was going to be a hit even before we had recorded it. Once we had recorded it and had captured that very characteristic sound, a rather haunting sound, we really did think that it was a good one,” Brooker had told UK Music Reviews.
Brooker’s childhood wasn’t an easy one. His father being a musician encouraged him to learn the piano, cornet, trombone, guitar and banjo but after his father’s death when he was 11, life changed with his mother having to find work on a factory assembly line.
After dropping out of college to work as a musician, he began playing with the R&B group, the Paramounts, which, by the time it fell apart in 1966, had already shared bills with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. This was when he started a band called the Pinewoods, ultimately becaming Procol Harum, fractured Latin for “beyond these things”. The organ wasn’t common in British rock. And the group used the instrument well.
Matthew Fisher at the Hammond M-102 made A Whiter Shade of Pale memorable, and had to fight to get a writing credit which ultimately arrived in 2009. The song became so famous that it added to the agony of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in the US. He was going through a traumatic period and was on the verge of giving up on his project, Smile. “I was so sensitive for the dramatic organ sound that I thought it was my funeral tune,” Wilson later recalled.
The self-titled debut album (the US version had the popular song) was followed by Shine On Brightly and a successful 17-and-a-half-minute song titled In Held ’Twas in I. Then came the 1969 album A Salty Dog with a well thought out orchestral arrangement by Brooker. The Procul Harum sound was complete.
In 1977, the group started a long break while Brooker joined Eric Clapton’s band in the late 1970s, touring and recording, and he made solo albums, the most popular being his 1985 effort, Echoes in the Night. He also toured with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band and Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, besides performing at the George Harrison tribute, Concert For George, in November 2002 (he is featured on Harrison’s albums All Things Must Pass, Somewhere In England and Gone Troppo).
It was only in the 1990s the group restarted and last year Brooker told Goldmine: “We don’t do a lot of grooves, but we do a good bit of rock. Down in the core, though, there’s the music where I’m trying to reach the people and to make them feel something that’s right. And I don’t mean they’re going to jump up and down and want to dance. Fine if they’re going to. But I mean, if I saw a tear roll down their face, that would be a good reaction — to reach people in their emotions, in the inside somewhere, not just on the surface.”
There was more to the man as the group remembered in their statement: “But for all his other interests and skills — prize-winning angler, pub-owner, lyricist, painter, inventor — he was above all a devoted and loyal husband to Franky, whom he met in 1965 and married in 1968.”
This weekend will be a good time to revisit Procul Harum’s music and the film Withnail and I (1987), which features King Curtis’s brilliant cover of A Whiter Shade of Pale.
