PLEDGE WEEK: “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024.

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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 and 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 Prokil Harum, sort of, but only sort of, because the actual story of Prokal Harum 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.

I was feeling kind of seasick.

The crowd called out for more.

The room was coming harder

as a ceiling The roots of Procol Harveam 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 Graeme Derrick Gary Brooker and Adrian Baggerley 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 manage 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 in 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 alright.

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 Paramounts full-time.

Scott soon left the group, and Brooker took over as lead singer.

Trower'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 RB records owned by a record collector friend of theirs, and started turning their own repertoire more in an RB direction, particularly playing the songs of Bobby Blue Bland and May Charles.

Their biggest number was Charles's Sticks and Stones.

bother me

People don't ain't gonna pick us up when they know that I love you so

So I don't care what the people may say, I'll never never let you go

I've been abused

in my heart

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 Graeme Derrick 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 Southend'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 were hugely impressed with the Paramounts, to the extent that in early 1964, Keith Richards told Melody Maker, 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 their 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 Coaster's Poison Ivy, which made number 35 in the charts.

She comes on like a rose,

and everybody knows

she gets you in touch.

You can look, but you better not touch.

Boys are

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 Parnes artist, Duffy Power.

They thought Power's version of Moz Allison's Parchment Farm, on which they backed him, came the closest to their live sound, and indeed it is one of the better early British RB records.

Though, other than Trower's Beef Guitar Solo, it just replicates Allison's record very closely.

Well, I'm putting it cotton in a lemfoot sack.

Well, I'm putting that cotton in a lemfoot sack with a talking shotgun at my back.

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.

I walk along the city streets, you used to walk along with me,

and every step I take recalls how much in love we used to be.

Oh, how can I

forget you

when there is always something there to remind me?

Always something there to remind

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 realize 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 RB band.

Their final single was a P.F.

Sloan and Steve Barry song, You Never Had It So Good.

I would

and

don't you complain, babe,

don't let me hear you complain, babe.

You're riding on a lot of pop train.

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 money that way, and Brooker had rather taken to writing music.

He was introduced by Guy Stevens, an executive at Island Records, to Keith Reid, who had been trying for a while to become a lyricist.

Reid had submitted lyrics to Steve Winwood and Jack Bruce, but they'd been turned down, though he had collaborated on two songs with the French rock star Michel Polnareff.

Brooker and Reed 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's house, where Stevens said to his wife that she looked tired and had turned a whiter shade of pale.

Reid came up with a lyric based on that line, while Brooker started noodling around a musical idea inspired by the Hamlet cigar adverts, 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.

Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.

The mild cigar from Vinson and Hedges.

The music used on the adverts was Jacques Lussier's jazz version of Bach's Air R 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 Prokulharum, after a mishearing of the name of a pedigree cat.

The cat was actually called Prokul,

the Latin for nearby, Haroon.

Arabic for lightbringer.

They got in Ray Royer on guitar and David Knights on bass, but were particularly interested in getting a Hammond organ player, because they wanted the sound that Bob Dylan had got on a live version of Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, which had been released as a B-side and which featured both piano and Hammond.

don't get you through.

Just don't put on any ass.

When you're not on the roof or gap on good.

Then they got in luck when they saw an ad in melody maker 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 McLean's Hammond.

At the time he placed the advert, Fischer was playing with Screaming Lord Such, a pioneer of shock rock, who had some of the best backing bands around.

Gone a train,

met a dame,

was a hipster, and a real gone dame.

Well the train kept a rollin'

while the train kept a movin'

with a heave

and a hole for that just good let her go

while the train kept a rollin'

Yes the train kept a movin' The new group was signed by Denny Cordell on the basis of Brooker's 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 a 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 Denny 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 Sledge's 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 Bach'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 Fischer 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 Garry Brooker.

Suddenly I realized what I had contributed went well beyond the call of duty.

Garry 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, Jimi Hendrix, who was in the audience and who of course had had a hit with another song plagiarized by Rose, got up on stage, took Knights' bass, turned it upside down, and played along left-handed.

The Speakeasy Club was also where Paul McCartney first heard the record, in the company of Eric Burden and Keith Moon.

McCartney 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 memento of their first meeting.

Shade off pale.

The record went to number one in the chart, but the first lineup 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 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 Reed, who controlled the band, and Cordell all agreed that they needed to get rid of Royer and Harrison.

They got Secunda to do the dirty work for them and sacked their guitarist and drummer, and in their place they brought in two former members of the the Paramount, Robin Trower and B.J.

Wilson.

Roy 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 Procol Harum, 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 Aiden felt rather hard done by, because he had played on the record and only got the standard session fee of £15.15.

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 whiter shade of pale became the subject of legal trouble, and when it happened later, it would be a lot more difficult to settle.

Royer and 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 Procl Haram sound to it.

My lady gold,

tears you unfold,

blinking your face,

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 Vocal 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 twelve-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 Humberg, a track which the group admitted in interviews was sonically very much a whiter shade of pale part two.

You're multilingual

business friend

has packed the bags and flay

leaving only ash-filled lash trace

and the lipstick

Humberg made the top ten but the album which didn't have either single on it, didn't chart, though when reissued as a twofer double album with their third album, A Salty Dog, in a revised track listing including a whiter shade of pale, the Tufa made the top thirty in the UK album charts.

Humberg would be their last top ten 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 twofor 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 case included things like tying Paris Match to piss off, when they wanted to do a positive front-page story on the group.

For the group's next album, Shine 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 Prokulharam at all.

He got B.J.

Wilson to play drums on Cocker's hit version of With a Little Help from My Friends, and both Wilson and Fisher played on Cocker's Just Like a Woman.

Dumps

that we will

But as far as making actual Procol Haram records went, the role was left to Glynn 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 Reed about Esther 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 singles from this point on, didn't chart.

I'm sore in need of saving grace.

Be kind and humor me.

I'm lost amidst the sea of we

where people speak

by cell and me.

Most of side two of the album was taken up by a long medley called In Hell'Twas in I,

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.

I heard the captain cry

explore the ship

replace the cook

let no

one

leave

alive

after the tour to promote that album though Fischer quit the group again, initially on the understanding that he would produce their records and work 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 rodie, and the sessions with Fischer producing were abandoned.

For the next album, as well as Fischer disappearing, Brooker and Reed decided to sack Dave Knights.

Both Knights and Fischer 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 Trower would play guitar while Copping played bass, and on songs that needed both, Copping would play a keyboard bass with his left hand, like Rayman Zarek 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 Reid, who never performed but was counted as a band member for writing all the lyrics, all the members of Prokal Haram 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 Fischer and Brooker continued touring together, and working with Reid as lyricist, until 2004, when Fisher finally sued Brooker and Reid 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 Fischer getting 40%, rather than the straight 50-50 split Fisher had been arguing for, but that 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 lawlords 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.

Prokal Harum continued as a vehicle for Brooker.

At some point, Keith Reed stopped writing with Brooker.

The final Prokal Harum 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 Prokolharum 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 Brooker had to spend on the eagle 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 the 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 Bach and inscrutable lyrics referencing Chaucer.