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Procol harum a whiter shade of pale
Procol harum a whiter shade of pale






procol harum a whiter shade of pale

If you love this song, you might want to read “Ghosts Of A Whiter Shade Of Pale” by Henry Scott-Irvine, which lays out a cohesive, well illustrated, and comprehensive history of the times and of the band.In June 1967, Procol Harum went to number 1 on the UK singles chart with a song that over 40 years later would be named the most-played record of the past 70 years (with more than 900 known recorded versions by other artists). It’s claimed that there are several references to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” with lines such as “The miller told his tale …” being cited to support this notion. *** The Fun Facts: The song’s title was taken from a conversation Keith Reid overheard at a party, where one woman was tell another that she’d turned a whiter shade of pale … which was a way of saying that she was more than a bit drunk. Even though none of the other songs on this album achieved the mysticism and praise of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the remaining tracks were richly layered, exhibited lush harmonies with melodic instrumentation that included overdubbing of both the piano and Hammond B organ, with these instruments sonically driving the music forward with a hypnotizing bit of intelligence and grace. Strangely enough, the album was recorded using state of the art multi tracks, yet released only as a mono version, with the original recording tapes having been lost to the ages.

procol harum a whiter shade of pale

With the studio version only containing two verses, these are those that were not included: What made this song so entirely special at the time was that “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was instrumentally driven for the most part, something other songs of the day were not, it also contained a more loosely structured rhyming scheme, and there were additional verses that never found their way to vinyl, and were only heard in the concert settings, marking it as perhaps one of the earliest dispositions of progressive rock.

procol harum a whiter shade of pale

I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote it … it was influenced by books, not by drugs.” I suppose it seems like a decadent she that I’m describing, but I was too young to have experienced any decadence back then. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images, I was attempting to be evocative. With the ceiling flying away and the room humming harder, I simply wanted to paint an image of a scene. Oddly enough, the song is pretty straight forward, even with its cryptic imagery, it’s basically about a boy having his heart broken by a girl, with Keith Reid saying, “I was trying to conjure a mood as much as to tell a straightforward story about a girl leaving a boy. I on the other hand thought that it was a significant success, and deeply saddened that the rest of the album from which it came was not laced with more of this lysergic intoxication, as the song was unlike anything to hit the airwaves back in May of 1967, becoming one of the anthems during the Summer of Love, and may just have managed to jumpstart The Moody Blues down their mysterious and surreal path, with artists such as John Lennon unable to play the song enough, especially while tooling around in his psychedelic Rolls Royce, with his head in the stars. There are those who will insist that “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was the most insignificant piece of music that Procol Harum was ever to lay down.








Procol harum a whiter shade of pale