Paling Well: Interview with Henry Scott-Irvine (Procol Harum: The Ghosts of A Whiter Shade of Pale)

Most groups would kill for a hit song that would define them and last the ages. But what about the hit songs that end up being the death of you? Procol Harum's 1967 milestone "A Whiter Shade of Pale," as seismic for its time as The Beatles Sgt Pepper was in that same year, is one such tune. With its elliptical images of "skipping the light fandango" and "vestal virgins," people have kept this song alive for years. It has been the choice to wed couples and it has graced funerals as well as appearing in dozens of movies. But the irony for Procol Harum remains that despite a long career of great, memorable records (Shine on Brightly, A Salty Dog, Grand Hotel), they can't seem to get beyond the pale.  

For over forty years, Procol Harum possessed a varied history that wedded rock, classical and blues based arrangements. With that classical baroque sound, their succession of albums were filled with cryptic tales of sea journeys, death knells and conquistadors. Being one of the few groups that had an in-house lyricist (Keith Reid), who wrote with keyboardist and singer Gary Brooker,  Procol Harum shaped their music along the piano/hammond organ tandem that Bob Dylan introduced into rock with both his Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) albums. (The Band would also continue that trend beginning with Music From Big Pink in 1968.) But Procol Harum remained more of a cult band throughout the Seventies and early Eighties (including when they reformed in the Nineties). The group has now become the subject of a fascinating book, Procol Harum: The Ghosts of A Whiter Shade of Pale, written by Henry Scott-Irvine, where he examines the strange, troubled history of a band that began life as a short-lived R&B outfit (The Paramounts) during the British Invasion, and would go on to lose some of their members right after "A Whiter Shade of Pale" became a massive hit, and eventually would find themselves in 2008 in court in a lengthy law suit launched by the original organist Matthew Fisher who claimed that he should be considered a co-writer of this famous track.

Writing in the book's forward, film director Martin Scorsese (who used "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and "Conquistador" in his 1989 short film, 'Life Lessons,' from New York Stories) describes Procol Harum's music as a rich mystery. "The point was not so much what the songs were saying, specifically, as what they were suggesting to each of us, individually, where all those sounds and images would lead us, and leave us," he writes. "Procol Harum's music drew from so many deep wells – classical music, 19th Century literature, rhythm and blues, seaman's logs, concretist poetry – that each tune became a cross-cultural whirligig, a road trip through the pop subconscious."

Henry Scott-Irvine, who has written and produced his own weekly radio show on the 24-hour Music & Arts radio station, Resonance FM 104.4 in London, has been a long time fan of the group. In his book, he provides a clear definition of that trip Procol Harum took through the pop subconscious. We spoke recently about the fascinating genesis of this veteran ensemble.

Fighting Nostalgia - Two Views on the Jethro Tull/Procol Harum concert: Molson Ampitheatre, June 18/10

I've never been one for the nostalgia musical acts that hit the road every summer (The Monkees, Crosby Stills & Nash, REO Speedwagon, Styx, The Who, to name but a few) because there's too much new music 'capturing my ears' (such as The Killers, Drake, Broken Social Scene, Metric, Cale Sampson, Femi Kuti, Eminem, Jamie Cullum, etc.) for me to wallow too much in the musical acts of the past. That doesn't mean I don't still listen to the music of these performers on CD/MP3, but I just don't have the need to see these acts perform well past their 'best before dates.' The first exception to this rule was two years ago when I got tickets to see Chicago. Now, ironically, I wasn't even a fan, but the tickets were free and the seats were great, so... I came away impressed by the still expert musicianship of the performers, even if the music, with a few exceptions, was really not my style.

Recently, I broke my rule again when I, along with a group of friends (including my Critics At Large colleague Kevin Courrier - see his review of the same show below) got tickets to see Jethro Tull with Procol Harum as opening act. I've always enjoyed the early music of Tull (the last album I bought was 1978's Heavy Horses), so when the opportunity came to see them live I was willing enough to enjoy an evening of, as one of my friends said, "Klassic Rawk!"

The Whaling Blues of Robin Trower: Procol Harum's In Held T'Was In I

Although they became widely known, and defined by their 1967 hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum has a long musical history dating back to the days of the British Invasion when they were known as the R&B band The Paramounts. Nevertheless, with a classical baroque sound, they took up the piano/organ combination made popular by Bob Dylan on Blonde on Blonde (1966) and released a succession of albums filled with cryptic tales of sea journeys, death and conquistadors.

On their second album, Shine on Brightly (1968), they attempted an epic cantata called “In Held T’Was In I” (an acronym that uses the first word of each movement's lyrics in order to create the title) that chronicled a descent into madness and its affirmative resolution. While Bach was the presiding spirit here, the wild card in the band (dating back to The Paramounts) was guitarist Robin Trower. In the concluding section, where the narrator affirms his quest for salvation, Trower’s guitar reminds you of salvation’s price. In the cantata's finale, his solo sounding, as critic Paul Williams once accurately described it, like “a banshee trapped in Hell but vainly crying for release,” Trower introduces the whaling blues of Albert King to the stately measure of Bach.

Allegories and Prophesies in Song: "The Beehive State" and "The Devil Came From Kansas"

Singer/Songwriter Randy Newman, in 1971 (Photo by Charles Seton)

Historian Constance Rourke once observed that Americans are "a people unacquainted with themselves, strange to the land, unshaped as a nation." That particular kind of estrangement is rarely taken up in song, but listening the other day to Randy Newman's deceptively obscure "The Beehive State," from his 1968 debut album Something New Under the Sun, I caught some of the intriguing aloofness in the mystery she poses of what it means to actually be an American. "The Beehive State" begins with a delegate from Kansas taking the Senate floor, where he is asked to describe what his state is all about. But we don't find out very much from him. First, we discover that Kansas is for the farmer and "the little man." The representative then, with a persistence that suggests a declaration of war, tells the senators gathered that they all they need is a firehouse in Topeka. Hardly worth the trouble. Next, the senate calls to the floor a delegate from Utah. He steps forward with a desperate plea that is also rather opaque: he insists Utah needs water to irrigate their desert, but mostly he just urges everyone to tell this country about his state. Why? "'Cause nobody seems to know." But how much do we really know when the song – which is barely two minutes in length – is over? With a relentless staccato rhythm that he builds on the piano, Newman tells this story so swiftly that he barely gives you time to absorb what the song is actually saying (which could be nothing so urgent as a laundry list). But he gives the song all the immediacy of prophesied fact and portentous calamity. "It should be longer," Newman once told an interviewer. "But I couldn't think of more to say." So is less truly more?

Un-American: The Ed Palermo Big Band

The Ed Palermo Big Band, with Ed Palermo (centre). (Photo: Chris Dukker)

Over the last 25 years or so, pop songs have entered the jazz world with abundance as a younger generation of musicians seeks out new music to arrange and perform. Though the so-called American Songbook, featuring standards that have stood the proverbial test of time, is still played with gusto at the educational level, the age of the music has shifted from the thirties and forties to the eighties and nineties. While original compositions abound for the current generation of arrangers, the challenges of rethinking a standard like Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” don’t necessarily have the appeal of, say, those of rethinking “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” by Tears For Fears. Generally speaking pop songs offer a creative chance for a new arrangement or a way of pushing the music beyond the three chords of the original. One of the best at stretching the limits of pop is Ed Palermo. His current release on Cuneiform Records, called The Great Un-American Songbook, Volume 1 & 2, is an ambitious 2-CD set of 21 pop songs arranged for his big band. The musical results are lively, passionate and just outside enough to engage the most experienced listener.

Pink Floyd Redux: The Piper at The Gates of Dawn

Pink Floyd (left to right): Nick Mason, Syd Barrett, David Gilmour, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright.

Fifty years ago, Pink Floyd emerged from the underground music scene of London's Soho district and released their debut album, The Piper at The Gates of Dawn (Columbia/EMI). The band played the UFO club (pron. YOU-faux) under the steady guidance of Joe Boyd, the American owner of the venue, who said they “engrossed” the crowd every night, not by playing dance music or pop songs but adding a light show to complement their improvisational sets. It was a band trying to find their sound with a slightly flamboyant front man by the name of Roger “Syd” Barrett.

Listening again to this album I’m struck by its enthusiasm and promise, but it’s difficult to ignore the simple fact that this handsome lad from Cambridge, Barrett, who had taken his first LSD trip in 1965, eventually got lost in the shuffle because of his addiction. By the end of 1967, he was persona non grata in Pink Floyd since his habit made him too unreliable to the other members of the band. As Boyd reports in his autobiography, “One evening in May [1967] I ran into Syd and his girlfriend in Cambridge Circus . . . [He] was sprawled on the [curb], his velvet trousers torn and dirty, his eyes crazed. Lindsey told me he’d been taking acid for a week.” When the album was released and Pink Floyd had a gig at UFO, Boyd saw the band just before they went on stage: “Syd’s sparkling eyes had always been his most attractive feature but that night they were vacant, as if someone had reached inside his head and turned off a switch.”

To Have and to Hold: The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 50th Anniversary Edition

Dreaming Pepper: The Beatles in costume.

                                                                          I.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in North America exactly 50 years ago today. Among the many things that were possible then and are impossible now is the unanimity that welcomed The Beatles’ eighth album as a culminating event in cultural history – if not History. “The closest that Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815,” critic Langdon Winner famously wrote at the time, “was the week that the Sgt. Pepper album was released.” An assertion so sweeping wouldn’t survive an hour in the social-media wind tunnel of today: experts both bona fide and instant would descend on it with annotated lists of other, far more unifying events. (Thus missing, as experts often do, the rhetorical value of overstatement: there’s a reason those words are still being quoted today.) But one unity Sgt. Pepper undoubtedly did effect was a new fusion of High and Low, of marketplace and ivory tower. It was embraced not only by pop fans, who kept it at #1 throughout the Summer of Love, but also highbrows previously dismissive of popular taste. Composer Ned Rorem believed the album announced “a new and glorious renaissance of song,” while literary scholar Richard Poirier called it “an eruption … for which no one could have been wholly prepared.” Wagner and Eliot, Monteverdi and Joyce were invoked for comparison.

Summer in the City: A Musical Notebook

In the 1997 film My Son, the Fanatic, based on a Hanif Kureishi short story, Parvez (Om Puri) is a Pakistani-born taxi driver and secular Muslim. His family life takes an unexpected downturn, however, when his son Farid (Akbar Kurtha) converts to fundamentalist Islam. Parts of the picture play like the reverse of the familiar story of the teenager faced with intolerant parents and so turns to music for comfort. In My Son, The Fanatic, it's Parvez who heads to the basement because of his intolerant son to find refuge playing his favourite R&B records. One of those tracks happens to be Percy Mayfield's sumptuous 1950 song, "Please Send Me Someone to Love" ("Heaven please send to all mankind/Understanding and peace of mind/And if it's not asking too much/Please send me someone to love"), which stayed perched on the black music charts for 27 weeks. Director Udayan Prasad takes this soft and pleading ballad, written four years before the United States Supreme Court would outlaw racial segregation in schools, and turns it into a secular prayer.

Andy Warhol would have been 85 this year. Lou Reed and John Cale's remarkable Songs for Drella, a song cycle portrait of their former mentor, is the perfect tonic and tribute to the late painter and film-maker. Reed and Cale, a fractious pair even on a good day, hadn't spoken to one another for years until Warhol's memorial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on April 1, 1987. It was painter Julian Schnabel who suggested they create a memorial piece for Warhol. So they set about writing songs that told Warhol's story, and in early January 1989, Cale and Reed, despite their troubled friendship, recorded the album. (Cinematographer Ed Lachman would also film a stunning live performance, but without an audience, on December 4–5, 1989 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) Songs for Drella (a nickname contraction of Dracula and Cinderella) has a touching delicacy ("Style it Takes"), features honest self-examination ("It Wasn't Me"), a periodic defiance ("Work"), and sometimes, even a jolting and blistering unapologetic anger ("I Believe"). It's as if Reed and Cale could only bring Warhol to life when they finally faced each other and settled their scores. From the grave, Andy Warhol found a memorable way on Songs for Drella to make them brothers again.

Me In Particular: The Reappearance of Oscar Z. Acosta

Oscar Z. Acosta, as photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

In his roughly 39 years of life, Oscar Zeta Acosta recreated himself more than once. From a typical barrio kid growing up in the working-class Mexican-American community of Riverbank, California, he became a clarinetist in the US Air Force marching band; a Baptist missionary in the jungles of Panama; a creative writing student in San Francisco, mentored by famed baseball novelist Mark Harris; a law-school graduate and member of the California bar; and a Legal Aid Society advocate for the impoverished of East Oakland. And that only takes him up to the beginning of his first book, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), which ends with his transformation into a budding Chicano militant. 

Most of us have known Acosta only as “Dr. Gonzo,” the fire-breathing, drug-scarfing, knife-wielding sidekick created by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), and portrayed by Benicio del Toro in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film of that book. Yet Acosta deserves to be remembered as more than a featured player in the Thompson legend; he left a legacy both historically important and all his own. That legacy is the subject of Phillip Rodriguez’s The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo, an hour-long documentary which debuted last month on PBS as part of the VOCES series on Latino arts and culture. The film is a mishmash, frankly imaginative and affably unpretentious, in which the skimpy visual evidence of Acosta’s life (mostly candid photos and news clips) is fleshed out with scripted reenactments played in period costume against sets that suggest workshop theater. The first-person narration is derived from Acosta’s two books, and aside from the compelling footage of the subject addressing protest rallies or courthouse cameras, the documentary’s chief value is that it inspires – in a way that Thompson’s portraiture never did – a curiosity to read the man’s own words.

All the Criticism That's Fit to Print: Revisiting The Rolling Stone Record Review and The Rolling Stone Record Review II

Led Zeppelin (courtesy of Getty Images).

In March 1969, writer John Mendelsohn was given the assignment for Rolling Stone to review the debut album of Led Zeppelin, a high-octane blues-rock outfit that had just emerged out of the ashes of The Yardbirds – a popular British Invasion band with a string of hits behind them including "Heart Full of Soul" and "For Your Love." Although there were no great expectations that this new ensemble would make history, Mendelsohn's words came to suggest that they might just become history. Chalking up their sound to formula, Mendelsohn remarked that Zeppelin "offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better..." Robert Plant's "howled vocals" were described as "prissy" on their cover of Joan Baez's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," and Mendelsohn went on to add that "[Plant] may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he's nowhere near so exciting." Jimmy Page gets complimented as an "extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist," but he's also singled out as "a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs." Criticizing them as wasting their talent on "unworthy material," Mendelsohn saw little from that first record that suggested that Led Zeppelin would be talked about fifty years later. "It would seem that, if they're there to fill the void created by the demise of Cream," he wrote, "they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention."