What We Talk About When We Talk About "Whiter Shade of Pale"
Over fifty years on, the Procul Harum anthem continues to baffle
There is thing Substack does that pisses me off. When you write and publish an article, a peculiar little metric comes up. You are told how long it will take somebody to read your piece. Example: "How To Fix Climate Change", 4 min read. "Does Popcorn give you Cancer?" 6 min read. "How to have amazing eyebrows" 84 min read. My therapist tells me all the time that size doesn't matter, but I'd been feeling embarrassed that my pieces were at the lower end of the scale. I try to take the modern, distracted reader into mind and write pieces that can be digested quickly while thinking about something else. But I decided to challenge myself. I wanted to aim for "The Story of “Whiter Shade of Pale”", 20 min read. I ran into a roadblock immediately.
Roadblock
It turns out that there is not that much to say about "Whiter Shade of Pale" because nobody knows what it's about. Supposedly, the track is iconically nonsensical. I'm just late to the party. In "Revolution in the Head" Ian McDonald literally compared WsOP with "I am the Walrus". The difference, I think, is that the Beatles song is clearly a bunch of gibberish, whereas WSoP feels like it's going to mean something, any moment now. Gary Brooker carries a sermonizing tone throughout, though we are not sure what the sermon is. If there is another lyric it reminds me of, it's from the same year - Dylan's "Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest".
Mad as a hatter
The common narrative is that Dylan sidestepped the Summer of Love, but a detailed read through of "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" makes it clear that he was smoking the same stuff as his contemporaries. A detailed read through. Listen to the track while doing something else and you'll probably think it's a parable about loving your neighbour or something. The opening verse puts us firmly in the so far, so good territory:
"Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
They were the best of friends
So when Frankie Lee needed money one day
Judas quickly pulled out a roll of tens
placed them on a footstool
Just above the plotted plain
Sayin', "Take your pick, Frankie Boy
My loss will be your gain"
I don’t know what that means.
"sometimes a man must be alone
and this is no place to hide".
We get another one at the end of the next verse:
"I'm gonna start my pickin' right now
Just tell me where you'll be"
Judas pointed down the road
And said, "Eternity"
I don't know what that means.
Near the end of the track we get another one:
"It's not a house" says Judas Priest
"It's not a house it's a home."
I know what that phrase means. I just don't know what it means in this context.
The most famous line in WSop is a Dylaneqsue pseudoaphorism: "That a face at first just ghostly Turned a whiter shade of pale"
What is whiter than a ghost? A corpse? Don't think so. That is before we get to why whatever or whoever is white is so white for.
Elsewhere:
"she said there is no reason
and the truth is plain to see"
"although my eyes were open
they may as well have been closed"
I am taking objection with McDonald's comparison. "I am the Walrus" is one type of surreal, WsOP another. Walrus is like: "the one-armed penguin exploded on the bouncy castle of cyanide mushrooms." WsOP is like: "Look inside your heart and see what you don't know isn't actually there."
The Bach Thing
Ask somebody to sing WSOP for you and they will probably jump to the organ part. Normally, in a pop song, the vocal is the main focus. Gary Brooker's performance is fine, but his voice is not particularly distinctive. The tune serves more as an extra accompanying instrument, like the drum or bass. Two things make this song special: the organ and the descending chord progression.
Let's look a little more closely at that famous riff. We begin with a long E note sustained for a measure and a half. This doesn't feel repetitive because of the chordal movement beneath, which we'll talk about shortly. That E note certainly arrests the ear, but the riff only becomes something great when we leap six tones, from C to A. The A is sustained for just under a full measure. Then we sweep down in preparation for another leap of a sixth, this time from D to B.
Ok, let's get to the Bach thing. There has been some debate as to the extent in which WsOP pinches from Air on a G string. For me, it is simple. WSOP is heavily inspired by the Bach piece, but it is not a direct sample. The two tunes work for different reasons. "G string" shares a sustained opening note, then its most distinctive moment is a gorgeous descending sweep. WSOP is all about that leap.
The pieces also share a descending progression. To budding songwriters, heed this warning. This chord progression only works because of the counterpoint on top. The chords go down, the melody goes up. I'd love to make a playlist of modern songs that use this technique. I can only think of two examples. One is Elvis Costello's "Accidents Will Happen", the other Elliott Smith's "Say Yes". Oh, and "For No One" by The Beatles. All exceptional melodic writers. I'll make the playlist someday.
You Only Get To Do It Once
I presumed at first that “Repent Walpurgis” was a shameless attempt to recapture old magic. Actually, this track also came out in that annus mirabilis, 1967. So I guess Procul Harum spent the summer of love smoking illegal substances and listening to a shit load of JS Bach. The song, unlike WSOP, samples the master outright, when an excerpt from the C Major prelude pops up at the halfway point. The reference doesn’t work at all, in my opinion, feeling out of place after the prog-rock chill that came before. More tasteful is the nod to Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, a steal of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety.
Why Me?
I think WSOP is an excellent song. Why this one became the anthem of the summer of love, and not Strawberry Fields, or Purple Haze, I am not sure. Listening through Procul Harum’s back catalogue, I hear a band who never quite found their feet, never quite figured out who they were. WSOP is above their usual level. Perhaps that is the appeal. “A Whiter Shade of Pale” seems to have come to us out of nowhere, from an odd alien force never to be seen again.