‘The Room Was Humming Harder . . .’

 by whiteray

The death nine days ago of Gary Brooker of the British group Procol Harum reminded me of this piece I wrote about fifteen years ago. I have a sense that Brooker, despite a career in music and performing that lasted almost fifty years – his last cited contribution at Wikipedia is for some work on a 2005 album by Kate Bush – will be most remembered for being the co-composer, with Matthew Fisher, of “A Whiter Shade Of Pale,” which went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom and to No. 5 in the U.S. in 1967. (I've updated a few things and made a few other changes.)

It was the summer of 1967, and I was doing my normal eight-week stint in summer school, an enrichment program designed to provide kids a chance to learn things they wouldn’t be exposed to during the school year. So, just as I had for the nine months preceding, I spent another two months hauling myself every day to the bus stop a block north of our house and riding the two miles to South Junior High for mornings of enrichment. 

On one of my rides home during that summer, someone had a radio on the bus tuned to one of the two Twin Cities’ Top 40 stations, almost certainly KDWB. This might have been a regular thing, music in the back of the bus, but I’m not sure. What I am certain of is that I listened with the other kids that day as the radio played the strangest-sounding song any of us had maybe ever heard. 

It began with a ponderous and spooky organ solo, with drums and cymbals providing punctuation. And then a reedy voice entered: “We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ’cross the floor . . .” It was, of course, Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade Of Pale.” 

We looked at each other, then back at the radio as the voice went on to tell a surreal tale in a setting that combined the ancient world with the medieval, although I doubt that any of us could place it that accurately back then. We just knew it wasn’t in our time: 

We skipped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels ’cross the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
The crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray 

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale 

She said “There is no reason
And the truth is plain to see”
But I wandered through my playing cards
And would not let her be
One of sixteen vestal virgins
Who were leaving for the coast
And although my eyes were open
They might just as well have been closed 

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face at first just ghostly
Turned a white shade of pale 

And so it was . . . 

What did it mean? We had no idea, but it was strange . . . and it was cool. We liked it a lot, even I, who was still a couple of years away from digging very deeply into pop and the Top 40. Over the years, the meaning of the words – written by Keith Reid – has been assessed maybe way too many times. At its website, Procol Harum provides a page with links to various discussions of the song. And there one finds a further link to a discussion of the lyrics, where listeners and fans – who seem to call themselves “Palers” – indulge themselves in deep and far-fetched theorizing. 

The last word on the lyrics, it would seem, comes from the top of that page of theories, where one finds organist Matthew Fisher’s comment from an interview with the BBC: 

“I don’t know what they mean. It’s never bothered me that I don’t know what they mean. This is what I find rather hard, that, especially in America, people are terribly hung up about lyrics and they’ve got to know what they mean, and they say, ‘I know, I’ve figured out what these lyrics mean.’ I don’t give a damn what they mean. You know, they sound great . . . that’s all they have to do.” 

The song was so odd, so different from anything on radio at the time, that beyond its lyrics, it spawned another discussion: Where did the music come from? Was it a lift from a classical piece? If so, which one? (Something by Bach was always considered most likely.) 

I recall reading a piece about the song that included a quotation from a fellow who at the time was a classical music critic for a London newspaper. He said that he and a colleague spent an entire morning whistling the melody from “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” back and forth to each other before deciding that it probably wasn’t Bach but a theme that sounded very much like his work. 

And that’s pretty much the case. At the Procol Harum website, there’s an excerpt from a 1992 radio interview with Fisher in which he notes that the song certainly refers to two Bach pieces but is nevertheless an original work. Those pieces are “Air For The G String” and the choral piece titled in English “Sleepers, Awake!” For those so inclined, the Procol Harum website also provides a link to Bach expert Bernard S. Greenberg’s formal analysis of “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” and its links to the two Bach pieces. (That analysis is preserved – at least for the time being – at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.) 

Of course, the other bus riders and I didn’t know all that as we listened for the first time to “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on that bus carrying us home from summer school. It was just a cool song. And it still is.