As I listened to this song my mind drifted back in time to a less sophisticated era. By sophisticated, I mean less technologically driven and/or devoid of our current "Black Screen" devices. Unlike the nuclear explosive mushroom cloud above!
“A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procul Harum:
NOTE!!!!! The Author of this article copied and pasted some of the following information from the following internet source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Whiter_Shade_of_Pale
I have always loved this song, however, as a young man one had to listen to Casey Kasem to get any information about rock groups and the hits that made Casey’s top 40. This was pre-internet, social media and TMZ.
This was also pre cellular phone technology where music was released as a 45 or 33. The 45’s had an “A” side and an “B” side. Typically, the “A” side was the hit that climbed the charts. It was a rarity if and when both A and B made it within the top 40. If you desired the album, one would purchase a 33. Of course, all of this required “HI-DEF” equipment consisting of a turntable and speakers.
This was a time when the “rag mags” and/or alternative news sources where delegated to The National Enquirer and then later the Star.
So What Was This Group Thinking when they composed the lyrics to this song? When this song was released in 1967 it starts off with the dreamy sounds of Hammond organist Mathew Fisher. One of the sounds that distinctly draws me into the blissful harmonics and dreamy sounds.
But let us digress here for a second! What is a “Procul Harun”? The name of the band? Guy Stevens, the groups first manager, named the band after a Burmese Cat, owned by Liz Coombes.
(QUICK NOTE REGARDING SOURCES)
The King has added the links and given credit to wikipedia for any information and if he has forgotten and/or been remiss in adding said links, be it known, that is where the background information has been obtained.
Ok, that was our commercial break now back to, “What Were They Thinking?”
Before The King started researching this band, his mind map went to the following.
Vestal Virgins_________= suicide bomber and 72 vestal virgins__________Seasick________LSD or as, “The Beatles sung Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds_____________OSS, processor to the CIA and confiscating Hitler’s Gold which financed MK ULTRA and LSD experimentation______ Timothy Leary________Fandango________Get you movie tickets here____________
All righty then…………… ROFL now to the author of the lyrics, Keith Reid and his version of the story!
Here is a direct copy and paste from WIKIPEDIA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Whiter_Shade_of_Pale
Lyrics
Keith Reid got the title and starting point for the song at a party. He overheard someone at the party saying to a woman, "You've turned a whiter shade of pale", and the phrase stuck in his mind.
The original lyrics had four verses, of which only two are heard on the original recording. The third verse has been heard in live performances by Procol Harum, and more seldom the fourth.
Claes Johansen, in his book Procol Harum: Beyond the Pale, suggests that the song "deals in metaphorical form with a male/female relationship which after some negotiation ends in a sexual act".
This is supported by Tim de Lisle in Lives of the Great Songs, who remarks that the lyrics concern a drunken seduction, which is described through references to sex as a form of travel, usually nautical, using mythical and literary journeys.
Other observers have also commented that the lyrics concern a sexual relationship.
Contrary to the above interpretations,
Reid was quoted in the February 2008 issue of Uncut magazine as saying:
I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story. With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images, I was trying to be evocative. I suppose it seems like a decadent scene I’m describing. But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then. I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote. It was influenced by books, not drugs.