Nobody understood it, although Gary Brooker articulated it much more clearly than, let’s say, Bob Dylan. The scene apparently takes place in a bar, but the singer gets dizzy. He orders more, the floor spins, the ceiling flies away, a ghostly woman appears, followed by sixteen vestal maidens, and then she pales even a touch more until it all drifts away, out to sea or into Alice’s wonderland, but this is only possible in a song called “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and contains everything that makes pop a three- to four-minute high at most, sent from a merciful heaven to save mankind, Hammond organted by Keith Reid, but infinite , infinitely, infinitely sad sung, suffered, fantasized by Gary Brooker.
No one had to smoke weed, this song was the wildest trip anyone can think of. It contains all the mellow melancholy that pop music and only it can become. There are probably only more cover versions of “La Paloma”, and it’s also true that the painful singing on “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is probably partly responsible for the fact that Gregorian chants are taped in every church today.
A poet might manage five good poems in a lifetime, and Gary Brooker’s voice has packed ten of them into this one song. Where else does one get so scared and happy at the same time when he sings without pity of his pale lady, that reason does not exist and the truth is plain to see?
It was a band with the pretentious name of Procol Harum that came out in June 1967, in Sergeant Pepper month, and even knocked the Beatles out of the top spot on the charts. The small latinum is not sufficient for what they wanted to say, albeit in the wrong case, but apparently it should mean “Far from these” (the women). In the song there are sixteen.
Martin Walser and Ulrike Meinhof are said to have danced to this song
No one had to feel moved by this pull below level: For some interpreters, the flood of images of this song was pure literature and influenced by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who played Air on the G string of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the legend fits in with this, that in 1967, when the summer of love in Germany was already turning violent, Reinhard Baumgart, Martin Walser and Ulrike Meinhof also left the fandango on the remote island of Sylt and turned to “A Whiter Shade of Pale”.
Brooker teamed up with Eric Clapton in 1977 after Procol Harum disbanded. He’d played with George Harrison, he’d toured with the lover bands organized by Bill Wyman and Ringo Starr, but when he was alone he had to sing that one song that put the song one out of misery for a few minutes humanity had become.
If music nourishes love, keep playing, it was not written by Gary Brooker, but by the other bard, William Shakespeare. His little brother died in London last Saturday at the age of 76.