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When Procol Harum’s 1967 debut single “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of a new Singles category in 2018, I presumed it was a convenient out for the board. Here was a way to acknowledge a venerable British group for their most famous work without having to induct them as artists. Steppenwolf got the same treatment for “Born to Be Wild,” and the Hall had made a similar gesture the previous year when it gave Nile Rodgers an Award for Musical Excellence as a consolation prize for not inducting his band Chic. (At least Procol were spared the ignominy that Rodgers had endured; they’d only been nominated for induction once, in 2013. Chic was nominated an eye-popping 11 times before the Hall gave up and handed Rodgers that special award on his own behalf, a sad acknowledgment that it didn’t and might never have the votes to do otherwise.)
Several years on, the two key members of Procol Harum, singer/songwriter/keyboardist Gary Brooker and lyricist Keith Reid, have left our temporal plane—Brooker in 2022 and Reid in 2023, both struck down by cancer at 76. The ghoulish truth is that their deaths should significantly improve the chances of their band becoming Hall of Famers. Getting inducted for one record also hasn’t proven to be the path toward oblivion that I thought it was in 2018. Link Wray, for example, received a Singles honor for “Rumble,” and he finally made it into the Hall as an artist last year. At the moment, however, Procol’s prospects don’t seem to have changed much, and that’s a shame.
I don’t mean this to be a tirade against the Rock Hall. (Lord knows there have already been plenty of those, all of them warranted.) I’m just using recent history to illustrate a simple point: that from a general popular-culture perspective, Procol Harum were and are one song. Maybe two, depending on whether you’re old enough to have heard “Conquistador” in semi-regular rotation on rock radio. And although that’s a better fate than many other artists have met, it’s less than what Procol deserve.
Consider this: The band’s best-selling album, 1972’s Live: In Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, wasn’t even close to being the first example of “symphonic rock”—the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed and Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra, to name only two, predated it by years—but more than half a century later, it remains the gold standard for such work. Any time a rock band decides to record with an orchestra, or an orchestra performs arrangements of rock songs, they’re aiming to match Procol Harum, whether they know it or not.
Don’t worry, I’ll give you time to stop laughing in response to the paragraph above. But before you recover your equilibrium enough to opine that the world would be better off without any such recordings or performances, let me state for the record that, on the whole, I second your opinion. Orchestral takes on rock music are ridiculous. What made Procol Harum special was that they understood the ridiculousness and embraced it with relish. It’s impossible to listen to their 20-minute epic “In Held ’Twas in I,” either the original studio version from 1968’s Shine on Brightly or the Live rendition with the Edmonton Symphony, and not hear the sound of tongues firmly planted in cheeks. Brooker’s fondness for complex harmony and extreme dynamics is well matched by his (and Reid’s) always dark, often wacky sense of humor. And that humor is contagious.
A perfect example is the title track of 1973’s Grand Hotel. Clearly intending to poke fun at successful ’70s rock stars and their luxurious road lives, Brooker gravely recites the menu at the Ritz—“Dover sole and oeufs Mornay, profiteroles and peach flambé”—while strings surge and drummer B.J. Wilson fires off Elgar-ian rolls. In the middle, Wilson switches from drums to mandolin (overdubbed 22 times, according to the album credits), accompanying the swelling orchestra as it launches into a Viennese-style melody that drips with kitsch. It’s bombastic, it’s hilarious and it’s thrilling.
Grand Hotel may be my favorite Procol album; it’s certainly the one I return to the most. For decades, whenever I’ve moved house, I use it to inaugurate the new apartment. Those mammoth orchestral bursts are an excellent means of testing whether the stereo’s operating at full power. And it amuses me, amid the chaos of boxes and packing tape, to be serenaded by the words “Tonight we sleep on silken sheets/We drink fine wine and eat rare meats.”
The prevailing view among Procol Harum fans seems to be that the 1967-69 configuration of the band, featuring organist Matthew Fisher and guitarist Robin Trower, was the best. I’m not sure I agree. Each of the three albums they made is inconsistent; the final one, ’69’s A Salty Dog, contains some of Procol’s finest material—“Too Much Between Us,” “All This and More,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the magnificent title cut—but suffers from giving too much space to vocalists other than Brooker. Not that Fisher and Trower are terrible singers, but they can’t hope to match Brooker’s strength, or the masterful way in which he ranges between the plaintive and the caustic. (Post-Procol, Fisher and Trower both established solo careers. Trower became the world’s top Jimi Hendrix impersonator, as heard to best effect on 1974’s Bridge of Sighs. Fisher’s 1973 debut, Journey’s End, is musically unimpeachable, but its lyrics suggest that he’s a miserable grudge-holding bastard.)
As much as I appreciate the ’60s Procol, I’m more partial to their early-’70s stuff. The death-obsessed Home (1970) features such gems as “Your Own Choice” and “Whisky Train.” The latter is Trower’s song but, smartly, he sticks to playing the monster guitar riff and lets Brooker sing this time. Broken Barricades (1971), Trower’s last Procol album, starts off with the mesmerizing “Simple Sister” and points a future way forward for the guitarist on the swirly, psychedelic “Song for a Dreamer.” The 1972 Live features no new compositions but is arguably Procol Harum’s crowning achievement, although Brooker’s insistence on pronouncing the qu in “conquistador” may trigger bad memories of The Great British Baking Show’s infamous “Mexican Week” episode. As both that record and the subsequent Grand Hotel demonstrate, orchestral and choral arrangements (all handled in-house by Brooker) suit this band to a tee. 1974’s Exotic Birds and Fruit dials back on the ambitious instrumentation but is nearly as good. Every one of these albums is worth a visit, or a revisit, or a re-revisit. (For reasons unknown to me, neither Home nor Broken Barricades can currently be found on any American streaming service; if you’re curious, I suggest searching YouTube.)
In closing, a disclaimer of sorts. I know that when many people hear the likes of Procol Harum, bands that make rock music with obvious Western classical influences, they’re repelled by what they feel is pomp and pretension. Whether you like it or not may depend to some extent on what you grew up with. My first musical passions as a child—before the Beatles or Dylan, before Monk or Coltrane—were Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and so I’ve always been drawn to music that evokes the type of creativity found in German-speaking nations of the 18th and 19th centuries. If that hadn’t been so, my tastes would probably be quite different. As it is, I find Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run far more pompous and pretentious, and far less humorous (at least intentionally), than anything produced by Procol Harum. So there you go, my cards are on the table, read them as you will.
I love this crew despite the pomp, not because of it.
It's simply irrelevant because the songwriting is so strong.
We won't see their like again.