If you love this song, you might want to read “Ghosts Of A Whiter Shade Of Pale” by Henry Scott-Irvine, which lays out a cohesive, well illustrated, and comprehensive history of the times and of the band. It’s claimed that there are several references to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” with lines such as “The miller told his tale …” being cited to support this notion. Released 50 years ago today (on May 12, 1967), the four-minute first single from Procol Harum skipped the light fandango whatever the hell that meant and became a Summer of Love anthem that. *** The Fun Facts: The song’s title was taken from a conversation Keith Reid overheard at a party, where one woman was tell another that she’d turned a whiter shade of pale … which was a way of saying that she was more than a bit drunk. Even though none of the other songs on this album achieved the mysticism and praise of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the remaining tracks were richly layered, exhibited lush harmonies with melodic instrumentation that included overdubbing of both the piano and Hammond B organ, with these instruments sonically driving the music forward with a hypnotizing bit of intelligence and grace. Strangely enough, the album was recorded using state of the art multi tracks, yet released only as a mono version, with the original recording tapes having been lost to the ages. With the studio version only containing two verses, these are those that were not included: What made this song so entirely special at the time was that “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was instrumentally driven for the most part, something other songs of the day were not, it also contained a more loosely structured rhyming scheme, and there were additional verses that never found their way to vinyl, and were only heard in the concert settings, marking it as perhaps one of the earliest dispositions of progressive rock. I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote it … it was influenced by books, not by drugs.” I suppose it seems like a decadent she that I’m describing, but I was too young to have experienced any decadence back then. The single reached number 1 in the UK Singles Chart on 8 June 1967 and stayed there for six weeks. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images, I was attempting to be evocative. 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' is the debut single by the British rock band Procol Harum, released. With the ceiling flying away and the room humming harder, I simply wanted to paint an image of a scene. Oddly enough, the song is pretty straight forward, even with its cryptic imagery, it’s basically about a boy having his heart broken by a girl, with Keith Reid saying, “I was trying to conjure a mood as much as to tell a straightforward story about a girl leaving a boy. I on the other hand thought that it was a significant success, and deeply saddened that the rest of the album from which it came was not laced with more of this lysergic intoxication, as the song was unlike anything to hit the airwaves back in May of 1967, becoming one of the anthems during the Summer of Love, and may just have managed to jumpstart The Moody Blues down their mysterious and surreal path, with artists such as John Lennon unable to play the song enough, especially while tooling around in his psychedelic Rolls Royce, with his head in the stars. Brooker/M.There are those who will insist that “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was the most insignificant piece of music that Procol Harum was ever to lay down. A Whiter Shade of Pale Lyrics A Whiter Shade of Pale - Procol Harum Lyrics by:K.
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