Now I'm not completelt ignorant, but what in the hell is this song about. I've loved the music since I was a kid, but what do the lyrics mean.

"A Whiter Shade Of Pale"

We skipped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels 'cross the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
The crowd called out for more
And the room was hummin' harder
As the ceiling flew away
And when we called outfor another drink
But the waiter brought a tray

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

You said: "There is no reason,
And the truth is plain to see."
But I wander through my playin' cards
Would not let him be
One of the sixteen virgins
Who were leaving for the coast
And although my eyes were open
They might just as well been closed

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




...????? I don't get it

You're not alone. I love this song too, but have no idea what it's about. Does anybody know or have any ideas?

Yeah, it's partly based on the Canterbury Tales.

Ever see "The Committments"?

One of my favorite movies of all times but the scene where the piano player is playing this song in church on the organ gives me chicken skin everytime. The priest catches them playing it and discussing what it's all about and says "what is that song about?"

Sorry, no explanation just thought I'd share

From a couple of the horse's mouths...

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The following text is excerpted from Tim de Lisle's Lives of the Great Songs [ISBN 1-85793-374-5] by kind permission of the publishers, Pavilion Books, London House, Great Eastern Wharf, Parkgate Road, London SW11 4NQ. It's an excellent, witty and learned book, which we thoroughly recommend.

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It's a summer song of pervasive dread, a wedding hymn riven with sexual anxiety, an epochal composition which routinely functions as background muzak for the keep-fit class (if you don't believe me, dig out Diana Moran's album Get Fit with the Green Goddess). Contradiction only bolsters the enigma of A Whiter Shade of Pale.

The début single from Procol Harum was the surprise hit of summer 1967. It captured listeners' imagination from the moment of its first toe-testing airing on Radio Caroline. 'Everything about this record is an overwhelming gas,' effused Melody Maker in May. In June, while Sgt Pepper topped the British album chart, A Whiter Shade of Pale (Deram) was the No 1 single.

It was among the first batch of songs produced by the songwriting team of composer-singer-pianist Gary Brooker and lyricist Keith Reid. Melody Maker of 3 June 1967 contains a contemporary account of the song's origin:

It was 'sixth member' Keith Reid who had the idea for the song, at a 'gathering' 'Some guy looked at a chick and said to her, 'You've gone a whiter shade of pale. That phrase stuck in my mind. It was a beautiful thing for someone to say. I wish I'd said it,' laughed Keith, while Gary put down his cup of coffee and struggled with a nose inhaler.

Reid confirmed the account when I telephoned him in New York in 1994. 'The title came first. It's always like that; like a puzzle. After the title you find the rest of the pieces to make a picture.' The found phrase is felicitous. It has the authority of a line from Shakespeare, and is as catchy as the most persistent jingle – which, inevitably, was to be its fate. The ad, just as inevitably, was for Dulux.

Brooker's setting was a motley synthesis, derived from Bach (though Reid dissents: 'It is not Air on a G-String) and Percy Sledge. When a Man Loves a Woman, a hit of the previous year, had also had a hymnal quality, an integral part for organ, and a fervent, soulful delivery. Reid's cryptic lyrics inject some of the waywardness of the counter-culture. There's a tension between the placid majesty of the music and the paranoia and messiness of the subject-matter. The disjunction may account for the common perception of A Whiter Shade of Pale as impenetrable and obscure.

'I never understand when people say they don't understand it,' said Reid. '"We skipped the light fandango"'. That's straightforward. "Turned cartwheels across the floor." It seems very clear to me.' Nervously, I hazarded my own reading, the summation of my voluntary immersion in the world of A Whiter Shade of Pale, and much pondering on its significance. Is it about getting pissed and fancying the person opposite you? 'It's a story, a journey, seen from the point of view of a man character.'

The song explores what it means to be wrecked, in more than one sense of the word. A nervous seducer sustains his courage with alcohol. As he becomes more drunk, his impressions of his unfamiliar partner become confused by stray thoughts, fragments of childhood reading and his own faint-hearted aspirations. The song's recurring metaphor is of maritime disaster, and a parallel is drawn between romantic conquest and the allure and peril of the sea. The hero is a callow juvenile, far happier with a book than risking the emotional bruising of relationships. This ambivalence is underscored by frequent allusions to nausea.

As befits a night of excess, there are gaps in the telling. The evasive 'And so it was that later ...' is given weight by repetition and its positioning just before the hook ('Her face at first just ghostly / Turned a whiter shade of pale'). The listener is invited to fill the gaps with his or her own (prurient) imagination. An entire verse was dropped early in the song's gestation. Another is optional ('She said, 'I'm home on shore leave,' / Though in truth we were at sea') and was excised from the recorded version at the insistence of producer Denny Cordell, to make the record conform to standard single length.

For a pop song, A Whiter Shade of Pale carries an unprecedented amount of literary baggage. Although, Reid reveals, the reference to Chaucer is a red herring. 'One thing people always get wrong is that line about the Miller's Tale. I've never read Chaucer in my life. They're right off the track there.' Why did he put it in then? (In mild dismay at the peremptory demolition of this intellectual prop.) 'I can't remember now.' The analogy with Canterbury Tales, whether welcomed by Reid or not, holds good. Both are quintessentially English works, the one established in the canon of literature, and the other a pop standard. Both have associations of piety and decorum. (The song has become a regular fixture of the wedding ritual, supplanting Handel's Wedding March as the tune to walk down the aisle to after the ceremony: it was played, indeed, at the wedding of Gary Brooker and Françoise, known as Frankie, with Procol Harum's Matthew Fisher in the organ loft.) Both, beneath their respectable surface, are puerile and sex-obsessed works. [sic!]

Even discounting the Chaucer reference – the Miller's Tale is the usual mediaeval bawdiness, involving cuckoldry, bared buttocks, flatulence and a sadistic rear-end attack – the conviction remains that A Whiter Shade of Pale is all about sex, and juvenile sex at that. The following memorable couplet is the giveaway:

[I] would not let her be
One of sixteen Vestal Virgins

Vestal Virgins were handmaidens of the Roman half-goddess Vesta (meaning hearth), whose job was to maintain a sacred and perpetual fire. The number of them is significant, invoking the biblical parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins, and, less edifyingly, the barrack-room ballad of '... four-and-twenty virgins ... down from Inverness'. Why Reid's lot should amount to 16 is one of the song's more imponderable details. Maybe it has something to do with 16 being the youngest a girl can be lusted after by a rock'n'roller with impunity (You're Sixteen, Sweet Little Sixteen, etc). The passing allusion to Lewis Carroll in the preceding couplet – 'I wandered through my playing cards' – suggests that some of the obscurity of A Whiter Shade, as in Alice, may be due to the broaching of taboo. The hesitant lover in the song is caught midway between the chivalry of When a Man Loves a Woman and the carnality of Jane Birkin in Je t'aime (a smash hit of the following year, blatantly modelled on the Procol Harum song).

The influence of A Whiter Shade of Pale is not confined to torrid French confections. Its success paved the way for pop music's assimilation of classical forms. Its progeny includes Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and the complete works of Rick Wakeman. Its theme of romance on the edge, as viewed through the dregs of a bottle, struck a responsive chord elsewhere.

http://www.procolharum.co..._lotgs.htm

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The front room of a quiet Croydon house provided the artistic base for one of pop's most enduring jukebox classics. Addiscombe-born Matthew Fisher, keyboard player for Procul Harum and now living in Croydon, was the brains behind the opening bars of the 1967 hit, A Whiter Shade of Pale.

Fisher helped explained the story behind the 250 seconds of pure pop psychedelia. 'By the time I had the idea for the intro, we had been rehearsing a song for quite a while.

'Originally this song was going to be ten minutes long with various piano and organ solos. We realised that we had to cut the song so I just put all the best bits together in my front room one day.'

Pop completists may be intrigued to know that classical music played a key part in forming one of the most distinctive intros in pop.

He said, 'I've always loved Bach's B Minor Mass. I never get tired of it. I first heard it when I was 13 and I'm still listening to it now. The intro came really from that and a few other scraps of music that I liked.

'We did all know that it sounded like Air on a G-string by that point.'

The song, which topped the charts for six weeks and was eventually knocked off the top spot by the Beatles' All You Need Is Love, has become an enduring if bewildering pop legend.

Fisher said: 'It's still on most pub jukeboxes which isn't bad for a song which is 33 years old. It's all the more surprising considering that it's hardly a karaoke classic!

'It was a magic, fluke record. You could never equal it or improve on it.'

He couldn't unfortunately shed any clues on the song's lyrics which have baffled pop pickers for over 30 years.

'I have no idea at all. It never bothered me what the lyrics meant. It's a great record but not a great song. By that I mean, it hasn't really been improved on by a big artist in the same way that Aretha Franklin took Otis Redding's Respect and did a better version.

'I've heard Joe Cocker do a version of A Whiter Shade of Pale which was OK. But even Tom Jones sung [sic] a version! Don't get me wrong, I love Tom Jones, but his version just didn't work at all.'

Fisher also laughed off any higher meaning behind the song's lyrics. 'There are a lot of things you can get from the song. You could look at the mood of the piece while some people try to make sense of the words. Others try to look on it at an emotional level while some people think they can dance to it.'

http://www.procolharum.co...eality.htm
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You asked for it.

tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm

"It's a summer song of pervasive dread, a wedding hymn riven with sexual anxiety, an epochal composition"

TRANSLATION: "I have no fucking clue what it's about, dude."

excellent, excellent song. i've never heard a version that anyone could fuck up.

VoicesCarry said:

After the writer's vomitorious intro, he does get some info out of Keith Reid (lyricist).

tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm