Songwriting inspiration can come from strange places—even an overimbibing partygoer, as was the case for Procol Harum’s 1967 hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. Then again, if you were to ask the man who was sitting in prison on a drug charge when the track first topped the charts, it wasn’t the partygoer who came up with the idea. It was him.
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Contested nearly as much as the song’s true origins is the meaning behind the lyrics, neither of which bothered Procol Harum songwriter Keith Reid. “If people can continually debate something, we’re talking about thirty years now, it just says to me that it had great depth,” Reid later said, per Claes Johansen’s Procol Harum: Beyond the Pale.
“If it had been a fairly superficial lyric,” he continued, “people would never have got into it.” That may be true, but this leaves one question: Which came first, the partygoer or Guy Stevens?
The Contested Origins of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”
According to Keith Reid, who was Procol Harum’s principal songwriter and non-performing member, he first overheard the titular phrase at a party. “Some guy looked at a chick and said to her, ‘You’ve gone a whiter shade of pale,’” Reid later explained, per Claes Johansen’s biography. “That phrase stuck in my mind. It was a beautiful thing for someone to say. I wish I’d said it.”
Guy Stevens was a colleague and de facto founder of Procol Harum, having named the band and introduced Reid to co-founding member Gary Brooker. And if you were to ask him, he was the one who came up with that “beautiful thing” to say. The only problem was that Stevens couldn’t confront Procol Harum about it directly. The music businessman was in prison on a drug charge after police arrested him on Brian Jones’ roof. (Yes, of The Rolling Stones.)
As fellow rock ‘n’ roller Steve Hyams would later recall, “I went to see Guy Stevens at the time when ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ had just come out. When I met him, he was very upset. He had this newspaper in his hand. And he had just found out that the song had gone to No. 1. He claimed that he had come up with that one line, ‘a whiter shade of pale.’ Reid must have heard him saying it somewhere and built his song around it.”
The Public Erroneously Linked This Hit to LSD
Procol Harum’s 1967 track, “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, was a global smash hit. The song topped the charts around the world, including the band’s native U.K. In the U.S., “A Whiter Shade of Pale” hit No. 5 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Cash Box Top 100. The band’s inability to recreate such a monumental success has placed them in the “one-hit wonder” category.
Meanwhile, the song’s roving lyricism also garnered the song serious psychedelic cred. Per Claes Johansen’s biography, Procol Harum’s biggest hit has been credited as having “the greatest acid lyric ever written.” However, according to Keith Reid, any associations with LSD are erroneous.
Erroneous, of course, but understandable. “A Whiter Shade of Pale” came out in May 1967, right when the Summer of Love really started to get hot. The song inevitably became tied to this particular cultural moment. But that didn’t mean Keith Reid was partaking, too. When responding to rumors that “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was actually about LSD, Reid said, “I had never taken acid when I wrote that song. And I don’t think I had done very many drugs.”
The same could certainly not be said for many of the people listening to Procol Harum’s biggest hit that summer.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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