The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  The Syn had a new guitarist, Peter Banks. He was introduced to the whole band, including guitarist John Painter, even though he was going to replace him. “This was my first introduction to how cold the music business could be.” After he got in, he inherited Painter’s Rickenbacker. “Not only did I steal his job, I stole his guitar as well.”7

  Chris Squire, the bassist, struck Banks as “talented, vain and selfish, all underlined with an affable, friendly persona.”8

  Emerson joined the V.I.P.s, a band managed by Chris Blackwell, in August 1966, hearing about them in pubs near the Marquee. “We were taking our lead from the likes of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and Charles Lloyd, contrasting heavily with PP Arnold’s black soul approach,” he said. “There was never a problem in moulding different ethnic backgrounds together musically.”9

  “‘A WHITER SHADE OF PALE’ was born during a party at Guy Stevens’s house,” Keith Reid would remember to a biographer. “There was a large group of us sitting round smoking and joking. During the course of much banter, Guy was trying to tell [his wife] Diane that she had turned very white and he was jumbling up his words.” The jumble, as multiple parties remembered it: You’ve turned a whiter shade of pale. Reid had his lyric. “It was much later after . . . when I had written the whole song that I told Guy about my moment of inspiration,” he recalled. “He was of course totally unaware that he had said anything that inspired me.”10

  Reid’s lyric, three verses that were later cut to two, captured the scene from the party and placed it in an inscrutable new context. “I never understand when people say they don’t understand it,” Reid would say, decades later. “ ‘We skipped the light fandango.’ That’s straightforward. ‘Turned cartwheels across the floor.’ It seems very clear to me.” Reid was a fan of French new-wave films and surrealist art, and he’d merely written a lyric that fit into the tradition. “You can draw a line between the narrative fractures and mood of those French films and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ ” he said.11

  Mystical lyrics were nothing really new to the charts—not in the spring of 1967. What Procol Harum had, and no other band had, was a classical hook played on a Hammond organ, blown up to cathedral proportions. The hook, a rising C-Em-Am-G figure, was copped from Bach’s Air on a G String.

  More precisely, it was borrowed from the light, jazzy, bass-heavy version performed by Jacques Loussier. Gary Brooker had heard it on a commercial for Hamlet cigars, a little comic scene in which a young man at a laundromat undresses down to his underwear, to the shock of the female clientele. After packing his suit into a washing machine, the man swivels around. He lights a cigar. The women calm and swoon; the Bach chords swell. “Happiness,” purrs a narrator, “is a cigar called Hamlet.”

  “The original Hamlet cigar commercial featuring Air on a G String had always been a big favorite of ours,” said Brooker. “When the guy lit up the cigar everything just went cool. Anyway, I sat down one day and tried to play ‘Air on a G String.’ ”12

  Matthew Fisher, who actually played the organ on the track, gave Brooker credit for the hook but not for the interpretation that created the hit. “He says he was trying to play Air on a G String sort of like the Jacques Loussier version, because I don’t think he ever listened to Bach in its original form,” said Fisher. “He was trying to play it and singing along to it, and he sort of got it wrong because he didn’t have a record of it at the time, so he was just trying to remember how it went, and it sort of went off in a sort of a different direction. I knew Air on a G String, so I kind of went along with that, but when I was constructing the solo, I made another reference to another Bach piece—you know, “Sleepers Awake,” or whatever you want to call it—so that was a deliberate reference again. It ended up as a mixture of the two, with quite a bit of other stuff, which was neither of them.”13

  The massive, celestial sound was a simple trick that no one else had thought to try. “I just had this little preset on my Hammond organ that had a big churchy sound, and I thought that would sound good in a rock band,” recalled Fisher. “It was entirely my idea to compose a set solo and to give the last two bars a satisfying ‘shape.’ ”14

  Procol Harum’s demo ended up with Tony Hall, who was signing acts for Decca’s progressive label Deram. “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was precisely the sort of song Deram had been created for—a loping ballad that didn’t sound like a hit, precisely, but was impossible to dislodge from the synapses. “We didn’t stop playing that demo all night long, until about two in the morning,” Hall would remember.15

  This song would not be debuted on the BBC. No—Hall would take it to Radio London, one of the pirate stations getting past British censors by sequestering itself in a boat off the coast. The pirate radio debut happened on April 17. “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was in shops just a few weeks later. The “big churchy sound” had done its trick—Procol Harum was a sensation. On May 12 the band played its first live gigs at the UFO, then performed for a more select crowd at the Speakeasy. “Hendrix was down at the Speakeasy watching us playing,” remembered Brooker, “and he suddenly jumped up onstage when we started ‘Morning Dew,’ grabbed the bass off our bass player, turned it upside down, and joined in.”16

  London was like that in the spring of 1967. The June 3 issue of Disc and Music Echo reported on all the boldface names at the last Procol Harum show at the Speakeasy: “All four Beatles, Georgie Fame, Chris Farlmowe, Cat Stevens, Andrew Loog Oldham, Eric Burdon, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and Denny Cordell.” Paul McCartney heard the record at the Speakeasy and pronounced it “the best song ever.”17 He met a girl that night, a photographer named Linda Eastman. Later, he’d give her a copy of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” to remind her of how they found each other.

  As the single rose to number one and started a six-week residence atop the charts, Brooker and his bandmates stepped into a Chelsea boutique called Dandy Fashions. The Beatles had beaten them there and “were standing around a harmonium singing ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ the very moment we came in,” said Brooker.18

  THE WILDE FLOWERS had not found their moment. Soft Machine would, after a few missteps. Like the Beatles, they booked a residency at the Star-Club in Hamburg. Unlike the Beatles, they lasted for one night of a three-night booking before being asked to go back home. The time was exquisite; the Softs got a new residency in the “Spontaneous Underground,” a Saturday series at the Marquee Club.

  Kevin Ayers found them new management, too, in the persons of Mike Jeffrey and Chas Chandler, respectively the former manager and bassist of the Animals. The club wanted only Ayers at first, but a deal was struck to pay the Softs £12 per week. Inspired by the flop in Hamburg, Ayers wrote a song designed for the charts—“Love Makes Sweet Music”—but the band found its biggest audiences at the growing psychedelic shows. “The music we made then was so amateurish compared to the rest of mainstream pop and rock ’n’ roll,” said Ayers. That distinction was bent into a strength: “You could tell that these people came from different reference areas.”19

  In September 1966, the team of Jeffrey and Chandler took on a new client: a twenty-five-year-old guitar player named Jimi Hendrix. While Soft Machine recorded, Hendrix built a live reputation over a string of gigs. A November concert at the Bag O’Nails drew out the likes of Pete Townshend and John Lennon—and Ayers. “All the stars were there and I heard serious comments, you know: ‘Shit,’ ‘Jesus,’ ‘Damn,’ and other words worse than that,” Ayers recalled.20

  The psychedelic wave hit everyone at a different angle. The Softs rode it, headlining more “be-ins” of increasing size and hype. On April 29, 1967, they joined Pink Floyd, the Move, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Creation, and the Pretty Things in the “14 Hour Technicolor Dream,” sponsored by the new International Times magazine, which would cover whatever this movement would become. The light show included a beam shining from a miner’s helmet, worn by Daevid Allen. The music, increasingly, was anchored by a sound that Ratledge was cranking
out of his Lowrey keyboard by running it through a fuzz box. “We couldn’t afford a Hammond, which was the authentic article, so I was playing this weedy Lowrey,” said Ratledge. “I wanted to approximate the power that Hendrix had. I got sick of guitarists having all the balls.”21

  The Syn evolved from the Motown covers and attempted to write epics, something that involved longer styles of composition and intricate costumes. This trend befuddled Peter Banks, who could not understand why American-style drug rock was catching on. We “ended up doing psychedelic rock operas,” said Banks. “We did one about gangsters. We would dress up in gangster attire—one of us had a yellow, double-breasted suite [sic], and Chris had a green one, and there was a white one. We each would act out a part and sing these songs like a musical—like a rock opera. Because we’d always read that Pete Townshend was writing one, which obviously became Tommy. So we were determined to be the first band to do one on stage—which we probably were.”22

  Other acts took more naturally to the scene. Steve Howe moved from a series of cover-heavy bands to Tomorrow, whose single “My White Bicycle” paid tribute to a radical ride-sharing program and was easily mistaken for a drug anthem. The gigs went into the night; the atmosphere, Howe remembered, was improving all the time. “Hippie promoters would actually come in and say things like, ‘We really liked the show, here’s some extra money,’ ” he said. “It was such a change from the old music biz agents who would just rip you off.”23

  Decades later, Howe would tell the journalist Jim DeRogatis that the style, and the scene, built bands like Yes. “Yes couldn’t have played the kind of music it made without having the experience of developing the freedom and total nonconformist approach that came from the psychedelic bands.”24

  More bands were coaxed out of the remnants of the ones who had made it. An agent named Ian Ralfini encouraged Pye Hastings, the left-behind member of the Wilde Flowers, to strike out with something new. “Progressive” had started to mean something—not a set definition, but a sense of scale and newness.

  “He said, I want an English progressive band to take to America and get an album out,” said Pye Hastings of Ralfini. “If you give me a good album and everything I’ll give you whatever you need—a van, clothes, gear—all the things you need to get by on the road. At that time we were still using odds and sods of Soft Machine equipment—amplifiers and so on, because they were in America but they were about to reclaim it. Then the deal came along at the right moment.”25

  And at that moment, Soft Machine was back in France, touring to audiences that were ready for the be-in. In Saint-Tropez, the band extended a simple melody called “We Did It Again” to more than forty minutes. “It was his idea that if you find something boring—a basic Zen concept—then in the end you will find it interesting,” Ratledge told band biographer Graham Bennett. “The ear either habituates or forces a change on itself, which is similar in a way to the stuff Terry Riley’s doing. Kevin saw it halfway between this spiritual libertarian thing and showing how hip we were.”26

  In August, the band rounded the continent and returned to England. It was stopped at the port of Dover. Immigration had cause to inspect Daevid Allen’s work status; Allen knew exactly why. “My name was on their list in a big black book,” he said. “Being thrown out of the country was exhilarating, liberating, the best thing that could have happened to me.”27

  “We were lucky,” remembered Davy O’List, guitarist for the Nice. “Jimi Hendrix came to one of the gigs and invited us on tour.” The “first psychedelic tour” of Britain—forty minutes for Hendrix, seventeen minutes for Pink Floyd, twelve minutes for O’List—turned the Nice into a headliner. “Rondo” killed.

  Their album was named The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack after Lee Jackson’s habit of carrying around Mao’s book.28 The album couldn’t have been less political: the title’s profundity was a joke, a portmanteau of the musicians’ names, illustrated by the quartet tied together by cling-film.

  IN 1967, MIKE PINDER got a call directing him to the Dunlop Tyres factory social club. There, for a steep discount—£300, down from £3,000—he could pick up a mellotron. What Pinder found resembled a keyboard, but each stroke set off a recorded sound from analog tape. The size of the tape was limiting; only seven or eight seconds of sound could play at a go. “I had two lead sides on my own machine: I had duplicated the right-hand side on the left keyboard and primarily had it as an organ,” he recalled. “So I had organ on my left hand and strings, flutes or brass on my right hand. I could show them that I was playing every note.”29

  While the Moodies were struggling, singer Denny Laine had left; Justin Hayward, a singer steeped in British folk, stepped in to replace him. Decca assigned them a new producer, Tony Clarke. When the mellotron was hauled in, Clarke was just twenty-five, with more expression as a faceless session musician than as an arranger. “It was an important instrument,” he said. “Anybody who was anybody was using one at the time. The Beatles had something like four and even Princess Margaret had one, black with gold bits on it.”30

  For Pinder, the little organ with the BBC orchestra trapped inside it was a godsend. “You get sick of playing piano, piano, piano on everything,” he said. Suddenly, he could summon “the ideas that I’d had in my head as a kid”: the countermelodies and colors that pianos could never conjure.31

  “If someone could read music, you could put C above E and know that was the rocket ship taking off,” said Graeme Edge. “You could retrieve the sounds by writing it like a musical form. Mike figured out to add horns, strings, bagpipes and all that sort of stuff behind it and turn it into a more natural musical instrument.”32

  Pinder was waiting for a project, and Decca came up with one. The label “wanted to combine an orchestra and a rock’n’roll band to make a demonstration record for a new stereo sound they’d developed on Deram,” he said, and its first idea was a rock-and-roll cover of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.33

  The band was cool to the idea. So was Clarke. What grabbed him, more than the idea of a straight cover album, was a demo of a Hayward song called “Nights in White Satin.” He’d written it before joining the group. The inspiration—seriously—was a set of satin bedsheets. “A girlfriend had given me white satin sheets that were terribly impractical because I had quite a heavy beard growth, and it’s terribly unpleasant if you’re trying to sleep on satin,” Hayward said. “I came home one night after a gig, and sat on the side of the bed, and a lot of these thoughts came out.”34

  The band, ignoring the advice of the studio, hunkered in Decca’s Studio One. “When the lights were down or out in the studio you had this massive cinemascope screen effect and years later I actually built a working screen at the far end of the studio,” said Clarke. “The projectors were underneath so we could sit and beam stuff onto this screen and it would slowly dissolve into something else.”35

  Instead of fiddling with someone else’s symphony, they created their own, with seven tracks corresponding to the times of day. “The Day Begins” led into “Dawn: Dawn is a Feeling,” which led eventually into “Nights in White Satin.” There was a song about the lunch break, and another pop song, “Tuesday Afternoon.”

  “I smoked a couple of joints, went out into a field with a guitar and sat there and wrote that song,” Hayward said. “It was just about searching for some kind of enlightenment or some kind of religious or psychedelic experience in life. I didn’t really mean it to be taken too seriously, but six months later, there it was: Our first single in America. Bang! You never expect to have to analyze these lyrics, or be questioned about them.”36

  According to Clarke, the first cut of the songs came as a surprise to Decca. “I remember arriving late one day at the Monday meeting and all the heads of department were pontificating with serious faces about the recording,” said Clarke. “Our managing director was saying ‘well, I didn’t ask for this,’ only to congratulate us a few weeks later. But then the head of classical got up and said: ‘I think it
’s great. It’s a brave step.’ That was nice of him.”37

  The label went with it. In short order, the band was joining the London Festival Orchestra for a full recording of the song cycle. For the first time, a rock album was written as a single piece, each song flowing into the next, guided by the novelty of strings and brass. “The musicians just about fit into the studio—there were three bow basses and one of them had to stand in the doorway,” remembered Clarke. “It was quite an impressive sight. Some of the orchestra had headphones on, all the first violins, which was a first.”38

  Decca released both “Nights in White Satin” and the album Days of Future Passed on November 10, 1967. In their roundabout way, the Moody Blues had produced something new: a pop song carried along by an orchestra. In Graeme Edge’s wry recollection, the secret was assembling “a bunch of guys who were too stupid to know that we weren’t supposed to be able to do it.”39

  BY 1968, THE PSYCHEDELIC boom defined the whole London scene—and the entirety of what rock labels were interested in. The Syn came apart, and both Banks and Squire joined another group: Mabel Greer’s Toyshop. The gigging came easily; for songs, Squire penned a new one, with his bass as the lead instrument, called “Beyond and Before.” “We would play a lot of the ‘happening’ London clubs at the time like the UFO, with the liquid lightshows and plenty of people wandering around, wondering what day and what year it was,” groused Banks.40