The case of Keith Reid is unusual in pop history. He was a member of a successful band (Procol Harum) but neither sang nor played an instrument. I wrote the songs. And he wasn’t content just being surrounded by papers in his apartment, looking for inspiration. He posed for publicity photos with the rest of the band, gave interviews and even traveled to concerts with them. There was another one. Reid died in London this Thursday at the age of 76 after battling cancer for the past 24 months. Undoubtedly his most famous lyrics were for the song A Whiter Shade of Pale, a song from 1967, the year of the summer of love, the hippie dream, psychedelia, LSD, cultural and social revolution and the possibility of the state to change things that faded with the coming of the following decade.
In Spain, the song was colloquially called “la del fandango” because the first movement was “We skipped the easy fandango” (which could be translated as “we danced a soft fandango”). It was played at parties in the late 1960s, a moment used to dance in pairs. There was a Spanish version, like Los Pop Tops’, entitled Con su blanca palidez.
Keith Reed was born in 1946 in Welwyn Garden City, 30 kilometers north of London. In 1966 he met singer and instrumentalist Gary Brooker, they hit it off and decided to form a musical partnership. They formed Procol Harum and took on instrumentalists. They made their big debut with A Whiter Shade of Pale. After a half-minute introduction with an organ playing in the foreground, Brooker begins to sing the lyrics, a psychedelic trip Reed began writing at a party. “Actually, it’s a type of film that tries to set a mood and tell a story. It’s the story of a relationship. There’s characters, there’s a place, and there’s a journey,” Reed has shared over the years. The lyrics have a lot of zeitgeist: spinning rooms, distorted faces, buzzing. A psychedelic fantasy, an acid trip. Reed confessed that his role model at the time of writing was Bob Dylan.
A Whiter Shade of Pale was number one in the UK and number five in the US. Years later he had another bestseller with a dramatic version of Joe Cocker. Procol Harum has never had such a huge success. The closest came Homburg, also from 1967, another ecstatic ballad with a psychedelic touch, his great specialty.
A Whiter Shade of Pale has a tart history. The band’s keyboardist, Matthew Fisher, He claimed partial authorship of the song on the grounds that the organ melody belonged to him. In 2006, a judge ruled that the subject was 40% copyright Fisher. The musician heard the news while working as a computer programmer in London. Since then, A Whiter Shade of Pale has been signed by Keith Reid, Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher.
Reed wrote most of Procol Harum’s songs in the 1960s and 1970s. The band broke up in 1977, then returned in the 1990s, with Reed also serving as lyricist, but on occasion as he focused on representing artists.
The group said goodbye to him with these words: “His lyrics were unique and shaped the music of the band. Imaginative, surreal, complex and layered, his words delighted fans of Procol and his time. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.”
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