“A Whiter Shade of Pale”
I was truly blessed to grow up in the 1980’s. Although I was born in 1972 and events of the late 70’s impacted me, it was my coming of age in the early, mid, and late 80’s that shaped me into who I was to become. Many aspects of that time period influenced me, but it was probably the movies and the music that shaped me most. They created a love for both that still endures in me to this day.
The movie soundtrack played a very essential role in helping me to expand my horizons as a kid. While I had MTV and “Casey Kasem’s Top 40,” both of those were designed around what was popular on the charts at the time. The movie soundtrack contained those popular hits also, but the extra tracks took you somewhere else entirely. For example, in the fall of 1986, as a 14 year old kid, I went to Northpark Cinemas in Lexington, Kentucky, one afternoon to see a double feature of Ferrris Bueller’s Day Off and Pretty in Pink. What a time to be alive! Ferris had some great music in it but it was Pretty in Pink that introduced me to OMD and The Psychedelic Furs. You never saw them on MTV or heard them on the Top 40. For a kid living in Lexington, KY, this opened up a whole new world of possibilities. But not only them…it also had INXS, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, and The Smiths. I had already liked what we now call the “New Romantic” bands like Duran Duran, The Human League, and A Flock of Seagulls because bands like those were in regular rotation on MTV, but the Pretty in Pink soundtrack and many others like it introduced me to so much more. I remember going to Musicland in Lexington Mall and Camelot Records in Fayette Mall searching for the back catalogs of these bands we had no idea even existed. These albums came to define my experience and still live on fondly in my memories and on my Spotify playlists.
When I turned 16, I got a job working at the Lexington Mall Cinemas and had the time of my young life. I remember waiting on the film credits to end so I could quickly clean up the theater before the next showing. As those credits rolled, there was always music playing. In 1989 we had When Harry Met Sally and by the time that film left I knew every one of the classics that Harry Connick Jr. performed. I remember picking up empty popcorn buckets and singing “It Had to Be You” as loudly as I wanted. I eventually picked up the soundtrack cd and am still a Harry Connick Jr. fan to this day. Not to mention, it led me to Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, all of whom are still in regular rotation for me as well. Don’t discount the power of a great soundtrack.
That same year, there was a film called New York Stories. It consisted of three stories that revolved around New York City at the time. The segment directed by Martin Scorsese was the one that stands out to me because of one song: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procol Harem. The segment was about an artist played by Nick Nolte. As I remember, the opening had him painting and listening to the song. I have no idea why, but that song entranced me. It was beautiful. I really don’t remember much about the movie, but that song found its way onto “My Favorite Songs” playlist that I have been making for the last 20 years.
The band released the song in 1967. Rock music was changing at that time into much more of an art form. The Beatles and The Beach Boys had been going back and forth creating masterpiece after masterpiece, each of them pushing things forward.The Beatles started it with Rubber Soul in 1965. That album pushed Brian Wilson to create Pet Sounds in 1966, which in turn pushed the Beatles to create Revolver. By October of 1966, Wilson released “Good Vibrations” and in 1967 The Beatles released Sgt. Peppers. And none of that even begins to acknowledge what Dylan, the Stones, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, and Simon and Garfunkel were also doing at that time. Rock music was being pushed into a whole new realm and Procol Harum were part of it as well.
They considered themselves a “blues band with classical influences.” In fact, the melody of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was created when organist Gary Brooker was trying to play J. S. Bach’s “Orchestral Suite No 3.” He started on the right note then couldn’t remember the rest. Brooker once said “it does a bar or two of Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ before it veers off. That spark was all it took. I wasn’t consciously combining rock with classical, it’s just that Bach’s music was in me.” The lyrics are vague, seemingly about a drunken party, a “seasick” protagonist, and a girl with a “ghostly” face that “turned a whiter shade of pale.” Whatever the song is about, for me it has always been the feel of it with that beautiful organ melody.
When I was writing the second chapter to my book If We Never Meet Again, there was never a question as to which song on my playlist would anchor it. The chapter is about the first death I ever experienced in the world of hospice. In that chapter, I refer to it as my initiation:
“My first death was quite the experience. Now you have to remember, the only place I had ever seen a dead body was at a funeral home all dressed up and on display. I certainly had never touched a dead body. As a teacher I had seen my share of crazy moments. I broke up fights, managed students during emergency drills, and dealt with my share of crazy parents. But this was different. Seriously, you don’t have to make up what happened to me” (11).
He was my first death and nothing had prepared me for it. In the chapter, I describe the horror of the moment. The wife was screaming, the coroner was cussing me out and it was a truly dizzying moment:
“I walked in the house, turned the corner, and there was Albert laid out on the floor, eyes wide open in a look of complete disbelief, naked, with arms and legs opened wide. He still had a tube coming out of his mouth where they had intubated him with blood splattered across the floor. I had never seen anything like that moment. It was a scene out of a horror movie to me, or a bloody picture from a crime scene. He looked terrible and it was certainly not the way I would want to go out” (13-14).
Still to this day, I cannot think of him without seeing that look on his face. It was horrible. I later stated that the experience was my “trial by fire into the world of hospice; none of the online training I had completed remotely prepared me for such insanity.” Later, I continued “The memory of Bert splayed out there on the floor with that terrified look in his eyes…I don’t think I’ll ever shake it. It’s still just as vivid to me as the morning it happened.”
I guess that for me the “Whiter Shade of Pale” line initially applied to the look on his poor face, but honestly, it could have been and probably was on mine the whole time.
Matthew M Cornett 