‘It was influenced by books, not drugs’

Keith Reid on “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

"I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale,’ that was the start, and I knew it was a song. It’s like a jigsaw where you’ve got one piece, then you make up all the others to fit in. I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story. With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images, I wasn’t trying to be evocative. I suppose it seems like a decadent scene I’m describing. But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then, I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote it. It was influenced by books, not drugs.

"It was twice as long, four verses. The fourth wasn’t any great loss, but you had the whole story in three. When I heard what Gary’d done with them, it just seemed so right. We felt we had something very important. As soon as we played it for anyone, we got an immediate response.

"In rehearsal, instrumentation was added. We had this concept for the sound of Procol Harum to be Hammond organ, piano and blues guitar. No other band had that; it gave us a bigger sound. It’s a live recording… I think we did three takes. It’s equal parts Dylan and Stax. On our own terms, we were always trying to make a Soul record. Funnily enough, Otis Redding wanted to do it, but we wanted our record out first, and Stax wanted the exclusive."

http://americandigest.org/wp/boomer-ballads-a-whiter-shade-of-pale-live-in-denmark-2006/#more-7852

(I never thought the song was about drugs. There was a girl and a boy and pictures made with words.)