Farewell, Old Salt
Gary Brooker, the voice and pianist of Procol Harum, left us on February 22.
GARY BROOKER was the singer and co-composer of one of the most radical, pivotal and colossally popular singles ever, soundtracking ’67’s Summer of Love on the global radio just as evocatively as Sgt. Pepper did on the world’s turntables.
Yet if A Whiter Shade Of Pale – a UK Number 1 and US Number 5 – resounded with enigmatic portentousness with an organ tune descended from Bach, its creators, Procol Harum, never took themselves quite seriously enough to reap in full the harvest of their very English hybrid of black America and conservatoire Europe. To Traffic, Genesis and Roxy Music arguably fell the richest pickings of the unlikely compound of elements that Sandie Shaw’s sometime backing band put together in search of something new.
His father Harry the pedal steel player for Felix Mendelssohn’s Hawaiian
Serenaders, Gary Brooker was born on May 29, 1945 in Hackney, east London. The family moved to the Essex seaside resort of Southend when he was nine. A musical child, he drank in the popular classics with the same enthusiasm as he did rock’n’roll and R&B. Ray Charles was an obvious inspiration as singer and pianist in the band he co-founded,
The Paramounts: a fixture on the mid-’60s R&B live club circuit, they were rated by the Stones and selected to support The Beatles. But by 1966, real deal American artists were touching down in the UK, making homegrown covers acts redundant; only the creative would survive.
With anything possible as the music industry danced the light fandango in the swirl of the new counterculture, donning kaftans and groovily naming the rejigged band after a pedigree cat at scenemaker Guy Stevens’ suggestion were not the silliest ideas in the world. Nor was pairing up with a word-drunk lyricist in thrall to peak-visionary Dylan.
Unlike the snug dovetailing of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Gary Brooker and fellow East Ender Keith Reid struggled to accommodate each other. “Keith was quite particular that every ‘and’ or ‘the’ stayed in the song.
I just adjusted the music to fit,” Gary told this writer in 2018. “He was never writing poetry – he was writing lyrics to be sung. Though songs didn’t always come out the way he thought they would. A Salty Dog [1969] he actually wrote as a comedy;
I saw it as dramatic and deep, and fitted the music accordingly.” After nine LPs, the band went on hiatus in 1977, but Brooker was back to helm successful post-1991 reformations that only ended with the advent of Covid. In addition, Gary’s wry, congenial gift for fitting in and pitching in admitted him to the rockbroker aristocracy (over the years he played with Paul, George and Ringo, Eric Clapton and Kate Bush, and oversaw charity gigs featuring Van Morrison, Tom Jones and Nick Mason, among others). But it’s for his soulful voice, eclectic musicality and commitment to an extraordinary collective vision that he’ll be remembered.
“Donning kaftans and naming the band after a pedigree cat…”