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The response to the Guildford
concert
has been overwhelmingly positive. Many fans flew in from around the world to catch the show. It sounds like it was quite a magical evening.
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 Well, they did that of course but they could do that and it could be a complete disaster. Luckily, it was a magical evening. It was very memorable from the band's point of view, we had a fantastic night.
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I read some time ago that you wanted to ensure that Procol Harum played live at some point during the
millennium
year. How did the Guildford show come about?
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Well, we had one or two things that had been proposed this year. We weren't particularly playing, Procol did not have any tours coming up or new product out, and therefore it was quite hard to see if we were going to play, where it would be. I think in the past couple of years we've had such a good response to the
website, which of course has nothing to do with us at all that website. It's put together by fans for fans and they're quite happy to carry on without us I think. But, at some point I said,
"Procol will play this
year," no doubt about it, an idle boast, and come the middle of the year, I thought, you know, we should really play in the year 2000 and try and do something.
A
couple of propositions came
along,
one was playing at the Dome site...and well, it was becoming less and less of a reality as the year went on. Then we had another proposition came up to play with an orchestra down in Guildford for a charity, and that seemed the best one to go with at the end of the day. Of course, playing outdoor in September in England is not what you should normally do.
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Not your ideal weather conditions for an open air concert.
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Well, no. But the Lord smiled upon us and we had fabulous weather.
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Can North American fans of Procol Harum look forward to a show or two?
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Well, hang on, you're getting greedy there, a show or
two! Well, I suppose you could always do east coast and west coast shows
because those are two separate worlds there. Well, we haven't got anything planned specifically to go to North America but on the other hand I see the millennium
is coming up at the end of this year. The start of the next millennium happens from Jan
1st next year, we all know that, as long as you do your arithmetic right. So, in fact I'll get on with my second promise. I'm sure that we should play in America at the start of the next millennium, we will be there.
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That's
going
to
make
a
lot
of
people
very
happy.
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Well, it will save them from coming all the way over here!
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Are there any plans to record with the current line up?
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Well, we haven't actually played with Procol for at least two years, maybe more. The line up we used the other night was myself and
Matthew Fisher,
Mark Brzezicki
on drums,
Mick Grabham
and
Geoff
Whitehorn
on
guitars and young
Matt Pegg
on bass.
They've all done tours with us in America.
Mick Grabham
of course was guitarist from 1973 to 77 with Procol Harum. So, he was one of the originators on certain albums. All of those people are really willing and really want to go out and play somewhere. We just have to get it together really.
As far as recording, I think there's a little bit
of, some sort of impetus going on towards making a record. You know it's strange days these days, has been for many
years,
and I think with Procol we were very down…we made an album in 1991
(The
Prodigal
Stranger)
and we thought very carefully about it…we thought, hang on, make an album after fifteen years what does Procol Harum… what was Procol Harum? What is it? Well, it was certainly …it was Reid/Brooker type songs,
Mathew came in and played the organ, we thought we were there
and
we thought we'd put together a good set of songs. I think we were rather disappointed in the…that we put our best at that time, our best effort in there and two things
happened;
a)
it only sold …well it didn't get in the charts or anything like that and secondly, the record company that we'd probably unwisely gone with, looked at the accounts and said "Hang on, this didn't quite pay for what we paid for it. The accounts are wrong here, goodbye Procol Harum." Procol Harum has always been a band that...we can deliver. You give us three or four years or more of writing songs and making records and we'll be able to deliver. We're not a one album band. And really to restart, if you like, after fifteen years, should have been given a bigger shot from the industry. So that took the wind out of our sails a little bit. So we're really recovering from that I
think.
You know, we didn't say, "Oh, well, fuck them, if they don't want to know, we'll just go get straight back in the studios", it's taken a while to recover from that.
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Describe your first introduction to music. Was there a lot of music being played in the house while growing up?
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By my father, he was a musician. He was a professional musician, he was a Hawaiian guitarist. He introduced the Hawaiian guitar to Great Britain almost. Which was the precursor to the modern day electric guitar. There were electric Hawaiian guitars before there were six-string, stand up and strum jobs. So I kind of grew up with Hawaiian music from an early age. I spent all my time listening to my father play, watching him from the wings and went to piano lessons from the age of about five and now and again got up with him to do duets on the piano. Unfortunately, my father died when I was eleven, he died when he was forty- one I think, of a heart attack, straight out of the blue. Kind of knocked the family apart, well not apart, but whacked it right down the middle. I don't think he was insured so we'd lost our bread winner and everything…so life was a bit tough for a few years. A bass player friend of my father's bought me a couple of years piano lessons. He kind of donated it…so I'm indebted to the man forever. My father had died and suddenly this man said, "Well, here, I've paid for them, it's all paid for, go and see the piano teacher". So I carried on and went and saw a new teacher and this was when I was about eleven or twelve, and carried on. I had a very, very good teacher, name of Ronald Meecham where I lived in South End and we worked it all out together. I'd actually got fed up, when I was young, I was learning classical pieces and things, scales and classical pieces, and you got hit across the knuckles if you didn't play it right. With a ruler. Most severely!
Goodness!
Yeah, it was a woman who taught me and she was absolutely
vicious. I mean, these days you'd be put away for that…but I deserved it anyway because I wouldn't practice from one week to the next! She was quite right, I needed a good whap. I never felt I had been treated unkindly, I deserved it…It wasn't like "Oh, I
can't play it anymore, you hurt my knuckles!"
But with the new teacher he was different. I think he worked out after a few weeks (he says)…" You're not really into just learning how to read and play these classical pieces are you?" And I said, "No, not really'. So he says, "Well, what do you want to know?" and I said ,"Well, I kind of heard something the other day, a Ray Charles record". And he says, "Bring it in" So I brought it in, and he wrote down what Ray Charles was playing and taught it to me. And then we got into boogie-woogies, writing it down as well, and just playing what I wanted to play rather than classical pieces all the time.
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You
were
eleven
or
twelve
at
this
time?
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Yeah, eleven or twelve and I think I worked with him until I was about fifteen. It was some point along there that I discovered Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll.
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And that's what really got you?
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Yeah. I think of two, three, four records that particularly hit me when I was young. I don't know when they came out, I was born in 1945 so by 1955 I was ten, so, eleven or twelve yeah, is about right. It was like, "Great Balls of Fire", "Tutti Frutti", Elvis Presley once he started using the piano in certain things. And fools such as I…I was listening to all that stuff all of
a
sudden. Ray Charles' "What'd I Say", all these raw sounds that you never ever heard before, never had on the planet anyway…the first time you heard "Great Balls Of Fire", believe me, you sat up and listened.
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You've been working with Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings. Tell us a little about playing R&B with some of those fabulous musicians.
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I have a great time with Bill. We retired in 77 with Procol Harum for a while and some time in the early 80s, after playing with Eric Clapton, I went back and started an R&B band again, playing all that early stuff. In the middle of the eighties I did that. I play now and again with Bill Wyman now, that's such a great band of musicians. It's a pleasure to be onstage with them. When we're out on the tour there's myself, Georgie Fame, Alvin Lee, Martin Taylor, Beverly Skeets singing as well, good 'ol Bill on bass, and brilliant brass players and backing singers and drummers, everything. To play with Georgie Fame, Martin Taylor, Alvin Lee etc is always a pleasure.
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What do you remember about your early days playing the club circuit?
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It wasn't always the club circuit. Clubs were great news because you went to a switched on club, that would be great. But that was like one in ten, the other ten gigs that you did would have been in suburban towns in Britain that had never heard an R&B or a black record in their life. And it was a dance hall and all they wanted to hear was who was #1 or the Top 5. So it was not all roses whatsoever. Looking back you kind of remember, "Oh, yeah, well great days" and you remember all the great club gigs and things, in
Guildford, or Windsor or Central London where there was a switched on audience. But most of the time it was pure hell. It was a tough sell and there was always twelve guys waiting outside to beat you up because their girlfriends said, "Oh, they're nice".
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How did you see the San Francisco music scene in comparison to what was going on in London at this time?
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I only know what happened when I
first went there in 1967 and saw all these bands. But the one thing that actually shocked me when I got there, to San Francisco in 1967, was that these bands that I'd heard about, which had great names and sounded as cool as The Who or The Action or Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames and countless other hip bands, and I'm not talking about Pop bands like Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas…we're talking about real bands not pop artists that got a few lucky breaks, was that they were absolutely terrible. The Youngbloods, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, I wouldn't say they were terrible, but they were not as good as the bands that I'd left behind in England when I left there in '67. The bands that were playing there were much more…they were better players. I won't say they had better ideas, particularly, but they were so much more professional. But it may have been a matter of drugs! That might have been the difference, too much dope in California , you know. I think the New York acts were probably slicker, someone like Vanilla Fudge or something like that, were probably slicker and more hip. And the Rascals before them, you know, but the West Coast bands were a bit of mess really.
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Both the San Francisco bands and the English bands developed great jamming and improvisational skills, yet the reasons for improv were very different.
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The free-form and jamming, from our point of view, from British artists point of view, came that we were quite used to playing like a forty-five minute set when we were in England in 67, let's say, and I spoke with Cream about this, Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton, and I found their experience to be very similar. They'd actually just, they were in America before Procol Harum were, but we weren't very far behind them, they were sort of four or five months ahead and what happened when you went to America was that you found that you're booked in for an hour and a half and you've got half an hour's worth of songs. And what Cream did, was like suddenly think, shit we've only got six songs, "Spoonful" and "Crossroads" and a few more and they just improvised and played solos and elongated the whole thing out. Which actually became Cream, this virtuoso, improvisarios. With Procol when we first went there, we found… we've got a song that was carefully crafted, and it was all there, but it was only two and three quarters minutes long. You've got nine of those and you've only got half an hour. And we started just doubling it up, going through the song, sticking a couple of solos in the middle and then going through the song again. But it builds up the soloing and the improvisational side of things. Which of course, Robin Trower, who was with us then, was well capable of.
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During your days with The Paramounts you covered everyone from Ray Charles to Bobby
Bland. I came across a quote from you, which read, "We only liked American music. We didn't like British music at all." Is that an accurate
quote?
If so, what was it about American Blues and R&B that so enraptured the young British musicians in the early to mid 60s?
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The quote is probably fairly accurate in that I think that surprisingly, even Procol Harum was a further extension of something that started back in 1920 or something like that. That started with the Blues and Blues and Jazz and B bop and Boogie and eventually sometime in the 50s made Rhythm and Blues and the white Rockabilly side spurred off into Rock and Roll, and we took all that in and we're still a part of it , it's part of that extension. The names I mentioned to you of the records that first affected me, there weren't anything in the British charts, I mean, we were five years behind. You know we were still on the Perry Comos, or the British equivalent, which was not as good as Perry Como... he was brilliant! We had just had a few copiers here and they didn't impress anybody. When you heard "Great Balls OF Fire" or you heard Little Richard sing, when you heard Ray Charles sing, you were touched by it. That was the whole thing, we were touched by that, it touched you, it stirred your emotions. We were all learning, really. Everybody was learning.
In the early sixties, The Beatles seemed to have turned around, course that was the same learning curve they had that I had, they're just three years older than me. But they had the same learning curve The Beatles, and they took in all those influences and made it into "A Hard Day's Night".
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I've read various accounts of your introduction to Keith Reid. Guy Stevens introduced you, but was it as short and curt as I've heard? Something along the lines of "This is Keith. He writes words. This is Gary. He doesn't write words." Tell us about that first introduction.
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Yeah, yeah. Guy Stevens, he passed away some years ago, but he was a top R&B DJ in and around London in the early sixties. He knew everything there was to know about American R&B music, black music. Black music which has
instilled
a lot of soul and a lot of feeling, a lot of gospel. Guy was right in, mind you, he always pulled out great whoever it was, if it was Dick Dale and his Surfers or whatever they were called, or it might have been the Young Rascals, or something like that. If It was a good, well done piece, Guy Stevens would have always had the record in his house a month before it was available in England. And he used to teach The Paramounts their repertoire, we'd go around and hear songs there and one day there he said, "This is Keith Reid, he writes words". And I said, "Oh, really?". "This is Gary", what Guy said was, "Why don't you try to write some music for Keith's words?". "I've never written music before, why would I want to do that for, when there's all this good stuff around to play?" But I remember being handed a bag full of his lyrics. In fact, I think I went home stoned and didn't find it until quite some months later it turned up at home. I said, "What's all this then?" and there was a vague recollection of where I got it and when I opened it up I think there was about ten lyrics in there, which were absolutely marvelous. And as soon as I read them I sat down and wrote a song, with the first one. So they were inspirational, if you like, and they were well done.
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Quite an experience for your first songwriting attempt.
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It was marvelous. Of course, when you're a youngster like that and those things happen it all seems quite natural. Although it was no great shakes, I was very pleased that I was able to write, what I thought, was a song. You know, to construct something musical that hadn't been written before. Because I wasn't really coming from anywhere else, I wasn't using, I wasn't writing something like, hey what's happening here, I'll try to write something like what's happening. It was like, whatever came out of me and whatever these words suggested that's what came out. And it was actually just a big amalgamation of everything else that had gone before. You know, an amalgamation of Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Bach, it was all in there.
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The Brooker/Reid partnership came together rather quickly then.
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I think as soon as we got going, what I mean is, as soon as I'd written a song to his words, in fact, it was from the moment I got this packet of words back at Guy Stevens, from that point, from when I got the words, and it was quite a few months until I actually found them, but as soon as I had, I told Keith that I had written something to his words and he was like, "Oh,
great."
When I played it to him he liked it and we went on from there.
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More
to
come...
in
December's
issue |
| Gary Brooker describes the creation of "A Whiter Shade Of Pale", playing with an orchestra, the outdoor music festivals of the late 60s and early 70s, the challenges and obstacles while recording the landmark "Live
In
Concert"
album
(with The Edmonton Symphony
Orchestra), his memories of drummer BJ Wilson and much
more... read
December's
issue
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