[ad_1]
Keith Reid, whose impressionistic lyrics for the early progressive rock band Procol Harum helped to gas emblematic songs of the Nineteen Sixties, most notably “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” has died. He was 76.
His loss of life was introduced in a Fb put up from the band. The announcement didn’t say the place or when he died or cite a trigger, however in response to information media reviews, he died in a hospital in London on March 23 after having been handled for most cancers for 2 years.
Throughout its heyday within the late Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, Procol Harum stood out as musically formidable, even by prog-rock requirements — as demonstrated by its 1972 album, “Procol Harum Dwell: In Live performance With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”
The band’s music, which at occasions bordered on the sepulchral, required lyrics that soared together with it. Mr. Reid was glad to oblige. “I at all times write them as poems,” he mentioned of his lyrics in a 1973 interview with Melody Maker, the British music journal. Certainly, with Procol Harum, the phrases tended to return first.
Because the lyricist Bernie Taupin has lengthy accomplished for Elton John, Mr. Reid typically submitted his lyrics to the band’s singer, pianist and first songwriter, Gary Brooker, or typically the band’s guitarist, Robin Trower, or organist, Matthew Fisher, who additionally wrote melodies.
Whereas Mr. Reid was a founding member of the group, he was extra a rock star by affiliation, since he didn’t sing or play an instrument and thus didn’t file or carry out with Procol Harum. Nonetheless, he hardly ever missed a gig.
“If I didn’t go to each gig, I’d not be a part of the group,” he instructed Melody Maker. Touring, he mentioned, helped him write: “I discover it a lot simpler to close myself away in a lodge room for 2 hours than to work from home, the place there are far too many distractions.”
The outcomes of such focus had been obvious with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the primary single off the band’s debut album, launched in 1967. The track, which hit No. 1 on the British charts and No. 5 on the Billboard Sizzling 100 in the USA, offered round 10 million copies worldwide. And it endured lengthy after the ’60s drew to an in depth.
By the ’80s, it had achieved canonical standing. It was typically used to underscore the wistful recollections of veterans of the flower-power period in movies like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 hippies-to-yuppies midlife disaster story, “The Massive Chill,” and Martin Scorsese’s Might-December romance installment within the 1989 movie “New York Tales,” which additionally included brief movies by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.
The track’s well-known opening strains (“We skipped the sunshine fandango/Turned cartwheels ‘cross the ground”) conjure bawdy photographs of drunken debauchery at a celebration, illuminating a failing romantic relationship. They’re set to a haunting chord development with echoes of Bach, rendered in ecclesiastical style by Mr. Fisher’s organ, and sung by Mr. Brooker in a raspy voice, soaked with longing and remorse.
She mentioned “There isn’t a purpose
And the reality is obvious to see.”
However I wandered by means of my enjoying playing cards
Wouldn’t let her be
One in every of sixteen vestal virgins
Who had been leaving for the coast
And though my eyes had been open
They may have simply as properly’ve been closed.
“I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale,’ that was the beginning, and I knew it was a track,” Mr. Reid mentioned in a 2008 interview with the British music journal Uncut.
“I used to be making an attempt to conjure a temper as a lot as inform a simple, girl-leaves-boy story,” he continued. “With the ceiling flying away and room buzzing more durable, I needed to color a picture of a scene.”
Keith Stuart Brian Reid was born on Oct. 19, 1946, in Welwyn Backyard Metropolis, north of London, certainly one of two sons of a father from Austria and a mom who had been born in England to Polish dad and mom. His father, who was fluent in six languages, had been a lawyer in Vienna however was amongst greater than 6,000 Jews arrested there in November 1938. He fled to England upon his launch.
His father’s experiences by the hands of the Nazis left emotional scars that Mr. Reid mentioned influenced his worldview, and his writing.
“The tone of my work could be very darkish, and I believe it’s in all probability from my background in some unconscious method,” Mr. Reid mentioned in an interview with Scott R. Benarde, the writer of “Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Tales” (2003).
In 1966, Mr. Reid was launched by a mutual buddy to Mr. Brooker, who was with a band known as the Paramounts, whose members additionally included Mr. Trower and the drummer B.J. Wilson. Mr. Reid and Mr. Brooker turned pals and began writing collectively; they, Mr. Trower, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Fisher would all ultimately kind Procol Harum.
Procol Harum by no means once more scaled the heights it achieved with its first single, nevertheless it continued to be a significant act by means of the mid-Seventies, usually releasing albums and scoring the occasional hit single; a stay orchestral model of “Conquistador,” a track from the band’s first album, reached the Prime 20 in 1972.
Mr. Reid mentioned he felt misplaced after the band broke up in 1977 (it could reform, in numerous incarnations, over time). In 1986 he moved to New York, the place he began a administration firm and composed songs for different artists.
That yr, he collaborated with the songwriters Andy Qunta, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on “You’re the Voice,” which was recorded by the Australian singer John Farnham, and topped the charts in a number of nations, though it made little impression in the USA.
Through the Nineties, Mr. Reid wrote for Annie Lennox, Willie Nelson, Coronary heart and plenty of others. He would ultimately flip the give attention to his personal abilities, releasing two albums by what he known as The Keith Reid Challenge, “The Frequent Thread” (2008) and “In My Head” (2018), which included artists like Southside Johnny, John Waite and Mr. Thompson.
Mr. Reid’s survivors embrace his spouse, Pinkey, whom he married in 2004.
In contrast to the rock luminaries he got here of age alongside, Mr. Reid didn’t bask within the lights of the stage. Even so, he skilled his personal type of glory, gazing on because the members of Procol Harum introduced life to his phrases at reveals he refused to overlook.
“You wouldn’t anticipate a playwright to not attend the rehearsals of his play,” he instructed Melody Maker in 1973. “My songs are simply as private to me. They’re part of my life. They don’t seem to be gone from me.”
[ad_2]
Source link