PROCUL HARUM

A Danish fan’s notes on the baroque British pop band that turned a talent for quoting Bach into a worldwide hit record.

Procol Harum—whose name does not come from some pseudo-Latin sorcerer’s tag, as some desperate critics have said, but was instead borrowed from a pet cat—made it big early in its career, charting a weeks-long number-one record in 1967 with “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” (In its first incarnation, as a blue-eyed-soul quartet called the Paramounts, the band toured with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—but their recorded covers of such tunes as “Poison Ivy” and “Turn on Your Love Light” have not stood up well to the passing of time.) Led by classically trained keyboard players Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher, and backed by guitar wizard Robin Trower and a tight rhythm section, the band turned in several albums that are regarded as art-rock classics, including “Shine On Brightly” and “A Salty Dog.” It eventually fell apart under the strain of vaulting egos and mind-altering substances—only to reunite, of course, in the 1990s to capture its share of the nostalgia market. Indisputably fine and influential though Procol Harum was in its day, the band made its share of dogs; as Johansen writes, toward the end of its life in the late 1970s the band “did probably the worst thing anyone could have done . . . they released a weedy progressive rock album.” Johansen’s book does a serviceable job of charting the band from glorious rise to inglorious fall, but it suffers from the author’s reliance on contemporary press clippings and generally unrevealing interviews with surviving members of the original lineup and from his failure to connect the Procol Harum story to larger themes in pop-culture history.

Obsessive Procol Harum collectors—and there are bound to be one or two of them out there—will find this an essential acquisition.