The Long Goodbye revisited (1)
Ian Hockley for BtP
With a brand new CD from Procol Harum imminent, culled
from the second of the open-air orchestral concerts at Ledreborg in Denmark in
2006, it might be an appropriate time to listen again to
the last official
recording of Procol Harum music with orchestra from the mid-1990s. The Long Goodbye has had very little written about it
at Beyond the Pale, and is often overlooked in the band’s work lists. The
sold-out, one-off concert at the Barbican in London in February 1996,
ostensibly to promote the new recording, completely eclipsed the album in terms
of critical reception, public profile and press coverage. Sometimes dismissed, I
believe The Long Goodbye does have some good things about it, not least
the superb orchestral playing and excellent recorded sound – so here is a
reappraisal, just prior to the newest Procol Harum recording hitting the
CD racks next month.
The whole
“rock meets classics” concept has had a pretty hard ride over the years from
critics, but Procol Harum have had a long history of
occasional concerts with
orchestras going as far back as 1969, and seem to have a repertoire that is well
suited to this marriage. The famous recording made at Edmonton in 1971
has passed into rock history, and quite deservedly too. It’s a wonderful
recording of an event that was clearly fraught with problems, limited in its
rehearsal time and helmed by a conductor so difficult and unsympathetic his name
didn’t make it on to the LP release. But somehow it all fell together, the
results were truly exceptional and the band had a smash hit.
I think Procol Harum with orchestra works better than most attempts at this
kind of combination for two reasons. Firstly an orchestra cannot rock and roll
and has to play in a different kind of time stricture to a rock band, yet
Procol’s piano basis (and that instrument’s role as maid-of-all-work for every
classical composer (except
Berlioz!) since its invention) instils into their
writing and subsequent execution a formality that might not necessarily be there
in a guitar-based band. Secondly, the approach to orchestration is fundamentally
correct in that the songs are not “orchestrated” so much as “texturised” or
thickened. There are some unusual peculiarities to the Procol Harum sound-world
and I think the critical factor is the way in which the vocals, piano, organ,
drums, bass and guitar are layered. The six parts usually end up having more
linear melody than filler block harmony, so that in many Procol Harum songs even
the drums play the tune and are one of the more prominent “melodic” features in
the band. Vitally, with so many strands going on, the musical texture is perfect
for beefing up with a full orchestra, and the lines complement the band
beautifully rather than sounding like an orchestra piled on the top and
struggling to find something to play. Another factor is Keith Reid’s lyrics
which are absolutely right for instrumental metaphor and word play: a perfect and very simple example is the violin “scratch”
at the “stinging like fleas” point in the Brooker orchestration of Butterfly
Boys, on the recording under discussion.
It is hard to remember life before 'Beyond the Pale'
got off the ground in October 1997; John Grayson’s
postal newsletter, Shine
On, was a true lifeline in the mid-1990s, in the absence of much press
coverage, and I first remember reading about the forthcoming album in
an
interview in Record Collector some time
in 1995. At that time The Prodigal Stranger album and
subsequent tours
were long since past (I missed them, as I didn’t even know the band had
regrouped) and the music industry seemed to be going through one of its periodic
spasms of chronic insecurity. I can only really speak for the UK, but I seem to
recall the pop charts being dominated by dance music in the early 1990s and
crucially, around the middle of the decade, BBC Radio 1 appointed new
management, stopped playing classic and contemporary rock music and sacked their
best rock DJ, Alan Freeman. At that point Radio 2 had yet to pick up the
mainstream core rock audience that it now has, and find its present identity.
This might explain the emergence of covers albums around this time from artists
from whom one might not have expected them (Paul McCartney, Status Quo and Brian
Ferry come immediately to mind); perhaps in 1995 an album of symphonic covers
of their own material was the only thing that would interest a major record
label in what was clearly a one-off deal for some new Procol Harum product. Such
speculation – in 2009 – could be well-wide of the mark but it makes a certain
amount of sense at a time when the music industry was desperately playing safe
and before the superb Eagle Records came into existence to sign and
breathe new life into core rock acts (including Procol Harum) who lacked record
company support to produce new product.
That
said, The Long Goodbye appeared at the beginning of 1996 to almost total
indifference in the wider world and seemed to drift into the shops almost by
mistake, with little or no promotion by RCA. No singles were lifted from it and
I think there are at least two tracks that could have met with some success in
the singles market had they been given a fair shot of airplay (Conquistador
and Butterfly Boys). The cover, title and artwork didn’t help. No one
was sure if it was really a Procol Harum record, and although it was promoted as
such, the band’s name does not appear on the CD sleeve, only on the spine and on
the red sticker that was affixed to the front of the jewel case.
I spent many hours down the subsequent years trying to
work out what the bizarre cover was about and I don’t think it did the album any
favours at all. I thought it was something like a phallic cigarette lighter; in
fact it is a purely abstract image of potentially varying things by one
Eric Dinyer which could have fitted on the front of a CD of lift muzak.
Part Two of this article follows here
More about this album |
The Barbican Concert