'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'
Butterfly Boys
This song combines an exuberant rock feel with highly disillusioned words
amounting to a transparent attack on the bosses of the band's record label. Gary
Brooker recalls that it was the first song recorded when Procol Harum went into
the studio for Exotic Birds and Fruit. 'We have a very close relationship
with the people we work with over the AIR Studios, John Punter and Chris Thomas.
They said, "Lets boogie," so we started off with this one. They
really enjoyed making it." There was less enjoyment when Chrysalis bosses,
Chris Wright and Terry Ellis, got to hear it, and realized that the 'Butterfly'
in question was their Chrysalis logo (shown right), and the 'boys' in question
were themselves (the word 'Chrysalis' is a phonic elision of 'Chris' and
'Ellis'). As Gary revealed to BtP (see here)
they were very disturbed by this (not least, presumably, by the up-front
connection with 'fly-boy', someone not to be trusted) 'and wanted us to change
the words and title to Government Boys. We said "Bollocks"'.
This is mid-period Procolised rock in the vein of Bringing Home the Bacon
as far as pace and feel go, and inasmuch as it rides on the piano/percussion
core. It lacks its ancestor's classic rhythmic hook, though, and substitutes an
effectively crunchy piano riff that would sound fresher had we not heard
something very like it already in the middle section of Nothing But the Truth
(though different in pace and key, these chords relate closely to the piano
opening of Grand Hotel!). The verses of Butterfly Boys (which is
arguably in G, though it spends time in other keys too) are based on the
alternation of D seventh and G seventh, but there is real originality in the
deployment of the standard I, IV and V at 'They say we haven't got a choice',
before the characteristic wind-down that precedes the chorus. This follows a
dramatically exposed solo vocal moment, and is very nicely constructed, starting
off with a C major flavour, cranking up the tonal centre line by line to a
climax in E, after which the return to the D7 riff of the subsequent verse
sounds fresh and bold. The chorus has features in common with Typewriter
Torment (the down-a-fourth scalar riff in the bass) and with Without a
Doubt (the rising bassline preceding 'give us a break' corresponds closely
to the reggae-style drop-ins in the later number which, let us not forget, was
originally slated for this album). In terms of sound the song exploits the full
majesty of the five-piece in top gear, with the collaboration of Cartwright and
Wilson being particularly solid; the texture of the song doesn't allow BJ much
space, but he puts in some energetic cymbal work in the chorus before the guitar
solo. Mick Grabham's electric guitar (an acoustic rhythm guitar is low in the
mix too) flicks effortlessly from delicate fills to a searing and
finely-articulated solo. This is double the expected length and is
uncharacteristically placed in the song, after the vocal verses are done; it
precedes a rhythmically-interesting coda, whose most striking feature is the
metre-breaking triplet figure separating the heavily-harmonised reiterations of
'Butterfly Boys': this seems to owe something to the guitar fills in The
Beatles' Here Comes the Sun .. and it's evident from encores through the
70s that Procol were not averse to throwing in the odd Beatle moment (reputedly
they played Why Don't We Do it In the Road in 1970, to say nothing of Eight
Days a Week, which they actually recorded, and Get Back was
interpolated into The Unquiet Zone in Vienna (and two days before this,
in Zurich on 22 January 1976, they soundchecked with Get Back (whole
band) and part of Let It Be (voice and piano) though neither Beatle piece
was heard in the concert). Brooker had by his time recorded with George
Harrison, and Keith Reid is known to be a fan of Rubber Soul / Revolver
era Fabs).
The chorus harmonies were taken, live, by Cartwright and Grabham, who tended
to do an adequate job; they are rather raggedly exposed on the BBC live
recording, made in March 1974 (see here),
which is in other respects similar to the record, though it comes to a 'concert'
ending, rather than fading, on the un-rocking words 'You got the cake',
decorating that most typical Brooker three-chord cadence (strongly featured in Without
a Doubt, The Piper's Tale, and many others) with powerful Quo-type
chordings from the guitar. The song had first been played during the eight-date
UK university tour that started 28 February 1974 at Exeter. It was a regular
set-fixture for the rest of 1974 but after its promotional duties were done it
was seldom heard: there's a lot to get right, chordally and rhythmically, while
singing at the same time! It was probably the most surprising inclusion on the
Symphonic Music album; but the fact that it was a rare Brooker orchestration,
with his typical lively and eclectic touches, makes it of special interest:
woodwinds delicately pick out the right-hand piano riff, with percussion section
and featured tambourine for company, while Andy Fairweather Low's unmistakable
guitar-fills could scarcely be further in style from Grabham. The piano is
extremely muted, but heavy brass heralds the chorus, on which Brooker trades
phrases with full choir: the effect of pitting the resentful words against this
elaborate, staidly muscular accompaniment, is curious: but it's a real creative
renewal of the song, unlike some of the syrupy orchestrations that have been
decanted over the other songs. The fact that Gary included Butterfly Boys on
this album, and that Keith selected it for his book, My
Own Choice, may suggest that they retain a particular affection for the
track.
- 'They tell us that we're savages': to start with, as so often in Procol
songs, we don't know who 'they' refers to; but in this one we quickly find
out. 'Savages' are members of primitive races, supposedly unsuited to
civilisation; Reid doesn't use this word elsewhere, but he does have
'natives' in A Rum Tale, which also deals with a flight to an island
in the sun, cf 'Jamaica' elsewhere in this song.
- 'who haven't got a hope': a dismissive idiom, meaning 'you are hopeless,
you will never get anywhere.'
- 'We're burning in the furnaces, we're choking at the smoke': the band
referred to AIR studios as 'dungeon' on the sleeve notes of Procol's
Ninth, and this line promotes the idea that their work is arduous,
sweatshop labour. Reid makes copious use of the verb 'burn': 'We fired the
gun, and burnt the mast' (A Salty Dog); 'Burnt by fire' (The
Wreck Of The Hesperus); 'The harbour lights are burning bright' (All
This And More); 'Ain't gonna burn up no more flame' etc (Whisky
Train); 'burn out her eyes' (Still There'll Be More); 'A
candle burning bright enough to tear the city down' etc (About to Die);
'Have to burn her toys' (Simple Sister); 'Burn me up sweet
oyster girl' (Luskus Delph); 'Falling over burning chairs' and
'Spark plugs burned up, power's fused' (Power Failure); 'Steal
his books, burn his prayers' (Poor Mohammed); 'I'll burn down
the town' (A Rum Tale); 'Fires which burnt brightly' (Fires
(Which Burnt Brightly)); 'the stars which burnt so bright' (Something
Magic); 'He hacked it to pieces and burnt it to dust' (The
Worm and The Tree); 'On these burning sands' (Holding on);
'I'll burn down the house' (Man with a mission).
- 'They say we haven't got a choice': in concert the final syllable of
'haven't' really didn't carry, upending the meaning (the same problem occurs
with 'Don't wait for Christmas' in Wizard Man
if you can't hear
'don't' the sense is entirely reversed)
- 'refuse to recognise our voice': the meaning of 'voice' is twofold: it
means not merely 'speaking' but also 'influence in decision-making' (cp
'voice of the people'). In both senses it tallies with putting fingers in
ears: refusing to be open to suggestions, not acknowledging the identity of
the speaker. This contrasts markedly with Reid's 'other' No. 1 hit, You're
The Voice.
- 'Yet they enjoy commissions': this sits awkwardly with the melody, and
'commission' is not normally accorded a terminal 's' in the plural. However
'commission' must allude to the percentage of earnings taken by the agents
of an artist (Wright and Ellis were the band's managers as well as owning
their record label). Another sense of 'commission' may be applicable here,
if the label-bosses were behaving like 'commissioned officers' in the armed
forces, and dismissively treating their artists as 'other ranks'. In the UK,
government inquiries into problem topics are called Royal Commissions: in
this context, the plural 's' is found.
- 'from the proceeds of the joke': the 'proceeds' are the funds accruing
from the commissions, and the implication is that the whole business of
running the band is a joke from which Chrysalis make money. Other sour
ironies involving 'joke' include 'and though the crowd clapped desperately
they could not see the joke' ('Twas Tea-time at the Circus); 'Got the
joker' (The Thin End of the (Wedge); 'Unique
entertainment no longer a joke' (New Lamps for Old); 'It had
all become a joke' (the Brooker solo piece (No More) Fear of Flying)
- 'Those Butterfly Boys at play with their toys': in addition to the
Chrysalis-specific resonances noted above, it may be worth observing that
butterflies, in view of their gaudiness and transience, have attracted a
considerable number of idiomatic significances: these include: a person with
varied interests or a limited attention span; a new young attractive
prisoner; a flashy dresser [cp the Kinks' Dedicated Follower of Fashion];
a worthless banker's cheque; a male homosexual [which might conceivably be
intended to resonate with 'play with their toys
itching
stinging].
Alexander Pope wrote the famous line 'who breaks a butterfly on a wheel'
(often misattributed to William Blake), which was quoted in the Times leader
when Mick Jagger was imprisoned on very slight amphetamine-related charges
(1 July 1967: see here):
'butterfly' has come, for this reason, to refer particularly to the jet-set
aspirational end of the male rock spectrum. The 'toys' may be the trappings
of a wealthy lifestyle (the word was 1960s slang for drug-injecting gear,
and from the 70s onwards it began to refer to sexual aids too) and also the
bands at the subjects' disposal, Jethro Tull and other pet projects. Note
that Procol Harum had also name-checked their previous record-label in a
song, though in Magdalene, (My Regal Zonophone) it is a vague,
innocuous reference.
- 'Stinging like bees, itching like fleas': the butterfly itself is harmless
to man, but these additional insect references thoroughly unflattering
to Ellis and Wright show that there is a painful, irritating side to the
problem, as well as the mere irritation of the butterfly lifestyle. The
orchestral version wittily deploys high string effects to imitate the sound
of these pestilential creatures.
- 'You got the breeze, we caught the freeze': the record was made during a
very cold winter when the UK Government was actually enforcing a 'three-day
week', called by Prime Minister Edward Heath on 13 December 1973 as a
step-up in the energy-saving measures already in force due to wage disputes
in key industries. This struggle brought about Heath's downfall in the
election of 28 February 1974. The three-day week was the second impediment
to Procol caused by labour disputes (the first was the curbed rehearsal time
at Edmonton), and was responsible for Grabham's shout of 'Is it on, Tommy?'
at the start of the album as the band were obliged to rely on a studio
generator, not the ordinary mains supply. If this song had actually been
changed to refer to Government Boys it would have borne a
Heath-oriented interpretation. He is widely reputed to be gay and has a
number of unexpected 'toys' for a Prime Minister mainly sailing yachts
and conducting orchestras; even the reference to 'flying off to Jamaica'
chimes with the way UK tabloid journalists castigate senior politicians if
they happen to have a holiday scheduled when a crisis has broken. In this
political reading, the voice not being recognised would be that of the
Trades Unions: it seems likely that Ellis and Wright based their hopes that
Reid would change Butterfly Boys to Government Boys on an
awareness of these political parallels
but, considering that Brooker was
reputedly not even permitted to change an 'and' in his colleague's writing,
we can hardly imagine that Keith would have conceded a whole butterfly to
the label bosses.
- The reference here seems to be that the butterflies are somewhere where
there's a breeze, and the band are somewhere where the air is very cold:
again this tallies with the 'Jamaica' reference below. Idioms also come into
play: 'life's a breeze' means that life is easy, and to 'freeze' is
conversely to snub, corresponding to the fingers-in-ears position. 'Breeze',
'freeze', 'groceries', and 'cake' could also all be drug references:
'freeze' in the 1970s was slang for cocaine. On the other hand it seems
unlikely that Reid's lyric would be complaining that 'we got the
freeze' if this is the intended meaning of the word: it's more probable that
the word is in his mind from the matter of the day, the 'wage freeze': more
on this below.
- 'Butterfly Boys give us a break': 'give us a break' means 'stop
suppressing us, improve our chances of improvement'; with record companies a
record 'breaks' when it makes a good showing in the sales charts.
- 'We got the groceries you got the cake': groceries could be considered as
fundamental for life, while cake is an extravagance. This corresponds in an
odd way with the healthy-living satire in Fresh Fruit, the preceding
track on the album. Note that Prime Minister Edward Heath had a
well-established nickname, 'The Grocer': the UK's satirical magazine, Private
Eye, even brought out a flexidisc parody on this theme, set to the tune
of Grocer Jack from the teenage opera by Keith West. Furthermore the
national income is known as the 'cake' (perhaps because it is so often
graphically represented in circular diagrams); the dispute surrounding the
three-day week was about the breakdown of the cooperation (wage freeze)
which had been designed in the hope of making a bigger cake so that the
voters could all have more even if their shares did not go up.
- 'We're sailing on a sinking ship': the band's career, following an
unexpected sales-upturn in 1972 / 73, was slipping commercially at this
time. Brooker seems prone to thinking of Procol Harum in terms of a ship
('Welcome aboard!' he greeted the audience at the band's first London gig of
the New Testament) and he told BtP 'Procol Harum is the 'sinking ship'.'
- 'We're swimming in the sand': Reid refers quite often to sand: see 'the
sand has taken seed' (Conquistador); 'new-mown sand' (Mabel);
'one foot on the seashore and the other in the sand' (Magdalene (My Regal
Zonophone)); 'A sand so white' (A Salty Dog); 'sands of gladness'
(Whaling Stories); 'glittering sand' (Broken Barricades );
'Sands are running fast' and 'On these burning sands' (Holding on).
- 'Sailing on a sinking ship / swimming on the sand' rolls together several
illogical propositions: a sinking ship can't be sailing, and sand is not a
suitable medium for swimming in unless a quicksand is involved
in which
case survival is very improbable. Reid is fond of paradoxes ('We've run
afloat' from A Salty Dog is the most famous) but the effect here is
to heighten the futility of the 'joke' in which the protagonists are
trapped; the idea of swimming or drowning is found in other Procol Harum
songs such as 'Went to the river, but I could not swim' (Your Own Choice);
'He knew that he would neither sink nor swim' (The Idol); 'we're
swimming in the sand' (Butterfly Boys); 'Swimming against the
tide' (Skating on Thin Ice); 'Star-crossed lovers they spoon
and swim' (Perpetual motion); 'in whose waters I shall drown' (The
Devil Came From Kansas); 'or drown amidst this stormy sea' (The Wreck
Of The Hesperus); 'Knew I'd drown if I went in' (Your Own Choice);
'He fell into the sea and drowned' (For Liquorice John); 'Like
drowning men' (The Idol).
- 'They put their fingers in their ears,' this gesture is made either to
blot out unbearable noise, or to symbolise that you are no longer interested
in hearing someone's requests. In the UK 'get your finger out' is a fairly
scurrilous term used to exhort someone to put more effort into the task they
are meant to be performing: the implication is that one hand is tied up by
the use of a finger in some inappropriate bodily recreation. Reid's
reference to 'fingers' in the songs include 'Clutching fingers break the
puzzle' in Kaleidoscope; 'Not a man who had a finger' in Whaling
Stories; 'The waiters dance on fingertips' in Grand Hotel; 'You
wear down your fingers' in Typewriter Torment and 'Rings upon your
fingers' (All Our Dreams are Sold)
- 'refuse to recognize our fears': we are not able to tell exactly what the
'fears' are, and it's interesting to contemplate how much this lack of
detailed background knowledge impairs our understanding of the track
or,
to put it another way, how obscure it makes it! Gary Brooker did elucidate
to an extent when he told BtP (see here)
'we weren't exactly ripped off, not like in the past, but Reid had spotted
an imbalance'. Claes Johansen's Procol biography
quotes Mick Grabham rumbling about 'business taking over the music' at this
stage and some feel that Butterfly Boys is about the attempt to
renegotiate a higher royalty rate, as the last two Procol albums had sold so
well: this might be the 'imbalance' Gary Brooker refers to, and it presents
an interesting parallel to the labour disputes that were simultaneously
racking the country. In this reading, 'we got the freeze' refers to the
'wage freeze', imposed in the hope that lower inflation would in the end
benefit us all thanks to the UK's enhanced competitiveness in world markets.
The 'furnaces' are where fuel is burnt for energy: the disputes centred on
fuel and energy workers, who had the most power
hence the
studio-generator syndrome referred to above. These parallels were surely
apparent to the label especially since the overtly political As
Strong as Samson was in the same set so the proposed amendment to 'Government
Boys' would not have seemed quite as daft then as it may do now.
- 'And fly off to Jamaica': it's unusual to find a real-world place-name in
Procol Harum songs. Jamaica is of course 'an island somewhere in the sun';
which is famed for its rum. This 'flight' ('fly' means not only 'travel in
an aeroplane' but also, of course, 'escape') would take them straight to the
home of the 'savages' who probably inspired Caliban in Shakespeare's The
Tempest, the most influential document, in the English-speaking world,
of the encounter of 'civilised' and 'uncivilised' man; however Jamaica was
'cool' at this time, having brought forth Bob Marley, the major 'toy' of
Blackwell's Island Records, which was so closely linked to Chrysalis that Broken
Barricades actually has an Island matrix-number. But flights to Jamaica
were not the sole province of managerial privilege. Keith Reid reports (here)
that he himself flew out to Jamaica during the making of Grand Hotel
we may well suppose that A Rum Tale is involved here and came
back to find that his solo track Sayonara (aka Mr Krupp), had
been axed from that album. There is a lyric in Keith Reid's book, entitled Flying
the Coop, which contains lines such as 'I'm skipping the country
I'm
slipping the customs
I'm taking the can in case of disgrace when the
shit hits the fan
I'm making a break-out and taking the loot
and
taking the gold
my bags are all packed and I'm off to the sun
I'm
heeding the needing and feeding myself
I'm dropping the sham
'. This
is placed before the Exotic Birds material in the same way that Mr
Krupp precedes the Grand Hotel songs. Since we know that Krupp
belonged with the Grand Hotel album it may be safe to assume that
Flying the Coop belongs with Exotic Birds: its very title
corresponds to Butterfly Boys, as does some of its imagery: equally
its theme overlaps significantly with that of A Rum Tale. Jamaica is
also occasionally a woman's name, as in Jackson Browne's Jamaica Say You
Will.
- 'when we called them underhand': 'underhand' means deceitful (presumably
from meaning concealed 'under the hand', though reference books show
remarkably little interest in the origins of this word). This line may
recall Brooker's famous concert introduction of Luskus Delph as 'a
bit of underhanded smut', but it has no other obvious resonance in the
Procol canon. One might think Procol would have been in Chrysalis's good
books following the sales peak of the last two albums, yet it should not be
forgotten that both of these bore additional cost factors Grand Hotel
in re-entering the studio after a change of guitarist, and Live at
Edmonton in terms of the mobile recording facilities. It is likely that
the label would have been pushing for another album of lush after-dinner
Procol Harum rather than the dogged, hostile and morose album that was in
fact served up to them.
Thanks to Frans
Steensma for additional information
about this song