'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'

A Rum Tale

Gary Brooker introduced the song in his series of short pieces, to camera, for Cherry Red Records in 2020

A Rum Tale is one of the most fluent and lyrical pieces anywhere in the Procol Harum canon, unashamedly melodic on classic songwriting lines, with four neatly-related rising phrases answered by a set that are predominantly falling. The opening phrase is unusual in that it spans more than an octave, and its apogee remains the high-point of the song until the tune stretches up, over four syllables, to reach 'sun'. Its range has not deterred cover-artists: the Italian version stays faithful to the fundamentals of Reid's text (though denying him a writing-credit!). However a glance at the punning title ('Ha - Rum Tale') suggests that much will be lost in translation, and indeed that fans who search for 'band-biographical' detail in every Reid song may on this occasion expect to be rewarded.

The Repertoire liner note tells how this is a personal favourite of Gary Brooker's: 'I was quite proud of having composed it and take great pleasure in trying to play it, ha ha! It's incredibly difficult, with very unusual chords.' Although the melody is clear-cut and natural, the harmonies are indeed unpredictable – rum, even – and Gary has from time to time tripped himself up momentarily when performing the piece on his own, on Danish television, at the Barbican in 1999 (collage mp3 here), and at the Palers' Convention; its brevity and superficially-innocuous words do mark it as a likely solo party-piece, but its difficulties are compounded by a transposed instrumental verse (one of its most ingenious features), obliging the pianist to learn all the changes in two different keys. This can be nerve-wracking when there is no possibility of dropping out and letting other instruments carry the accompaniment.

The song was performed promotionally, though not often, and then faded from view until European dates of the 1995 tour, when it was strongly featured (and when the second chord of the first verse was usually commuted to a C major, first inversion). It was probably written by early 1972: scraps of it were heard onstage in Gary's between-songs doodlings before even the Live album came out. Gary told Douglas Adams at the Barbican (1999) that the chords had 'just sprung out, as quite a few songs do'; elsewhere he tells how it 'came out naturally and quickly' and he 'banged it down on a cassette'; Chris Thomas always preferred this to the finished product, on which he had striven to match the feel of the original. His production is full and lush, to the extent that it sounds like another orchestrated track; but that illusion is accomplished by Copping's very careful organ registration and the deft layering of his playing. Piano and bass achieve a very warm sound at the start, and the celestial organ makes a surreptitious appearance half way through verse one; the many suspended chords resolving, and the gentle minor-seventh interplay between piano and organ, deserve the space they are given, and the drums don't appear until the key-shift verse, which is bookended by a swirl of concert harp, the only interloper on the track. In the final verse there's an oddly-recorded cymbal sound in the centre of the stereo, but BJ's fine touch on the snare drum is otherwise the main decoration, and the ending has a delicate rubato. It would be interesting to hear the cassette demo, if its 'feel' eclipses all this.

On the compositional front: after an opening in F major, firmly established by the waltzing piano preliminaries, A Rum Tale steps to an E minor 7^th (unpredictable, if you haven't ever played Yesterday!) which then descends to a D minor; some fourth-stepping and a delayed imperfect cadence leave us poised on the dominant at the end of the second phrase; he kicks off the next on the subdominant, and more conventional chords take us home to F again. The bombshell comes with an E (major this time) which ushers in its relations, G# minor and C# minor, and establishes itself as the home key with IV, V and I. Yet Gary brings us back to F within two bars, using a diminished chord on the fifth of the new key to step up on to a C, and thence logically home.

Even more remarkable is the end of the transposed instrumental in D major (which is handsomely played on the record by Prof Copping at the organ … oddly it fell to Matthew Fisher at Redhill, where Copping was the song's dedicatee). When it gets to the point where the words would be 'knobbled me', one would naturally anticipate a change from D flat to an A flat diminished, and home through A to D. However a musical scale spans only twelve semitones, and a 'diminished' chord consists of four notes, symmetrically-spaced with each a minor-third from its neighbour. There are thus effectively only three diminished chords, and Gary exploits this by re-construing the A flat diminished as B diminished (it has the same notes) and using it as a pivot to swing back, via a C major, into the verse key of F. It sounds natural, but it's 'incredibly ingenious' in Adams's words. Extraordinarily Perpetual Motion also has a transposed instrumental section followed by an imperceptible reversion to the original verse key, but it's not accomplished with such bare-faced magic.

Keith Reid selected the words for his book, My Own Choice. He may have been led to 'rum' primarily by a liking for title-puns (cf Beyond the Pale, For Liquorice John, Juicy John Pink etc), but he develops the maudlin escapism of the disillusioned drunkard as his main material. 'Rum' means suspicious or peculiar as in 'a rum cove' or 'a rum affair'; 'tale' is a synonym for 'story', a word he also favours; 'tale' occurs in 'the miller told his tale' (A Whiter Shade of Pale); 'how the tale unfolds' (Piggy Pig Pig); 'There's no-one here to tell the tale' (Robert's Box); 'years may have passed since the tale I have told' (The Worm and The Tree). In a contemporary interview Keith admitted 'This is another song about love gone wrong', yet in another (Circus, May 1973) he called it '… a real drinking song. Well, not a drinking song as such, but a song from the bottom of the bottle! The music is actually quite romantic.' Reading A Rum Tale 'cold' alongside Toujours l'Amour, for example, one would be hard put to guess which was the hard-riffing rocker and which the pretty waltz. The gentleness of the setting Brooker chose may have helped Phonograph Magazine (April 1973) to conclude that the words 'contribute[d] a whimsical alienation to the lyrical array' but Gary Brooker acknowledges a blacker side to them: 'I think Keith must have been going through a bad spell,' he told Chris Welch in 2000.

• 'She's fuddled my fancy': 'fuddle' is a slightly jocular archaism, defined in the OED as 'to have a drinking bout; to tipple, booze'; it is more commonly encountered in the form 'befuddled' which Reid uses to describe the brain in Shine on Brightly. Like Whisky Train, this song concerns the woman problem / drink nexus: 'fancy' is cognate with 'fantasy' and has numerous, related applications in the field of love and attraction. It's also an English name for a kind of cake, the 'French Fancy'. 'Fancy' is the philanderer in the mid-60s song of the same name by the Kinks. 'Tickled my fancy' is a non-sexual saying in English meaning 'aroused my interest' or 'attracted me'; but 'fancy' is also applied to ephemeral sexual liaisons as in 'fancy piece', 'fancy woman', 'fancy man' and so on. To 'fuddle my fancy' might be to 'confuse me about what I once liked';
• 'she's muddled me good': the thick consonants of 'fuddled' and muddled' sit well in a drunken mouth; 'muddled' means 'thrown into disarray', not usually considered a 'good' thing: so good here presumably implies 'she did a good job in sowing confusion in my life'.
• 'I've taken to drinking, and given up food': a similar plight of alcoholic self-neglect is depicted in Drunk Again ('the cellar is empty / the cupboard is bare')

• 'I'm buying an island, somewhere in the sun': buying an island is the escapist's fantasy … to own a place where one calls the shots; it's also rock-star conduct (John Lennon bought an island, but not one with inhabitants). Island, however, was the host record-label of Chrysalis; and Reid did visit a sunny island, Jamaica, while Grand Hotel was being recorded, during which absence his oration Mr Krupp, intended to end the album, was cut (see here). This may buttress the 'quitting' explanation below. 'Island' is also a common expression for the Isle of Wight where Procol Harum played in 1970, and for prisons located thereon; and 'island', in the vocabulary of some songwriters, is used as a mythical escape symbol (cp Amazing Rhythm Aces / Paul Brady). The Kinks' End of Season is similar only in that the person addressed in the song has gone to an island.
• 'I'll hide from the natives, live only on rum': the other reference to 'rum' in Procol songs comes in Whaling Stories, where it is considered a fit ration for traitors. The narrator here seems to be going into splendid isolation from everyone in the band, hiding from the Island people (natives?) while he slips into a desultory alcoholism. 'Rum' seems to find its way into a lot of titles: Rum and Coke a Cola, Rum Sodomy and the Lash: it typically comes from Jamaica (name-checked in Butterfly Boys); the other spirit in Procoldom is whisky, from Scotland, as featured on Home. Spencer Zahn's booklet illustration is unusually straightforward: an iced drink, a summery sky, a bare foot perhaps suggestive of sunbathing: these don't specially invoke the troubled air of the lines. Given Reid's predilection for nautical imagery, we note that rum is the spirit of preference for the seafarer.
• 'I'm selling my memoirs, I'm writing it down': 'memoirs' is often used for an autobiography of a public person that might contain momentous revelations, but it seems from the word-order here that the idea of selling precedes the act of composition (as we find in Without a Doubt). Keith Reid has not published an autobiography, and in fact withdrew his co-operation from Claes Johansen's Procol Biography; some would argue that this song comes close to being a memoir itself.
• 'If no one will pay me I'll burn down the town': a similarly sweeping threat comes in Man with a Mission, where the author proclaims that he will 'burn down your house'. Presumably however if no-one pays for the memoirs he will not be able to buy the island to escape to, and will run the risk of burning himself: 'burning' is used as a metaphor for the drunk in Whisky Train and Reid makes copious use of the verb 'burn' elsewhere: '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); '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); 'Fires which burnt brightly' (Fires (Which Burnt Brightly)); 'We're burning in the furnaces' (Butterfly Boys); '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).
• 'I'll rent out an aircraft and print on the sky': in the days before controlled air-space, dashing pilots could use light aeroplanes either to drag an advertising banner or to leave a message in the sky by means of a coloured trail of smoke. This was often done as a hyperbolic romantic gesture, and the message would be a brief proposal of marriage, declaration of love, and so on. 'Print' on the sky overlooks the fact that such messages are exceptionally evanescent, and is part-and-parcel of the desperate romanticism of the piece. John Lennon's Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986) is one of few other rock-oriented uses of this idea. The word 'sky', like 'sun' and 'name', is stretched over four syllables, in a manner perhaps reminiscent of the prolonged syllable in Nothing But the Truth: but here the context helps us to hear the words correctly, and in the cases of 'sun' and 'sky' an upward-aspiring melody seems very apt.
• 'If God likes my story then maybe he'll buy': this is one of Reid's few references to a single deity, such as the Christian God, rather than the multiple deities of classical mythology. To 'buy' a story is to believe something or be persuaded by it; if God is the 'buyer' this perhaps implies that the author gets into heaven rather than the hell his habits seem to be destining him for. Other references to a solo God include 'God's aloft …' (Piggy Pig Pig); 'God's alive inside a movie' and 'closely watched by God on high' (Whaling Stories); 'A God forsaken emptiness' (Nothing But the Truth); 'a God-awful mess' (The Mark of The Claw); 'All God's children running scared' (The Pursuit of Happiness); allusions to plural gods include 'The men who play the gods of war' (Holding On) and 'The laughing gods they just reel them in' (Perpetual Motion).
• 'I'm buying a ticket for places unknown': we are reminded of the voyage, in A Salty Dog, for 'parts unknown to man'. The mystery tour is an established UK holiday tradition [cp the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour]: the narrator has now abandoned the plan of buying an island and is allowing a ticket-vendor to determine his destination. However 'ticket' is slang for an LSD tab, which could indeed take him to places unknown, as this was the most unpredictable psychedelic drug, offering no guarantees as to where the intrepid dropper would end up or how much damage would be done to him along the way. 'Ticket' is also mentioned directly in the thematically-related Drunk Again, and implicitly in Whisky Train where one presumably needs a ticket to travel. 'Ticket' in the Beatles' Ticket To Ride has an overtone of something like 'warrant'; 'just the ticket' means the right, proper or fashionable thing to do; one's 'ticket' could also be a prison sentence, or – in former times – parole-leave.
• 'It's only a one-way: I'm not coming home': one comes home from a mystery tour; the present destination seems to be death, 'the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns' (Hamlet III. I). If not a reference to suicide, the line could allude to leaving the band, in which case Home has clear reference to their recorded work; the 'she' that follows could be read as 'the good ship' Procol Harum, the whole experience of being involved with the band.
• 'She's swallowed my secret': we often talk about 'swallowing' a belief (cp 'buying' a story). To swallow a secret could be (like swallowing drugs to hide them during a bust) a way of guaranteeing that the secret is not detected; it seems that the narrator has vouchsafed a secret, perhaps a guilty one, to the 'she' who started the song; if they are now parting company, he presumably loses his confidence that she will not divulge. Reid tends to hint that secrets exist, rather than revealing them: 'Finding out your secret fears' (TV Ceasar); 'They knew his secrets every stitch' (The Idol); 'Just a whole load of secrets' (Man with a Mission); 'The secrets of the hive' (A Dream in Ev'ry Home); 'There's a man with a secret' (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle). The present words are sometimes overlooked by Brooker in performance, with the result that the 'Follow my footsteps' line is heard twice.
• 'and taken my name': there are overtones here of 'steal the alphabet' in Whaling Stories; one's name remains one's own whatever others may do with it. However in a marriage the woman is conventionally said to 'take' the man's name. 'To take a person's name in vain' is wrongly to implicate or accuse them; as Iago says in Shakespeare's Othello, 'He that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him /And makes me poor indeed' (III i). In a band-biographical sense this could be understood as 'taken over the brand-name 'Procol Harum' as a creative enterprise, wrested it from my control'; we see something similar, perhaps, in Toujours L'Amour with 'left me a note / and taken the cat' … if, as some believe, the band was named after a cat.
• 'To follow my footsteps': to 'follow the footsteps' is commonly to go into the same trade as a parent ['I'm following my father's footsteps / following my dear old Dad' as the old song goes]. But here it could equally mean 'dogged my footsteps', come chasing after me; the protective power of a mentor's footsteps are remembered in the carol Good King Wenceslas; but in magical folklore, dust collected from someone's footsteps can be used in a spell against them: the practice was once a crime under Russian law.
• 'and knobble me lame': to 'knobble' something is to intervene and put it out of action: the term may be derived from the knob on the end of a stick, used to strike someone. 'Lame' is not only 'unable to walk properly' but is also a derisory term for low-quality work. 'Knobbled me lame' could allude to the knee being put out of action – another holiday aspect, since UK holiday camps used to hold 'knobbly knees' contests – though 'knob' has a penile meaning too, in which case there could be a sense here of male potency reduced by over-indulgence in alcohol. The relation of the last two lines to the rest of the narrative must remain a matter for conjecture, but the sense of being pursued with a vengeful motive remains in mind. All in all, though the song shows touches of self-mocking humour, desperation would seem to be the overall emotion, given this suspicion that, even in the ultimate exile of death, the narrator will not be immune to acts of incapacitating retribution.

 Thanks to Frans Steensma for additional information about this song