'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'

Bringing Home the Bacon

Once they had abandoned the 'Medieval Spaceman' outfits fashioned for them by Seemon and Marijke in 1967, Procol Harum as a band didn't really dress up on stage again. Gary used to affect concert tails for fun, but the others seem just to have chosen clothes that would have attracted little attention in any other setting. The Live at Edmonton cover illustrates this easy-going sartorial code, yet the artwork for Grand Hotel – a huge European seller – portrays the band unremittingly in top-hatted finery. It lacks any jeans-and-tee-shirt cutaway to lend perspective or irony to this stuffy image: small wonder, then, that journalists even three years later (NME) were surprised 'that these maestros of dicky-bow rock should play rock'n'roll'.

Bringing Home the Bacon is the meatiest rock'n'roll song on the album, with its heavily-echoing drum work and pounding piano riff. Yet this too is 'dressed up' (as a leg of meat still is, by British butchers) with orchestral frilleries, whose redundancy is evident from the fact that the piece has never been played with orchestra since, even at the Hollywood Bowl concert which was arguably the album's high-profile orchestral shop-window.

This second piece of porcine Procoling – after Piggy Pig Pig – marks a departure. It is percussively led, with the rest of the band also filling a largely percussive role. It's a progression on the 'dropped in' Power Failure-style drum solo, and paves the way for the more integrated drum-showcase of The Unquiet Zone which shares Bacon-like percussivity. The first few times one heard BJ's tricksy rhythmic opening on record, it was not easy to locate the bar-lines, and the piano triplets appeared to start on the beat – only when the melodic riff made its syncopated entry could we be certain that the second quaver of the piano riff was the start of the bar (a similar ruse wrong-foots the listener to Backgammon and to Brooker's solo (No More) Fear of Flying). This is the only feature-drumming song to have survived into the post-Wilson era – but the particular subtleties of this introduction have in general not survived with it.

In earliest performances, both before and after the record came out, we hear the introductory order reversed, piano leading in, followed by the drums. Sometimes the clapping crowds, having picked up a false downbeat from the piano, collapse in bewilderment as the ensemble comes in (mp3 here). Later on Barrie Wilson would lead the song in, taking the opportunity for an extended bout of cowbell-punishing (mp3 here). Sometimes Brooker would sing the organ riff off-mic, to counterfeit the scarcely-audible haze of sound conferred by the recorder-players on the original track. This riff is certainly the poppiest, hookiest line ever heard from the instrument some regard as the band's trademark sound: … a far cry from the world of A Whiter Shade of Pale. Both on record and on stage the organ remains a backing instrument, and both solos are allotted to the guitar: the ambiguously-related chords (B flat, F, G) offer plenty of scope and seem to bring out very lively work from Mick Grabham. But the ear constantly returns to the drumming; a good indication of the flair BJ brought to this track can be gleaned from comparing the way his successor (on the live Utrecht album, at 2:46) plays BJ's five-beat tom-tom fill (at 2:32 on Grand Hotel) [mp3 of both here]. Although the fills are very similar, Mark Brzezicki starts both of his on the second quaver of the bar; BJ imposes tension by choosing to start his on the fourth in bar three and the second in bar four.

The composition of the song is exceptionally modular. The three-chord riff, played twice, constitutes the verses, and a completely different music is bolted on between them: this starts in F minor and cadences, two bars later, in an entirely unpredictable E minor. When the verse comes in again, it jump-cuts back to B flat with no passing chords or notes. Brooker knows he can rely on his band's powerful playing to drive our attention over these fault-lines: in fact there are grounds for supposing that he is deliberately re-using a chord-change that has done good work before: in Still There'll be More the mood-swing between 'cry out for mercy' and 'still there'll be more' is accomplished by exactly the same, tritone-based E minor / B flat juxtaposition.

Lyrically this is the most food-saturated song since Mabel: a salacious equation between food and sex, seen in Luskus Delph and later revisited in Fresh Fruit, is hinted at. Here, however, the meat which is disavowed in Fresh Fruit is enthusiastically described. The text is extremely brief, consisting of three quatrains rhyming abcb, def(e), gfg(f) [a bracketed letter signifies a half-rhyme; the 'g' rhymes in the final stanza consist of the repeated word, 'dumpling']. Very little of the playing-time is occupied by these words (it's about 16%, whereas For Liquorice John, very similar in length, is almost 40% sung): and although it's a frequently-heard song it is one that few Procoholics could quote in accurate detail. This may be because it lacks syntax, and is composed of snapshot images presented almost as a list. This reflects its reported derivation: Gary Brooker told Rock (December 1972) 'Bringing Home The Bacon is about American menus … breast fed baby duckling, three-day-old honey-fed milk-fed fresh thin-sliced delicious gourmet veal, wrapped in a heavenly blessing of crushed bread crumbs and egg yolks grilled to your personal delight on a bed of lettuce garnished with dill pickles. Keith got all that off actual American menus.' Reid concurred, when he told Streetlife (15 May 1976) 'Bringing Home The Bacon was inspired by American hamburger joint menus.' However Reid did much more than merely transcribe menus: he transmuted them, as may be seen below.

The song was written in the last months of 1971 and first recorded with Dave Ball on lead. 'We might re-record those tracks with Mick if we can do a vastly superior job on them; otherwise we'll use them the way they are.' Brooker told Rock in late 1972. The powerful guitar solos we now know are certainly Mick Grabham's work; Frans Steensma tells that Dave played the recorder as part of the 'Pahene Ensemble', and can still be heard in that capacity. ['The Great Pahene' was a nickname of Gary's father Harry Brooker ... perhaps his were the recorders?]. Bringing Home The Bacon / Toujours L’Amour (CHS 2011) was released as a single in May 1973 in the USA. The promotional copies contained only Bringing Home the Bacon, comprising an edited version (3:20) and an album version; Chrysalis USA did likewise with Grand Hotel. The song was definitely played as early as January 1972 when Procol undertook a short British tour with Amazing Blondel supporting. Alongside the title-track, Bacon is the most-played live item from the Grand Hotel album, and has often served as a show-starter (it was also a century-starter at Guildford): as the instruments come in piecemeal, it allows the sound-team a last-minute tweak on each individual channel [it served as the Guildford sound-check for exactly this reason].

Since the band returned in 1991 Bringing Home the Bacon has been an almost guaranteed feature of every set, sometimes introduced by Brooker solely with the shout of 'Schinken', the German word for bacon. A feature of 90s performances has been the novelty fillings founds for the gaps between the riffs, which formerly showcased BJ's dandy kick drumming; the various bassists, drummers and guitarists took the opportunity to show their tastiest chops, and Matthew Fisher sometimes did too: Gary Brooker, the band's musical ironist, would insert a deft extract from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet (as popularised by B Bumble and the Stingers' Nutrocker). Bits of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and of the theme from children's TV's The Magic Roundabout have been heard in this context as well, the last-mentioned being perhaps the aptest in view of the song's superficially child-oriented subject matter (mp3 here)

• 'Bringing home the bacon': in ordinary usage this phrase relates being the breadwinner in a family: 'bringing in the wages'. Journalistically it is used for someone who gets results. It may derive from the practice of catching a greased piglet in competitions at country fairs. The most famous instance in English folklore is the 'flitch' of bacon awarded annually at Dunmow in Essex to the couple who had not argued during the preceding year. Chaucer refers to it in The Wife of Bath's Tale; between 1244 and 1772 it was awarded eight times. Bacon is a cut of meat like (Back)gammon, Procol Harum's last instrumental. We also talk about 'saving my bacon' for 'saving my skin', on the reputed basis that human flesh tastes porky; bacon is used in slang to mean 'penis', and the police (known in the 70s as 'the pigs'). The bacon in Poor Mohammed is not only a food but a symbol of the forbidden, to Muslims. To 'bring something home' to someone is to convince them, often forcibly, of some opinion. As well as having an album named Home and two song-titles featuring the word, Procol Harum sang a lot about home in both positive and negative lights: 'I'm home on shore leave' (A Whiter Shade of Pale); 'Thought I'd left it at home' (Something Following Me); 'ships come home to die' (A Salty Dog); 'Tell all my friends back home' (The Milk Of Human Kindness); 'I wasn't at home in bed' (Juicy John Pink); 'how far I was from home' (Pilgrims Progress); 'I came home to an empty flat' (Toujours L 'amour); 'I'm not coming home' (A Rum Tale); 'I'll have to take it home' (A Souvenir of London); 'The crowds have gone home' (Fires (Which Burnt Brightly)); 'Far away from home' (Holding on); 'you're coming back home again' (One more time); 'A dream in every home' (A dream in ev'ry home); 'you can't find a way back home' (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle) and 'leave our home for pastures new' in the unpublished One Eye on the Future, One Eye on the Past. 'Bringing home' is also applied to souvenirs from overseas, in which connection – with A Souvenir of London adjoining – it is interesting that 60s pornographers in the UK apparently shipped work to Denmark for bulk duplication, and brought it home smuggled amid consignments of Danish bacon, which is much in demand in Britain.
• 'tender juicy steaks': this is hyperbolic chef-parlance; it's ironic that it takes a menu-parody to get the archetypal love-song word 'tender' into a Procol Harum number. Bacon is not often referred to as being cut in steaks – the usage is mainly reserved for beef. The Beefsteak Club (or Sublime Society of the Steaks) was established in London in 1709, and only steaks, beer and wine were consumed there.
• 'Breast-fed baby dumpling': in the developed world at the era of this song mothers were often counseled to suckle babies with cows'-milk from a bottle. In the context of breast-feeding, 'baby' here must mean infant, though usually it means a paramour in popular song. 'Baby cakes' is a twee term of affection used between friends, and 'baby gravy' is semen. The last sighting of a Procol Harum baby (in Playmate of the Mouth) found it ensconced in a sandwich, but there the subtext is undoubtedly phallic. The next is in (the unpublished) A Real Attitude, where 'Godfather's baby who gets every wish' again implies a 'spoilt' person.

• 'gobbling up the cakes': 'gobbling' is hurried eating, but the word is also used for acts of fellatio ('gobbledygoo' is a prostitute willing to oblige in this way: the dripping mouth in the Spencer Zahn booklet illustration glances in this direction too). 'Gobbling' is also the characteristic noise of turkeys, and has overtones of excessive consumption. In the ordinary way of things a child that was being breast-fed would not be able to eat cake; but 'breast-fed' could refer to a completed action, perhaps to a child that, having been breast-fed in the past, now looked prosperously plump. Idiomatic expressions for greedy eating include 'making a pig of yourself' and pigging out, both having relation to the 'bacon' in this song's title. Etiquette requires that cake be devoured only after the main course; it is a luxury, and is mentioned as such in Butterfly Boys. 'Cake' also means money, or a fool/dandy; and it has various meanings in drug culture, possibly giving rise to band-names such as 'Cake' and 'The Sea and Cake'.
• 'Milk-fed baby dumpling': 'milk-fed' is unusual, and may have been adapted from an echt menu, where one would expect to see it applied to a suckling pig. Dumplings are a now-unfashionable food used both as a main meal and to extend a meagre course such as soup. They are largely full of stodgy suet and are also made in a sweet variety for consumption with custard. This may account for their eighteenth-century slang coinage as a word for 'breast' (some might allege a visual resemblance too): the 'breast' sense obviously chimes with the milky imagery here. A 'puzzle' feature of Zahn's illustration is revealed by turning it clockwise, when the drooling milk on the baby's wide chin becomes a nursing mother's dumpling-like breast, the regurgitated drool a swollen nipple.

• 'slobbering, goo-faced, mean': these are not attractive epithets, though there may well have been babies that epitomise Reid's specification. One is reminded of the attitude underlying the horror-images associated with the implied birth of a baby in the first verse of Something Magic. 'Slobbering' implies saliva or half-masticated food running down the face in a greed-induced overspill; it has overtones of 'slob'. 'Goo' is a jocular word applied to numerous sticky substances including semen and phlegm, and 'gooey' is applied metaphorically to excessive sentiment in speech or in writing; the word 'goo' famously appears in another recipe-oriented song, Traffic's 1968 drug-spoof Medicated Goo. 'Mean' is much less colourful than the rest of the line, and its harsh tone comes as a surprise at the end, perhaps emphasising the loathsome greed of the subject of the piece
• 'Wet-nursed sour purse spot face': this cannot be an easy line to remember, let alone sing so quickly. A wet-nurse is a woman employed as a breast-feeding surrogate by mothers anxious to regain their slim figure quickly; such a nurse might become a nanny, and is potentially implicated in the spoiling of the child depicted here. 'To wet-nurse' is to be unduly tolerant of someone's weaknesses, and to offer more help than is good for them. 'Sour-purse' is a curious conflation of several ideas: we hear 'sow' (with its suckling implications) and are reminded of 'sour-puss', a graceless spoilsport. We talk of 'pursing' lips, which draws attention back to the mouth; Shakespeare has 'in the fatness of these pursy times' (Hamlet, III iv). 'Spot-face' may imply a tiny red face (though the booklet's illustration shows a specially broad-faced baby) or it may refer to a child's pimply complexion, such as is often caused by incompatibility with slight dietary shifts.
• 'blubbering in the cream': 'blubbering' is onomatopoeic and is used sometimes for foolish crying, and sometimes for other bubbly noises, such as the regurgitation of excess food. 'Cream' refers of course to another fatty milk product (as well as to the ur-rock trio, two of whose members worked with Brooker (Bruce, Clapton) and one with Trower and Reid (Bruce)). In Salad Days 'the peaches snuggle closer down into the clotted cream', a more appealingly voluptuous image. 'The cream of' is an idiom alluding to the highest quality of something, and 'to cream' is to ejaculate in orgasm. A later diet-oriented song, Procol's unpublished A la Carte, reportedly also equates another dairy-product with sensuality, speaking with relish of the feeling of butter oozing through one's hands.
• 'Emperor baby dumpling': this is the second 'emperor' in Procoldom, after 'for him perhaps an emperor's throne' in Too Much Between Us. Equating a mere baby with such a potentate powerfully implies that the child is so pampered that it has taken over rule of the household. Gourmets and chefs use 'emperor' hyperbolically to confer apparent worth upon small dishes: 'emperor baby duckling'. In some Eastern cultures babies do become rulers, thanks to local customs of accession: Christ was of course a 'king' from birth. Some listeners will relate this song's gooey slobberings to the sale, as religious relics, of fluids and excrement from the pseudo-miraculous Baby of Macon in Peter Greenaway's vicious 1993 film.
• 'Loaded, bloated curse': the vicious guitar-squawk at the end of this line emphasises the nasty imagery here, as does Brooker's declamatory style throughout. 'Loaded' can mean 'full of drink or drugs'; it can relate to a biased argument, dishonest dice, and it is now the name of a 'top-shelf' men's magazine in the UK. 'Loaded gun' is slang for pre-ejaculative penis. Reid uses 'bloated' in Fat Cats, whose eponymous moguls 'writhe around like bloated worms'. A curse (the word later makes an appearance in Typewriter Torment) cannot literally be 'loaded' or 'bloated'; but the volume of this baby's gobbling has 'loaded' it for bowel-discharge, in which sense it is a 'curse' to its parents. The song seems to be a vituperative swipe at a particular child, or at children in general, yet Keith Reid was quoted as saying 'Bringing Home The Bacon … is about obesity, and to me it's as valid as something like As Strong As Samson …'. His focus appears to have been on the enormousness of the child and its appalling appetite [list of songs about fat people here] and this may remind us of 'tell her that she's stout', one of the taunts offered in Simple Sister.
• 'Mighty baby dumpling': 'mighty' emhasises the emperor aspect of this dangerously-laden child. 'Dumpling' could conceivably be a term of endearment for someone agreeably portly, but here it seems more probable that we are to imagine that the child has become an outsized dumpling thanks to its over-indulgence. In song Randy Newman attacked Davy the Fat Boy, and later Short People: there may be an element of pre-emptive cruelty here: attack before being attacked.

• 'Stuffing till he bursts': 'stuffing' is not only a verb, but a food product (bread-crumbs, onion, herbs) thrust into birds destined for oven-roasting, filling the cavity left by the removal of their giblets and so forth. This last line contradicts the idea that the child is loaded for a natural discharge; we are now invited to imagine that he or she will eventually explode. Gary Brooker emphasises the grotesque comedy of this notion with his New Jersey vowel sound, 'boyst' for 'burst'. Keith Reid told Hit Parader (May 1973) 'It's about someone called Mighty Baby Dumpling and his parents stuffing food down him.' Perhaps he had a cartoon-like character in mind, since 'Mighty' is a characteristic adjective in that field: TV Ceasar on the same album concerns 'Mighty Mouse'. However both the liner booklet and Reid's selection My Own Choice print the 'baby dumpling' all in lowercase letters. Keith's quotation also implies that 'stuffing' should perhaps not be taken as a reflexive: the child is not stuffing itself (like Monty Python's 'Mr Creosote' in The Meaning of Life, ten years later), but is being force-fed by the parents in the way turkeys are fattened for the table. The disproportionate baby, absorbing parental energies and attention, is reminiscent of the growth of a cuckoo in the nest of another bird: in Procol-specific terms, the parallel is the later The Worm and the Tree, where the worm eats more each day, and the (family) tree shrinks away, like the parents' control here of the 'Emperor' baby. The worm tries to dominate the natural order but eventually 'bursts': the implied parents here seem bent on bursting their own baby by stuffing it to the point of regurgitation. Reid may have had a half-memory of the Duchess's grotesque baby 'sneezing and howling' in Chapter Six of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which is given away to Alice (not quite a wet-nurse) and which promptly turns into a pig – a mild link to the 'bacon' of the title. There are few other rock numbers so fascinated and disgusted with babies, their feeding and hygiene (Talking Heads' Stay up Late is one), and not many containing such a comically vitriolic critique of infant corpulence: that Procol Harum should have opened so many shows around the world with a forceful rocker treating this topic is just one more of the band's many distinctions.