'Taking Notes and Stealing Quotes'

Robert's Box

In the liner note for the Repertoire CD-re-issue of Grand Hotel, Gary Brooker tells how the two-year gap since Procol Harum had last recorded new material was affecting his writing: 'I found myself using a couple of ideas in one song', he told compiler Chris Welch. Welch's note calls Robert's Box 'a holiday song influenced by the exotic atmosphere of the Caribbean islands' – he is surely not referring to the words! – and notes that the elaborate arrangement has two other distinct parts, including a chorus which has nothing to do with the verse. Gary reports that 'much of the whole album is like that. There's a schizophrenic element where lots of the songs are in fact two songs. So you get more for your money!' Part of the achievement of this often-overlooked song was the way that Reid's verbal theme – short on words, long on emotion – provide the conceptual sticky-tape to hold the diverse musics together.

Though the words themselves fall into two parts. The printed text is just six couplets (which rhyme, if 'remedy / fee' is pronounced with sufficient emphasis, or half-rhyme in the case of 'box / cost') whose import seems unusually straightforward. But the title is another part again. The song is a comparative rarity, in the Chrysalis years, in that its title does not appear anywhere in the song, and the unusually specific name has attracted some discussion. The only relevant 'Robert' known to Procol fans is ousted drummer Bobby Harrison, and it seems unlikely that the 'box' is his drum kit, or a container (as in 'box office') for collecting royalties. The song has two characters, the pleading narrator and the silent doctor, but the title doesn't indicate which, if either, goes by the name of Robert. The name itself is of Germanic origin and means 'bright famous one' … could this Robert be one of the 'famous doctors' who 'all agree' in Fresh Fruit? And what of the box itself? 'Box' is an odd choice for a song title [though Living in a Box was a hit for Living in a Box] but Procol Harum can boast the unusual distinction of having released box-singles of both male and female variety (a 'box' is the testicle-guard worn by cricketers, as well as being US is slang for vagina). This, like the existence of Robert Heinlein's Pandora's Box (1950) can be only a coincidence, as was the delightful episode of the bemused railway conductor named 'Robert Box' who was photographed by Procoholics at Redhill in 1997.

But the fact remains that it’s a very odd title. Other male-named Procol pieces include Juicy John Pink, For Liquorice John and Poor Mohammed: some, at least, of these are puns, so perhaps we are supposed to hear 'Robert's' as 'robbers' (though this doctor doesn't take anything from the narrator) and 'box' as 'pox' … maybe medication is being sought to relieve a 'pox' or venereal disease. Maybe 'Robert' is to be taken in its hypocoristic form 'Bob', which is Cockney rhyming-slang (on the basis of comedian Bob Hope) for 'dope'? It has often been noted that the Beatles have a song Dr Robert (Keith Reid speaks, in Toujours L'Amour, of 'buying a revolver', which some choose to see as a reference to the Beatle album in question, just as they imagine the reference to 'plimsolls' in Rambling On to be an oblique name-check for Rubber Soul). Certainly Dr Robert did influence Procol Harum (think of its middle section, alongside the middle of The Final Thrust) but 'Doc Robert' in Lennon's lyric 'does everything he can' to assist the wealthy New York socialites he sets out to lure into addiction: and this is a very far cry from the obstinate intractability of Reid's doctor in this song.

Keith Reid explained the song to Hit Parader (May 1973): 'It's about being a doctor [sic]. The box being his bag full of equipment that will help the patient get well. It's a very sad song, lyric-wise. The poor patient is needing help and isn't getting any. A very pathetic situation.' It's not easy to accept some of this explanation, not least the idea of the 'box being his bag', which does not square with ordinary usage: in a medical context, 'box' is the receptacle in which tablets were dispensed, in the days before plastic. However the illustration by Spencer Zahn in the Grand Hotel booklet does show a gaping medical bag, mysteriously emitting vapour, or possibly flames. Whether Zahn responded to the songs solely, or received direction from the band, is not known. The implication might seem to be that if you play with this doctor, you play with fire.

Keith Reid did not, himself, dilate on any Beatle parallel, though he is reputed to be fond of their Revolver-period work. However Gary Brooker's setting of the words does seem to have absorbed good numbers of period influences of its own. Following the jumpy descending start – which is reworked with more chords and more forward impetus in Nothing But the Truth, chronologically the band's next track – the main part of the song seems very simple, spinning an attractively straightforward melody in C major over standard I, IV and V chords. The verses highlight a rolling piano, some dry and flamboyant drums, and two flavours of organ; but it's with the background sounds that much unpredictable care has been taken. The echoey backdrop in verse one sounds very much like a Hawaiian guitar, though no such instrument is credited on the sleeve. In live performance, Mick Grabham took care of these fills with some silvery lead-playing (mp3 here), but this did not quite share the Polynesian character that presumably prompted the Repertoire liner to mention a 'holiday character'. These effects might seem to belong more to A Rum Tale with its island in the sun, than to the world of the pleading drug-addict. Keith Reid told Hit Parader that 'The music though, is very bright... almost like carousel music. That's the black humour of the song, the direct clash between words and music.' However it is perhaps not entirely a clash: the 'holiday' music lies aptly behind the addict's plea for exotic comfort. This correspondence is highlighted in the second musical element, the chorus or hook, which piles on a multiplicity of doo-wop vocals while diving to A major and back to C. Here Brooker's music glances at the world of the Beach Boys, especially with the comic basso (heard also in Skip Softly and Nothing But the Truth – presumably all the voices are Gary's): listeners are reminded of Oh Darlin' and similar highly-arranged pieces. Once again there is a sort of appropriateness, in that this sound-world suggests the addict's desired 'escape' into some moments of carefree exuberance: as suggested above, such consideration of the libretto does much to justify the apparently arbitrary, modular construction of the song.

By the time the third verse arrives, and the implacable doctor has still not come up with anything to assuage the narrator's yearning, the backing has grown a bitterly ironic additional element. With the Doctor seemingly locking his door, the crooning in the background takes on the dreamy quality of a Hawaiian 'aloha': the word is clearly heard. We need not have recourse to a Hawaiian dictionary to know that 'aloha' embodies a loving welcome, and this is no doubt what the narrator wishes he was hearing. The use of a Hawaiian term, incidentally, fixes the 'holiday' element not in Caribbean (though the song might have been written there … ), but in the terrain of Gary Brooker's Godmother, who, as he explained to Douglas Adams at in the Barbican interview in 1999, was Polynesian herself (mp3 here). In fact the texture of this song is probably the closest Gary got to reproducing the music that his father, Harry Brooker, made professionally with Felix Mendelssohn and his Hawaiian Serenaders. The healthy, seaside associations of the 'Aloha State' again tally neatly with image the Beach Boys in their surfing era were eager to foster, and which the record-buying (and record-making!) public seem to have swallowed: 1965 saw two hit singles with 'Hawaii' in the title, and the Kinks recorded Holiday in Waikiki on Face to Face in 1966.

Finally, as the music makes its final great leap into an entirely new element, we sense that the coda demonstrates what will surely happen in the mind of the unsatisfied narrator. Gone is the lightweight 'aloha' chanting, the easy harmonies: in their place, one of Brooker's tricksiest and most elaborately ingenious little cycles, poised over an unorthodox bassline that starts by dropping a semitone, then goes up a tone, and down a fifth (a G chord predictably follows the opening C, but the following F#7^th is entirely unexpected). The band shifts this up a minor third and repeats it in A, then drops it a minor third to resume in C again. Unlike the serpentine organ solo that depicts wandering sanity in In the Autumn of my Madness, and which visits every key, this motif cycles back and forth in a vicious circle, while the arrangement grows more and more foreboding and Wagnerian. At 3:59 a brass figure is heard, similar to the introductory melody that is stated twice in the first twelve seconds of the Beach Boys' God Only Knows; but the upbeat nature of that song is utterly passed over. The Robert's Box playout grows more and more weighty, and the harmonies break away into a very Procolian pattern of grandly rising bass, passing diminished sevenths, and heroic screaming guitar; we are back in the territory of the magnificent instrumental passages that concluded the first three Procol Harum albums. 'I also like very much the way the song ends, 'Reid told Hit Parader 'When one hears the ending, they know it's not only the end of the song, but the album, too. I like the idea of that.' In fact the final chord cuts off very suddenly, and in live performance the band used to extend it considerably (mp3 here) for Beethovenesque effect.

Roberts [sic] Box / A Rum Tale (CHS 2010) was released as a single in the UK on 6 April 1973. Roberts Box was an edited version (3:57 instead of 4:45) which curtailed a lot of the vicious circling before the soaring guitar finale. The song was also released as a single in Denmark (CHS 2010), Italy (010 1037), Portugal (6155 008) and Netherlands (5C 006-94 591). Sadly it gained only lukewarm reviews, and did not sell well.

The song had probably been played as early January 1972, when Procol did a short British tour with Amazing Blondel supporting. It was first recorded with Dave Ball on lead, and later Mick Grabham re-recorded the guitar parts. Gary told Melody Maker (22 April 1972): "I’ve written about five or six tunes." These must have been Grand Hotel, Souvenir Of London, Bringing Home The Bacon, Fires (Which Burnt Brightly) and Robert’s Box … the sixth tune is either A Rum Tale or Toujours L’Amour). Robert's Box was definitely on the setlist from July 1972, and was a promotional regular in 1972 / 1973. In 1973 it was lit with a shift to greens and blues on stage, and the demeanour of the entire band changed as they absorbed themselves in a groove more mellow than much of their other material requires. The song has not been heard since then, a notable exception being the fans' party at Redhill 1997, when it was played at the request of Alan Cartwright: one can see that a bass-player would get a lot of satisfaction from the final sequence.

• 'Doctor where's your remedy?': old-fashioned over-the-counter medicines were marketed as' remedies' and were often close kin to family- or folk-remedies [cp Auntie Maggie's Remedy, sung George Formby]. The word 'doctor' has its roots in the Latin docere, to teach, although its most common use is for a medical practitioner. This song does not specify the nature of the remedy that is sought any more than it specifies the disease: in this sense it is quite obviously not intended to record a plausible dialogue (or monologue, since the doctor remains silent). Doctors invaded Reid's output chiefly in the Chrysalis years (the throw-back, Pandora's Box, being the exception): 'The doctors say they must operate' (Song For A Dreamer); 'Got to show it to my doctor' (A Souvenir of London); 'The doctors didn't hesitate', 'The doctors said they knew no cure' (For Liquorice John); 'Famous doctors all agree' (Fresh Fruit); 'Doctors cause uncertainty' (Pandora's Box); 'If only my doctor could see that I'm ill', 'If only my doctor would give me a pill' and 'But why can't my doctor just say that I'm ill?' (Typewriter Torment).
• 'I've got enough to pay the fee': in Britain at the time the man in the street did not pay a doctor for a routine visit; the expense was covered by the National Health Service. The tenor of this line is that the doctor needs some persuading that the client has funds; grounds for this might be a downbeat appearance, which might in turn be some sort of consequence of the habit he is presently trying to feed.
• 'Can't you see I'm awful sick?': the word 'sick' here presumably doesn't allude to a bilious attack, but to a more general illness of the body or soul. 'Awful' strictly means 'full or awe', and it's a word Reid likes to use for intensifying drama: "I've got an awful pain!"' (Something Following Me); 'it's hard at times, it's awful raw' (Glimpses of Nirvana); 'an awful gaping scream' and 'They caught us in that awful glare' (Nothing But the Truth); 'An awful waste of guts and gore' and 'An awful waste of human life' (The Unquiet Zone); 'your awful crime' (The Piper's Tune); 'a God-awful mess' (The Mark of The Claw); 'The smell was so awful' (The Worm and The Tree).
• 'I'll pay you well to do the trick': the word 'trick' has many long-established meanings: theft, sexual performance by a prostitute, or simply achieving something which seemed difficult. This could be a bleakly ironic phrase of the 'his should do the trick' sort, which seeks really to minimise the magic by suggesting that the solution is in fact very straightforward: clearly not what the luckless patient feels here. In The Idol we learn that 'they knew the monster's every trick' and the word is used again in the Brooker / Fisher / Reid Trick of the Night. The thaumaturgical sense here leads into 'magic box' below.
• 'Doctor where's your magic box': this is the first published use of the word 'magic' in Reid's work (others come in Pandora's Box, Something Magic and Wizard Man). Stage magicians would produce items from a magic box, having tapped it with their magic wand, and the desperate patient here apparently desires a similarly miraculous outcome. The song highlights a thematic opposition with Typewriter Torment: whereas the stage magician produces something from nothing by tapping his box, the struggling creative artist seems to have nothing, from which he aches to get something. Pills and potions and alcohol are often resorted to at such times.
• 'There's no one here to count the cost': as a financial transaction is implied in this song, 'cost' may hold its everyday financial meaning; but the overall sweep of paying / counting costs in other Reid texts suggests that 'cost' should also be construed as a matter of guilt, sin, and damage done to the querant: 'and now you'll have to pay the cost' (The Piper's Tune); 'and pay the cost': ((You can't) turn back the page); 'no-one here' implies that there is no witness, or no-one responsible to notice the harm done to the person paying. The doctor is evidently counted out of this moral role.
• 'Doctor Doctor': this is certainly the most minimal chorus in Procoldom, alongside the wordless hook of Wizard Man. The words are delivered in antiphony between the high and the low backing voices, and come close to being comical, except that the unanswered repetition of the plea for attention from the doctor becomes harrowing, specially after the last verse when the words are re-repeated. Pink Floyd started Take up thy Stethoscope and Walk with the words 'Doctor Doctor', though the effect is very different: there seems to be no indication that Reid was interested in their work, but the two bands certainly moved in the same circles in late-60s London and must surely have heard each other play. Synth-pop trio, the Thompson Twins, took a song called Doctor Doctor to No 3 in the charts in 1984. Some fans are reminded of the Rolling Stones' Mother's Little Helper with its refrain, 'Doctor please, some more of these; outside the door, she took four more': this song also contains a Procol title in the line 'The pursuit of happiness just seems a bore' ...
• 'Name your price and make the sale': there is a tone of desperation here, suggesting 'I'll pay whatever you want'; 'make the sale' is more the language of a huckster or mountebank than of a reputable dispenser.
• 'There's no-one here to tell the tale': Reid is fond of the word 'story' in his work, and the synonym 'tale' gets a number of mentions too: 'the miller told his tale' (A Whiter Shade of Pale); 'how the tale unfolds' (Piggy Pig Pig); A Rum Tale (title); 'years may have passed since the tale I have told' (The Worm and The Tree). However 'tell the tale' raises the idea of a 'tell-tale', a gossip-monger who cannot be trusted with a secret, and furthers the furtive elements of the scenario. The seventeenth-century proverb, 'a tale never loses in the telling', also reminds us that the tell-tale's version will almost certainly exaggerate the racy, shameful or criminal elements of what actually happened.
• 'Doctor please don't lock your door': this line perhaps encourages us to imagine the helpless plaintiff outside, while the doctor signals his resolve not to co-operate by locking his door from the inside. In The Piper's Tune 'they' seem to have trapped the narrator where 'knocking on the door' is his only recourse, and both Holding On and Simple Sister involve locked incarcerations. The story of waiting outside the door is, of course, painfully reminiscent of any number of Kafka stories, perhaps most tellingly Before the Law.
• 'I've never troubled you before': this line and the very similar final line of the song imply that there is no ongoing relationship between the demander and the supplier … or at least that the demander wants the supplier to believe that is the case. It's at this point that the story particularly parts company with the Beatles' Dr Robert, since that doctor is an habitual supplier, keen to network friends and broaden his clientele.
• 'Just a pinch to ease the pain': this wonderful line presents a paradox since, a 'pinch' (specially in the playground frame-of-reference that 'tell the tale' has established) is a mean-spirited assault that causes, not eases, pain; however the paradox is resolved if we construe 'pinch' as 'a small amount held between finger and thumb', and the 'pain' as being the mental agony of deprivation rather than any specific bodily suffering. To 'pinch' is to steal, and 'at a pinch' is used for something that is just about acceptable: both of these meanings tally with the clandestine dealing of the song, and with the narrator's desperate willingness to settle for any assistance, however slight. The measure, 'a pinch', indicates that the required remedy is a powder (rather than a pill, ointment, liquid, etc), which would narrow the field if one were seeking to identify an addictive substance.
• 'I'll never trouble you again': this two-edged line seems to imply that the narrator will voluntarily abstain from hassling the doctor in future; equally it could imply that he knows that in future – given his condition – he will no longer be in a position to do so. The way the musical arrangement piles up the 'doctor doctor' pleas at this point seems to reinforce the former interpretation; the way the coda repeats the last two lines of the verse, until the words – and sense – are lost in the growing tumult, sadly reinforces the second. When we hear the Beach Boys evoked again, by the poignant horn line – played by top-drawer husband-and-wife team Alan 'For No One' Civil and Shirley Hopkins – we well understand the new, addict-oriented, spin that is being put on the once-sentimental line, 'God only knows what I'd be without you'.

  Thanks to Frans Steensma for additional information about this song