A Pilgrim's Progress (2)
George Lovell at the LA Palers'
Festival ... and beyond
Read the first part of this article
here
Monday 28 July
Shortly after 8 am – late nights and early rises were a feature of our
time together – the Palers piled into BB King’s, first for a soundcheck with
the club’s engineer, then for final tuning of the songs to be performed at the
Palers’ Party, scheduled to run from 12 noon to 4 p.m. After that beckoned
Procol Harum themselves. Palers I spoke with all voiced satisfaction with their
public performance the night before, which saw them share the stage at BB
King’s with Roland's other band, called Apeneck. But the Palers’ Party is
what surely drew the best out of the Palers’ Band – two sets of Procol Harum
covers, twenty numbers in all. After the first set I offered verbal
entertainment in the guise of Lofty Peaks: Concert Highs with Procol Harum,
in which I traced my trajectory as a fan from first hearing the band play live
at Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow (2 October 1970) to my twenty-first engagement
with them at the Bottom Line in New York (11 May 2003). Visual entertainment and
lucid commentary were furnished by Neal Fischer, who put together a fascinating
mosaic of A Whiter Shade of Pale on the silver screen, an apt topic given
our proximity to Hollywood.
It was during the first set – song thirteen of fifteen – that I was
called upon to tackle Rambling On. I made my way on stage, a man with a
mission. Just before take-off I made eye-contact with my fellow ramblers, Roland
on piano, Jeremy on organ, Gary on guitar, John Crouch on bass, and Jens at the
drums.
“Hey, guys! Look what I found ,” I hollered above their tweaking. They
all looked towards me.
From my bag I unearthed the item Monsieur Marvin had recommended I get hold
of, and pulled it over my head. It was a brand new Batman T-shirt, the logo of
the airborne creature set boldly in black against a yellow disk of sun. Howls of
laughter, nods of approval, and shakes of disbelief came from band members and
audience alike. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly as Roland rolled, Gary
riffed, and Jens gave me the signal beat to start:
“Our local picture house was showing a Batman movie.
You see this guy fly up in the sky. I thought to myself, “Why shouldn’t
I?”
So I bought a pair of wings, and climbed upon a wall ...”
The predicament in which I found myself was exhilarating. With a breeze of
adrenalin rushing through me, up in the air I went:
“I must have flown a mile, or maybe it was eight ...”
In truth I don’t think – unlike our hero in Rambling On – I have
yet come down to earth, for the catharsis of performing in such splendid company
and circumstances is with me still. From singing in the shower, my habitual
venue for a gathered crowd of one, to spreading my wings at BB King’s – what
a blast!
With no broken bones to speak of, only a slight tear to my Y-fronts hardly
worth mentioning, I swooped down from stage to audience upon completion, treated
thereafter to celebratory ales in abundance. Small wonder I was as loquacious as
I was – rambling on again, so to speak – during Lofty Peaks.
It was the thrill of a lifetime. Something magic.
*
The elements – be they of earth, water, fire, or air – figure prominently
in the lyrics of Keith Reid, so much so that at times you wonder if the power of
them being invoked musically might not stir the planet to unleash them
physically. Well, that’s exactly what happened when Procol Harum took to the
stage at John Anson Ford Theatre after the first leg of the Palers’ Party had
wound down.
It started with gusty winds in the late afternoon. Soon the sun disappeared
behind a build-up of clouds. By the time we were taking our seats at the outdoor
venue the sky had turned dark and menacing. The Well’s on Fire declared
the emblem on Mark Brzezicki’s drum kit. So too, it turned out, were the
heavens above us, for a loud peal of thunder was followed by a jagged zap of
lightning. Might it rain on the coast of southern California in late July? No
way! It will surely blow over, I told myself, as must have scores of others as
Procol Harum filed on to the stage and started to play. The first drops fell
during Bringing Home the Bacon. Not good. But when Pandora’s Box
was opened, out jumped lashes of precipitation in earnest. The image of Geoff
Whitehorn unplugging his guitar and running for cover – “ I don’t do
electrocution, George,” he confided in me later – was the kinetic highlight
of the show, and he had stiff competition from colleagues Brooker, Brzezicki,
and Pegg. Only Matthew Fisher showed no great sense of urgency, walking stately
from a scene that fellow band-members fled in unceremonial haste. Let down the
curtain, and exit the play. What next, I thought?
The storm raged for an hour or so, then subsided. Like the conquistador he
sings of so movingly, Gary led the troops back out to the fray. The decision to
re-commence with Whaling Stories was inspirational, its shifts of mood
and tempo at one with the weather. A dozen songs followed, among them War is
Not Healthy, the first time I had heard it played. But nature is a force not
even we humans can control. As in Barnyard Story, once again the heavens
opened wide. I beheld no flaming chariot, just a tarpaulin being thrown over
Gary’s piano, from which he’d been able to wring only one verse of A
Whiter Shade of Pale before throwing in a very wet towel.
The night, however, was young. Back to BB King’s we retired, where the
Palers’ Band in various guises was soon back in action. To our great delight
– in the midst, appropriately enough, of Quite Rightly So – Procol
Harum themselves showed up, treating us to a handful of songs that more than
compensated for the interrupted and truncated concert. First up was A Rum
Tale which Gary sang as a piano solo at the first Palers’ Festival in
Guildford in 2000, when Richard Beck conceded that his soul-mate Donna Roberds
– Toujours L’Amour – indeed had fuddled his fancy and muddled him
good. Richard and Donna were in rapture at BB King’s. A Rum Tale was
followed by The Emperor’s New Clothes and Echoes in the Night,
after which came a raucous rendition of Juicy John Pink. A groovy serving
of Green Onions finished off the unexpected offering. The Palers for
their part reciprocated with several more covers, which culminated in the
mammoth task of enacting Whaling Stories, with every Paler on deck at BB
King’s to trumpet SHALIMAR by way of voicing thanks and appreciation, truly a
“grand finale” to an unforgettable day.
Tuesday 29 July
The tour schedule had Procol Harum playing San Diego this evening but in order
to hear the band in San Francisco the day after I headed north instead of south,
hugging the California coast as much as possible, motoring past Santa Barbara
and Morro Bay to Big Sur and on towards Santa Cruz. My friend Victor had taught
journalism and creative writing at the University of California there, and Santa
Cruz was where he had spent his final days after a debilitating stroke. I pulled
in for the night near Capitola, at a motel called Ocean Echo. The sound of the
sea lulled me to sleep.
Wednesday 30 July
No Dead Man’s Dream disturbed me, despite the palpable presence of
Victor lurking at every turn. The morning mist turned to drizzle as I strolled
along the beach, bracing myself for the final leg of my pilgrimage. I drove up
to Half Moon Bay, beyond which I again stuck as close to the coast as I could.
It was slow going on the winding road, but I made it to San Francisco by
mid-afternoon. A bed-and-breakfast I had stayed at a couple of years before
while attending an anthropology conference I knew to be a short walk from the
legendary Fillmore, my field site for the evening’s investigations. I checked
in and rested up for what I reckoned would be another memorable night.
The Fillmore. East or West, how can anyone who came of age in the sixties, as
I did, not yearn to experience the Fillmore? I arrived early in order explore
the place leisurely, which I did with great nostalgia, imagining what it must
have been like to have been in San Francisco during “flower power” and to
have heard music played at the Fillmore in its heyday. The sound palace of the
counter-culture, no denying it, now looked a little the worse for wear, but who
cares about threadbare carpets and lumpy upholstery when the walls of the
establishment are lined, top to bottom in the upstairs bar, with posters
documenting row by row which two or three or four epic bands shared the bill
night after night when playing the Fillmore. I perused the displays awestruck,
spotting Procol Harum a number of times, drooling at the prospect of having been
at the Fillmore then.
But you can’t turn back the page. I wasn’t in San Francisco to hear the
band play in 1968, but I was in 2003. A quarter of a century on the music of
Procol Harum is still sensational. With no adverse elements at hand to wreak
havoc, we were treated to twenty-one songs stretching from the first album to
the last. If My Girl, which came across (given our gay setting) sounding
like My Guy, was a bit of a surprise, so too was the rarity (for me at
any rate) of hearing Memorial Drive played live. Other highlights were a
tour-de-force Quite Rightly So and the sombre majesty of Repent
Walpurgis, which closed the show after a three-verse delivery of A Whiter
Shade of Pale. Everyone was in fine form, but Mark’s drumming was
outstanding.
There being no BB King’s to retire to, we had to make do with hanging
around the hallowed space of the Fillmore. Some lucky Palers, myself among them,
were afforded one-on-one time with members of the band. I had a wonderful
conversation with Matt as we trawled through the poster displays, with him
getting a huge kick out of determining which gigs his father would have played
at when he was in swaddling clothes back home. He photographed a bunch of
posters, for him family keepsakes as well as rock memorabilia.
It was the wee small hours, much in excess of sixpence, when Gary joined us
in the bar. He noticed I was wearing my Batman T-shirt, at which juncture Roland
informed him of my adventure with Rambling On. Gary looked at me
quizzically. “How does that one go again?”, he inquired, bit by bit
unearthing the lyrics of the song from the vast archive in his mind. I helped
him with a couple of lines and we engaged in an impromptu duet. It was all over
in the blink of an eye. Gary smiled and put his arm around my shoulder. Roland
clicked his camera, capturing two passing birds frozen in time at the Fillmore.
Back up in the air I went.
W. George Lovell teaches geography at Queen’s University in Kingston,
Canada and Latin American history at Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville,
Spain. A third edition of his first book, Conquest and Survival in Colonial
Guatemala, in which the Conquistador imagery that Procol Harum sing
about resonates throughout, was recently published by McGill-Queen’s
University Press. There are more illustrations to accompany this report, which
will eventually find their way into the text at the right points.
Thanks, George!