Procol Harum A Whiter Shade of Pale

Procol Harum's debut album is amazingly engaging, considering that it was rushed out to capitalize on the hit title track. The material was all already written (before the hit, in fact), but the group recorded the LP in just two days, simply to get a long-player out, and came up with one of the more pleasingly straightforward releases in their history…

Procol Harum's debut album is amazingly engaging, considering that it was rushed out to capitalize on the hit title track. The material was all already written (before the hit, in fact), but the group recorded the LP in just two days, simply to get a long-player out, and came up with one of the more pleasingly straightforward releases in their history…

Procol Harum's debut album is amazingly engaging, considering that it was rushed out to capitalize on the hit title track. The material was all already written (before the hit, in fact), but the group recorded the LP in just two days, simply to get a long-player out, and came up with one of the more pleasingly straightforward releases in their history. The range of sounds here is the widest ever heard on one of the group's albums – "A Christmas Camel" isn't that far from the old Paramounts, the group tackling a sound inspired by Bob Dylan (and derived specifically from his "Ballad of a Thin Man"), while "Salad Days" and "Kaleidoscope" are hard-driven psychedelic rockers, stripped down to the basics, with no pretensions.

Procol Harum is the eponymous debut studio album by English rock band Procol Harum. It was released in September 1967 by record label Regal Zonophone following their breakthrough and immensely popular single "A Whiter Shade of Pale". The track doesn't appear on the original album but was included in the US issue of the album…

Although Procol Harum owed their career to their initial single, "A Whiter Shade of Pale," they were never really a singles band. Annotator Chris Welch notes that the group was not a one-hit wonder, but it might be called a three-hit wonder by tossing in "Homburg" and "Conquistador" (four, if "Pandora's Box," a U.K. Top 20, is included). For the most part, Procol Harum were known for their LPs, so the idea of organizing a compilation around singles that happen to have been excerpted from those LPs, largely without the band's say-so, in one country or another, is a curious one…

This is a reissue of Procol Harum's third and fourth albums released in 1969 and 1970. While there was outside and perhaps internal pressure to equal the success of "A Whiter Shade of Pale," this band was not deterred from creating wonderfully creative music that sometimes matched the grandeur of its 1967 smash but just didn't translate into a "hit."…

Esoteric Recordings are proud to announce the release of a newly re-mastered and expanded edition of the classic 1969 album A Salty Dog by Procol Harum. Released in June 1969, the record followed on from the huge international success of the band's debut single A Whiter Shade of Pale and the follow up single Homburg and the superb albums Procol Harum and Shine On Brightly. One of the finest releases of the era A Salty Dog saw the exquisite song writing of Gary Brooker and Keith Reid honed to perfection on highlights such as the album's title track, The Devil Came From Kansas, Wreck of the Hesperus, The Milk of Human Kindness and more. Recorded at Abbey Road studios, the album captured the excellence of the musicians in the group, namely Gary Brooker (voice, piano), Robin Trower (lead guitar), David Knights (bass guitar), B.J. Wilson (drums) and Matthew Fisher (Hammond organ)…