By John Carlson—
A fella suspects he’s on the cusp of entering his second childhood when, at the ripe old age of 70, he joins his favorite musical group’s fan club.
Nevertheless, I say bring it on.
It’s not like I haven’t been in a fan club before, after all.
I have.
It was the Cloud Appreciation Society. For just twenty-five euros-a-year the club emailed me a daily cloud picture, some of them spectacular and others less so, along with related cloud information. As a longtime aviation nut who was temporarily absent from the cockpit, I figured the cloud fan club was a way to sort of keep in touch with the sky.
Early on, I was right.
After about four years though, you had to figure they’d sent you a picture of pretty much every kind of cloud you could possibly spot floating around up there. The images were all starting to run together, you know? So I quit. The truth is, I still vastly prefer a sky with clouds to a cloudless one, and look admiringly at them all the time.
I just don’t pay twenty-five euros-a-year for the privilege.
But now I’m in a musical group’s fan club. I’ll be upfront about this. If that group was, say, the 1910 Fruit Gum Co. from back in the Sixties, or even worse, a couple yahoos like Milli Vanilli, I’d rather be dead than admit it. Therefore, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
But it’s not them …
It’s Procol Harum.
You remember them, right? A Sixties standard, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was Procol’s first hit and remains their signature song. In noting that, however, I feel a little sheepish. I liked the song and all, but never went ape over it.
But when a college dorm buddy traded me the album that song was on for my copy of Jefferson Airplane’s LP “Crown of Creation,” I had no idea what he’d wrought in my life. Even now I crank up songs from that self-titled album, plus other Procol albums like “Shine On Brightly” and “A Salty Dog” and “The Grand Hotel” several times every week.
I don’t merely play ‘em, though.
Piano-playing lead singer Gary Brooker was and remains an amazing vocalist, able to wring wailing notes from what sounds like the far reaches of his very soul. Meanwhile, I can do precisely the same thing by the simple matter of lip-syncing him. So in the dark of any given night, you can find me at my man-cave desk, Brooker’s howl blasting from my Bluetooth hearing aids with the considerable assistance of my tortured facial expressions.
Were I to see me straining to reach Brooker’s high notes in the reflection of my window on a stormy night, I’d probably scare the living crap out of myself. People accidentally squished by highway road rollers have died with more placid expressions on their faces than I get pretending to sing “She Wandered Through the Garden Fence.”
And another thing. About those lyrics …
From the start, the guy who writes Procol’s song lyrics, poet Keith Reid, has been given full credit as a band member alongside the notation, “Words.” You could probably figure his value by noting the opening stanza to “A Christmas Camel,” which begins, “My Amazon six-triggered bride …” I tried to figure out the words for years before flashing on the brilliant notion of looking them up on the Internet (Duh.) In my defense, they’re slightly more challenging to comprehend than, say, “Yummy, yummy, yummy I’ve got love in my tummy!”
Anyway, I saw Procol Harum twice back in the day, experiences I found nothing less than magical. Once I even found myself standing alongside Reid on a concert hall floor in Cleveland before the show began. Forgive me if I sound like a typical rabid fan going on and on about nothing here, but this wasn’t the band’s earliest iteration with Matthew Fisher on organ and David Knights on bass. But besides Brooker, it did have the late B.J. Wilson on drums and Robin Trower (later called “the British Jimi Hendrix”) on guitar, and Chris Copping handling both bass and organ chores.
So what about the fan club?
It’s called Beyond the Pale, and turned out to be easily affordable, as in free! Joining required I complete a taxing 12-second qualification test to determine I wasn’t a robot (I wasn’t!) Now I am signed up for the newsletter to keep me updated on Procol news.
Of course, I’m sure some wag out there will say, “Ace, you’re 70 now. Isn’t that a little old to be joining Procol Harum’s fan club?”
Yeah, I s’pose, but then when I was 20, I never thought I’d still be listening to them at my age. Heck, I never thought I’d be listening to anything at my age except the munching sound of worm mandibles at work.
But Procol Harum fandom is a lifetime commitment. I only mention it to note that when the time comes many, many decades from now, if you’re looking for my memorial service and hear Gary Brooker wailing about his “six-triggered bride” from an open window at Meeks or Parsons mortuaries, come on in.
You’ve found the right place.
John’s weekly columns are sponsored by Beasley & Gilkison, Muncie’s trusted attorneys for over 120 years.
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A former longtime feature writer and columnist for The Star Press in Muncie, Indiana, John Carlson is a storyteller with an unflagging appreciation for the wonderful people of East Central Indiana and the tales of their lives, be they funny, poignant, inspirational or all three. John’s columns appear on MuncieJournal.com every Friday.
