DB's Song of the Day (day 149): "A SALTY DOG" (1969) Procol Harum

The beach visit is looming. I’m packing, so that means it’s happening. And it’s Gary Brooker’s birthday. Brooker, the pianist, main composer and main vocalist for Procol Harum. Brooker was the vocalist on all the songs I know best, but early on there are also vocals by Matthew Fisher and Robin Trower.

Today’s song is the title track from that initial band’s best LP, and it’s the album that features the most variety in composition credits, with lyricist Keith Reid writing with all three of the band’s composers. By the time I got around to buying PH material—the 45 “Conquistador” from the live album with symphony orchestra, in 1972 (a version of today’s track, with orchestra, was the B-side), and Exotic Birds and Fruit (1974)—Brooker was the man on the vocals. And I’ve always loved his singing. My favorite pick from the latter LP would probably be “Strong as Samson,” but I picked “A Salty Dog” for its seafaring theme. O let me get down to the sea again, y’know?

Of course their most famous song is “A Whiter Shade of Pale” with that indelible organ intro and Brooker’s voice coming in with a bluesy intonation in the midst of that Bach-like sound. Really gets to ya. But I find Brooker’s vocal on today’s song even more stirring, and the lyrics show Reid’s penchant for rather literary conceits.

This one, of a crew that lays waist to another ship, then flees pursuit only to find an island upon which to live (and escape), has associations with stories like the mutiny on the Bounty (and thus also shares something with a song I may get to next week, one of my favorites, Mekons’ “(Sometimes I Feel Like) Fletcher Christian”). What’s key to the success of this song is the way that the big lifts in Brooker’s melody and vocal match to the lyrics in that section.

Each verse begins somberly enough with a verse that sets the mood and sets up the big burst of excitement that comes at its close and carries into the next verse’s bravura:

“All hands on deck, we’ve run afloat,”

I heard the captain cry,

“Explore the ship, replace the cook,

Let no one leave alive.”

One might assume the captain is speaking of his own ship, but then that makes no sense. They’ve “run afloat”—a drifting ship, I take it—and pillage it, slaying its crew, then take off: “Across the straits, around the Horn / how far can sailors fly? / A twisted path, our tortured course, / and no one left alive.”  The final line drops back into the mood of somber reflection after the stress of the flight—a “tortured course” to frustrate pursuit.

We sailed for parts unknown to man

Where ships come home to die

No lofty peak nor fortress bold

Could match our captain’s eye.

This part simply serves to let us know that they have become nomads, and that the captain, in his fortitude, is loftier than a peak and bolder than a fortress, then the big climb again for: “Upon the seventh seasick day / We made our port of call / A sand so white, a sea so blue / No mortal place at all.”

That’s the part that has always tugged at my heartstrings: that vision of a beach and the sea. Sounds like heaven, and “no mortal place at all” lets us know it’s deserted, much as Pitcairn Island was for the Bounty deserters. In my youth I used to think that perhaps the lyrics here were suggesting that the “port of call” in its perfection beyond the “mortal” was actually death. That the ship sank and this was Reid’s way of saying it in a very poetic way.  But then that makes the final verse pointless, and it is a very good, very pointed final verse.

“We fired the gun, and burnt the mast / And rowed from ship to shore / The captain cried, we sailors wept / Our tears were tears of joy.” That little pause as he climbs from the somber doings of the crew as it abandons and destroys the ship (again, like the Bounty) to the Joy! Is wonderful, particularly as this verse has very touching violin fills in the background. Then, the kicker (with its internal rhymes on lines 1 and 3):

Now many moons and many Junes

Have passed since we made land

A salty dog, this seaman’s log,

Your witness: my own hand.

Here, as with the Mekons’ “no one will know I got away,” we realize that the narrator is a crewman who remains on the island—which they reached many moons and many Junes ago. We may, if we like, assume that, in fact, they have all gone to those heavenly beaches by now, and “I alone am left to tell the tale”—a seaman’s log.  Very nicely done.

But what sells the song is that brooding orchestration, the major uplifts that soar highest on the title line “a salty dog,” making it an epithet of praise. The song didn’t break the top 40 and I’m not surprised as it's too brooding in its sound, too long in its duration, and too elliptical in its narrative for most listeners. And yet it is a key example of the majesty of Brooker’s singing and writing and the great economy of Reid’s lyrics.

And, with the sound of the gulls at the opening, it’s a song that feels as fully expansive as the ocean seems when you stand before it, as lung filling and as uplifting. And now it’s time to go back again.

Now many moons and many Junes have passed since we first went there. Actually, the family has been staying a week at least since the summer before this song came out. Many Junes indeed.

DB's Song of the Day (day 97):"GRAND HOTEL" (1973), Procol Harum

Sunday I saw Wes Anderson’s new film Grand Budapest Hotel and am happy to offer today’s song as a tie-in of sorts. The film’s early going thoroughly enthralled me with its evocation of a fading Hotel Grande, the kind celebrated in Procol Harum’s song from 1973. What is the attraction? Both my first hearing of this album—around ten years after it was released—and my viewing of Anderson’s film recalled to me the evocations of the hotel by the sea in Cabourg that the narrator of the Recherche stays in as a boy. Something of that sense of unsuspected confluences, of people coming together par hasard, and of the sumptuous qualities of the setting combine to give me a little frisson of imaginative splendor. As remarked in yesterday’s post, me and Marcel share the tendency to find life not quite adequate to our imaginings. In Anderson’s film, the character played so impeccably by Ralph Fiennes (one of the finest actors of his generation) helps to recreate that sense of someone for whom tawdry reality is just not good enough. While I may be aligning myself with dandies in these comments, I have to say that the great contribution of such refined types is that they make such heights of taste seem possible, even as I accepted soon enough that such are not available in twentieth-century America.

And look how dandified today’s song is: “Tonight we sleep on silken sheets / We drink fine wines and eat rare meats.” That all may be easy enough to do on your tour of any major city, but still. The spirit in which this is delivered, in the full flower of PH’s prog-era willingness to ape classic dance measures and to orchestrate their compositions sublimely (Procol Harum’s album recorded with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra was a top ten LP and the recasting of “Conquistador”—the 45 that was my first purchase by them—top twenty). The spirit can be best summed up by the way, here, the foxtrot, after that highly melodramatic sequence with orchestra and choir, segues into a trumpeting guitar solo.

Keith Reid and Gary Brooker

It’s all terrifically decadent as well, doubtless, which would have held great attraction for me at one time. Not so much when I finally got around to the album, but, even so, I like to think that the song inspired the kind of imaginative flights that Anderson’s film also serves. Boy with Apple, the fictitious Old Master painting that contributes to the plot of Grand Budapest Hotel, is the kind of “touch” that I find delightful. For, in a sense, one’s idea of the sumptuous past is a matter of oil paintings, back when the rendering of the tactile feel of material culture was one of the highest arts.  See how PH lyricist Keith Reid gives us a taste here: “It’s mirrored walls, and velvet drapes, / Dry champagne, and bursting grapes, / Dover sole, and Oeufs Mornay, / Profiteroles and Peach Flambé.” Gary Brooker’s vocal, as ever, does a nice tongue-in-cheek with Reid’s tendency to ornate lyrics; Brooker always sounds like a lad from Hackney, thus undercutting any pretensions to aristocracy.

Procol Harum was hot at this time, in my view. The live album with the orchestra, then Grand Hotel, then the one I consider my favorite, Exotic Birds and Fruit. Glorious, ain’t it, squire? “It’s serenade and Sarabande, / The nights we stay at Hotel Grande.” And who wouldn’t, with the affable M. Gustave H. as concierge. But Anderson’s film would be less affecting to me personally without the part of the writer, played by Jude Law. For in that image of the solitary traveler who does nothing but soak up the ambiance of a place and move on, I find one of my finest “abstract plane” type of imaginings. And certainly the evocation of a vanished Europe—which is already present in those great writers of the early part of the last century, Proust, Mann—does much to recommend the film to me.  A theme dear as well to Stefan Zweig (from whose writings Anderson derives his tale) who, a nomad after the rise of Nazism in Germany, took his life in a double suicide with his wife, in 1942, rather than endure what the world was becoming. Très raffiné, no doubt, but far be it from me to deplore the decision.

On Carousel and gambling stake
Our fortunes speed, and dissipate . . . .