Picking the defining anthem of the 1960s is no easy task. The tumultuous decade, which saw artists raised on the music of Elvis Presley, Little Richards and the like finally come of age, is regarded as something of a golden age. Today’s music industry bears the mark of everything from punk’s year zero to the halcyon days of acid house and Britpop, yet it is the 1960s that continues to capture our hearts and minds more than anything else. Here, The Beatles‘ Ringo Starr, who played no small part in the ’60s music scene, attempts to distil the creativity of that pioneering decade in just one single.
Ask anyone to name three features of the 1960s, and The Beatles will undoubtedly be one of them. The Fab Four defined the meaning of celebrity, rising from their humble origins to become the most influential bands on the planet. When it came to the drug culture of the ’60s, this posed significant challenges. Let’s not forget that The Beatles were frequently accused of influencing young people’s burgeoning inclination towards hallucinogens as well as informing their music tastes.
With tracks like ‘She Said, She Said’, ‘Day Tripper’, and ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr painted a picture of drug use as exploratory and innovative. As Paul once put it: “I’d been a rather straight working-class lad, but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting. It didn’t seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana and to me it seemed it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding.”
Without really even meaning to, The Beatles had become purveyors of the acid anthem – tracks which seemed to capture the hedonism, glamour and essential importance of the hippie movement.
But, according to Ringo, it wasn’t The Beatles who defined the sound of the ’60s. Speaking to Rolling Stones’ David Wild about his acid-tinged 1992 album Time Takes Time, Starr said: “With that period you can’t help think about us. Personally, I always think of Procol Harum. Everyone else thinks of me and the Fabs, but I think of Procol Harum, because to me ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ is the ultimate ‘60s record.”
Recorded in just three takes, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ became the defining singles of the ‘Summer of Love’, with John Lennon declaring himself a huge fan of Procol Harum and their work. So many years later, the recording – characterised by that swelling organ sound – still sounds as fresh and vital as ever, which is especially surprising when you discover that it was heavily inspired by the music of J.S Bach, which frontman Gary Brooker was listening to a lot of at the time: “If you trace the chordal element, it does a bar or two of Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ before it veers off,” he once recalled. “That spark was all it took. I wasn’t consciously combining rock with classical, it’s just that Bach’s music was in me.”
You can revisit Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ below.
