Here it is. Moral? Don’t wait 38 years to recover from the drugs. And anyway, isn’t Bach the real originator of this choon?
I thought you’d like to know what Dominic Sandbrook says about it in White Heat:
Psychedelic music set out to evoke the dilation of the senses experienced through LSD ‘acid trips’. Its songs abandoned traditional structures for lengthy, often self-indulgent improvisation, while its lyrics were self-consciously ‘spiritual’ and ‘meaningful’. An obvious bestselling example was Procul Harum’s single ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, which included an introduction based on Bach and some magnificently pretentious lyrics… With references to ‘sixteen Vestal virgins’, people ‘wandering through playing cards’ mermaids taking ‘Neptune for a ride’ and so on, this was typical psychedelic stuff, anticipating the lyrical excesses of progressive rock in the early 1970s.
Deciding just who ‘composes’ a pop/rock song looks far from straightforward. In practice, the final thing the public hears is a ‘mix’ which has been contributed to by the originator of the basic song ( let’s call him/her the ‘writer’ ) a producer, an arranger, an engineer, and, probably, several of the musicians, too. The other musicians may be said to ‘write’ a contribution in the sense that, during the recording, a keyboard player might, for instance, be asked: ‘ give us a bluesy riff in A over that bass line ‘ or some such vague instruction, and he ‘composes’ a bit to suit.
This is probably why the action was taken ( albeit a bit late ), as the famous keyboard passage – it does sound somewhat like the old ad for Hamlet that Bach wrote – is the key ‘hook’ for this song.
Happily, it seems to be the norm that the guy/girl who ‘writes’ the bare bones of the song, however much added to in production, is generally still acknowledged as the ‘composer’. If not, we’d be in court every day.
There aren’t many Kelyvns around… so I guess this is the one I know!
Yes, the judgment does distinguish between “the song”, i.e. what the writer originally composed, and “the work”, i.e. the arrangement heard on the famous record, which the dispute was about.