Procol Harum: Shine On Brightly
The conversation with Ryan C about this album (see comments on this post) made me get it out and give it a listen for the first time in quite a few years. Shine On Brightly was Procol Harum’s second album, and I still find it, as I did when it was new, something of a disappointment. The first album, Procol Harum, was pretty uneven but about two-thirds brilliant. This one begins with half a dozen or so songs that are very much in the style of the first album, but to my taste not quite as good as its best—not bad by any means, but just not as memorable. These are followed by a long suite which might be described as either ambitious or pretentious, depending on how much self-conscious striving for profundity one thinks suitable for a rock group.
I was very definitely one of those who used the second word when the album came out. In the spirit of the times (1968), the suite includes everything from hard rock to sitars and spoken passages, and I found it almost comical. I remember a conversation with an acquaintance which began with my speaking derisively of the suite. There was a long pause while the look on his face went from shock to defiance, and he said, very deliberately, “I think it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” There was another pause, and we changed the subject.
More generous in my old age, I find the suite better now than I remembered, but still, to put it gently, not a success, although there are some very good moments. A couple of the individual sections would have made excellent songs on their own, especially “In the Autumn of My Madness.” And I’m struck now, as I wasn’t then, by the courage involved: you certainly can’t say the group was afraid of taking artistic risks. This is especially true for lyricist Keith Reid, who swapped his Dylan-influenced surrealism for painfully awkward soul-searching. That they followed this album with a rather different one which is now widely considered to be a classic, A Salty Dog, is a testimony to the virtue of learning from mistakes and keeping at it.
And give them credit for:
They say that Jesus healed the sick
and helped the poor
and those unsure
believed his eyes
—a strange disguise
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
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