I don't dance, but I remember a sort of drunken grappling slow dance to this song. Ah, memories....

Don't tell Mrs. Obvious - it was before her time.

"Procol Harum's lyricist Keith Reid wrote the words to this song. He told us: "It's sort of a film, really, trying to conjure up mood and tell a story. It's about a relationship. There's characters and there's a location, and there's a journey. You get the sound of the room and the feel of the room and the smell of the room. But certainly there's a journey going on, it's not a collection of lines just stuck together. It's got a thread running through it." Reid got the idea for the title when it came to him at a party, which gave him a starting point for the song. Says Reid: "I feel with songs that you're given a piece of the puzzle, the inspiration or whatever. In this case, I had that title, 'Whiter Shade of Pale,' and I thought, There's a song here. And it's making up the puzzle that fits the piece you've got. You fill out the picture, you find the rest of the picture that that piece fits into."

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1131


"Despite the song's mournful elegance it is, says Mr Butler, the account of a drunken seduction. 'The song explores what it means to be wrecked, in more than one sense of the word,' he says, adding that it uses the sea as a metaphor, and the final missing lines are the giveaway:

My mouth by then like cardboard

Seemed to slip straight through my head:

So we crashed, dived straight way quickly

And attacked the ocean bed

They show, Mr Butler says, that 'the drunken seduction is consummated, and the sea metaphor reaches its apotheosis in the oblivion and forgetfulness of sex'."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/whiter-shade-of-pale-a-bit-clearer-1449532.html

This really makes me view this song in a different light. Thank you.