All Our Dreams Are Sold

You know, when the Zoo Crew spins something like All Our Dreams Are Sold by Procol Harum off that 1991 comeback record The Prodigal Stranger, it always gets the Zoo Freaks leaning in a little closer. That track was the one the label Zoo Entertainment pushed out as the first promo single, and Gary Brooker later explained that after a whole lot of deliberation and asking around, the folks at the label figured it lined up best with whatever was charting around late 1991. It is a medium-paced rocker sitting in G minor, with Robin Trower laying down some of that guitar tone that feels right at home, and it even climbed to number 29 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart before slipping away. The band took it out on the road for the promotional tours in 1991 and 1992, sometimes opening with it or saving it for the encore, though after a 1993 show in Southend it pretty much dropped out of the set list. Keith Reid thought enough of the words to put them in his own book My Own Choice, and Trower himself said it was the first song he had written in a long stretch of years that was not for one of his own projects, that it was really for somebody else.

Reid was clear that the title is not meant to be taken in some straight literal way. He put it that the song is not really saying all our dreams are sold, even if that is how some people might hear it. Another way of looking at it, he offered, is that all our dreams are sold to us, that feeling of being manipulated. There is this paradox sitting right in the middle of the lyric, whether the dreams are being marketed the way a band might hope or whether they are being sold down the river. It lands a little heavier when you remember this is the one number co-written with Trower, part of that studio dream team that never quite made it back out on the road together after the album. Brooker admitted it was a tough vocal, pitched so high, and the jerky rhythm under the title phrase is something unusual in his catalog. The lyric runs through rings upon your fingers, bells upon your toes, every day a game of chance, then into the king's apartment where heavy lies the crown, a thousand ways to bring that castle down, waving the mighty dollar to make us live again, lead and we will follow faithful to the end, pave the streets with gold, lead us by the collar. Some of the longtime listeners later felt those lines proved a bit prophetic for the band itself, that sense of being led by the collar while the dreams got sold.

That reunion album came after a fourteen-year break, dedicated to the memory of drummer B.J. Wilson, and it kicked off a stretch of shows that fans greeted warmly even if the record itself did not set the charts on fire. Trower played on it and co-wrote the music for this track but chose not to join the following tour. The whole thing felt a bit like making a first album again, Brooker said, because they never quite knew if it would work out until they had a solid set of songs in hand. Matthew Fisher, back on organ after years away, said he just sort of slotted back in like it had only been the day before. Reid wrote from emotion and instinct, going by what felt right at the time without overthinking the effect it might have.

All of that brings us around to how Procol Harum got started in the first place, which is a story that still feels like pure rock and roll luck mixed with a whole lot of stubborn work. It goes back to the Paramounts, that Southend-on-Sea R&B outfit Gary Brooker had been in since his school days with Robin Trower, Chris Copping, and later B.J. Wilson. They scored a modest hit with a cover of Poison Ivy, got a nod from the Rolling Stones as one of their favorite British R&B bands, but the follow-ups never quite took hold. By 1966 the Paramounts had split, and Brooker decided to step back from performing for a bit and focus on writing songs. Through the producer and scene-maker Guy Stevens he got introduced to the lyricist Keith Reid, and the two of them started pairing Brooker's music with Reid's words. For months they tried to place the songs with other artists, but nothing stuck, so they decided to put a band together themselves to play their own material.

They placed ads and answered ads in Melody Maker, pulling in organist Matthew Fisher who had been with Screaming Lord Sutch's Savages, guitarist Ray Royer, bassist David Knights, and drummer Bobby Harrison. The name itself came from a phone call from Stevens while they were rehearsing. He said he had found one, Procol Harum, and when they asked where from, he explained it was the pedigree name of a friend's Burmese cat. Brooker recalled they liked the sound of it, that it felt ambiguous in a way that matched the music they were writing. Later they learned the original spelling on the cat's papers was a little different and that the Latin worked out roughly to beyond these things, which struck them as a nice coincidence. Their first recording session produced A Whiter Shade of Pale, with Brooker's melody drawing loosely from Bach and Reid's surreal words, and that single shot straight to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in 1967. It defined something new at the time, that blend of rock power with thoughtful lyrics and classical touches, and the band was suddenly out there playing with acts like Hendrix while the record stayed at number one for weeks.

The lineup shifted almost right away, with Royer and Harrison out and Trower plus Wilson coming in from the old Paramounts days, but Brooker and Reid stayed the constant core, Reid listed as a full member even though he never performed on stage. They kept writing and recording through the years, from the early psychedelic and proto-prog feel through the more expansive work with orchestra, all the way to that 1991 return and beyond. The songs always carried Reid's distinctive imagery and Brooker's rich voice and piano, and fans still gather around them the way Zoo Freaks do whenever the Crew drops a deep cut like All Our Dreams Are Sold into the stream over at THE ZOO. If you want to dig deeper into the whole catalog, the lyrics, the interviews, and the history, the place to start is the official website, and you can also catch updates on the Facebook page or follow along on X.