robin trower riverside casino st louis missouri

“Lyrically, the song is all about that first line,” Trower continues. That was a very big factor in how the song and the whole album sounds.”

“It was a big room and he had one mic in close, one mic set in the middle distance, and one mic set fifteen feet away to get the sound of the room. “He came up with a way of recording the guitar I don’t think had been done before,” Trower says. But it is engineer Geoff Emerick whom Trower credits for the revolutionary sound of the recording. The album was produced by Matthew Fisher, Trower’s ex-bandmate from Procol Harum. After recording five albums with Procol, he left in 1971 to form a new group called Jude before finally setting up his own trio with singer and bassist Dewar (formerly with Stone The Crows) and drummer Reg Isidore. Having set out with The Paramounts during the beat boom of the early 1960s, he joined Procol Harum soon after they recorded their first and biggest hit, A Whiter Shade Of Pale, in 1967.

In contrast to the wondrous flights of fancy on which he embarks in his music, Trower is an emphatically down-to- earth character who began his career serving a colossal apprenticeship to stardom. And in 1974, thanks in large part to Bridge Of Sighs and the album named after it, Trower transitioned from the role of English rock journeyman to international guitar hero. With a lyric that evokes cosmic disturbances and divine interventions, conveyed by the rich, mournful voice of James Dewar, it is a truly monumental and mysterious rock track. Built around a dense, doomy, echo-drenched riff, taken at a speed as slow and implacable as a planet moving across the night sky, Bridge Of Sighs is a song that goes beyond blues into an otherworldly realm of existential sorrow. It certainly turned out to be a good horse to back.

And I thought: ‘That’s a great title.’ So I worked it into the song,” the guitarist says cheerfully, and firmly debunking any myths. “I was reading a paper one morning, and there was a horse running called Bridge Of Sighs. Nor was he even thinking about this, or any other historic monument, when the inspiration to write the song struck.

Robin trower riverside casino st louis missouri