Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories

by Rick Wakeman

  Take vegetables, for example.

  And meat.

  Or in the case of most of Yes, the lack of meat.

  I liked to eat meat. The rest of the band were vegetarians. Also, they didn’t drink – although rumour had it that one or two indulged in the odd substance here and there. So I was a little bit of a fish out of water, to some extent. I was the steak-eating heavy drinker. Meat seven times a week, please.

  Nowadays, I’m the only teetotaller and eat meat no more than three times a week.

  To be fair, Steve Howe doesn’t drink much – the odd glass of wine – but the rest all like a drink. And they are all now confirmed carnivores, again with the exception of Steve (who has stuck by his position all these years and I take my hat off to him). So there has been a complete reversal of roles.

  Before I go on, I’d like to mention one thing that I’ve never understood about vegetarianism. I have no objections to it at all, but what I don’t understand is if you don’t like meat, why do you make things like nut cutlets to look like a chop? And tofu to look like sausages or burgers? I’ve never understood that.

  I digress.

  On Yes tours, food was constantly a hot potato, on the menu, dish of the day – you take your pick of clichés. For one tour, it was decided that we would take a chef on the road with us. I wasn’t surprised, as we’d pretty much taken everything else we needed over the years, so why not a chef?! Some of the band were quite extreme with their vegetarianism. For a couple of Yes, having a meal with no meat in it was not enough; they had to know pretty much the origin of the soil it was planted in, the organic farming methods used in its production, the name of the guy who planted this food and, ideally, the species and health of the birds who had shit on the organic soil where these plants and vegetables were grown. Well, that might be possible in the noughties in an organic wholefood specialist shop; but try this in a Holiday Inn coffee shop in the Deep South in the early 1970s. Some of the band were going without food for days and it was becoming impossible.

  So our manager, Brian ‘Deal-a-Day’ Lane, called a meeting at his Notting Hill Gate office. We looked at the reality of the band members’ food preferences and, of course, the only way around this was to take a chef on the road.

  Yes was never really blessed with management who knew how to handle the band. However, in all fairness, I’m not sure that Yes were ‘handle-able’, because none of us would take advice. Whatever meeting we were in, whatever advice we were given, we would all just sit there and listen patiently, then go out and do whatever we wanted. Which was invariably a disaster.

  So that’s what we did in this case. We decided to hire a chef for the tour. In between mouthfuls of sirloin, I remonstrated.

  ‘Hang on, guys, I have absolutely no objections to getting a chef. I accept you have strong principles and a chef will accommodate that. What I don’t accept is that this chef isn’t going to come cheap and, what’s more, we are going to need to take a kitchen on the road with us too. Now, no disrespect to you guys, but I don’t think I should pay one fifth of these costs.’

  They said that I could eat their vegetarian food too, if that helped.

  Perfectly reasonably, I said, ‘I do not want to have an organically reared nut cutlet in the evening for the whole tour with a lettuce leaf that has been washed on the banks of the River Nile by a spiritual woman’s feet . . . or something. I really don’t want to know.’

  At this point, Deal-a-Day stepped in and suggested that the chef could cook separate meat-crammed meals for me. This seemed like a fair compromise and, on reflection, I actually liked the idea of having these delicious meals made for me – after all, tour grub is pretty lousy and I do like my food.

  So we hired this fabulous English chef and he flew out to America with us for the tour. He had all the top professional stoves and an amazing amount of equipment. Basically, what happened was this: at each hotel, we rented a small reception room, laid the table out and then at the end of each show we would go back to this room and all sit round and eat, including the management and any other members of the tour party.

  Very early on the first day I’d chatted with the chef about what he was going to cook for me. I was actually very interested by now and glad we’d taken him along. I just agreed to eat whatever vegetables he was cooking for the rest of the band, and he said he’d stick a bit of steak or chops in for me too, in a separate pan. This all worked out very nicely.

  Then, on the first Saturday of the tour, this chef took me to one side and said, ‘Rick, do you fancy a nice big roast tomorrow?’

  ‘Bloody hell, do I fancy a roast!’

  ‘Well, I haven’t asked before because there’s no point cooking a roast for one person, but I understand your manager will be eating with us and your accountant David Moss, and neither of them are veggies. What do you think?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Right, Rick, I’ll go out today and buy a smashing turkey with all the trimmings.’

  I was beginning to think that taking a chef out on tour was a stroke of genius.

  We played the Sunday show and I headed back to the hotel virtually floating on saliva at the prospect of this roast. We all sat down and the chef brought out the rest of the band’s food first: a lettuce leaf, a carrot or two, celery sticks, whatever . . . and they all tucked in, giving it the old rather unconvincing ‘mmmm’ and ‘delicious’.

  Then he walked out, went back to the kitchen and a minute later banged back through the door with an enormous silver platter on which sat a 22 lb turkey, golden brown, heaped high with sausages wrapped in bacon, potatoes and parsnips. It was a sensational sight.

  The veggies around the table stopped eating, some of them with forks halfway to their mouths.

  Jon said, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a roast turkey, Jon.’

  ‘Yes, I know it’s a roast turkey, Rick, but what is it doing here?’

  The chef, meanwhile, put the roast in front of me and started serving it up; the smell was incredible.

  Someone said, ‘Er, could I try some roasted parsnips, please?’

  ‘Sorry, chaps, cooked in goose fat.’

  ‘And the potatoes . . . ?’

  ‘Goose fat. Rick, shall I cut the breast or the leg, sir?’

  I could barely pick my plate up, there was that much roast turkey piled onto it. With the exception of Steve, I think every veggie around the table watched every mouthful go in. Steve never batted an eyelid, but the rest were struggling badly. After they’d all finished their veggie meals a mass exodus ensued, clearly to avoid being around this delightful roast for too long.

  A few minutes later I still hadn’t finished and was just heaping some more sausages wrapped in bacon on my plate when the door opened. It was Alan.

  ‘All right, Rick. I was thinking, I know I’m veggie and all that, but to be honest, I do eat the occasional piece of white meat. Any chance I could try some of the turkey?’

  ‘Alan, of course you can – tuck in, help yourself,’ I said.

  ‘OK, thanks, but I’ll take it back to my room, if that’s OK.’

  He hastily put some of the roast turkey and trimmings on a plate and off he scurried.

  Five minutes later, the door opened and Jon walked in.

  ‘All right, Rick. I was thinking, I do have the odd bit of chicken now and then, so I was wondering . . .’

  ‘Help yourself, tuck in, Jon,’ I offered.

  ‘Cheers, Rick. I’ll take it back to my room, though, if you don’t mind.’

  Ten minutes later, door opens, Chris walks in.

  ‘All right, Rick . . . I, er . . .’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  I turned to the chef who was grinning widely. ‘Probably best if you don’t mention this, my friend . . .’

  Fast-forward to 2003, and Yes were playing some overseas shows. We were at an airport eating rubbish departure-lounge snacks and I had opted for a sweaty cheese sandwich. I think it was Alan who said, ‘That
’s funny, Rick, you’re eating cheese and, apart from Steve, we’re all eating meat. That reminds me, do you remember the time you had the chef make you a roast-turkey dinner in the States . . . ?’

  I smiled knowingly, in between mouthfuls of cheese.

  People often wondered what planet the various members of Yes were on. Some even suggested that we regularly visited other planets to get our music. And clothes. And hair. And stage sets. I’d like to think that Yes was a pioneering band, I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Especially in the early days with regards to some of the stuff we did onstage. Take a look at Spinal Tap – we did that stuff for real.

  During the Tales from Topographic Oceans album project, the grandiose elements of Yes were spiralling out of all control. I have to be honest and say that was not my favourite Yes album and I said so at the time. We’d ended up with too much material for a single album but clearly not enough quality songs to genuinely fill a double album. This was 1973, way before the days of CDs, which was a shame because we could have used just the good songs and fitted them on a CD nicely. Don’t get me wrong, that album had a few really nice songs and melodies on it, but basically it didn’t work for me personally. It felt like the record had been stretched a little thin.

  Maturely, I renamed the album Tales from Toby’s Graphic Go-Kart.

  We took the album out on tour and the stage set was unbelievable. We’d been using Roger Dean for the artwork and he’d become like a sixth member of the band. Yes was always a very visual band and by this point, the sets we used were colossal. Again, if you’ve seen Spinal Tap you’ll know what I am talking about. There is a scene in that film where the bass player is trapped in a giant pod – well, that actually happened to Alan one night. He was placed with his drum kit inside a giant seashell pod, it was truly enormous. However, when it came time to open, the gearing jammed and he was trapped inside.

  The problem was, it was a sealed unit, so Alan quickly began to run out of air.

  This was onstage, live, with thousands of people watching.

  You could almost hear him clawing for breath.

  Suddenly there was a real dilemma. How on earth were we going to finish the song properly with no drums?

  The roadies started trying to smash the pod open, all the time staying out of the line of sight of the crowd so that no one noticed. That wasn’t working so they got some oxygen pumps and tried that and eventually, somehow, they prised this bloody thing open with pickaxes. The audience must have noticed the rescue effort because as the pod sprang open a huge cheer went up, and Alan stumbled about gasping for breath.

  The sheer scale of the stage sets that Yes used was breathtaking. Sometimes I needed directions to get to my keyboards. If satnav had been invented, it would have been very useful. Sometimes I felt like I was journeying through the Himalayas. ‘Yes, take a left here, Rick, climb over that giant mushroom, past the seashell and the spaceship and just behind that, beyond that cloud, are your keyboards.’

  This was the same for all of us and it was generally fine when you played a conventional stage, facing the audience. But when we started to perform ‘in the round’ – where a circular stage is planted smack bang in the middle of the venue with the audience circling the band 360 degrees – getting to our instruments was suddenly a major headache.

  I think it was Jon who suggested a solution and said that he thought it was a bloody good idea. He said, ‘We need a tunnel, then we can all get to the stage in one piece and quickly.’

  ‘We can’t dig a bloody tunnel under the floor of every venue, Jon!’ I pointed out, not unreasonably.

  ‘No, Rick, we build an overground tunnel, and it will look fantastic.’

  He was right.

  It was a bloody good idea.

  We had this immense tunnel built out of what appeared to be very strong rice paper. It looked like the world’s biggest Chinese lantern. Using the finest engineering science known to man, we based it on the Slinky, you know, those toys that flip down stairs. The tunnel folded in on itself for shipping and opened up into great elongated hollow paper worm for the show each night. We ran lights through the inside and it looked absolutely brilliant. As the music started to play, we’d walk through the tunnel and our silhouettes would alert the audience to our presence, raising the tension – it was amazing.

  The crew hated it.

  And as any seasoned rock musician knows, if the crew hate something then that something will eventually stop being used.

  They hated it because the paper would rip, the wooden frames would split, it never folded in on itself as easily and neatly as they’d want, it took too long to work and it was almost impossible to cart around. So they made their feelings known and, respectfully, we completely ignored them.

  After losing yet another particularly heated argument about this problem, at the very next show the crew took their revenge. Unbeknown to us, they redirected the tunnels away from the stage.

  The music duly started and we all strode excitedly along inside the illuminated tunnel, only half noticing that the sound of the audience was getting further and further away, until we finally came to a halt by a large green EXIT sign.

  We didn’t use the tunnel again.

  DRINK LIKE A FISH, SMOKE LIKE A CHIMNEY

  Back then I never would have imagined that by the 21st century I would be spending a large amount of my leisure time gardening, but it is certainly better for your health than the lifestyle I have led for much of my time on God’s green earth. By the late 1960s, I was a prolific drinker. By 1971, when I first joined Yes, I was quite an accomplished alcoholic. I was really very, very good at it. I never indulged in any other substances, but alcohol was a speciality of mine.

  Then, in 1975, I nearly died.

  I’d already recorded Journey to the Centre of the Earth as a solo project and I was very excited about it; conversely, I wasn’t enjoying what was happening in Yes. That band was always at its best when you contributed a lot as you then received a lot back in return.

  Earlier on, I certainly felt I was putting in my fair share, sometimes more on occasion, but that was no problem because it was reciprocated, I was getting a lot out of it. However, by this stage, due to circumstances and the musical direction in which we were heading, there was increasingly less and less I could put in and it was becoming very unrewarding. The management knew I was unhappy and after I told them in January that I wanted to leave they reassured me that, once the heavy touring schedule was completed and we could start rehearsing the new material, it would all be fine.

  ‘No, it won’t.’

  ‘It’ll be fine, Rick, it’ll be fine.’

  I knew my time in Yes was nearing its end.

  I couldn’t handle it any more.

  Rehearsals were due to start on 18 May 1975 – I know the date because it was my birthday. I used to have a farmhouse down in Devon and I’d gone down there to clear my head. It was a very weird day. First off, I got a phone call from the Yes management asking why I wasn’t at rehearsals that had started that morning.

  ‘I told you back in January, that’s it, I’m off. I don’t want to do this free-form jazz, I can’t contribute anything to it, it’s not me and I don’t think it’s Yes.’

  They tried to talk me into rehearsing but my mind was made up; then they asked if I would kindly not tell anyone until they had found a replacement. Five minutes later the phone rang and it was Terry O’Neil from A&M Records in London. He sounded ecstatic.

  ‘Rick! I’ve got some amazing news! Journey has just gone to Number 1 in the album charts!’

  ‘Has it? Great.’

  ‘Well, you don’t sound very bloody pleased – we’re all going nuts up here, it’s the first Number 1 the label’s had in the UK and we’re all getting pissed.’

  ‘Sorry, Terry, I’ve had a weird day, it’s my birthday and you’ve just told me that news about Journey, but five minutes ago I officially left Yes. But you must not tell anyone.’

  ‘Shit.�
��

  You may recall that while I was drinking that plane dry in Japan my 1974 solo album Journey to the Centre of the Earth had hit Number 1 in that country and several others. With it topping the charts in the UK too, there was even less reason to stay in a band that I wasn’t enjoying.

  Long before Yes rehearsals started, I’d booked the enormous Crystal Palace to put on an extravagant live show for Journey. When I say ‘extravagant’, I mean it. Fifty-piece orchestras were no longer enough for me, huge stage sets didn’t cut it, this time I also had . . . dinosaurs.

  But we’ll come to that finally, dinosaurs and all. Bear with me . . .

  The Journey show at Crystal Palace was booked for the summer and I started rehearsing like crazy. I was drinking phenomenally heavily and I used to smoke far too many cigarettes as well. I wasn’t exactly a party animal, out with all the latest pop stars, it was more like old-fashioned excess. I was a pub man: beer and skittles, darts and dominoes. Nonetheless, regardless of whether I was in a pub or at home or in the studio, my excess was reaching frightening levels.

  And, it turned out, very dangerous ones.

  The problem was that I was very much burning the candle at both ends.

  And in the middle.

  I would rehearse in the day, then head off to the studio and work there until really late, and after that I’d head out to a lock-in at a local pub till four or five in the morning. Then it would all start again at eight or nine the next day. Then add to that an increasing amount of pre-publicity for the shows and writing and yet more rehearsals, plus meetings about the stage set and the show itself – not forgetting my chronically wayward lifestyle – and basically you had a recipe for disaster. I think that for many weeks I was surviving on adrenalin only.

  On the day at Crystal Palace, the situation started to get dangerous. I had a beautiful black and silver left-hand-drive Mustang, with a huge great V8 engine that made the most wonderful noise. I drove that to get to the show but I felt ill all the way there – or rather, I started feeling numb. What I mean by that is, say for example when you’ve had too much to drink and your head has a certain type of numbness . . . well, my entire body felt like that.