1/30/23
Newsletter 235
The Crack of Dawn
Since Jeff Beck died last week, YouTube has been feeding me a lot of Jeff Beck content. I watched an interview last night where he discussed his five days in the Rolling Stones. In 1968 the founding member of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, was kicked out of the band for being too stoned to function. If Keith Richard is accusing you of being too stoned, you probably are. This isn’t much of a story, really, other than the idea of Jeff Beck being in the Rolling Stones seems so absurd to me. Jeff Beck was going to play second fiddle to Keith Richard? Jeff put it very nicely, saying, “Keith and I didn’t get on.”
The Jeff Beck Band, with Rod Stewart, Ron Wood (on bass), and Mick Waller on drums, only existed for a very short time – part of 1968. Rod Stewart, Ron Wood (now on lead and bass guitar), and Mick Waller formed the Rod Stewart Group, and put out three really good albums in a row: The Rod Stewart Album (with Keith Emerson on organ), Gasoline Alley, then the smash success, Every Picture Tells a Story, with the single, Maggie May. I got that album as a present for my Bar Mitzvah. As I’ve said, this isn’t much of a story. So, Jeff Beck spent five days with the Rolling Stones, then they hired Mick Taylor, also a terrific guitarist, and his stint with the Stones is the peak of their career – Beggar’s Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. Then Mick Taylor quit the Rolling Stones because he didn’t like the lifestyle, perhaps one of the most rational decisions in the history of rock & roll. And since, as Keith put it, “The Rolling Stones are a two guitar band,” they somehow completed the circle and hired Ron Wood.
Keith Emerson playing on The Rod Stewart Album (just before forming Emerson, Lake & Palmer) puts me in mind of Rick Wakeman playing piano on a number of David Bowie’s earliest albums, such as his utterly brilliant, breakthrough album, Hunky Dory, with the single, Changes. Wakeman’s piano on those albums is masterful, but it’s highly secondary to Bowie. As Bowie wrote Ziggy Stardust, he put together the band the Spiders From Mars, and asked Rick Wakeman to play piano. However, another band called Yes had just scored a big success with their album, The Yes Album (the “hit” song, Yours is No Disgrace, is 9-minutes, 36 seconds) and, for whatever reason had shit-canned their keyboard player. So they approached Rick Wakeman to play keyboards. Rick Wakeman, like his comrade, Keith Emerson, were both well-trained, accomplished pianists, and both were keyboard freaks, happily testing out every new synthesizer that Robert Moog could build (there’s a good documentary, Moog [2004], which has interviews with both Emerson and Wakeman. A synthesizer, particularly those early ones, is nothing but a panel of switches. At one point Keith Emerson, who is sitting in front of an early Moog synthesizer, turns toward the camera and says with a dreamy smile, “There isn’t a switch on there I haven’t used”). And Wakeman and Emerson wanted to use all of these new toys.
So, Rick Wakeman, who is a funny, goofy, extremely talented character, was faced with the decision to join Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars, or join Yes. Wakeman asked the guys in Yes if he could use all of his new synthesizers, and they enthusiastically said, “Yes.” He asked Bowie and he flatly said no. Ziggy played guitar. So Wakeman joined Yes. Their next album, Fragile, with Roundabout, was their biggest album, then they stuck around for a decade and made five more albums. Then they had a come-back hit in 1983, Owner of a Lonely Heart, which is a cool song.
The Spiders From Mars lasted for one album. I think Rick Wakeman made the right decision.
Let me just finish my tribute to Rick Wakeman with: he does these little plings at the end of phrases all over Hunky Dory that just tickle me to death. Why is that?
And off we go into a new day. Tally-ho.