Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (7 page)

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.

I got to Crystal Palace and parked up the car. By the stage were some tents and the support acts had already started playing. Then I saw Tony Burdfield and Terry O’Neil from A&M Records and they came over to talk to me, but I couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. I wasn’t pissed – because I’d felt ill previously I’d only drunk a fraction of my usual consumption. Yet Terry and Tony were saying things to me and I couldn’t really follow, there was this fog across my brain, almost like I was in a different world. I came onstage with the New World Symphony Orchestra and English Chamber Choir and we played the show. But from a musical point of view, I just remember it was incredibly hard to concentrate on the pieces, the notes, the timing, everything.

It was a real struggle. In that state, you tend to do a lot of things on autopilot and that was certainly the case that day – I was not on top of my game at all. I had to think about every single note and it was exhausting. Going back for an encore pretty much finished me off. Afterwards, I slouched offstage and sat down, whereupon I think I fell asleep for a little bit. I now felt very, very numb and I remember saying to Brian Deal-a-Day Lane, ‘I really don’t feel well.’ He offered to get someone to look at me but I just wanted to go home. ‘I think it’s just been a hard few months,’ I suggested.

I remember getting back in the Mustang and driving home very slowly even though it was a very fast car, because – like at the gig – I had to think about everything very deliberately. It was
like,
I need to turn left, I am going to put the indicator on, now I need to turn the wheel left . . .

I got home and my missus Roz, who hadn’t been at the show, asked how it had gone and I just said, ‘Fine, but I really need to go to bed.’ She said I’d probably been drinking too much but I hadn’t, I just felt terrible. I thought a long night’s sleep would see me right. I went to bed and fell fast asleep.

I woke up the next morning . . . and felt exactly the same.

I had an interview to do with Chris Hayes from
Melody Maker
; they used to do a piece made up of questions sent in from the public.
Melody Maker
would phone the person concerned and you’d give the answer over the phone, in person. Normally, I really enjoyed this feature, but I was still feeling like shit and when Chris phoned I didn’t really respond very well.

‘Are you all right, Rick?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t feel great. Can we do this another time? I’m so sorry.’

I put the phone down and went up the stairs . . . on my hands and knees. My arms felt like lead weights and I tried to get up but I couldn’t. I shouted for Roz and when she came up I said, ‘I think you’d better call a doctor . . . and an ambulance.’

The doctor arrived and came up to my room where he examined me and asked some poignant questions and then said, ‘I’m going to give you an injection.’ Within a couple of minutes, I started to feel quite good. I presumed it was a B12 injection, a massive rush of vitamins to kick-start my system and get me back on track.

‘You will need to go to hospital for more checks, Mr Wakeman, I’m afraid.’

‘But I feel much better since you gave me that injection.’

‘You should do – I’ve pumped you full of morphine. In a few moments you won’t be able to feel any pain whatsoever.’

He wouldn’t even let me walk to the ambulance, I was
stretchered out of my own home. As they carted me across the driveway, my band arrived for a scheduled meeting.

‘Rick, what’s up?’ said my singer, Ashley, looking very disturbed.

‘Nothing really, Ash, I’ll be back later so we can have the meeting then, OK.’

‘OK, we’ll see you in the Packhorse later, Rick.’

There are certain experiences in your life you won’t forget and being wheeled on a trolley through a hospital is one of them. If you’re going in for a leg plaster or maybe an X-ray, it’s perhaps no big deal. But as I was wheeled past the various departments in Wexham Park Hospital, signs whizzed past me, and I tried to read them and second-guess where we were heading.

Then we stopped outside a large double door with a sign directly above it.