Yes in the Press

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MARCH 1976
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Source: Contemporary Keyboard

March/April 1976 Issue

Rick Wakeman: Rock Powerhouse

By Dominic Milano

On stage Rick Wakeman is enveloped by a ring of fourteen keyboard instruments, and it is a master of each one of them. Born on May 18, 1949 in the county of Middlesex, England, Wakeman began his study of music on the piano at the age of four. With hopes of becoming a concert pianist, Rick set out to earn a living as a studio musician while attending London's Royal College of Music. However, as time went on, he found himself doing more and more sessions, working for people such as guitarist Cat Stevens and vocalist David Bowie. This led him a to abandon his dreams of a concert career, later choosing to join the British folk group Strawbs, where he put to work his talents as an arranger and keyboardist. In 1971, he joined Yes as they were launching their a legendary "Fragile" album
(Atlantic, S-7211), which was to make the name Wakeman almost a household word among followers of progressive rock.

She needs and it all when his first solo album, "The Sixth Wives of Henry VIII" (A&M, SP-4361), appeared, Rick's lavishly orchestrated keyboard works further established his stature in the world of music. In 1974, he left Yes to explore his own the musical ideas. What followed were two albums,
"Journey to the Centre of the Earth" (A&M, SP-3621), and "The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table" (A&M, SP-4515), involving an 84-piece orchestra, his group, a chamber choir, vocal groups, and, at one point, ice skaters.

Rick is currently touring with his 8-piece band, the English Rock Ensemble, performing rearrangements of pieces taken from his three solo albums. For those who have seen or heard his subtle pyrotechnics, there can be little doubt that Rick Wakeman is one of the more technically able multi-keyboardists in pop music today.

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Question: How did you become interested in playing piano?

Answer: My father was a good piano player, and there were also some little girls living next door to us who were learning to play the instrument. I could hear them through the wall. So those two things put together got me wanting to play. When I was just over four years old I started taking lessons from the same teacher the girls had. I stayed with that teacher until I was eighteen, at which point I started going to the Royal College of Music in London. I stayed there until I was twenty.

Question: Did you ever study anything besides piano?

Answer: I took clarinet lessons from the time I was eleven until I was twenty. I started church organ when I was fourteen, and I had separate training for theory and history.

Question: What kind of music were you doing at that time?

Answer: I was playing in jazz and dance bands, rock and roll bands, that sort of thing. But what I really wanted to do was to be a concert pianist and teach.

Question: When was it that you turned to studio work?

Answer: That's quite a funny story, because it was something that everyone dreams of getting into at first. The whole thing really came about through an amazing bit of luck. There are two sorts of sessions that you do in England. There are the sessions you do for friends, which are more or less favors, and there are the true sessions that are set up by a fixer. Those are the ones to really get into, because you can make a living at it. I knew a guy called Jimmy Thomas the used to be the lead singer for Ike and
Tina Turner's band. He was the first person to take me into a studio. That's when I got lucky -- During that session [producers] Tony Visconti and Gus Dudgeon were there. They started giving me sessions for other bands. But the sessions were very few, and I still couldn't get a and with a fixer.

Question: How did that finally come about?

Answer: Gus Dudgeon produced a session for a group called Magna Carta. I think the album was called "Seasons" [Dunhill, S-50091]. On one track they were using an orchestra, which had been booked through a fixer. I was enlisted separately to do the piano work. The fixer turned up at the session and liked what I did. I was in on sessions from then on.

Question: How extensive was your studio experience?

Answer: I used to do about fifteen a week for around 2 1/2 years. I should think I worked for just about everybody at some time or another. In fact there were times when I didn't know who I was working for.

Question: Was it through session work that you met [Strawbs guitarist] Dave Cousins?

Answer: Yeah. The first session I did for Dave happened when I was working at the Top Rank Bowl in Reading, and Tony Visconti phoned me up and asked me to come down to do what was called a BBC session at the Paris Studio. It was to play piano for a folk group called Strawbs. I did it and became
quite good friends with Dave. I ended up doing all their stuff for them. Things just seemed to culminate and I fancied to join them. I had become disillusioned with session work. I was getting good bread, but I wasn't getting a chance to be part of the music: you're in there for three hours and then you're out again. So that was it. I joined Strawbs and stayed there for fifteen months.

Question: What was it like to work with them?

Answer: Dave's an amazing person. The guy is probably the best lyricist that this century has ever produced, in my mind anyway. We got on very well. At that time I wasn't writing anything, but Dave knew nothing of how to arrange or organize pieces of music. So that was left up to me. When he'd get a song together I would come streaming over to his house and we'd work on it. Once we had it organized we would call the rest of the band. That's the way it used to work -- very well.

Question: What made you leave?

Answer: I suddenly got more and more on the outside of things, with Dave himself doing all the work. In the end, with the musicians that were in Strawbs at the time, things had gone as far as they could. There would have to be a complete change-around or it would have rotted away. Yes was having a change-around also, and asked me if I wanted to join. I said no, but went to one of the rehearsals anyway. I was only going to stay ten minutes, but I ended up staying about three years. In fact, I joined
Strawbs on March 28, 1970, and left on July 31, 1971. I joined Yes August 1st of that same year, and left May 18, 1974.

Question: Could you tell us about your stay with Yes?

Answer: I had some great times and some lousy times. It was a band that was bonded together by music. There was little love lost. It wasn't bad until things got to the stage where I didn't know what direction the music was going in. I didn't enjoy "Tales from Topographic Oceans" [Atlantic (2), 908], so I finished out the European tour we were doing and left.

Question: And that's when you do your second solo albums, "Journey to the Centre of the Earth," and began using an orchestra in your touring act?

Answer: We had actually gone through that stage already. We had already done the Festival Hall concert, where "Journey" was recorded, and the problem was that there was nothing left to do. We wanted to go out and play, but had no material for a band. It was all material for orchestra. The only practical solution I had was to take the orchestra on the road with us. When we had done that, we came back and did "Arthur." But present restrictions with recording and the orchestra pushed things about as far as they could go. It was time to say goodbye to that. That was when we got The English Rock Ensemble together. I already had a band, but we changed around some of the personnel to strengthen a few places and add a few things. The next album will be a band album. It all seems to becoming together.

Question: When composing, is there a difference in the way you approach orchestral pieces and keyboard pieces?

Answer: The thing I always keep in mind is that you can't write for piano what you would write for harpsichord. The one problem I'd found with orchestra is that to listen to the way everybody else had used it, I always felt that they sort of got rock and roll parts together and then shoveled the orchestra over guitar, which doesn't work. An orchestra can't rock and roll. The musicians aren't taught to, they hold a whole different attitude that makes it absolutely impossible. So I thought that object would not be
to integrate the group and orchestra, but to write the group parts to complement the orchestra parts. As for keywords, that can be difficult because you are dealing with textures more than anything else. Instruments like Mellotrons and Moog synthesizers, the Moogs especially, are so thick. You have to be very very careful in your sound selections and spacings so you don't thicken things too badly, destroying any little colors or harmonies that you put in. Even though they have polyphonic Moogs, and I've got one, I think they should be monophonic instruments. They are better that way.

Question: You've done a lot of work involving overdubbing keyboards. What should someone doing this kind of multi-track a recording keep in mind?

Answer: It's important to record of the instruments in the right order. You start with the acoustical instruments, the more rhythmic instruments. The Moogs and the Mellotrons come last, because it's harder to overdub rhythmically or percussively onto something that's melodic. As you're putting tracks down the thing takes shape. It's easy for it to go off in different directions, which makes it impossible to bring it back to where you want it. As it turns out, it's easier to shape the piece rhythmically, adding harmonies and such later. I don't work the same as I did in Yes, where we would have a guitar week that involved nothing but Steve [Howe] going into the studio with a guitar. This way you'd end up after six or
seven weeks with a vocal week. I prefer to finish a track once it's started, so that everybody is doing something all the time. Doing it Yes' way, taking six weeks for all the backing tracks and then coming back to do the vocals and overdubs, you've lost the original mood of the pieces by the time the albums finished.

Question: What keyboards are you using at the moment?

Answer: Well, we use things according to what we're going to need for the show. We've got so many keyboards you wouldn't believe; I mean it's ridiculous. According to what is that is, we work out the most logical positions to put the keyboards in, so as to make life simple. We also try to minimize them so we can get away with the least amount of keyboards as possible on stage. Right now, it works out that I'm using four Minimoogs, a Double Mellotron, a Rhodes electric piano, an RMI electric piano and
harpsichord, a Hohner Clavinet, a jangle piano, a Steinway grand piano, and a Goff electric harpsichord. But by the next tour, it might be completely different.

Question: Do you run into many problems with upkeep, carting all that delicate equipment around the country?

Answer: Most of the things are silly. Like you might get booked in a hole and the power will be going up and down. That can affect the Moogs, but then you just stick a few voltage regulators on. Terminals break off, stuff like that. Every instrument has its little niggly points that annoy you. After each tour, we find out what to the problems are and take the instruments to factories and put them right. There isn't really such a thing as a perfect instrument anywhere, just because every keyboard player's needs are different.

Question: How do you approach playing all these different instruments?

Answer: First you've got to know that no two keyboards are the same to play. The touch is dissimilar on all of them, and every instrument has its little idiosyncrasies. That's the thing you have to get used to. When you get your instrument, don't just take it on the road straight away. Take it home and practice on the thing until you know it inside out -- until you know if it's going to do something silly and why it's doing it. One of the hardest instruments to adapt to is the straight harpsichord, because the keys are smaller. You really have to be on your toes, or else you will end up with 30,000 split notes.

Question: What should people watch out for when switching from acoustic piano to electronic keyboards?

Answer: There are various things. You can always tell a piano player when he is playing electronic instruments because he'll still attack the keys according to the strength of sound. And you can always tell an organ player when he is playing piano, because organists invariably make dreadful piano players. They just play from their fingers instead of using the various other parts of the wrist and hand. Also, the piano player, when he first goes to the organ, tends to forget that he hasn't got any form of sustain, and the whole fingering technique is different. Which brings up another fault of organ players: they go to slide off notes on the piano and it just doesn't work. It's basically down to having confidence in your
instruments more than anything else. I can guarantee when I put a new instrument up there, even if I know it, for the first week in practice, something will go wrong. It will be my fault and not the instrument's. You just have to keep going until you iron out all the faults.

Question: Does the Mellotron present any peculiar problems when on the road?

Answer: Ours is not a proper Mellotron, actually. You can't get a Mellotron on the road -- it's a waste of time. So we had ours rebuilt completely. It's a good machine, really. There's a new instrument coming
out in mid-1976 that we helped a guy named Dave Biro develop. It's called Birotron. It's really outrageous. It creates all the orchestra sounds, the choir and strings are really frightening. It uses eight-track tapes arranged in loops so there's no eight-second sustain the limits like on the Mellotron. You can program different kinds of attack and sustain, and the keyboard is light -- you can play as fast as you like, which you can't do on the Mellotron.

Question: What to do you use for amplification?

Answer: I always get this wrong, but I think there's a Soundcraft mixer, an electronic crossover, two JBL horns, and an 18" JBL speaker, all of which I use for monitoring. We use an 18" speaker because it can handle the lower registers of the Moogs. We try to stay away from all the fancy things on stage. We direct-feed everything into the PA, and let the man out front handle all the things like echo and ADT. It's easier and more fun that way.

Question: What kind of pickup do you use for the piano?

Answer: We use Helpinstill, because outside of America, you see, I own the company. So I'm not very interested in other brands [laughs]. Oh, I've used Countryman's and such, but Helpinstill is the one. The 175 model still has a few faults which we are put it right, but the upright one is tremendous.

Question: You play piano standing up in ' live ' performance. Does that affect your playing as compared to when you're sitting down?

Answer: No, because we put the piano on raises so it is at the same level as if I were sitting down. Actually, we try to keep all the keyboards as level with my hands as possible. If they're up too high we just tilt them. Otherwise you end up getting a severe cramp.

Question: Has your Hammond C-3 been modified in anyway?

Answer: The one I have in England has. I couldn't tell you the technical details, but I had it done because I don't like Leslie speakers. I always thought they sucked because they ruin all the tone qualities of the organ. They hide everything. If your playing it straight, the slightest adjustment of a drawbar can alter the tone. But if it's going through a Leslie, you can forget it. So we altered the values of it a bit and found we could get extra percussion, which I had wanted. Hammonds are funny, they are like cars. You can lineup 24 Ford Pintos or 24 Hammonds, and they will all be different. You can get good Hammonds and band Hammonds. My organ does things and I don't even know why it does them. The same with Minimoogs. We've got about nine of them, and you could number of them all and I would know each one, because for some reason they are all different.

Question: What kind of tone colors to you generally aim for when setting up to do a piece of music?

Answer: It's depends on the music, of course. I don't believe in getting pet sounds together. The object, if you've got many tone colors to use, is to use them as much as possible rather than sticking to what is safe. There are obviously certain cliches and settings that you start with. You know, you don't work from nothing. Like when I do a sound check, I just say, "Set 'em up." And I use what I call my standard setting.

Question: Do you to any warm-up exercises before you go on stage?

Answer: Yeah. About 36 cans of beer, and only about two bottles of wine. [Chuckles.] Really, I practice a lot. I try to put in three hours a day, otherwise my fingers stiffen up. And that practice can be anything. Sometimes I might have the day when I like to get out the old Bach 48 [The Well-Tempered Clavier] and bore myself to death. On another day I might leap through scales and arpeggios. It just depends, you know. It's important to keep your technique up because you write according to it. That's the one fault with anybody who writes for themselves. They write what they know they can technically play. So if you keep working on your technique, constantly improving it, then that must help your writing, as it gives you a wider variety of things you can play. I think there's a lot of self-written crap going around because people are writing according to their technical ability. That's why we end up with these 3-chord rondos.

Question: Would you have any advice for kids starting out in the music business as keyboard players?

Answer: The best bit of advice I ever heard was in "Creem" magazine. They had asked [the Who's drummer] Keith Moon, "What would you recommend for any young budding drummer to do?" And he said, "Take up guitar." No seriously, you can't really give advice. It's down to the individual. There is a lot more to it, unfortunately, than musical abilities. There are so many people outside the music business who should be in it. You've got to have the strength and personality to carry through. It doesn't matter what you're musical training is. It's down to being prepared to stand on your own two feet. You can't really give advice in general terms. Now isn't the brightest of times to come into the business either. Things are going through a sort of lapse. There aren't any really good bands coming up, and the days for apprenticeship courses and leaping down motorways in the backs of bands are over. The music business has taken over from Hollywood a bit. It grew like Hollywood, in a strange sort of way. Now it's into the big business type thing. I just hope it doesn't end up like Hollywood, in collapse, a shadow of its former self -- which looks like what is going to happen.

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