![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/wakeman_poster.jpg\")
Legendary keyboardist Rick Wakeman is perhaps best known for his work with Yes, a group he has joined and quit at least five times since the early ’90s. But the classically-trained musician also has a staggeringly large catalog of solo albums. Beginning with his debut release (1973’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII<\/i>) and continuing across more than 90(!) albums, Wakeman has showcased his deeply textured work on piano, organ and all manner of synthesizers.<\/p>\n
He’s also very well known in his native England as a raconteur and standup comic; he was a popular fixture of the BBC program Grumpy Old Men<\/i>, among others. His 2019 U.S. tour combined both his keyboard prowess and his skills as a storytelling comic. With more than two dozen dates in North America, the \u201cGrumpy Old Rock Star\u201d tour launched in September and ran through October. Ahead of the run of solo dates, I spoke with Wakeman about his winning combination of music and comedy. And I couldn’t avoid inquiring about Yes.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve famously long since reined in some of your indulgent behaviors that were affecting your health, but your wicked sense of humor has remained intact. Does connecting with the audience through humor scratch a different itch for you than does playing music?<\/b><\/p>\n
Well, I\u2019ve done comedy in the UK for, crikey, nearly 40 years now. I hosted my own standup show on terrestrial TV here for quite a few years, and I\u2019m as much known in the UK for my standup as I am for the music. But it\u2019s a different; it\u2019s anecdotal standup that I do, and it was just really that, when I was going out \u2013 especially doing the piano concerts \u2013 when people said, \u201cTell some of the great stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, I started, and that\u2019s become an integral part of the show now, which is great. They\u2019re all linked together, and it\u2019s fun. The point is, I think when people come to a concert, especially if it\u2019s a solo concert like the one I do, you want people to go away having experienced everything: laughter, sadness, happiness, thoughtfulness. You want to try to get through as many emotions as you possibly can.<\/p>\n
Humor is very important to me. My father once said to me, he said, \u201cYou can\u2019t be miserable if you\u2019re laughing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The upcoming tour is being billed as \u201cmusic and witty stories.\u201d And you certainly do have a reputation for telling good dirty jokes. Would you be willing to share one right now?<\/b><\/p>\n
Nope. I don\u2019t do any except on the stage. I get asked that all the time. I did it once, and people start to say, \u201cOh, we heard that. We saw that.\u201d No, I don\u2019t tell any of the stories that I tell on stage and I do in the shows. Mainly because I change them around all the time.<\/p>\n
When I do the show, I will have a plan, because they all follow a pattern. They\u2019re all linking together one after the other. So, sometimes, I\u2019ll be in a place \u2013 and I may have been there before \u2013 and something will remind me of something [else] and I\u2019ll go off on a completely different direction. That’s something you can do when you\u2019re on your own. You haven\u2019t got to worry about a band guy: \u201cWhat the bloody hell is he doing?\u201d You can actually do what you like, which is great fun.<\/p>\n
But the stories, people always ask. And I say, \u201cWanna hear the stories? Well, I\u2019m afraid you\u2019re gonna have to come along.\u201d<\/p>\n
This tour is truly a solo run; you\u2019re not going to have any musical accompaniment at all?<\/b><\/p>\n
No. I\u2019ve been doing it around Europe for quite a few years now, this show. It has been incredibly successful around the UK. I\u2019ve also done it in Australia. I\u2019ve done it all around Europe. My agents who were in the UK, they saw one and said, \u201cYou have to bring this to America!\u201d And I said, \u201cWell, okay. Book it and I\u2019ll come,\u201d and that\u2019s basically what\u2019s happened.<\/p>\n
I will adapt some stories to where I am. I won\u2019t do the same show I\u2019m doing in the UK. So, out of the plethora of stories I\u2019ve got, I will gear it very much to the USA.<\/p>\n
In addition to your solo tours, you’ve also been performing the last few years with Jon Anderson and Trevor Ravin, first as ARW and more recently billed as Yes featuring Anderson, Rabin and Wakeman. Can you tell me anything at all about the possibility or the prospect of any future studio releases from that group?<\/b><\/p>\n
At the moment, we have got some stuff that we\u2019re reasonably happy with, but it\u2019s nowhere near finished. We all decided that we would only release stuff if we were 100% all of us agreed that this was something that was special. We didn\u2019t wanna just churn something out for the sake of churning it out.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re getting together next year to do probably the last AWR tour, and it\u2019ll be during that time, I think, that we\u2019ll analyze what we\u2019ve done, what we\u2019ve got, and go, \u201cOkay, can we finish this? Can we make something as a last and living legacy to AWR?\u201d I would like to think we can, but I won\u2019t say for definitely because if it doesn\u2019t turn out to the satisfaction that we all want, then we\u2019re not gonna put something out second rate.<\/p>\n
For years and years now, Pete Frame has done those Rock Family Trees to help fans understand who has been in various groups, where they\u2019ve come from and that kind of thing. You certainly made his job difficult by joining and leaving Yes more times than anyone else. And that\u2019s saying something. Is there something deeply irresistible about Yes that keeps bringing you back?<\/b><\/p>\n
You know, in a strange way, there probably is. Somebody once wrote my relationship with Yes was the equivalent of \u201cRichard Taylor\u201d: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. They couldn\u2019t live with each other, but couldn\u2019t live without<\/i> each other. And there\u2019s an element of truth in that.<\/p>\n
I thoroughly enjoy working with Yes with the different lineups that I\u2019ve been in. But I think what\u2019s healthy sometimes is to go away. Because every time I\u2019ve gone away, I\u2019ve done things either on my own or with other people, worked with other artists, different producers. And when I\u2019ve come back, I\u2019ve got something to bring<\/i> back because I\u2019ve got some new ideas, some new tools.<\/p>\n
Jon Anderson does the same. He\u2019s very good at that, and to be honest, Trev Rabin has done very much that as well before we all got together. We were all bringing things that we didn\u2019t bring the previous times. And I think that\u2019s very healthy because you\u2019re bringing in like, \u201cYes, I worked on this. This I did. This is a good\u2026\u201d And you can throw that into the mix.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, I think that\u2019s sometimes why, certainly, music from bands can get a little stale because it has nothing to do with playing the same pieces sometimes. Because it\u2019s just a matter of playing them the same. And that\u2019s where the danger lies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Legendary keyboardist Rick Wakeman is perhaps best known for his work with Yes, a group he has joined and quit at least five times since the early ’90s. But the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17366,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,41,44,56],"tags":[1843,2413],"class_list":["post-17364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedy","category-interview","category-live-shows","category-prog","tag-rick-wakeman","tag-yes","cat-18-id","cat-41-id","cat-44-id","cat-56-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17367,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17364\/revisions\/17367"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}