Rick Wakeman's Last Hurrah In Sydney

So Long Rick, We Hardly Knew ya'
He's not dead, but he's bidding farewell with his current tour. He's close on 60 or something, so it doesn't seem too outrageous that he's calling it quits. I've known he was coming for about... four weeks when an old friend e-mailed me asking me if I wanted to go. The tickets were listed at $90 so I declined. I saw Yes at long last after wanting to see them for so many years, but that was sort of a lukewarm concert compared to the passion and glory of Van Halen live, which I think must be the best gig I've ever seen. Yes were a close second, but only because they were Yes, if you get my drift. So I figured, what's Rick Wakeman on his own going too do that Yes couldn't do?

Then Walk-Off-HBP went on Tuesday night and came back with some pretty funny stories; the one about the wurlitzer under the stage in Seattle and the other one about the Vindaloo curry. It seemed like it was a pretty funny show, and I was willing to leave it at that. Then around 8pm, I got a phone call from The Dude at Audio Darnok saying he had free tickets to Rick Wakeman's show, did I want to go? I dropped everything and ran. There's no price like free. The tickets came through courtesy of an old workmate of mine at the ABC who is now the lighting techie at the State Theatre and is friends with The Dude's older brother. The seats were amazingly good seats. I was sitting down the centre aisle, 8 rows back from the stage. Like I said, there's no other price like 'Free'. :)

By the way, these pickies are from a review off the net covering his Melbourne show.



Straight, No Caper
What is Rick Wakeman, the solo performer like? Good question. He's a raconteur who recounts some pretty funny stories about touring and signing and playing and getting arrested for trivial things. There was one anecdote about Jon Anderson's paintings and the quip, "He's somebody who is trying to save the planet while living on another one"; the lady who wanted her G-String signed while it was still being worn; the deaf old bloke who heard his gigs clearly; and not to mention the vindaloo curry story. As Yes once sang, "even Siberia, goes through the motions, hold on and hold fast..." I'm sure Rick's used the joke somewhere too.

The man still has chops to burn. The night was like a celebration of 16th notes cascading up and down the keyboard. Things he described as skeleton arrangements sounded more like entires from an orchestral score. So in between telling stories he played like a demon-possessed.

The funny thing about Rick Wakeman is that with all his amazing chops, he's still a rock musician. As classical pianists go, he was an also-ran; but lucky for him, music itself opened out much wider; and he was just adventurous and imaginative enough to take full advantage of that moment in musical history. Had hee been born 50 years earlier, he wouldn't have become this phantasmagoric player of weird and wonderful sounds and tunes. And yet, that kind of playing is almost against the spirit of rock'n'roll. Rock music is supposed to be open to everybody; for it to be taken up by these conservatorium types is sort of 'against the rules' - or so said the punks with righteous indignation. Aye, but there's the rub. Should rock music necessarily be closed to somebody as technically proficient as Rick Wakeman? Okay he's no Glenn Gould. He's not Sid Vicious either. Is there even a sensible line that can be drawn between the kinds of musicianship (or lack thereof) of such people? Wasn't the promise of rock music that it didn't matter?

It's funny how the central polemics of Prog Rock and Punk, respectively keep playing themselves out in the different arts. On the one hand, you want to get technically better and do better things. On the other hand you want to say, screw technique and look for the purest expression. It has to be said that Adorno and his group defined Kitsch (as opposed to the Avant Garde) as the slavish copying/repetition of technique. Maybe Prog rock is musical kitsch? Maybe all things with technique including classical and jazz and any kind of traditional music is at its heart Kitsch? Maybe Kitsch is the real identity of art (as hard as it is to accept grandma's strange lamp object as art)?
Then, it seemed very fitting that Rick Wakeman was seeing out his Australian tour in he ornately Kitsch decorations of the State Theatre.

Anyway, watching Rick splash out with his frilly technique as he re-constructed Beatles numbers in the image of French chansson and Prokofiev, made me think about the emptiness of technique as any kind of objective measure in art or music. Critics are conks. Was it a bad night? Hell no, it was a fun little evening. I'm glad I caught him just once more before his departure and I wish him well in his retirement.