Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories

by Rick Wakeman

  Once again, Harry Palmer kept flickering across my mind.

  Eventually I got through customs and was met by a man called Yachek, a government official charged with looking after me (a task at which many world-class tour managers had, as you now know, failed abysmally). He instantly seemed a very pleasant albeit slightly reserved man, and we chatted along merrily. I could see he wasn’t an ‘ordinary’ worker, because he stuck out a little bit from the crowd: his clothes were a little Western in style, slightly better quality than most and with richer colours. Most obviously of all, he drove an old Ford Escort that was, quite frankly, falling apart – perhaps only slightly more road-worthy than my beautiful old Ford Anglia. That might not sound like a Howard Hughes standard of wealth, but in Poland very few people owned cars, you hardly saw one on the street, and of those nine out of every ten cars were very old, very battered Ladas, Skodas or Trabants. So driving this Escort was like rolling around in a Bentley. It was the best car I saw during my entire stay in Poland, by some considerable margin. It has to be said though that the old Ladas started first time every time in all sorts of unbelievable conditions so the bad name they got in the West is actually unfair.

  Yachek drove me to a fairly dishevelled hotel that was used exclusively by visiting Western businessmen – not by any members of the general public – so locally it was considered quite upmarket. I was immediately struck by how grey everything was: the buildings, the clothes, the cars, people’s skin, everything. The street lighting was very low too, almost like either the energy was running out or there wasn’t the money to keep them on brighter. Perhaps it was both.

  On arrival, I was checked in swiftly and taken to my sparse and very basic room. It had a small bed, a tiny shower room with a shower-head that, at best, dribbled water out at you feebly. The decor was . . . grey.

  The rooms were almost certainly bugged. I told Rod Weinberg this (he had travelled with me), and about this time in Russia where in one of the few very sparsely decorated rooms I was staying in I said out loud to myself that it would be nice to have an extra bath towel – and five minutes later there was a knock at the door and a woman stood there with a bath towel in her hands to give me. Rod thought this was highly amusing and walked into his room saying in an extremely loud voice, ‘Don’t think much of the colour of this carpet!’

  Nonetheless, I didn’t expect anything else – and besides, on our way to the hotel I noticed we passed Lazienki Park where the memorial statue to Chopin had been erected just before the Second World War. Every Sunday, in the warmer months of the year, musicians performed free piano recitals of his work next to the statue: it was a renowned and revered focal point for Chopin fanatics and pianists around the world.

  I was desperate to go back to the park straight away.

  Unfortunately, Yachek had said to me in reception that I was not allowed to go anywhere without him, under any circumstances. His room was just down the corridor and he insisted I could knock on his door at any time of the day or night, as long as I did not leave the hotel alone. A meeting with Janusz, this famed pianist who I was to work with, was arranged for just after breakfast the next morning.

  I slept fairly fitfully that first night and woke very early from the hard bed. It was only 5 a.m. There was no breakfast place if I recall and I was keen to see what was happening outside. The room was virtually empty – certainly no television – so there was absolutely nothing to do.

  I thought, I’ll go to the park and look at that Chopin statue.

  I knew I’d been told this was exactly the sort of thing not to do, but I wondered what harm could it really do? It was still half dark outside and I walked through the small, empty hotel foyer without a hitch, straight out of the door and into the forbidden streets. There was no one around. I saw only a couple of people fleetingly. The odd tram, a Lada, a cyclist.

  Remembering the biting chill, I’d wrapped up heavily and had used the scarf to hide my face. The tiny strip of my eyes and forehead that was exposed to the cold was frozen within seconds. I remembered the way to the park as it wasn’t that far from where we were staying, so I walked there but the gates were closed.

  Bugger.

  Then it started to snow.

  Bugger.

  It was so cold that my feet, inside my woollen socks and fleece-lined boots, were frozen solid.

  There was no one around at all now, so I climbed over the gate.

  I was so desperate to see this statue and the stage where people played that I wasn’t going to let anything get in my way. I’d seen pictures; if you are a professional piano player you know what it looks like, but I wanted to see it for myself. I stood in front of the statue, soaking up the history, when I suddenly became aware of two figures standing just to my right.

  ‘Hello, Mr Wakeman.’

  It was strange, because as a musician in various well-known bands I’m used to strangers saying, ‘Hey! Rick!’ and all that; yet, here in Poland, there was no reason to expect this, not least because my own mother wouldn’t have recognised me in the secretive scarf and hat.

  They spoke perfect English. But they weren’t from England.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, almost by reflex.

  ‘My name is Boris and this is Ivan,’ the tallest one said.

  You’re having a laugh, I thought.

  He wasn’t.

  ‘It’s very early and very cold, Mr Wakeman. What are you doing in the park?’

  ‘Well, it’s funny you should say that. I woke up really early and I’m supposed to be having a meeting later with Janusz Olejniczak about working with him, mixing wonderful Chopin works with some electronic keyboards, but I woke up early and, being bored, thought I’d come and look at this famous landmark. The gate was locked so I climbed over it. How did you get in?’

  ‘We have a key. We would like to take your photograph.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, relieved. ‘I’ll stand by the statue, shall I?’

  Out of his large trench coat Boris produced a really old-school camera with a detachable flashbulb, like something Prohibition-era paparazzi would have used. He took a picture of me staring directly into the camera with the statue right behind me. He looked a little close to me but I wasn’t about to complain.

  ‘And would you like to turn ninety degrees to your right and I’ll take another picture, Mr Wakeman . . . ?’

  I did as I was told . . .

  ‘And now 180 degrees please, so you are facing the other way . . .’

  It was only at the last second that I realised what he was doing.

  ‘I’ve done something wrong, haven’t I?’ I said, with a growing sense of unease.

  ‘It’s OK. Please follow me.’

  I didn’t really have much choice so I did, indeed, follow them. At the park gates, Yachek’s trusty old battered Ford Escort was there and as he saw me he got out of the car. Like my friends Igor in Moscow and Barry the Perv in Paraguay, he was as white as the snow falling on the ground. I seem to do that to people. Ivan and Boris didn’t shout at Yachek but he was given a very firm talking-to.

  In Russian.

  Eventually, Boris came over to me and said, ‘Enjoy the rest of your stay in Poland, Mr Wakeman, but please do not go anywhere without speaking to Mr Yachek first.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I hope I haven’t got Mr Yachek into any trouble. I was only coming to see the statue.’ With that they left and I climbed into the Escort, suitably chastised.

  Yachek looked quite cross but very politely said, ‘You’re not allowed to go out on your own – I told you this, you mustn’t go anywhere on your own. Please. I get privileges. I have an apartment just for me and my family, I have a stereo and a television and I have my car. I can lose all of that.’

  I apologised profusely and felt awful.

  ‘Who was that, by the way?’

  ‘Russian. The KGB. Their embassy is almost directly opposite. They still monitor everything we do.’

  After that brush with the Russian secret ser
vice, everything went relatively to plan. I went back to the hotel and met Janusz and we talked about Chopin and Western music and how we could make something new from these various influences. I came up with the idea of making something suitable for a string quartet.

  ‘Yes, they will like that,’ said Yachek.

  I wasn’t sure who ‘they’ were, but Yachek then offered me any musicians I wanted, so I didn’t really care. He also said any venue and any orchestra would be made available, as would any recordings we might need. There was one big problem, though – they didn’t have any electronic instruments which, when you are trying to write an electronic/classical collaboration, can be quite a sticking point. So, in other words, they gave me everything except the one thing I needed. I also couldn’t ship any keyboards to Poland at that time, as to even try and consider getting the paperwork was nigh-on impossible and whilst musicians, manpower, recording facilities etc. were free, there was no hard currency budget to get in equipment.

  While I worked on the music with Janusz, I was also invited outside the city to various houses that belonged to other renowned musicians and local dignitaries. Janusz was also enjoying some privileges and he invited me to his apartment and also to his parents’ house. I remember going to one small house belonging to a friend of Janusz and the table was laid for one person with a plate on which was beetroot and salad and a pig’s trotter. In many of these households, if there was any meat available it was pig’s trotter. Nobody else ate. I was shown to the single chair where I ate everything; it was obvious in certain cases that I was getting the best food they had in the house, so not eating it was not an option, out of simple courtesy if nothing else. These people were in the depths of poverty and yet would have given me their last grain of rice to make me feel welcome. Very, very proud people, lovely. To this day I have a wonderful warm feeling towards the Polish people. They are some of the kindest and nicest folk I have met on my travels.

  One particularly fascinating character I met was Janusz’s father-in-law. He was a publisher, so he worked with the authorities on what was and wasn’t allowed to be printed for public consumption. He worked in a magnificent oak-lined office – a throwback to Mervyn Conn from all those years ago! Next to his room was a receptionist’s room, just like at Mervyn’s. But we couldn’t have been in a more different universe to Leicester Square.

  I went into his office and, once again, there was a mysterious man in a suit joining the meeting. It was blatantly obvious that I was not going to be left on my own anywhere in case I asked anything I shouldn’t ask, or said anything I shouldn’t be saying or was told anything I shouldn’t be told. We had weak tea and talked generally about music and books. Already, in a few short days, I’d learned to be very careful about what I said and what I didn’t say.

  As I was leaving, the publisher said to me quietly, ‘It would be nice if you came back soon. Come back and have tea with me tomorrow, before you go home.’

  I did exactly that and, for some reason, we were alone this time.

  Yachek, who had accompanied me as usual, began to pale.

  The publisher asked me into another room on my own.

  And that’s when Yachek went a whiter shade of white.

  As the publisher closed the door, he said, ‘What do you know about Warsaw?’

  ‘A little more than most, but a lot less than many,’ I answered honestly. ‘I know the tragedy of Warsaw at the end of the war when the Russians obstructed Polish resistance efforts and in effect allowed the Germans to burn the city to the ground.’

  ‘Do you know about the band of child soldiers, Mr Wakeman?’

  He then proceeded to tell me about these child soldiers who lived in the hundreds of miles of sewers below Warsaw and formed some sort of resistance. There are statues in memoriam of these poor kids and it was very moving to hear the tale told by such a man. The Russians couldn’t track them down in this extensive and antiquated sewage system and couldn’t blow them up because it would destroy the waste system for the city. Then he showed me a book of photographs, a pictorial chronology of exactly what the Russians and Germans did to Warsaw at the end of the war. I hasten to add that what the Allies did to Dresden was no less inhumane and it does seem that war has no love for people, history, art and beauty. I remember speaking to an American astronaut friend of mine not so long ago who said that every world leader should go into space and look down at the earth, which becomes just a tiny speck among millions and millions of other tiny specks, so they can realise that our tiny speck is the only known place in this universe with life, and then perhaps they would think differently about slowly destroying it, as all world leaders seem intent on doing.

  Back to the oak-panelled room: ‘Never ever underestimate the Poles,’ he said to me. ‘If someone said there were cabbages available, there’d be a two-mile queue. The last people in this two-mile queue would wait patiently, knowing that there would almost certainly be nothing left when they got to the front. But they’d wait nonetheless. If ever the opportunity arises, you watch Poland rise: we are the hardest-working people you will ever meet.’

  I couldn’t agree more. If you kept animals in the way that some of the Polish people were kept back then, the RSPCA would take you to court.

  I couldn’t help but think that, at that time, Poland was in the worst possible geographical sandwich: East Germany on one side and Russia on the other. It was so sad. A few months after the Wall came down, I went back to Poland, which now had a Western border. The change was unbelievable. My friend, the publisher, was right. ‘Watch the Poles rise,’ he’d said . . . and they certainly had. They had embraced their new-found freedom with hard work and creativity. I take my hat off to them.

  As I was about to leave the company of this amazing man, who had so many stories to tell sitting in this oak-lined office, he leaned over to me and whispered in my ear . . .

  ‘Mr Wakeman, please do not speak a word of this to anyone, but I was one of those children . . .’

  ‘NO, MR WAKEMAN, SIX MONTHS TO LIVE’

  You remember all that medical advice after I’d had those two heart attacks? And do you remember how I didn’t actually heed any of it? Well, let me tell you how I finally came to stop smoking and drinking.

  Initially, my heart attacks and degenerative ill health had very little impact on my choice of lifestyle. As you know, against all medical advice I travelled uninsured to America to tour King Arthur, had a jolly splendid time and underwent more ECGs than the Bionic Man. I have to say that when I came back from the States I was feeling really, really good. I had laid off the drink a bit and I had cut down the smoking a lot. I phoned up Jess Conrad, who organised matches for the Top Ten XI football side (which I’d previously been a keen member of) and asked him when the next match was.

  ‘Are you sure you’re well enough, Rick?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine, yes.’

  I played the game and scored four goals.

  I have to be honest and say that it was as much down to the other players as me; you see, it was common knowledge that I’d had heart attacks and been really ill. So on the day of the game, no one would come near me, everyone was terrified to tackle me. At one point, for no particular reason, I did get banged up in the air and came down with quite a crunch.

  You’ve never seen twenty-one men panic so fast.

  I was lying there gathering myself to get up and all I could hear were these whisperings of ‘. . . heart attack?’ or ‘. . . still breathing?’ or ‘. . . ambulance?’ Someone came right up to me and said, ‘Shall I give him the kiss of life?’

  ‘I’ve only hurt my bloody elbow!’ I roared, laughing and wincing at the same time.

  Not long after the game I had to go to Harefield Hospital for another of my regular check-ups. Even though I was progressing well I still had to be closely monitored. On this occasion the consultant hadn’t seen me before and seemed not to know about my recent jaunt in the States. He started asking me the usual stuff.

 
‘Mr Wakeman, your ECG is good, your blood pressure’s fine, it’s all excellent. I can see you’ve been taking it easy and heeding our advice. Good.’

  ‘Well, er, not exactly. I’ve just come back from a lengthy tour of America.’

  ‘Oh, I see. But otherwise you’ve been taking it easy?’

  ‘Well, sort of, although I played a game of football last week.’

  ‘Remarkable. There’s no scarring on the heart, everything looks great. Obviously the pills we gave you are working perfectly.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I ran out of them six weeks ago.’

  They discharged me completely three months later.

  As you know, I did give up cigarettes but only because I’d moved on to cigars. The doctors were horrified. Smoking was a real concern for the heart. They said I obviously drank too much but, ‘For God’s sake, stop smoking, Mr Wakeman!’ I tried and I tried and I tried. The New Year’s resolutions came and went but could I even last until Lent?

  Not a hope in hell.

  Then a bizarre thing happened.

  We were on tour with Yes in 1979 and had a break from the road in October. As I often did during a prolonged period of time off, I rented a house in California to relax in. It was pointless flying home because by the time I’d got over the jet lag it was time to fly back again.

  Mornings in my West Coast retreat were particularly robust on the flatulence front (more about that later). A veritable cacophony of sound and smells. On this particular morning, I was sitting at the table enjoying my usual breakfast of a Café Crème cigar and a large, strong cup of coffee (my first of ten such each morning). I opened the cigar tin, looked down at the little cigarillos . . . and for some reason I do not know to this day, I thought, I really don’t want to smoke any more.

  And that was it.

  I stopped smoking there and then.

  October 1979.

  Even more bizarrely, I have never had a single withdrawal symptom, not one. Years later, I might unearth a cigar tin from the back of a cupboard and I’d just look at it and throw it in the bin. There has never been any chance that I’d go back to it.