Rick Beato · Rick Wakeman on Prog Rock

moshkito wrote: Hi, Nice ... and the stories alone are worthy of the fun in it. BTW, the title is not quite right ... this is not really about "prog rock" at all but about RW and how he handled a lotof situations but the ones that you will remember are the history of his early days and what he learned. I was thinking that is some ways, it shows how/where RW came from ... it was mostly pop music, and I never thought of him as a classical musician at all, and his albums as ... maybe ... something that just went a few steps further than pop music. The sad part is enjoying all this stuff, but not be able to get a good feel for his ideas in music and specially composition ... and how TFTO can't be accepted by him, but we are supposed to think that the wife's stuff is better composition. I think the free form material was the part that threw him off. Creativity just being there for the sake of it being there sort of thing according to his thoughts about music? This was good and nice to hear ...  BTW, make sure you check out the interviews that RW did with several folks ... to my knowledge these have never been "released" but some of them are on the toob ... there are some good ones in there and the Ian one will throw you for a loop, as will the one with Tony ... I would have liked to be able to find/see several of the others as well, but have never found them!

Saw this the other day. I knew Rick had done some studio work, but I did not know he was as prolific as he said in the interview.

As far as the classical music, he stated in an interview many years ago that his Dad told him to learn to play classical music as it would give him the technique to play anything. Rick stated he liked classical, so that was not an issue. Wakeman attending the Royal Academy of Music, he was certainly learning to be a classical musician.

As he stated in the Beato interview, his excellent sight reading skills, keyboard talent, as well as some luck allowed him to get a good bit of studio work. If I remember correctly, Rick said in another interview that he was doing pretty well and talked to his Professor if he really needed to stay at the academy. Essentially, the Professor told him unless he wanted to be strictly a classical musician, no. The musical opportunities were already there, he had a good grasp of musical theory and excellent technique that there wasn't much more the academy could teach him.

As far as Tales is concerned, there was another interview with Rick where he said if CDs existed during the 70s, that Tales would have been great, because there was 50-55 minutes of good music. Unfortunately, in his opinion, that was to much for a single album but, not enough for a double, which resulted in an album that had about 25 minutes of padding because, the band ( ok, mainly Anderson and Howe) wanted a double album.