Rick Wakeman has entered the chat ..
When Yes we're out on tour promoting Tales From Topographic Oceans during every show, a keyboard tech reclined underneath Wakeman’s Hammond organ, ready to fix broken hammers or ribbons and to “continually hand me my alcoholic beverages.” That night in Manchester, the tech asked the bored Wakeman what he wanted to eat after the show. Wakeman, the lone carnivore in Yes, ordered a curry. “Half the audience were in narcotic rapture on some far-off planet,” Wakeman wrote in his autobiography “and the other half were asleep, bored shitless.”
The reason Rick and half the audience were bored is Tales From Topographic Oceans is an album consisted of four songs that run over four sides of vinyl, for 83 minutes...I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune to hear it but it's beyond pretentious and the whole thing is utterly ridiculous, I really like some Yes stuff but that record sums up everything that represents the worst musical excesses of Prog Rock.
“There were a couple of pieces where I hadn’t got much to do,” Wakeman would recall, “and it was all a bit dull.
So the roadie went one step above and beyond and brought his boss's dinner to him on stage.
The order, Rick Wakeman remembers, was for chicken vindaloo, rice pilau, six papadums, bhindi bhaji, Bombay aloo, and a stuffed paratha. This was November 1973 and Yes had sold out the Manchester Free Trade Hall.
Wakeman kept on at the keyboards, adding gossamer organ melodies and ambient passages to the songs. And then, around 30 minutes later, his tech started handing up “little foil trays” of curry, and Wakeman began placing them on top of his keyboards. “I still didn’t have a lot to do,” he wrote, “so I thought I might as well tuck in.” The food was obscured by the instrument stacks, further obscured by Wakeman’s cape, but the aroma danced over to Yes’s lead singer, Jon Anderson. He took a good look at the culinary insult and just shrugged then walked off with a papadum in hand, he returned to his microphone to sing his next part.
Wakeman s time in Yes was effectively over obviously...😂
now that's the man ...