It seemed like an April Fool’s joke when I convinced Vanity Fair to assign me a 5000 word feature on “The Stranger-Than-Fiction Secret History of Prog-Rock Icon Rick Wakeman.” But a few weeks later in February 2020, I was in London with him, eating curry and retracing his epic adventure staging a rock opera about King Arthur…on ice. You can read the story here.
During our hours of interviews, he spoke movingly about David Bowie, whom he had known since playing mellotron on “Space Oddity.” Bowie was a mentor to the young Wakeman, and gave him some valuable advice - including the audioclip I’m posting here: “Let it fail on your terms…”
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