David Bowie gave Prog Rock’s “Caped Crusader” Rick Wakeman the financial advice that helped the keyboard wizard make millions.

Wakeman tinkled the ivories for Bowie on such seminal tracks as “Life on Mars,” “Changes,” “Oh! You Pretty Things” and had played the Mellotron on “Space Oddity.” However, Wakeman harbored ambitions beyond being a session musician and after joining prog rock band Yes, he decided he wanted to produce his own solo work. This led to his first solo concept album The Six Wives of Henry VIII, but when he planned a follow-up album based on a novel by Jules Verne that would involve an orchestra and narration by actor David Hemmings, Wakeman was frustrated by the lack of interest and financial support from his record company. It was then that Bowie’s advice inspired Wakeman into action.

Undoubtedly listening to David Bowie who said: “Be your own man and don’t listen to people who don’t know a hatchet from a crotchet and try to fulfil their own ideas through you because they haven’t got any.” I wanted to do Journey to the Centre of the Earth with an orchestra but there wasn’t enough money from the record company. I ended up mortgaging my house, selling everything I owned. I begged, borrowed and stole to do it. But the record company didn’t want it and I faced losing everything because I was so heavily in debt.

Eventually my record company in America loved it, insisted it was released and it sold 15 million copies and that really taught me to be my own man. Spending money I didn’t have was simply my best financial decision because if I hadn’t done it, 40 years on, I wouldn’t be doing my shows now.

The success of Journey to the Centre of the Earth made Wakeman a solo star, and he went on to record The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, No Earthly Connection, White Rock and Rick Wakeman’s Criminal Record. He also memorably worked with film director Ken Russell on the soundtrack for his film Lisztomania (Wakeman also appears in the film as Thor, the god of thunder.

I always quite liked Wakeman, in particular his Wives of Henry VIII, Criminal Record and Myths and Legends of King Arthur being very enjoyable fayre of excellent quality. This is the “Caped Crusader” performing Journey to the Centre of the Earth with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, when the blonde-haired maestro was the height of his fame.
 

 
Via the Daily Telegraph

 
Ken Russell’s 1975 ribald cult favorite Lisztomania will be screened this coming weekend at Cinefamily in Los Angeles as part of the Allison Anders curated Don’t Knock The Rock film festival:

The most fantastical, bawdy, synth-adelic, opulent and outré film ever from the Seventies’ most audacious cinematic enfant terrible! Following the huge success of Tommy, Ken Russell next tackled one of his trademark composer biographies—and the result was the life of Franz Liszt as channeled through Superman comics, 10-foot phalluses, glittery hoedowns, Frankenstein, Metropolis, Ringo Starr as “The Pope”(!), and a stupendous list of other impossible stuff. Portrayed by Roger Daltrey (and accompanied by an adapted score from keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman), Liszt is at first shown as a 19th-century equivalent to Daltrey’s real-life brand of rock ‘n roll animal—but, of course, Russell gleefully ramps every piece of sensory input to 11, pitting Liszt as a superhero priest sent to annihilate the scourge of vampiric Nazi mad scientist Richard Wagner. Not all pure insanity, Lisztomania also features startling moments of quiet clarity, exemplified in a heartrending flashback re-imagining Liszt’s idyllic romantic life as a cross-pollination between the winter cabin scenes of both Citizen Kane and The Gold Rush. Woefully misunderstood and critically savaged upon its original release, Lisztomania is one hell of a good time, and exemplifies a kind of radical chance-taking Hollywood can’t even conceive of today—the kind that Russell couldn’t conceive of not bringing to the screen.

Co-sponsored by the Warner Archive
 

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If you live in the Los Angeles area and you’d like to win tickets to this special screening of Lisztomania, Dangerous Minds is giving away three pairs of tickets. All you have to do is come up with a good caption for the above photograph of Roger Daltery and Rick Wakeman (seen here playing a particularly demented looking Thor).

The three “Caption This” winners will be chosen by the number of “likes.”

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Original Photo-spread for Ken Russell’s ‘Lisztomania’, 1975