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How I met The Great Man - and survived ! |
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If you have read my Potted History page you will have seen that up to the point of meeting The Great Man, I was just a freelance Trumpet player. You know the sort of thing - the phone rings and the first thing you say is " Yes - I'll do it " and the second is " How much ?" then you talk about the mundane things like where and what time the gig is etc.
It was such a phone call that came from a friend of mine - George Mickey -a conductor and 'fixer '. He was fixing a Trumpet player and Trombone player to put down the brass tracks for the film Lisztomania, (which Wakey did the music for. Well - Liszt did the music first - Wakey just improved on it !! ) and as the studio was in High Wycombe which is whereI lived at the time, George thought of me first. Which just goes to show that the old saying that it's not what you know but who you know ( and that you happened to be in when the phone rang ) holds true !
Now for the confession. It is such a horrendeous confession that I cannot put it on the same page as The Great Man's name. So -
Anyway - we spent some days in the studio putting the brass tracks together, and at the final mix The Man asked Reg ( yes - he was the trombone player ) and me to join the English Rock Ensemble.
By this time I realised that ' here was a musician of stature ' ( Well - he was nearly 6 feet tall ! ). This realization was helped by the fact that I'd listened to Journey and Arthur by that time so I said yes. With hindsight, I should have realised that judging by the complexity and difficulty of the parts he had written for Lisztomania, I was letting myself in for an 'interesting' time !!
One of Rick's favourite tricks was to ask if the part he had just written was playable. If you said yes - but only just - he thought that was far too easy and proceeded to write something even more fiendish ! It was one hell of a challenge, and he did this for every man in the band. |
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