The Session Man

And on piano, the legendary Nicky Hopkins.

It was this unique marriage of the rawness

of the electric guitars and the rhythm section,

and then the wider palette of the piano.

Piano says, has all the colors and can say everything.

And a, a guy who's as talented as Nicky

can take a simple song

and fill it with all kinds of extra meaning and feeling.

Nicky could do the absolute incredible--

you would believe that Otis Spann was in the room,

which for, for a white English kid in 1960s,

was absolutely amazing.

You didn't realize how amazing he was

until you would take his contribution out.

And then you realize, oh man, that's, you know.

He's adding stuff in there that broadens and deepens the songs.

Or he's like, right out front.

He can entrance, he could play just about anything.

It was inspiring. He was talented.

He was invisible. It's an instinct. It's an art form.

Being a good session man.

It absolutely blew my mind to see

this list of such classic songs

that are still being played today.

And he performed on those.

I started listening for what he's added,

and it's like, it's genius, absolute genius.

Over a 30 year period,

Nicky Hopkins would play on over 250 albums.

In the golden age of rock and roll,

bands consisted of guitar and drums,

until they realized that the piano

added harmonic richness and melodic flair.

Then, along came the legendary pianist, Nicky Hopkins.

You know the story. It was when I was a little kid

and I was tall enough to reach up to play this...

I didn't know what was up there. It was just this table thing.

And all of a sudden, these things on the top,

which were the keys, right?

Started making a noise, and I got into it.

Mum lifted me up and helped me for about three years, and...

You know, I picked it up.

So by the time you were six, you were rocking out?

- Almost. - Yeah.

He learned classical music to start with.

He went to the Royal Academy of Music

and discovered rock and roll when he was in his teens.

So he had both these strands, which is what I think,

one of the things that makes him unique.

So he could play very melodic, semi-classical parts,

but he also could play very beautiful gospel parts,

and very good blues playing.

Nicky left the Royal Academy

and its emphasis on classical music

when he was 16 years old

and joined three other aspiring musicians.

They became the Savages.

For Nicky, it was a raw entry into the world of rock and roll,

boozy venues and shady nightclubs.

The '60s, if you were a teenager in the 1960s,

you believed you could do anything.

It was a land of opportunity, then.

It was fantastic to be in London in the 1960s.

Well, at 16, yeah. We played local cinemas.

Back in those days, they could,

they'd have a little group on before the movie.

We had so much great music coming from America,

and unfortunately, you couldn't always see these artists.

So that led to, uh, a great, uh, boom in British artists.

The first pro gig I did was

with this bizarre character called Screaming Lord Sutch.

Oh, yes. I remember Screaming Lord Sutch.

It was, uh, you know, basic.

It was very basic, very cheap, and none of us had any money.

So I used to turn up and sometimes

you had to look for a poster,

see where we were playing, and then find the gig.

And then of course, the whole club circuit developed on pubs.

And, uh, that's where the, uh, young British bands

really learned how to play and how to perform to audiences.

All those clubs, you know, from Soho

going out all the way down to, you know,

Crawdaddy in Richmond or Eel Pie Island in Twickenham

or the Ricky-Tick in Windsor.

They're all in the area where I lived.

One of my favorite places was Eel Pie Island on the Thames,

where you had to cross a little bridge

and you had to pay tuppence to a little old lady, a toll.

In November 1961,

Nicky joined the legendary Cyril Davies.

Cyril was a blues guy,

a phenomenal blues harmonica player,

who was with Alexis Korner

and decided to leave Alexis to form his own band.

And I understood why,

because Alexis was playing the right material,

but very insipidly.

Cyril went off on his own and made his own band,

which was called the Cyril Davies All-Stars.

And this included, amongst some other great players,

Nicky Hopkins, very young piano player.

Cyril was a very aggressive guy

who wanted an authentic Chicago blues band.

And he actually took Sutch's band.

We had gotten pissed off with Sutch for some reason, uh,

and left Sutch about a month before,

and then all of a sudden the entire band, except for Sutch,

were just backing Cyril,

and we filled out the marquee every Thursday night to capacity

and then beyond.

Mick and I were down the club

and we went to see Cyril, and see what his new band was like.

And the piano player, they just blew, he just blew us away.

There's this little white kid, and he's sounding like

he's in the back room of somewhere in Mississippi

or Chicago.

He is phenomenal, you know, he is.

And that was my first, Mick and I looked at each other:

Whoa. You know, where did Cyril find this guy?

Star, he had a special star,

which was this combination of gospel and classical

that, that I didn't ever heard anyone else do.

Seriously enough,

it was during that period of doing the marquee every week

that I met up with the Stones.

What year now, Nicky,

that you met up with the Stones?

- Still the tail end of '62. - Oh, wow. That early then.

- Oh, yeah. - I see.

In fact, they were just starting and we were just starting.

We already had our audience.

Uh, they didn't, so they were our support act.

When I first met him, um, when he was playing

with Cyril Davies at the Marquee

'cause we were opening for Cyril Davies for about five shows

until we started to get a bit more applause than expected.

And then we got fired because he didn't like the competition.

In May, 1963,

Nicky was rushed into King Edward's Hospital in Park Royal

with internal trouble and was put on the critical list.

He was later diagnosed with Crohn's disease,

which was complicated by losing his gallbladder,

his left kidney, and suffering a collapsed lung.

Crohn's disease is something where the, um,

the guts effectively become very inflamed, um,

because the immune system isn't working properly.

And as one young musician would testify,

Crohn's is no fun.

It kind of came out of nowhere.

I had it, I had symptoms for about three months of vomiting,

diarrhea, loss of weight, fatigue.

And it got to the point where I was rushed to hospital

and then I was quite quickly diagnosed with Crohn's.

But then, certainly, very little was known and understood

and how to treat it even less.

Trying to navigate your way through normal life,

as well as being a musician as well, which is, you know,

rock and roll and Crohn's don't go hand in hand.

Nicky's unexpected hospitalization

was to be the start of an illness

that plagued him all his life.

The way I ran into, found out about Nicky is, uh,

there was a, my go-to drummer at the time was Bobby Graham,

who was one of the great drummers in England.

And, uh, he told me that

he saw this kid named Nicky Hopkins playing piano.

And he was terrific, and I should check him out.

So I did. And he was absolutely correct.

Cyril Davies came in one Sunday

and he brought this young lad with him

who looked terribly ill, I must say.

- The one thing I remember-- - He was so thin.

He was incredibly thin anyway,

but he'd turned up in clothes he'd obviously been wearing

before he'd been in the hospital.

Apparently he was playing the piano, so I mic'ed the piano up

He started playing and I'd never heard anything close to it.

So when the session finished, I went up to him

and I said, well, give me your number

and I'm sure I can get you lots of work, and da da da.

And he said, "Well, I'm not available at the moment

'cause I'm still not recovered from these operations I've had."

So I said, "Well, here's my number.

You ring me when you are feeling up to it,

and I know I can get you lots of work."

- Which he did, and I did. - I know.

Glyn, who was a producer and engineer,

recognized instantly that this guy

was going to be an important session player

because he covered so much, so many bases.

And that's where Nicky Hopkins could come in

as a classically trained pianist

who also miraculously could play in so many different styles,

whether it was boogie-woogie, the blues, rock and roll,

he could do it all.

Ray wrote a, a poignant kind of, bit of a dig,

but respectful song called "Session Man".

Nicky plays this incredible baroque-esque type intro

on the harpsichord.

And I first saw Nicky's name playing harpsichord,