WITHOUT A HINT OF IRONY,
ROCK'S MOST ABSURD MOMENT

For years I've admired the work of keyboardist Rick Wakeman, mostly his stuff with the British art rock band Yes. After all, his solo on the Yes song "Roundabout" is one of the best in the classic rock canon. Of course, playing almost exclusively in the 70s art rock style is fraught with danger. That is, attempting to fuse elements of classical or serious composition and instrumentation with poetry and rock music is a lofty and pretentious venture in the first place--most, if not all, art rockers have fallen flat on their highfalutin faces more than once. I recently found that Rick Wakeman once took such a fall in such a grand way that all I could do was stare in confusion, wondering how he could be such a moron.

A week or so ago over at Eschaton, I learned about a little feature Atrios does called "The Youtube Wars." Every now and then he, and some of his bigtime blogger pals, will try to outdo each other by finding and posting the worst videos available on the internet video site. Atrios won this most recent bout hands down. He posted four clips from Rick Wakeman's Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which is pretentious enough by itself, as an album, but these performances are from a live show in 1975. In an ice skating rink. And while the band played, the events were dramatized by ice skaters wearing Arthurian costumes. I'm not joking, and there doesn't seem to be one lick of irony about it all from Wakeman. He was dead serious, which is kind of a drag because it's really one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It is to rock music what Plan 9 from Outer Space is to film.

Here, check it out.

Stylistically, Myths and Legends on ice is indistinguishable from pretty much anything ever done by the fictional satire band Spinal Tap. No really, if anything, Spinal Tap is actually less absurd. I mean, compare what you just saw with this clip from This Is Spinal Tap, a live performance of the song "Stonehenge." See what I mean? You just can't write humor like Myths and Legends; it has to simply happen, like a man falling on a banana peel, which is probably the best metaphor I can think of to describe Wakeman's ice rink travesty: it's like a man falling on a banana peel in real life. You see it, and you're like, "wait, did I just actually see that?"


Rick Wakeman


Spinal Tap

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