00:00In the golden age of rock'n'roll, bands consisted of guitar and drums.
00:15Then, along came the legendary pianist, Nicky Hopkins.
00:23Nicky was a rock'n'roll player, and, I mean, aside from everything else he could do,
00:28he could play rock'n'roll piano like nobody else.
00:31Seriously enough, it was during that period of doing the marquee every week that I met up with the Stones.
00:37Nick and I were down at the club and we didn't see Cyril, you know,
00:41to see what his new band was like, and the piano player, he just blew us away.
00:47I first saw Nicky's name playing harpsichord, I think, on a Kinks record.
00:51So if we look back at some of those early Who records, we can see evidence of Nicky's musicality.
00:57He would just be in the background and Pete would say,
01:00OK, we need some piano, we need this, and Nicky would just get up and play.
01:04When Nicky came into the Rolling Stones scene,
01:09and all of a sudden this guitar band had this whole other colour to it, or a bunch of colours.
01:16Suddenly Nicky had just come out with a riff or a melody line or something,
01:23which completely changed the song.
01:26I don't think Nicky knew how, you know, good he was.
01:30Everybody would always talk about Nicky Hopkins this, Nicky Hopkins that,
01:34and sadly I became very aware that he was playing on everything.
01:38Nicky had three years of session work in London where he played with absolutely everybody.
01:43I took him to San Francisco to do a Steve Miller album, which he was brilliant on.
01:50Usually if somebody came to town like Nicky did for Steve Miller,
01:55he would get with this family and was meeting members of the dead and members of Quicksilver
02:02and the Airplane.
02:03He should have played at Woodstock with the Jeff Beck group, but Jeff Beck sulked and went home.
02:08But Nicky still played at Woodstock because he was on stage with the Jefferson Airplane.
02:12He had an intuitive feeling of where the piano should sit and where it should be.
02:20Iconic guitar riffs, well, he was the master and the creator of a lot of iconic piano riffs.
02:24I was involved in the Lennon stuff, but I would imagine if you listen to what he's actually playing,
02:28it's very delicate.
02:30But it was always very thematic and cinematic in a way.
02:34It was just, you know, beautiful, you know, session work, improv by Nicky.
02:39Over a 30-year period, Nicky Hopkins would play on over 250 albums.
02:46And during that time, he played with some of the greatest bands in the world.
02:50His contributions on their records made him rock and roll's greatest session man.
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