"And if I Start To Cry, You Come Down From the Sky on Your Wings"

A tribute to Nicky Hopkins.

Nicky Hopkins did not live a long life, and other than creating music whose adjacency to the spirit world is so proximate as to be harrowing, I have very little sense of what that life consisted of. A lot of times I read everything there is to read about my favorite musicians, which can be a pretty mixed experience. Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis: inspiring to be certain, but on the other hand, these were not necessarily the kinds of people you would strictly speaking like to… be around? A lot of the time, anyway. 

I have, I think, consciously not looked under the hood of  Hopkins’ life, not that there is any vast, forensic biography of him that I know about. Living a short life is not a bad thing, necessarily, or at least not in every instance. I possess only the broad atmospherics. Hopkins was frail and his health was not good, maybe ever. He played with just about every consequential musician and band coming out of England in the ‘60s: the Beatles, the Stones, the Who and the Kinks, but also Jerry Garcia, Harry Nilsson, the Move, Rod Stewart. Everybody wanted him because no one else could make the sounds he made.

Having been raised as an aspiring concert pianist with dueling preoccupations with classical music and R&B, Hopkins fascinated me from the time I started seeing his name turn up in the credits for more and more albums I owned. His style was unmistakable — a dandy fop who also happened to be a champion bare-knuckles brawler. He could show you the outlines of paradise and he could kick you in the balls. He could do both simultaneously, if he was so inclined. Some musicians might draw a bright line distinction between, say, Fats Domino and Frederic Chopin. This distinction seemingly did not occur to Hopkins, who interpolated their music intuitively, and without apparent difficulty. He was absolutely capable of conjuring ornery menace, but the feelings I most associate with him are yearning, compassion, wonder and grief. 

About the topic of grief, Nicky Hopkins has as much to say in his playing as any musician I have ever heard. Think of the Stones’ “Let It Loose” from Exile on Main Street, with its weary, triumphal, terrifying, exhilarating acquiescence, all punch-drunk psycho-sexual acts of submission before God. It’s all gone too far. Why had they pushed this far? Why were they still pushing? Hopkins enters with an emphatic blue note around the twenty-seven second mark, while Keith plays that spiraling, snake-eating-its-tail riff and right before Mick, sounding badly shaken, sings “I bit off more than I could chew.” Then for the rest of the song, a vein is opened. The final two minutes — a fanfare of horns, keys and a gospel choir — accompanies Jagger as he urges: “Let it loose, let it all come down.” But also “No, no, no, no, no.” The appetites and consequences, the junkie basements and moonlight miles, Brian and Altamont. It’s all too much to answer for. Hopkins’ piano is the lantern lighting the path towards redemption, but the shadows of the past are everywhere. This is what I mean about grief. 

Then there is his playing on John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy;” talk about shadows and the past. Nicky’s in at the top, high in his piano’s register, playing off Phil Spector’s weird string arrangement —  beautiful, but also queasy-feeling to the point of unpleasantness. This is Lennon in his radical truth telling era — having manufactured metric tons of joy for an audience of billions, here is him giving us the bill. “Jealous Guy” is one of Lennon’s greatest songs and also too much information to the point of wanting to lock yourself in a cabinet and cry from sheer mortification. He’s not the walrus, you see. Or anyway, the walrus is a transgressive, raging, self-loathing depressive of fathomless depths of despair. You might have guessed that from “Help!” or you might have been carried away by its tsunami of urgent hooks, but there is no mistaking it here. “Alright, then,” Hopkins’ piano seems to say. “If this is what we are doing, let's get on with it.” 

It’s not easy to listen to. Having been abandoned repeatedly as a child, Lennon is not opposed to using violence — physical, emotional, psychological — to avoid feeling that way again. I mean, he is opposed to it, but he is not in control of himself. “Jealous Guy” is not an apology, exactly, but more of a halting explanation. It’s very frightening, to me, to hear him sound so afraid. We are troubling very rocky psychological waters here, and the danger is considerable. “I was feeling insecure,” Lennon sings, “you might not love me anymore.” There is such sympathy in Hopkins’ playing around all of this. He is putting his arm around his mate, who is busy tearing himself apart molecule by molecule. What else can you do? 

By the way, this is the tweet that inspired this Nicky Hopkins elegy: 

Back on my ex-boyfriend Twitter, I declared Rod Stewart a no-antagonism-zone. That holds here, at my Substack, Please Take My Advice. Do not fuck with Rod, and do not mention Greil. I’m not interested. Rod’s 1977 ballad “You’re in My Heart” is a full-on classic of the Gershwin/Rodgers and Hart variety. The rock press ridiculed it, but failed to see the long game. Time is always, infinitely, on Rod’s side. Nicky’s playing seals the deal for anyone who ever had anything ticking in their chest.  

There’s so many other great tracks. “A Legal Matter,” “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues,” “Volunteers.”  Nicky Hopkins made everything he touched more magical. When the Paranoid Style was recording The Interrogator, Peter Holsapple and I switched off on piano and keys, depending on who best “had the feeling.” We didn’t even have to say his name.

Trying to capture the feeling. The blazer helps.

Deeply appreciative to Ed Hamell for this painting.  

Listen on, friends: