Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (2 page)

I knew all of this.

However, it was a really very splendid uniform.

Splendid.

At first I assumed it was a fake and I told him so. He was having none of it.

‘No, really, this is KGB. My brother’s uniform. I got hat too.’

‘But how do I know it’s real?’

‘It was my brother’s. He was in KGB and then . . . he . . . er . . . left.’

‘Right. And how the hell am I supposed to get this thing back to my hotel room?’

‘You take off big coat, put on KGB uniform underneath, put big coat over top and put hat in bag – nobody know.’

‘How much?’

‘Five dollar.’

‘Done.’

I took off my
Dallas
coat, furtively changed into this long KGB greatcoat and, with my fingers struggling to grasp the buttons in the cold, put my own coat over the top. Looking like a blimp, I started to walk away, back towards the main road.

‘Mr Wakeman . . .’ It was the same guy, shuffling after me.

‘What?’

‘You want to buy admiral’s jacket?’

Great. I couldn’t resist.

He opened up his case again.

‘It’s splendid, very nice. How do I know it’s real?’

‘Is really real, this is actual admiral jacket. It was my other brother. He was an admiral and then . . . er . . . he wasn’t.’

‘You’ve got a lot of family in the military, haven’t you?’

‘Er, yes, well, er, I did have.’

‘Right, and how do you suggest I get this back to the hotel as well?’

‘Is easy. You take off coat, put admiral’s jacket over KGB one of my other brother, then put your coat over top.’

At least I wasn’t going to be cold.

He took this admiral’s uniform out of his suitcase and it really was beautiful, resplendent with these magnificent shiny buttons and badges. Every bone in my body was telling me I was sailing a little too close to the wind, but it certainly was a splendid uniform.

‘How much?’

‘Eight dollar.’

‘Done.’

By the time I’d got changed again I made Pavarotti look like Twiggy. I could barely walk down the alleyway without turning sideways. I’m thinking,
This is absolutely preposterous
. I got back to the hotel and the guard on the door just laughed out loud when he saw me. I slipped him a dollar and he didn’t care any more. He just carried on chuckling as this six-foot-plus multilayered Russian doll with blond hair waddled across the foyer.

Sweating and rather breathless, I got back to my room and peeled off all these layers, then laid the two uniforms neatly out on the bed, next to the dolls and T-shirts I’d also ended up buying. The uniforms were really very splendid. However, scary visions of decades of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp were giving me severe doubts about the wisdom of trying to smuggle these things out of the country. I felt lucky not to have got caught wearing them in the street and I was just anxious to get back home. So, despite the absolute logic of my sensible purchasing decision, it was with a heavy heart that I decided to leave the uniforms behind.

At this point the phone rang. It was someone from the TV company; they still had our passports, which needed exit visas stamped in them. Bloody visas. Me and visas have never really got on very well, but I’ll tell you more about that later. As soon as I heard his voice, I thought to myself,
Please don’t let there be a problem with the visas
.

‘Mr Wakeman, I’m sorry but there is a problem with the visas.’

Great.

‘But I have been assured that the visas will be ready for your Aeroflot flight home in the morning.’

I put the phone down and started to head off for some food but, with my anxiety levels escalating, I turned back to my bed and carefully folded the uniforms up in my suitcase. Then, just in case a maid – or someone else – came into my room while I was away, I locked the case and hid it under the bed. Best to play safe.

The next morning there was no sign of the passports at the hotel. I called the TV company and they assured me that the visas would be waiting for me at the airport. By now I was in a right state – all I wanted to do was go home, all I could think about was my passport, my exit visa and how I desperately did not want to miss my flight. I headed off to the airport with hours to spare.
Back in those days, Russian airports were like some throwback to a railway station in the 1920s, and the ticket desks were just little wooden holes in the wall with pale undernourished faces behind them. Very few Russians flew so these decrepit buildings were often a hive of Westerners. I explained my situation and that I had been assured the passports plus visas would be waiting for us in time for our flight.

No sign of the passports.

Great.

I sat down on this old wooden bench with the rest of the band while people made enquiries. There were no telephones, we didn’t know anyone and our flight-departure time was getting worryingly close. My mind was a whirl with what to do about these visas. We sat there for an eternity . . . but no news.

Then our flight left.

Without us on board.

Just after we realised the plane had gone, a sternly dressed man in a dark suit walked over to me. Without introduction he said, ‘Mr Wakeman, can you come with me, please?’

Of course, I complied and followed him into this tiny office. He was Head of Security at the airport. In the corner was a little cabinet with a very old kettle on it, next to a small table – not even as big as a desk – and his chair to one side. We could barely both fit in the room. It smelled musty and very 1950s. He introduced himself as Igor – I kid you not – with a second name I couldn’t understand but it did end in ‘kov’, and said, ‘Sit, please, sit. Mr Wakeman, you did not go when your plane left. Why is this?’

I said that we didn’t have our passports or visas and explained at length all the problems we’d had. He said there was an unscheduled British Airways flight stopping at the airport that afternoon and he could arrange to get us on that. He took the phone number of the TV station that had our passports and said he would make
some calls and get the visas sorted. Then he instructed me to buy these new plane tickets while I waited. I was sent to some Finnish airline with an even smaller office. Bizarrely, they accepted my AmEx card and gave me four scraps of paper that looked like old betting slips but were, apparently, plane tickets. When I looked at my credit card receipt . . . it was for $2,000! This was a small fortune back then, but by this stage I didn’t care.

When I got back to Igor’s office he was on the phone to the TV company; he appeared to be quite irate with them and had explained that I was now $2,000 down because of their problems with the visas. The TV guy came on the phone, apologised profusely and said, ‘I have your passports and I have your visas. I come over now. I will bring $2,000 in an envelope for you to airport . . .’

‘No! You can’t do that – I’m supposed to leave the country with the same currency I came in with. That’s worth about a billion roubles . . . they’ll never let me out.’ By this point, I was waiting for novelist Len Deighton’s spy character Harry Palmer to walk through the door. Or Michael Caine, who played Palmer in the movies.

The passports finally arrived with visas stamped in them. Igor was visibly relieved and he said to me, ‘OK, I think everything sorted. Tickets, passports, visa . . . I will offer my help to get you through customs quick but you need to tell me if you have like Russian dolls or any T-shirts, that kind of thing. Do you have anything that you shouldn’t have in the suitcase, Mr Wakeman?’

It was at this point that, for the very first time that day, I realised that in my rush to get to the airport I hadn’t taken out the KGB and Soviet admiral uniforms, which were folded neatly in the suitcase that nestled between my legs, next to Igor’s table, in that small 1970s office, in that decrepit airport, in Cold War Russia, thousands of miles from home.

‘Er, yes, well, there are a couple of little things, yes.’

‘OK, what like, dolls, yes? You like Russian dolls?’

‘Er, no.’

Igor opened the suitcase and looked in. His face went as white as the snow that was tumbling onto the tundra outside.

‘Mr Wakeman, what is this?’

‘It’s an authentic KGB uniform, I believe.’

‘Yes, I know it is KGB uniform, Mr Wakeman, but what is it doing here?’

‘It’s a cracking uniform,’ I offered, clawing for some hope.

‘Is not possible, Mr Wakeman. No one has those uniforms.’

‘But they are real, they belonged to this chap’s brother . . . er . . . and he was in the KGB and . . . er . . . then he left.’

Igor leaned across the table and said, ‘Rick,
nobody
leaves KGB.’ He put the tips of his fingers in a pyramid of anxiety and sat thinking for a few moments. Then he said, ‘OK, here is what we do. I may be able to help you but you must help me, Rick.’

At that moment, I could think of very little I wouldn’t do to ‘help’ him – I could almost smell the gruel they served at the Siberian labour camp.

‘Anything, sir, I’ll do anything. What is it you want?’

‘Some records by Led Zeppelin. And The Who, yes?’

I don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved in my life. I was in a very serious situation and yet here was something so trivial and easy for me to get hold of that could remedy everything.

‘My friend, I can get you records by anybody you like!’

‘Even The Yes?’

‘Yes, even The Yes.’

He quietly explained that Lufthansa trucks were able to travel across East/West borders relatively unchecked and that was how we would be able to get him the records. I promised him I would send all the records he wanted and he hastily scribbled out a list. He then escorted me to the metal detector at customs and
whispered in my ear, ‘Do not worry, Rick, KGB long coat is just cloth, it will not set off metal detector.’

‘No, it won’t, sir, but the badges and buttons on the admiral’s uniform in there might.’

He went white again.

‘Not possible, Rick. How? Wait, let me guess: same man?’

‘Same man. His other brother. He was an admiral and then . . . er . . . he wasn’t.’

‘I see. Follow me.’

It couldn’t get much worse.

But it did.

As we were walking across the airport with these two highly illegal uniforms in a case that was about to be smuggled through customs by a security man from the KGB himself, a man from the TV company came running across and said, ‘Rick, Rick, I have your passports and visas and I have got your $2,000!!! I am good man, I make my word, Rick!!!’ and promptly handed me a huge brown-paper bag stuffed full of one- and two-dollar bills.

Quick as a flash, Igor said, ‘Hide it.’

I had to think fast. I looked at my three travelling companions from the band and they were like, ‘We’re having nothing to do with this!’ so I stuffed the money down my pants and into my socks.

Best I could do.

When I looked up, the customs officers were just standing there across the hall, watching me.

I have to tell you, laugh as I might now, I was shitting myself.

Then, like a dead man walking, I trudged up to the customs desk. I handed them my ticket, exit visa and passport. The guy started to grumble something but then Igor took him into a little booth and whispered something in his ear. The customs man came back and waved me and my contraband suitcase straight through, unchecked.

Next up was the currency desk where they examined your money. Including, in my case, $2,000 from a brown-paper envelope shoved down my pants. I looked up – and I mean up – at a woman who made Giant Haystacks look feminine. She said, ‘You came in with $100 and £130 sterling and you changed £30 into roubles and so you need to leave with £100 sterling and $100. Or do you have any other currency on your person that you wish to tell me about?’

I was standing there, literally bloated with dollar bills rammed down every crevice and the odd orifice. Two minutes earlier, she’d watched me stuff all this money into my trousers.

‘Er, no, no.’

Cue Igor and his little whisper in the ear and, once again, I was waved through. Within five minutes I was sitting on a virtually empty plane, struggling to fit into the seat with all these dollars spilling out of my pockets and more intimate regions of my trousers. After a few minutes, a stewardess came over to me and said, ‘We are actually only here for refuelling, Mr Wakeman, we are not supposed to take passengers on board here. I’ve heard you had some fun and games – you must have a story to tell . . .’

‘Yes, you could say that. And one day I might be able to tell it.’

EVER BEEN CONNED?

Long before KGB uniforms, TV shows in Russia, before Yes, before touring the world, prog rock and all that jazz, I was just a kid who loved music and playing the piano. As Louis Armstrong once said, ‘It’s a wonderful world,’ but for a naive sixteen-yearold trying to break through into the music business in the 1960s I don’t think he was referring to the wonderful world of showbiz management.

At that age you have so much to learn.

Here’s one of my very first lessons – how I met, worked for and subsequently wasn’t paid by one of the greatest music-biz managers of all time.

In the mid-1960s radio was in the grip of a so-called ‘nonneedle time’ controversy. With the explosion of vinyl sales and the prevalence of records rather than live tunes being played on the radio, the Musicians’ Union were very worried that musicians were being forced out of work. They campaigned vehemently against this and, consequently, it was agreed that on Radio 1 there had to be a certain amount of what was christened ‘nonneedle time’ – namely the broadcast of live bands rather than just vinyl. It’s absolutely true, strange as it may seem now.
DJs like Jimmy Young (who I think is about 128 now) would play the hits of the day and, every now and then, would have to throw in a live track. To be fair, although it sounds archaic now the practical reality was that this regulation did indeed create work for live musicians.