EastWest Review

Autumn, 1970: the Matrix club, San Francisco. On the tapes you can hear it happening — Nicky Hopkins, flanked by Carlos Santana, Jorma Kaukonen and Papa John Creach, playing at the outer edge of his talent, which is to say at the outer edge of anybody's. This is the most metaphysical Hopkins we have, the deepest Hopkins that survives in sound: the voicings, the touch, the countermelody which throws open windows you didn't know existed — and letting through the rush of unfamiliar air. Here Hopkins is all flame and falling star: a one-man cosmology in a room the size of a kitchen. This is what Nicky sounded like when he sounded like himself — not when he was hired by fools, liars, enormous babies, narcissists, thieves, or till-rattlers.

 

And there was a reason why he ended up living in California as the Sixties drew to their close. England had worn him out — with its control games and its genius for the unpaid invoice. The final straw was the fiscal pantomime staged by Jeff Beck, who liked having Nicky in his band and liked it even better when it cost nothing: Nicky at the piano, gratis, while the money went off to pay for Jeff's new amps and other playthings. So Hopkins got out. And California gave him more than sunshine and acreage. There he found release, friendship, and the strange American possibility that life need not always arrive with its hand on your collar.

 

San Francisco in 1970 was London turned inside out:  unneurotic, musical without grifting. And Nicky walked in like he'd been born there. Back home they took from him the way they took from the blues: hungrily and with all the reverence of men emptying a till. And in San Francisco he met people who operated at the level of genre creation: Papa John Creach, Jorma Kaukonen, Grace Slick, Carlos Santana. No scavenger in sight.

 

The San Francisco scene didn't need to leech — its people came from homes where nothing was missing. They treated Hopkins with interest and respect. "The people are really friendly and it never gets depressing," Nicky told NME in December 1971 when talking about his life in the States.

 

The Californians who hijacked Nicky's first year — and with it, his ticket home — had musical culture in their bloodline. For them, cultural capital came unpriced, and music never doubled as a social lift. Papa John first picked up his uncle's violin at ten, attended a Chicago conservatory, then spent three years in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Grace's mother was a singer married to an investment banker, and came from a home of upper-middle-class cultural ease. Jorma followed his State Department father round the world, had no provincial itch, and took up blues and folk as taste, not a lifeline. For Steve Miller, culture piped straight through the drywall: a jazz-influenced singer mother, a doctor father besotted with jazz, and godfather — Les Paul. At the Cipollina residence, a conservatory-trained matriarch presided over two baby grands.

 

British rock, by contrast, rose from a culturally underfed substratum — anxious, poor in cultural capital, with a petit-bourgeois aspiration to socially climb. And it was this very specific formation of postwar British class insecurity which exploited Hopkins — afraid of the drop below, desperate not to look back.

 

The British acts who used Nicky treated rock as a ladder — out of the suburbs, past the limitations of their origins. That scramble breeds a fierce grip: the music must be branded yours because the new self you are shaping depends on it being yours, or you are back at the bus stop. Hopkins, with his classical training and structurally indispensable, represented a threat to this founding myth of self-invention.

 

By contrast, not a single San Francisco act underpaid Nicky or denied him credit. And almost every British act did. To take social class out of this means to lose the plot of the era — to pretend, implausibly, that we are dealing either with a roster of isolated moral lapses or with some misty trans-Atlantic difference in manners. Which is not enough to carry this story.  

                                                                             

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After playing his final show with Jeff Beck at Yale University on May 9, 1969, Nicky was back in London, and by the 12th was in the Olympic Studios, where the Stones were distilling Let It Bleed into something barely licit. Between those takes he slipped away to seed chords for Donovan and, in quieter hours, to lay down courtly arpeggios for Ella Fitzgerald's album Ella. Amid the Stones' excess, his keys on Ella arrive like the clink of crystal — polite, a world away from all that low-slung swagger.

 

On June 4, 1969, he finally left Jeff Beck officially — disgusted, unpaid, and adamant that respect, once squandered, remains beyond retrieval.

 

Fate swept him back to America almost at once. The conduit was the strange work he's done at a session for Steve Miller: introduced by the ubiquitous producer Glyn Johns. The song was titled "Kow Kow Calqulator," bound for Miller's Brave New World record. In a 2021 interview to Record Collector Miller explained: "Glyn wanted expansive echo chambers and that became integral, especially when Nicky Hopkins joined and became a huge part of that." And his recollections of Nicky's playing were unguarded in that interview: "Sublime."

 

A few days later, still under the spell of Nicky's piano, Miller asked him to fly to San Francisco on June 14 to work on his next album, Your Saving Grace. And with that invitation, casual as such things so often are, began a chain of events that would bind Nicky's soul to America until the end of his days.

 

By 1969 Miller — a man with a flexible taste and a professional sense of scene opportunity — had already packed away the San Francisco visionary persona and became something nearer a radio instrument. He had climbed off the sincerity float, with its sunshine-pop and its soft-psych routine, having perhaps noticed that his version of psychedelia was being outsold by the genuine lunatics — the Jefferson Airplanes of this world. So he stopped marketing innocence and started marketing entertainment. And fair enough — while most rock musicians were still bent on baring their souls to the paying public, Miller had a humbler and more durable ambition: maximum legibility, minimum risk.

 

Brave New World, in 1969, showed Miller clearly leaning toward the market. "Kow Kow Calqulator" was the only track on the album which got the Hopkins treatment, but the shortage of Nicky was offset by the scale of his offering. On this track Miller goes into full overdrive, where his entire persona swells, declaims, suffers, prophesies, and even threatens to become important. Here, he is all announcement: look, I contain immensities. And Hopkins — surrealistically — walks in and orchestrates it as if it were real.

 

Every time Miller swells into that Californian theater of the self, Hopkins answers him with the truth of European art music: the harmonic weight, the sense that Miller's emotion has lineage. An ordinary accompanist would have followed along behind, marked the changes, maybe decorated a little, then disappeared into the backdrop. Hopkins doesn't do that — he lavishes, and does so with aristocratic control, without mess.

 

Had Hopkins played with irony, it would have protected everyone. But instead he commits. Why? We can only guess. Nicky at that moment was a genius young man bored by the ordinary uses of his gift and longing to self-express. And if self-expression meant, for the moment, hanging silk curtains in a child's house, then he would do that with magnificent hand. He was not going to save himself only for the occasions where the singer deserved him. If he had done that, he would have spent half his life silent. The track is needy, and need, to a player like Hopkins, was a kind of invitation. His seriousness on "Kow Kow Calqulator" was a vote for music's ability to redeem pretense. And the sad thing is that the musician of deeper harmonic intelligence and the stronger sense of emotional proportion, did not get seen enough behind the singer's pageantry of self.

 

But Miller's next album, Your Saving Grace, catches Hopkins in a markedly less charitable mood. On "Just a Passin' Fancy in a Midnite Dream" he refuses the whole masquerade, while Miller, with borrowed swagger, presses forward into lines like "Black magic got a spell on you." To a modern ear this borrowed Black-coded virility sounds ill-composed, like a man trying a style on before a mirror. And Hopkins doesn't underwrite this costume ball: he answers with piano that is cold and lucid. Nor does he indulge the pathos of "Motherless Children." There too he keeps himself apart, offering only a sparse accompaniment to Miller's overfurnished lament.

 

"Baby's House", for which Hopkins gets a co-credit, opens with chapel-air piano and continues with the sort of tasteful, adult comping that a singer like Miller badly needs: tactful, steadying. Nicky even takes a piano solo, all sun-splashes and shimmer, but not even that can float the track into proper air. The song is too raw, too lacking in compositional body — there simply is not enough there for a solo to redeem.

 

And it says something that the best tracks on the record, and the best of Hopkins on it, are the songs that know enough not to push: the lovely crooner-and-blues suspension of "Feel So Glad," and the title song, "Saving Grace," where Nicky plays one of those parts that seem at once delicate and faintly preposterous, like some exquisite logic out of Lewis Carroll. His strangeness there is the mark of that remote inward country from which his gift had come. The far-travelled and solitary element in him which makes the musical decisions no one else would have had the audacity, or perhaps the innocence, to make.

 

Neither of these two songs have the scent of trying hard. On "Feel So Glad" Miller's voice, for once, simply sings. He is sincere, clear, beautifully poised. And Hopkins, hearing an actual song, answers it with the full spectrum of his gifts: soaring feeling, exact pacing, impeccable rhythmic cunning which is at once subtle and alive, and the right hand flashing off little splashes of light while the left rumbles underneath. The guitar becomes an interrupter, talking over Hopkins, while he is in in the middle of telling sagas. There were musicians, Jefferson Airplane among them, and Jerry Garcia too, who understood that the highest courtesy one could pay Nicky was to let him speak. Miller, unhappily, did not always know that.

 

To an average young listener in 2026 the album may sound perplexing. In one song Miller is doing a cartoon of Black-coded swagger, in the next he reverts to the folk-hippie innocence, and then, with no sense of contradiction, he is borrowing the pathos of a traditional lament. But when the album came out in November 1969 and reached No. 38 on the Billboard LP chart, contemporary rock reception was not scandalized, with Rolling Stone logging it as favorable.

 

Truth is, Miller was less a rocker than a retailer of popular styles, and he sold to the audience which wanted to feel hip without submitting to rock in its full terms — kids who wanted something a little hotter, a little louder than their own life. Your Saving Grace wasn't born deep, nor was it born erotic. There is nothing here of James Brown's libido, or Jagger's slink, or Hendrix's electrical transport. The material was ambitious and nimble, but it was light. Too light to carry the freight Miller wants to load onto it. Which gave Hopkins an opportunity to caulk the hollows and lend the songs an ancestry they didn't possess. Quite often, however, he refused. On "Just a Passin' Fancy," when invited to underwrite a caricature, he does the opposite and sends down a run of piano so lucid that Miller's manufactured heat is not inflamed but cooled. And in cooling it, he makes the track — not the singer — cooler.

 

At the time, Miller wanted to be whatever sacred figure the age was then patting on the head — the holy innocent, the rural simpleton, the flower guru, the anti-war conscience, a whole rail of moral costumes under flattering light. And Nicky's task was to make these impersonations pass — to take the fancy dress out of them and give them musical legitimacy. And this, in one form or another, would continue for much of his career — saving songs from vulgarity, standing beside someone's ego and making it bearable.

 

The album turned out four months in the making. "When it was completed I joined the band," Nicky told Andrew Tyler of Disc and Music Echo, in December 1971. Something that wouldn't last.

 

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While recording with Miller and staying as house guest at Miller's Marin County home, Nicky came into the company of John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service, who stopped by the studio one day. Although the press at the time placed their first encounter earlier, when Nicky was in California with Jeff Beck. But wherever the first spark was struck, there began a friendship that would continue until Cipollina's death in 1989.

 

Cipollina was a signature musician, but not a growing one. He had his sound and his manner, but he was not the kind of player who used the guitar to push farther and find out what else music might know. For him, playing was primarily social, a form of fellowship. Cipollina's band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, was short a man, and when Miller's sessions were finished they asked Nicky to play with them. He stayed on in San Francisco, lived in Mill Valley with Cipollina and his "old lady," and in the space of a little more than a year he made three records with the band and came into Quicksilver as a full member. What he had imagined as a brief Californian interlude became instead one of those accidents by which a life is quietly redirected: a bright bauble pinned to the map of his years, and one that altered the whole design.

 

"What was supposedly a two- or three-week visit turned into almost two years, during which time I got married, applied for a green card and everything," Nicky said, half-amused himself by how it all turned out, in a 1979 interview to Steven Rosen. As it happened, of course, he remained for the rest of his life, with only occasional defections back to England, as one returns for a moment to an earlier version of oneself. In the end he became so thoroughly woven into the American scene that he became a living, essential thread in its fabric.        

                                                                           

                                                                      ***

 

Nicky did not come to California in time for the white-hot peak of its psychedelic season, but he came while the light of it was still in the air. The blaze had burned, but the afterglow lay over the place — and he found that. And California had lived in his mind for some time before he ever reached it. Since the very early days of his career, while still in England, he was dreaming about going to there, specifically to play with The Mamas & the Papas, as his mind, lit by the childlike capacity for enchantment, told Beat Instrumental in September 1967. A glimmer of promise from a far country spoke to him through music when he was impressionably young and gave him a belief it was meant to be reached.

 

And almost at once he found in California something just as good as what he had come seeking, and perhaps better: Jefferson Airplane. He had missed the band's groundbreaking year of 1967, when Surrealistic Pillow tore through the charts like a visitation from upper air. But not long afterwards, less than two years later, he gave his rollicking piano to Volunteers, and then took that same force onto the stage at Woodstock, where, in front of 400,000 people, he drove a vibrating underlife through the Airplane's 13-song set — like a warm-blooded creature moving beneath a naos, feeding power into the communal dream of the age.

 

For a musician, a festival is very seldom a tall story while it is still in progress. It is transport, cables, food one shouldn't eat, instruments suffering in the rain, people asking where someone is, and somebody else announcing that the stage time has changed, yet again. And then you go on and play. You do not stand there thinking, "Behold, history has put on a wet shirt."

 

But at Woodstock there was something. Not only musical, but physical — the sheer size of the thing and the extraordinary fact that it continued to hold together when by every ordinary law it should have dissolved into violence or grotesque farce. Woodstock became a legend because, seen from the outside, it looked like proof of something America — which was frightened of its children by then — badly wanted proven. Proof that a great mass of young people could gather in heinous conditions and not devour one another. Suddenly here were all these young people in a field, rained on, hungry, and they didn't fall upon one another. This gave the age the picture it wanted of itself.

 

Years later the band's drummer, Spencer Dryden, remembered what it meant to have Nicky with them on that great day of August 17, 1969. "If anything else, he helped glue the band together," he said. And by then the band was in need of gluing. The festival had knocked it out of its natural shape — Airplane was running on festival exhaustion, schedule chaos, and the absurdity of coming on at dawn when they were meant to appear at midnight. Add to it that familiar late-Sixties regimen of drinking, sobering up, drinking again, and in such conditions Hopkins was tensile strength.

 

A photograph from that time, with him and Grace Slick at two pianos, catches one of his more polished incarnations: the pristine Edwardian young gentleman, the tailored jacket, the whole arrangement poetically composed and cinematic, as if imported from a period film.

 

But Woodstock gives you the correction. Now his shirt is loud, the cigarette hangs from the corner of the mouth, the sideburns have thickened into something zoological, and the stare comes forward hard, with that small tincture of menace — turning prettiness into force.

 

By then, naturally, the local women were laying siege with open voracity, and a great deal of his new assurance plainly came from being wanted in precisely that way. Adoration on that scale became a metabolic event — it altered his carriage, changed his confidence. The man at Woodstock is not the withdrawn figure in a high-street suit that Godard caught 14 months earlier. Hopkins became another animal altogether.

 

The next day brought a television appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, and with it, apparently, a talk of Hopkins joining the band — a prospect which, as he later said with characteristic flatness, "never happened." But if the membership never materialized, the impression certainly did. Hopkins left a mark on Grace Slick that seems to have lasted for life. Paul Kantner, in a 2005 interview, spoke drily of her "stealing everything she could from him because he just was so good," and of the force of his influence on her. The almost gospel quality Kantner talks about which she seemed to have drawn from Nicky was probably only the most visible part of the transaction, the bit that made it to the surface.

 

Nicky was lucky, certainly, in the obvious Californian ways: admired, wanted, indulged, receiving lavish local attention both as a musician and as a man. But in the larger historical sense he was badly timed. He arrived too late for the actual emergence of psychedelic rock, which was rock's sharpest, most artistically mutinous edge. He got California after the ignition, and Woodstock, for all the myth that later gathered around it, was not the dawn.

 

On Volunteers, recorded with the Airplane at Wally Heider in San Francisco in June 1969, Hopkins plays beautifully, even perfectly, but within the frame of tradition. "I listened to Volunteers once or twice afterward, but didn't like it," he told Argentinian journalist Fernando Basabru in 1977. He knew he had joined Jefferson Airplane not in flight but in descent, when the band was already heading back indoors, back to the parlor, the porch, and the politics of the possible. Yet on the title track his little trills in the high register fall through the music like points of pure light, the London conservatoire, with all discipline and splendor, entering the Californian swell as it tries to sing itself into freedom. Later remasters pushed much of him down in the mix, and in doing so injured not only Hopkins but the song itself, because those bright interventions are among its best distinctions.

 

On "We Can Be Together" his opening riff gives the song its first shove with boisterous authority. He then continues to drive the track's weight forward, building beneath it, installing the floor, and suddenly underneath the band's customary headrush there is ballast. And over that ballast come the Hopkins signatures, the rough blues counter-harmony and the small upper-register spillages of clear light. That conjunction — barroom and chapel — was new to the Airplane and would prove non-repeatable: they would never again sound so grounded, yet so airborne.

 

On "Hey Frederick" Nicky gets the most space. The track begins in bright tension of acid rock and then, a few minutes in, turns liquid. From there his piano is what keeps the whole shape-shifting river from spreading over the floor. He holds the harmony, the romantic undercurrent, and the water moving beneath Grace Slick's ice. He governs the transitions from heavy riffing into long psychedelic reaches, and then the return of the blues drive full of brooding sexual charge.

 

Here the name "Frederick" may function as a private invocation of the Chopin identity Hopkins carried around with him. Because he believed — privately, in that secret region where gifted men keep their legends — that he was the composer reincarnated. Even the letters of his own name seemed willing to arrange themselves toward Chopin. And there was, as well, the haunting physical resemblance — the cheekbones, the nose in certain lights, and, above all, the eyes and the curve of the mouth — the two places where Nicky's soul most visibly crossed his body. Both men had beauty with the faint sadness to it. And beyond the face there were the biographical rhymes: the otherworldly gift, the birth in one country to mixed parentage, the life and work completed in another, and the old shadow of physical illness.

 

And the track's musical reality does seem to contain a portrait of Nicky. Given that there had been talk of him joining the band, the opening line, "Either go away or go all the way in," perfectly echoes that possibility. Because it sounds uncannily apt — like someone addressing a wavering guest at the doorway who is charming the house and yet refuses to belong to it.

 

"Look at what you hold" can be read as erotic or psychological, but with Hopkins it also becomes musical. He "holds" a tradition, a gift: the European keyboard inheritance, Chopin transmuted through English session work, rhythm and blues, gospel, acid rock, all arriving inside the Airplane's communal San Francisco scene.

 

Paul Kantner's memory that Grace Slick was taking all the piano knowledge she could from Nicky, makes this a rich hypothesis. In a 2005 interview to Steve Silberman Kantner remembered that being exposed to Hopkins's playing was "monumental" for Slick's style: "Grace was stealing everything she could from him because he just was so good… He inspired her greatly. What she got from him is almost like gospel music."

 

"Come back down on a spear of silence / When it flies you go on through" follows, and for Hopkins, under the sign of Frédéric, it grows suddenly exact.  Chopin has come back down, reincarnated, into a rock band, through romantic imagination which good sense would reject and psychedelic America warrants. No explanation was ever offered, nor could one have been. It would have discharged the glamour and spent the whole bright mystery.

 

Nicky decorates Grace's voice with tenderness on "Wooden Ships" and lays a cloud for the song to float on — without his piano it would scarcely drift, much less fly. And on "A Song for All Seasons" country rock receives the full saloon treatment, as something inhabited from within, all the more striking for coming from an Englishman. Hopkins is in complete rhythmic command — his left hand has swing and snap, never stiff and the groove is never forced or overplayed. He slurs the line just enough to make it human and in the same movement gives you a rare doubleness: mischief and melancholy, both arriving together. Above all, he does not patronize the style. Most British players, and many white American ones, jangle this music up, make it chirpy and silly. Hopkins knew that real barrelhouse piano was dirty, often morally exhausted. Grace Slick may have tried to learn it, but you don't get taught into knowledge of that order.

 

The Airplane were not like English groups. They had none of that final tidiness, that instinct for keeping everything in its place. They carried argument into the music — with them you felt the entire house speaking at once: politics, intelligence, fury. At moments it seemed almost about to come apart, but that was the exact point — dissolution was the very source of the band's life.

 

But Volunteers was not Surrealistic Pillow. There was no brinkmanship now, no metaphysical tension. The inward light of Surrealistic Pillow, the deep glow by which it laid one filter after another across reality, prism behind prism, belonged to a moment Hopkins reached too late to share in the studio. The trembling, reality-enlarging voice, the guitar stretched across worlds, the pleading, all-masks-fallen sincerity of "Today" — that sound of holding one moment open until it broke through to something beyond itself — all this had happened two years before, in Nicky's absence. But by some grace he was able to catch that very spirit later, in live jams with Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, where the old strange light continued to move.

 

The San Francisco jam scene still crackled. Kaukonen and Casady were prepared, with the 1967 hunger still sharp, to go the whole way: all the way in and all the way out, the inner life serving, in that configuration, as a musician's entrance to the cosmos — as though the inward road was a portal to transcendence. Into this churn came Hopkins and re-wired the circuitry — blues bled into Bach and Bach bled back, Nicky hurling his full shapeshifting self into the unscored now. With every stylistic membrane gone, he was striding and sprawling across the full spectrum of these vast jam soundscapes — the full extent of his musical vocabulary in play.

 

The fabled jams of August and October 1970 took place at the Matrix — a tiny music club at 3138 Fillmore Street in San Francisco knocked together by Marty Balin as a base for Airplane's experiments. The idea was for it to serve as a testing ground for local bands, and it did — from the Doors to the Grateful Dead, in the days before global fame came round to collect them.

 

The 1970 Hopkins jams at the Matrix became legendary. They show him with Kaukonen, Casady, and John Cipollina — the constants — joined by a fluctuating roster of local greats: Jerry Garcia on occasion; Carlos Santana on another; and, on a few wondrous nights, the far-out violinist Papa John Creach.

 

Papa John was a singular presence in West Coast music — singular as in: one of him, ever — a violinist who carried blues, jazz and country without separating them. Long before the rock audience discovered him (through Jefferson Airplane, through Hot Tuna — the rock audience never discovers anything unescorted), Creach had lived a rich musical life: playing with legends, absorbing styles at street level, and developing a tone that sounded both ancient and spontaneous.

 

Onstage with Hopkins, Papa John's violin spoke in a voice that was very nearly human — grinning, cutting, testifying — and Nicky answered it with something just as singular. There is a live tape from October 21, 1970 where he lays down Bach-like chords — gravitas tolling through them with full sobriety — and then repeats them ostinato, hypnotic and driving, until the classical heritage becomes something countercultural: Journey with me, it says, into the dark. A few months later, Nicky would summon that same shadow for Lennon's "Don't Wanna Be a Soldier."

 

The way he makes that shifting, recurring vamp the bedrock for his hypnotic blues is the genius of his two-chambered soul — where classical Europe and Africa coexisted in unified movement. This is Hopkins in his revelatory state, at the liminal point of physical and metaphysical. His ability to find that doorway while still seated among us opens unsettling potentialities — the miracle of his uncaged mind.

 

Papa John comes level with him on this track, the violin shrieking, screeching, flashing, pouncing — liberated. But in other jams we hear the bow respond to Hopkins with depth — low-toned, almost shy in its tenderness. And labels start to look silly. It is not blues, not classical, not jazz, and not even the avant-garde — it is simply there, immeasurable, like a story told in a language invented at the moment of its utterance.

 

This is what Hopkins left suffocating England for — to make music with authentic bearers of tradition, such as Papa John Creach, and genre-establishing artists like Jorma Kaukonen, to be treated with respect as an equal musical mind by them, and not a sideman exploited by imitators.

 

And to those who say Hopkins never played jazz, the Matrix tapes reply with a bright laugh. On "Sunshine Superman" he enters the jazz republic entirely, his piano dancing in urgent, rollicking, full-spectrum tonal palette, with whirls and leaps underneath the groove. He sends little silver phrases ticking and flashing — full of colors no ordinary daylight quite contains — and then suddenly gathers up whole armfuls of harmony, flinging the chords wide as if laying a landscape across the air.

 

And when he solos, it is sunlight upon water, jazz in its most graceful clothes, lovely without becoming cute. It is light-handed, but with that rare sorcery which rearranged some secret lens inside you, the world changes color.

 

When he supports Santana's solos, it's not comping — it is a second melody running beside the first, independent, Hopkins pouring cascades of diamond light, each bead flashing as it falls, mingling for a breath with Santana's lava before the piano turns toward earth-bound chords. And when he goes from high register to the lower octaves, it gives you a bodily jolt — like sky tumbling down to earth. A man in dialogue with God.

 

His genius stands here in full radiance: that unerring musical instinct, the touch, the answering rhythm, the countermelody which throws open possibilities no one knew were there. Here Hopkins is all gravity, wave and light: the old deathless force that once passed through Chopin, which has worn a thousand mortal names, moving on, always moving on, and which the world will go on meeting in generations still waiting behind the curtain of time.

 

When Kaukonen comes in, he is so Pillow that it gives you a start. But this is Pillow in extremis, in a jam situation, with that harsh bright burr of his slicing through the proceedings. It is juxtaposed against the suspended psychedelic notes which seem to hang there for what seems like eternity and then drop like bombs, saying in one detonation more than a thousand notes by another guitarist. Nicky gives him every inch of the sky he has, and Jorma repays the courtesy, clearing space for Hopkins to unspool his argument. At moments they are not so much taking turns as running two systems in parallel. And when Jorma and Carlos begin trading phrases, Nicky is there too, completing the circuit, converting a dialogue into a trinity. Not something London was ever able to offer Hopkins. Or anyone else, for that matter.

 

These tapes have been doing the rounds for years. Now they sit in the open on Archive.org and — cleaned-up — on YouTube. This is the sound of Hopkins in love — he has already met Lynda, the future wife, and this is the voice of a man adored into audacity and given the deepest permission to descend into himself without fear, to ask what it is, this business of being alive. This is the most metaphysically complex Hopkins we have on record, the deepest version of him that survives in sound. His meditation is not only on the layered structure of existence, and not only on his place in it, but on how he can influence it — the meditation on his power to shape worlds.

 

This was the sound of Nicky when he was himself — when the machinery of hire fell away and the man was restored to his own authority. The sound of man who could sit at a piano and summon ten centuries at once — with grace, speed, mischief, truth.

 

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Surrealistic Pillow was a stance, and the trouble with stances is that you can strike them but you can't live in them. To keep it up — daily, as practice — would have asked the unaskable of Jefferson Airplane: continued drug intake combined with artistic seriousness, upkeep of a psychological state alongside artistic exploration, and confirmation that popular music had become metaphysical art.

 

The music critics — the ones culture counts on to give encouragement at the moment when a new movement is taking shape — proved not just inadequate but obstructive. It was a failure of knowledge, a failure of cultural placement. Rock criticism of the time was written by people who could not see where the music was going because they had never understood where it had come from. They missed the origins, the migrations, the signal fires between one era and the next, and so stood before the thing with the blank authority of the professional incomprehender. "Blues," "fast," "snarly": this was their vocabulary.

 

By 1965 the jazz critics already knew how to write about popular music properly: show the works, name the bridge, the vamp, the riff, the changes, then put the result inside wider history. This kind of knowledgeable writing was perfectly transferable to the 1960s rock — fans were primed for that treatment and did not reject seriousness. They came to art half-educated, sincere, and burning to be told the names of things. The old fantasy of the rock fan as a happy idiot, unwilling to think, is a lie — they wanted to know history, lineages, explanations, where the song comes from, what it is made of, and what, exactly, it thinks it is doing.

 

But editors built the entire magazine culture on contempt: the notion that the reader was an overgrown child — impulsive and after gossip and "attitude". Bad faith always works this way: declare your audience dim and excuse yourself from effort.

 

Consequently, the San Francisco psychedelia never had a serious scholar in its corner. No one to amplify, explain, or champion counterculture's strangeness — when it stood at artistic and spiritual edge, at the highest precipice of truth — to the global culture. So its vision collapsed almost instantly, left no school, no legacy within serious culture. Because there was no one to accurately name the album's stance as existential, no one to translate it outward. It was filtered through the kazoo of fan babble and culturally illiterate rock journalism into marginality — a poster on a dorm wall. Modernism had Stein, Apollinaire, Greenberg. Rock had Rolling Stone magazine.

 

                                                                        ***
 

John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service was one of those California men the coast seemed to grow in certain seasons. And he had the luck to draw Hopkins into his circle during Nicky's early days in San Francisco. The story has him wandering into the studio while Nicky was recording with Steve Miller, and somehow emerging with him, as if he had pocketed a Stradivarius left briefly unattended.

 

It was not an even match, not in the serious ledger of craft. Cipollina had a mother who was a pianist and a teacher of music, but blood doesn’t always carry the full cargo. Beside Hopkins he seemed thinly equipped: a guitarist who leaned on familiar turns, a little unmoored, and no great maker of songs. The kind of refusal of clarity in music craft was the opposite to Hopkins's ethos, but Nicky refused clarity in another sphere — in career direction — and this was perhaps the key to their friendship: two men blurring reality, but in different registers. This was not a likeness exactly, but a layered correspondence, intricate enough to become interesting.

 

Cipollina was positioned inside the infrastructure of venues, bills, posters, promoters, and the circuits of the scene, but outside the tribe his music barely survived. He was a local guitarist, not an international cultural actor. But he was someone socially embedded, constantly present, and able to ride the atmosphere of "something's happening" without ever being forced to meet the external tests which sort artists from local fixtures.

 

If anything, Cipollina and his band stood at the far end of the psychedelia spectrum: not the high-register altered state, but the loose variant. The Doors, on their blade-bright debut, and Jefferson Airplane, with Surrealistic Pillow, were enemies of mess. Their trips were exact, engineered precisely. "White Rabbit," "End of the Night" — these were mechanisms of meticulous planning, control, rhythm, tempo, shade, pressure, release. Cipollina's principle was the opposite — spontaneity shading into drift, songs assembled from things already known. High individuality was not what he was after or perhaps not what he even possessed — his gift, such as it was, lay in arranging the familiar.

 

But the marvel of Cipollina was that he didn’t view the gulf between what he could do and what the top tier could do as a defect which demanded withdrawal. Instead, he saw the scene as horizontally navigable: if you are in the space, you are in the game. This low sensitivity to hierarchy gave him resilience — something that wouldn't survive the hard filters of conservatories, orchestras, competitive studios, or export markets. It thrived where standards were masked by atmosphere.

 

Hopkins slipped into Cipollina's band for roughly a year, less by grand design than by the arithmetic of the scene: every other outfit playing at Nicky's caliber was already staffed. Cipollina, meanwhile, had a vacancy left by a departing guitarist. Together they cut Shady Grove between July and September 1969, and by December the album was out.

 

From the first instant of the title track, Hopkins creates an entire world — the intro is a self-sufficient kingdom. His piano is lucid as cut crystal and at the same time suffused with reverie — that eternal paradox at the heart of his playing. It is dreamy, but rendered with such assurance that it doesn't feel invented. He seems not to be creating the landscape but remembering it, as though some secret country had been shown to him whole, and his task is only to set it down. And how he sets it down: each note exact, suspended in its place, a glass pixel in a landscape that makes you forget there was ever a hand upon the keys.

 

And guess what? This intro is the first keys-governed prog rock to ever emerge where the piano spells out the full pathos of the genre. Before Keith Emerson, before Yes. Hopkins's piano is making rock feel fated, turning it both inward and skyward at once. In that intro to "Shady Grove" he shows us extended form which develops internally, classical or jazz material absorbed, not pasted in as quotation. This is well before rock had sense for such expanse, before it could convey that everything — love, regret, the long reach of time — could be carried in a single, unfolding phrase.

 

To slight Keith Emerson would be unfair. He kept faith with the budding genre of progressive rock, while others — Hopkins among them — wandered off into other regions. The three early records Emerson made with his band the Nice continue to stand as prog's preliminary sketches  — daring, brave with promise — but they are stitched from borrowed brocade: psychedelic pop, covers and classical quotations, Brubeck, Bach, Copland, Bernstein, Rachmaninoff. It is dazzling, but still quotation and adaptation: pictures from a survey exhibition.

 

The message of ripened, keyboard-driven prog, coming into full realization, was this: You have an inner kingdom, and ordinary music has been under-addressing you. This is exactly what the introduction to "Shady Grove" declares, and what keys-crowned prog had not had the courage to say before Hopkins. On this track he tells us that music is a sovereign world, with its own landscapes and laws. And he proves it by motion: by leading you through complexity and showing you that you can understand it, because complexity is what you secretly are.

 

On the rest of the album Hopkins is the consciousness of the band, rumbling like a volcano underneath the decorous blues-rock surfaces. He adds extra dimensions both to the record's folk balladry and to its Motown flirtations, providing altitude and depth. And when the record has ended and a day has passed, it is his piano that remains — those exploratory solos, that tenderness, that flawless, four-dimensional comping, which prevents the songs from becoming cardboard cutouts and turns them into buildings. Even his grooves, which in rock easily become mechanical repetitions, are architectural events: staircases turning out of sight, windows, huge sunlit rooms, vast dark corridors, and glass ceilings which show you the stars. And the band pays him back — no one is talking over his piano, no one is fighting for the spotlight, no one barges in with ego. The album's centerfold photographs show him at the same scale as everyone else — something no other band has done before or after — certainly not Steve Miller who excluded Hopkins's photograph from his albums altogether.

 

But there was a reverse to the coin: the band's individuality was never securely maintained. This vaporousness of identity followed Quicksilver throughout its lifetime. On Shady Grove Hopkins is working all-out trying to haul the thing up from county-fair California onto the world stage. He wanted them to succeed so much that he even gifted them one of his best compositions, "Edward, the Mad Shirt Grinder." And rather foolishly, because on this record the piece came out wrong, or at least came out diminished, and had to wait a few years for Nicky's solo album The Tin Man Was a Dreamer before it acquired its proper shape. And for all Nicky's labor, Shady Grove rose no higher than No. 25 on the U.S. Billboard album chart in 1970, which is respectable enough, but hardly the sound of history kicking the door in.

 

Rolling Stone's Gary Von Tersch wrote at the time that "The Quicksilver on Shady Grove has had its collective head turned around by Nicky Hopkins. The result is a more precise, more lyrical, and more textured Quicksilver." But it was also a short-lived Quicksilver. Cipollina may have been serenely convinced that "Nicky was the best," but Hopkins, never a man to leave the hierarchy of talent unmeasured for long, soon began airing his own assessments of where Cipollina the rest of the band stood in terms of musical ability.

 

At the Winterland Quicksilver show, the legend, as Robert Greenfield later told it in "S.T.P.: A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones", had Hopkins transfiguring the room: "… people looked at each other wide-eyed as the music poured out of the amps and Nicky Hopkins played a riff that was water, pure water — it flowed off his fingertips." One can see why people wanted to keep the lovely picture. But Nicky did not. Three years later, during the Goats Head Soup sessions with the Rolling Stones, he summoned the same memory with a headshake: "I recall all tha stuff — people coming backstage at Winterland to tell us how great we all were. And everybody in the band so wiped out, they were a semitone off, either way through the whole set. It was awful. God, it made me want to puke."

 

Perhaps this was a little cruel of Nicky, because, according to Greenfield, the people at that show "danced and whirled and Winterland became a spaceship," and one should not be too quick in dismissing such collective lift-off. But Nicky had his own diagnostic purity — Cipollina was not operating at his level. Ability aside, Cipollina treated music as a track one could keep riding and not something that made a demand upon the soul. Or, to put it plainly, he was something artistically colder than what California was able to produce at the time: unhaunted.

 

But whatever the limits of Quicksilver’s field of vision, Nicky, to the end, still nominated the by-then-deceased Cipollina as his only friend in the music business. And the two did resemble one another, sharing that wide-eyed-boy innocent impulse: Let's see where this goes. Where it went, naturally, was the road. After the New Year's Eve 1969 show in New York, Bill Graham offered them a gig the following week. They accepted and as Cipollina told Chip Lamey in the months before his death, "Before the night was over we booked a Texas tour with The Dead. It just sort of happened." It just sort of happened was the motto of the era.

 

On that tour Nicky, among other activities, met women, and in the months that followed he was sending them his tender little dispatches. Even by the summer of 1970, when he was in Hawaii for Just For Love and parts of What About Me, installed in a hunting lodge converted into a recording studio, and with his romance with his future wife Lynda poised to begin, he was still writing to a Texas girl-cat and signing off, with disarming amplitude, "Love." Cipollina remembered the Hawaiian arrangement with fondness: "They didn't even have electricity on that side of the island. It was paradise." Paradise, certainly, for Cipollina. And paradise too for Nicky, whose romantic life in 1970 was not exactly suffering from a shortage of available futures.

 

By Just for Love (released in August 1970), Nicky already sounds, if not already eyeing the exit, then disenchanted. He gave the record plenty because he did not really know how to under-give. But he did not give it what he gave Shady Grove. Not the full grace. And you can see why. The cover is an amateurish curiosity: naive native Indians, sky spirits, the whole thing wearing the scent of a school mural. Worse, this unseriousness leaked inward, into the music. The album can't decide what species it wants to be — a hippie vision quest, a concept album (with songs bisected into Part One and Part Two) or if it wants to mock or grovel when it quotes the instantly recognizable style of Jorma Kaukonen's guitar so baldly that it becomes an identity grab. Elsewhere it wants to be light entertainment, all Cuban-style goodtime inflections and grinning holiday shirts.

 

What you get is drift without identity. And Hopkins, professional to the marrow, props up the record with his pneumatic, feather-light piano, laying a world-class foundation under material that might otherwise have folded in on itself. He is the adult in the room, which in 1970 was not always a coveted social position.

 

There are beautiful things here, certainly. "Cobra," for instance, where his imaginative, ever-shifting piano gives the song its purpose. And "Gone Again," a folk ballad whose slightly comic vocal delivery Hopkins rescues by deploying the entire keyboard: ethereal upper reaches, rumbly undercarriage, and, between them, lavish splashes of arpeggiated gold. Still, the album is not Shady Grove. The band are thinking like scene musicians — with atmosphere, props, cliches. What it lacks is necessity.

 

Just For Love's erotic command comes from Hopkins too, particularly when he starts driving tracks such as "Fresh Air" and "Freeway Flyer" with full hot charge. His wife-to-be was a New Jersey girl, a music fan, who called herself Dolly, and who belonged to that suddenly populous female species of the late Sixties and Seventies: the rock-and-roll satellite. Liberated from housework and childbearing by the pill and the emancipation, but not yet provided with anything very convincing to be emancipated into. She drifted into view in 1970, borne on the hot air of the scene, and, when Nicky left her in 1982, drifted out again, back into the same elsewhere from which she had first emerged.

 

Hungry for the sudden social fluorescence, she had little to add to Nicky's life beyond handling his logistics and the inert lyrical deposits he allowed her to lodge in his two solo albums. What she was unable to produce was an internally generated "why". Counterculture liberated men into self-expression and women into availability, and it dressed up women's aimlessness as "openness" or "freedom." Aspiration beyond relationship was often punished — Yoko Ono's story is an illustration of the point. The question women were expected to ask in the 1960 was not "Who am I becoming" but "Who am I with?"

 

And speaking of Ono, Lennon had Dolly's number, with his unmistakable giggle which had razor inside it. In October 1971, sketching for the Evening Standard the utopian outline of his proposed new band, he spoke of a loose communal circus where people orbiting the musicians — wives, girlfriends — might take part in the act. Then came the jab: "Nicky Hopkins's wife will be doing her knitting and eating apples." Thus reducing Lynda to a little absurdity accidentally admitted to the avant-garde. Lennon wanted Nicky badly enough to make room for the wife, but still talked about her as a ridiculous prop: click-click go the needles, crunch goes the apple.

 

For all Lennon's crudeness, the point was plain: Yoko Ono, however vexed or vexing, was not another wife in the wings but a woman with metaphysical questions, a seeker before Lennon, with meaning not borrowed from her husband's trajectory. So Lennon complained in the Evening Standard that even with her recent Syracuse exhibition, the 90-minute Channel 13 appearance explaining conceptual art, and an off-Broadway play, Yoko was visible but unacknowledged: "They can see her now, but can't recognize her."

 

But perhaps Nicky had no need of a second Nicky. Otherwise he would not have remained with Lynda for more than a decade. What he needed was not a rival intelligence, but a shield, a mouthpiece trying to stop the world from rubbing him out. Lynda tried to do that: to protect him, to announce his value through the thin little aperture allowed to her. Clumsily, with thin schooling, blunt instruments, insufficient reach. But the role was real: the woman beside the unarmoured gifted man, trying to prevent his deletion. And yet this was love with a receipt attached. Love that loved him most when genius was visibly paying out.

 

On What About Me, the last studio album Hopkins would make with Quicksilver, the faux-Cuban, Latin-spritzed shimmy has stopped being a happy accident and became a strategy. The thing grins at you, commercially, with its shirt open one button too far: California dreaming repackaged as a leisure brochure, all "earthy" maleness scrubbed of introspection. What passes for looseness here is a marketable slump, pitched at the women buying the records and coming to shows. It’s a way of announcing: we are sensual and we are communing. But without being changed by what we borrow. That's why it feels plasticky — there is no expansion of skill or thought in it. In this sense What About Me has a cousinly resemblance to Steve Miller's Number Five, released the same year and likewise Hopkins's final outing with him.

 

Where Cipollina wanted to exist without being measured, Steve Miller wanted results. He used music as a process: a way to manufacture broadly pleasurable, low-friction objects with distribution prospects. On Number Five he is again courting circulation and the kind of success that doesn't exact psychological payment — just pleasant self-protection. And Hopkins gave him, once more, the necessary adult supervision: professional depth on a record which, without his piano, might have come over as semi-pro. On tracks such as "Industrial Military Complex Hex" and "Never Kill Another Man," he gives the songs a sensation of event, of something actually occurring, instead of simply yielding to Miller's recitatives and those guitars going round and round like flies in a lampshade.

 

Other songs on Number Five, however, have proven more difficult to save. On "Hot Chili," an absurd bit of Mexicano pop parody, Miller adopts, or rather mugs, a Mexican accent as comic pastiche: juvenile, farcical. Hopkins's piano is barely there, if it is there at all. What Miller is doing would now be called, in cultural studies parlance, "mock Spanish" — a linguistic caricature that works through indirect indexicality, turning Mexican identity into a comic register and, in the process, reaffirming the hierarchy of who gets to sound "normal," and who gets to sound comical in the public ear.

 

As with so many songs bearing foolish lyrics on which Hopkins played during his career, you are left here with the old studio question: Were the vocals added later? Since the standard practice is to put the voice on last, we don't know what guide vocal, if any, Hopkins heard while recording his piano parts. What we do know is that he later insisted, repeatedly and across decades, that he did not listen to lyrics. More than that: he made a principle of not listening to them.

 

On "Never Kill Another Man" Miller again does a crooner-meets-rock thing, and again reaches for the grand theme from a small altitude, this time with strings, which only makes the misjudgement more padded. And it's a lapse of taste that even Hopkins can't save. In retrospect, what astonishes is not just that Miller sounds dated in 1969, but how dated. Beside Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, or Jeff Beck, he is already sepia, already belonging to an earlier evolutionary branch. The record climbed no higher than No. 32, and stayed there for a single week. A brief pulse on the monitor, followed by the flatline.

 

By 1969, the Summer of Love had already gone off in the sun. What remained was several coexisting survivals: politics, hustle, mysticism, real art, bad faith, all running in parallel. San Francisco was a convergence of tribes using the same stages where the sacred, the theatrical-demonic, and the commercially frictionless could all be presented as "rock," sometimes on the same week, because promoters and record companies have learned to monetize every register.

 

And this Californian triptych in Hopkins's life, from 1969 to 1970 — Airplane, Cipollina, Miller — tells you the essential thing about him:  his indifference to social rank of the people around him and his knowledge that his own rank was internal and could not be contaminated. He could walk into cheap settings, grand settings, experimental settings because he could create something real in them. He had a kind of aristocratic contempt for reputations and treated most of them as raw material. The fact that he could do what he did with lesser songs was not compromise — it was a testament to how absolute his musicianship was.

 

                                                                      ***

 

Nicky bought his Mill Valley house in 1970 with London money — made in sessions for television, radio, commercials, and films. Very little of it had come from rock, that noisy land of promises and vanishing gold. And TV and radio earnings were serious. In May 1969 the Chicago Daily News, profiling him, printed that he had been making between $15,000 to $25,000 a year "for the past five years." For scale, average wage in the UK was $5,894 in 1969 in U.S. money, and the kind of income Nicky described was reserved for private practice physicians and law firm heads. Hansard lists a British MP's basic salary as £3,250 for every year from 1965 through 1971, which was $7,800 in 1969 U.S. dollars. Even across the Atlantic, the comparison held: in 1967, musicians in 26 major U.S. symphony orchestras averaged about $6,900 a year.

 

It was natural, then, that the house he bought had beauty of the newest and most persuasive kind — lucid, built of glass, timber, and western light which seemed to promise a second life. He had bought it at the bright summit of his American life, in that brief interval between continents, before the next life stepped forward with a bill. Already by 1972 he began borrowing against the house, having switched to rock work and left a dependable income for settings where the air was louder, the applause more intoxicating, and the cheques — poor bashful things — had a way of arriving late or not arriving at all. Even after his hands had moved through some of the most colossal, thunderous records of 1971, the money replied in a smaller voice.

 

But whatever coin the English laid in Nicky's hand, and however (un)ceremonious the bargain, he would go back to London the following year to record on the English classics — Imagine, Exile on Main St., Who's Next, and leave the drift of Quicksilver behind. "In San Francisco, it's almost as if the music becomes secondary with some of them," he told Disc and Music Echo in December 1971. "You're supposed to start work in a studio at seven and nothing happens for four hours. Everybody gets loaded out of their minds and nothing gets done."

 

The mag gave him the full treatment: a long interview and a color portrait in which Hopkins sat like an outlaw from a half-invented frontier, wearing an exuberant Southwestern silverwork belt where native, Spanish colonial, and Mexican designs seemed to pour together in one bright current. Legs set apart, shirt open at the chest, hair falling to his collarbones, and skin taking on the deep bronze of a man who had been living too long under a California sun that promised revelation and delivered delay.

 

"San Francisco knocks me out. I don't think I'll ever leave," he says, and then, almost at once, in a typical Hopkins turn where contradiction arrives as second truth, adds: "I keep coming back to London because the music scene is here. I think the London musicians are the best in the world." Yet England, praised in one breath, was diminished in the next: "I don't like England as it is now. I don't like the weather or the people and I always have that feeling of being trapped here."

 

Between the two he moved like a man loyal to one country by temperament and to another by talent.

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Links:

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Jam sessions at the Matrix club, 1970: https://archive.org/details/matrix-1970-tuesday-night-jam-sessions-ksan-sf/08+All+Star+Jam+4.flac

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Jefferson Airplane at Dick Cavett Show with Nicky Hopkins, 1969: https://youtu.be/ZONP48yq80Y?si=q4MptObTt0v6pEQf

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Jefferson Airplane album Volunteers: https://open.spotify.com/album/5bTEcbj80W6kgh4y2FasRR

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Quicksilver Messenger Service live at Stony Brook College, April 5, 1970: https://youtu.be/HR1Ea4FzTq8?si=qpogDQQ5NPJ93uXW

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Quicksilver Messenger Service on August 15, 1969 at Sonoma State College: https://youtu.be/nXrPvHePueA?si=vlH0h3j-flY1pWyW