No More Changes:
Nicky Hopkins' War on Pop
by Alissa Ordabai
This is a chapter from Alissa Ordabai's upcoming book on Nicky Hopkins, a full-length study of the pianist’s life, music, and the era that shaped him.
"It was terrible. I wasn't interested. I needed money," Nicky Hopkins told Fernando Basabru, an Argentinian journalist, in Buenos Aires in August 1977 — dry as ash, without a cushion of self-mythology. And there you have No More Changes, dismissed by its own author, straight from the source. We could stop there. We probably should. But tilt the record — hold it at an angle to the light — and it begins to refract not just the disillusionment which overtook Nicky in 1975. You see a larger story: how a natural poet ended up living like a session man, gauging his value by what others failed to notice. And it shows, too, what the world did with his talent. Which is to say: far too little. Not nearly enough.
There are moments on this album — painterly, poetic, glimmering with that unique Hopkins iridescence. But they are islands in a sea of Vegas-lounge, middle-of-the-road sound, the kind of music which drips out of radio speakers in dentist offices and midwestern malls. And it is, stamped with his name, Nicky Hopkins, the pianist whose touch set fire to Exile and gave Imagine its weight. This is when you know it: the decision to let this album out was the most aggressive act of self-neglect in his career.
* * *
From the moment the needle drops, you are in a carpeted dance hall for the gently declining — mid-tempo, harmony straight off the rack, syruped melody. It's Huey Smith's "Sea Cruise," an R&B relic from 1959, reanimated here with an eerie wink. And it's a conscious, declarative choice — to let kitsch seize the wheel and drive straight through the front gates of Nicky's once-private idiom.
That Smith's band was actually called the Clowns isn't subtext — it's the punchline. And the premise. Nicky sings on this track too — the same voice that carried half-whispered magic on his previous solo album The Tin Man Was a Dreamer now drags itself across the notes, listless: "Old man rhythm is in my shoes... Ooh-wee, ooh-wee, baby..." You want to laugh, but mostly you want to weep. Because it's an inside job — not some outside hand, but by the artist himself, turning the blade inward and dragging it across the canvas.
The package says: Here I am, Nicky Hopkins, live and direct from the musical no man's land.
But it would be unfair — or at least incomplete — to pin the blame solely on Nicky. The album arose from a mixture of absences instead of strengths: no band to call his own, no songwriting partner or even a reliable life partner, no label exec with a cultural antennae. Add to this a body without surplus energy, and a market pivoting away from serious music. What resulted wasn't a record a singer would have made — it was a pianist's record that didn't put the piano at the center.
* * *
Part of the underlying wrongness beneath No More Changes was Nicky's frustration. His previous album, The Tin Man Was a Dreamer, had been a heartfelt bid — expressive, vulnerable. It was the record into which he poured his true self, and the world gave it nothing back. No More Changes feels, in turn, like a retaliation. The anti-Tin Man. Not a labor of love, but of something closer to contempt. As if Hopkins is saying: "Oh, you didn't want Tin Man? Fine. Try this. Try slop. Try schlock. Try plastic cheese with backing vocals." There is a strange theatricality to the album, as though he were staging a deliberate affront.
Leaning into clichés like a lounge pianist on a cruise ship gig, Hopkins reveals the half-cloaked contempt he'd always had for the general public's appetites. "A pack of morons," he'd said to Andrew Taylor of the Disc and Music Echo back in 1971 — speaking of the early-Sixties rock concertgoers who "didn't really know what was going on," — though conceded that things had since improved. This was his view of the masses, delivered in a classic Hopkins style: unvarnished, utterly devoid of the saccharine ritual by which British entertainers genuflect to "the great British public."
And that disdain became its own kind of trap. Trying to caricature the phantom — that fictitious chimera known as "average listener" — he ended up playing host to the spirit he despised. If The Tin Man stripped the masks away, No More Changes glued them on with industrial strength. The result was the sound of a man pretending not to know what he knows.
* * *
Mercury, his new record label, could have stopped this and given Hopkins direction — toward coherence, or at least self-recognition. But it didn't. This was mid-1970s America, and coherence was no longer on offer. Being a business, Mercury aimed to catch "middle America" buyers — men in shirtsleeves and women in curlers. They wanted the safe dollar, and they dressed the record accordingly. Hopkins, on his part, went along with that marketing logic. And this is why the album stares at you like a white flag.
The musicians who played on No More Changes constituted, in Hopkins' own estimation, less a band than a blur. "I don't remember. I called anyone," he told Basabru when asked for their names, flicking the whole affair away like the ash off a Dunhill. And this came from a man known for photographic memory — who could reel off personnel lists with surnames spelled out phonetically for journalists, even of sessions that never quite happened. But that lapse wasn't exactly forgetfulness: the lineup weren't his equals, not even colleagues. This was a slapdash pick-up band scrounged when he tried — in vain — to build a touring group for The Tin Man. The real players, the ones he respected — those were off elsewhere, tied up in other bands. What Hopkins got instead were musicians whose claim to fame, in hindsight, would be accidental proximity to him.
And then there was Lynda. By 1975, she wasn't just Mrs. Hopkins any more, but "manager" and "fellow musician." This is how the press began billing her, and you can chart the ascent: 1973, The Tin Man Was a Dreamer — no credit, her lyrics tucked quietly into the corners, something faintly domestic, a Sunday afternoon muse vibe. But by 1975 she is co-writer by name, and even a prominent visual presence on the flip side of the sleeve.
Officially, of course, Ron Strasner of Backstage Management was Hopkins' manager at the time. And he was one of those middleweight operatives the music business excels at breeding: specialized in negotiating bookings and building transactional bridges. In the 1970s he positioned himself at the convergence of the Detroit-Motown soul-rock crossover — see Rare Earth — and the emergent Afro-funk orbit of Parliament / Funkadelic. That was his range. He was not a producer and certainly not a visionary. Not a philistine exactly, but a man for whom genius was only visible once it had charted. For Strasner's type Nicky Hopkins was raw inventory — a "name" attached to transferable labor. The logic was: if a sideman has a cult aura, market him as a frontman. If that fails, cut losses and move on. It wasn't cynicism in the emotional sense, but structural cynicism of the middle tier of the music business. Strasner's failing was not malice but smallness. He and Nicky intersected, briefly, fatally — and the result was that Nicky never released a solo album again.
But while Strasner was bureaucratically managerial, Lynda calling herself "manager" had more weight to it than Nicky's giggling peers were prepared to admit. Her influence ran deeper — not strategic, but atmospheric. It's tempting, in moments of lazy symmetry, to draw a line to Anita Pallenberg and her effect on Keith Richards — proximity shaping aesthetic — but the comparison fails quickly. Lynda had none of Anita's grace, which, at Nellcôte, had given Exile on Main St. its shimmer. Anita didn't sing on that album, didn't play (despite being classically trained and able to read music), didn't direct sessions. But her presence was intelligent, dangerous, thrillingly alive. Exile carries her imprint in its atmosphere: Men played differently when Anita was in the house. So did Nicky. With Lynda, it was not oxygen but pressure.
Hopkins was porous, a barometric soul picking up the pressure front and the vibe of whoever was within his orbit. He soaked up the people around him, for better or worse. (And we did see the worst). So it's no surprise that just a few months after No More Changes sagged, Jerry Garcia managed to resurrect Nicky's creativity in September of that same year. Garcia didn't posture, didn't pester, didn't try to get his name on the credits as "manager-slash-muse-slash-midwife." He just played. And Hopkins responded to Garcia's sincerity with grace — with music that felt like walking through air, not trudging through mud in platform boots. As soon as Lynda was gone from his creative process in September 1975, the music became free again — melodically beautiful, structurally sound, emotionally weightless. It was the difference between a clenched jaw and a breathing body. And it's not just that the music got better — it reappeared.
***
By 1975, something had shifted in Nicky's marriage. What passed between them, what slipped, we shall never quite know. Perhaps the failure of The Tin Man, into which she too had poured some tender piece of herself, left Lynda as disenchanted as it did Nicky.
Only two years earlier, in June 1973, Al Rudis of Chicago Sun-Times had caught them in the early glow of their mirage. He wrote, dazzled, that they finished each other's sentences, their voices weaving in and out like the same thread. He wrote about meeting them as though he'd stumbled upon one of those rare pairings where the soul seems to echo outward and return in another's speech. Lynda, he noted with wonder, even looked a little like Nicky. And it didn't sound strange — not then. Because that, of course, is the secret signal of the truly bonded, people who love each other true, when their faces grow similar in ways deeper than genetics. You see it in old couples, who fall so deep into each other's rhythms they begin to resemble their own reflection.
But by the time No More Changes limped into the world, something had already curdled. The bloom was off, the rot was on, and you could smell it straight through the shrink-wrap. Lynda was now billing herself Nicky's equal, and out on the road, while touring the album, she let her husband — a man with Crohn's disease, major intestinal loss and just one kidney — start the day with a bowl of Rice Krispies. That was breakfast. Meanwhile she busied herself with the upward project of self-reclassification: from wife to peer, from soft muse to co-creator.
But Lynda, for all her posing, was an amateur, while the men at Mercury — those who held the reins of Nicky Hopkins' record — had no such excuse. They had seen great music, shepherded it, sold it. And yet, somehow, they let this pass. The cover showed their attitude. It is credited to Kosh and Strobel, John Kosh being the creative director at Apple Records who designed covers for Abbey Road, Let It Be, and the Who's Who's Next, and Hotel California. And perhaps that's the trouble: the names were impressive, but the output was often hit-and-miss when it came to artistic literacy. And in the case of a musician like Hopkins, Kosh was catastrophically mismatched.
With Nicky perched — ludicrously — atop the piano keys, arms raised like a Vegas cabaret host at curtain call, the sleeve of No More Changes wasn't just weak. It was a semiotic failure which shrank him and cheapened the very instrument that gave him meaning. This is where Kosh’s theatre background oozed in a particularly toxic way: the visual language of kitsch. The typeface — those swirly gold curlicues, straight off a wedding invitation sealed it — a stylistic miss so wide you understood why Pete Townshend once dismissed Kosh's similarly empty cover for Who's Next as "disgusting… no artistic consequence whatsoever."
What is more staggering is that the cover isn't even technically competent: Hopkins is in grayscale, the background is black, the logo is gold, and the keys are in hard black-and-white contrast. Even the tonal blending is poor — his lower body almost vanishes into the background, and the scale of the keys makes him appear tiny and floating. This compositing cheapened him — visually and symbolically. He becomes a cutout. And that's exactly what he wasn't.
You could say that this was l'air du temps — tone of the era, with the Stones having done their own turn of aesthetic exhaustion just before with It's Only Rock'n'Roll: a cover steeped in queasy pageant, mimicking the pomp of Russian coronation paintings — think Henri Gervex and Georges Becker. The difference is the Stones' cover contradicted the music. With No More Changes, the opposite happened — it reinforced the music, sealing it in the same tone. A man who could have been staged like the Cheshire Cat — grinning, fragmenting, bending time — was instead framed like Liberace's valet. While the music — with its weirdness, its 1950s eruptions, its sadness — wanted another house entirely: something foxed, surreal, timewormed.
Ethan Russell, the photographer, must have delivered a whole reel — and was not responsible for how the image was ultimately used. The one who should have exercised artistic oversight was Denny Rosencrantz, the Mercury A&R man in charge of the Hopkins deal. But Rosencrantz was not a builder of visions. He was a company man. He sat in that 1970s Los Angeles–Hollywood layer of Mercury / Phonogram A&R executives whose job was to shepherd projects, keep artists on schedule, and feed product into the system. He didn't originate aesthetics or build an empire like Clive Davis. He was a functional connector — someone who signed a few acts (Captain Beefheart's Mercury albums, The Runaways, Love Craft), liaised between producers and the label, and then moved laterally into artist management, following the standard career arc of LA A&R men once their label years ended. So no one watched over the Hopkins cover or the Hopkins album to say, "This isn't right." No one stepped in to say, "This man deserves better."
***
For anyone still baffled by the opening song, the track that follows — a piano instrumental called "The Ridiculous Trip" — makes it plain that it wasn't some fluke of taste. It's all here again: piano clear as glass, precise, full of gleaming trills and flawless articulation — and yet as predictable as a golden cookie cutter. Technical perfection pressed into the shape of nothing. This is music for cheerful seniors in community center halls, entertainment with its edges filed smooth. The meter is fixed, boxed-in — but what really catches at the chest, is an echo inside of the opening riff of "Rocks Off," the barnburner opener that lit up Exile four years earlier at Nellcôte. Here, it's a glimmer of what was — the pale shadow which haunts the track.
"Hanna" — a Jackie DeShannon "gem," marks the record's lowest point, a pastiche of radio sentiment so tone-deaf to the gospel lineage it gestures toward, that you nearly forget to wince at the singer's delivery: androgynous, childlike, almost primitively earnest. And when we arrive at the rhyme — "Hanna" with "bandana," offered without irony or rescue — it lands like a final, unintended flourish.
But of course it wasn't all ruin. There are luminous patches in this album when the real Hopkins comes through, just before the room forgets to breathe. If you are looking for the man himself, don't go to "Hanna" or "The Ridiculous Trip," or other tracks where he is trying to please the radio. Go instead to where his left hand builds the house and his right lets in the light — "Lady Sleeps," for instance — the haunting passage on the record. It isn't Classical piano, and it isn't Romantic piano, but just a beautiful phrase repeating and then resolving into something like grief, but so pure it feels elevated. It hovers above the rest of the album, above its utilitarianism and compromise, reaching down like a higher voice of forgiveness to himself. A wiser presence which speaks from another register. It didn't need the guitar or the organ — they only cluttered its clarity. Later that year, Nicky played it live with Garcia, and it was everything it should have been. Everything.
"No Time" is another gem — quiet and tender, touched with the kind of melancholy that feels half-remembered from early youth. Nicky plays and sings with unguarded poise, in full knowledge that the song's shape is laconic and flawless, each note placed by instinct rather than design. It shows how clear his mind could be when the noise fell away, how the piano, in his hands, could turn emptiness into elegance. There is something of late-Sixties London in it — that subdued radiance of the city which formed him, which mirrored his restraint, and which still held, somewhere deep beneath the smog and sorrow, the true timbre of his soul.
And then there is "Last Night's Changes" — a soul-lifter and a contradiction not only to the album's title, but to its entire mood. There is motion in it, forward, sure, the kind of sound that believes in its own direction. It carries a whiff of the future — not loud or brash, but touched with lightness of ambition. Some might say the organ takes up too much room, and maybe it does. But the piano is serious. The music spreads like a Turner canvas — bright sky giving way to gold, then to storm, then to dusk, until all that's left is the hush of stars. You can see it if you close your eyes: a ship lifting from the ground, passing through sky into something wider. This is how Nicky was dreaming in 1975 — or how he should have been allowed to dream. He should have built the house around that dream and thrown the rest away.
***
No More Changes is where Nicky's A-list collaborators were gone and players filed in. People with names you forget before you finish reading the sleeve. They weren't drafted in for stature, or vision, or even the inner liberty to give a glimpse of strangeness to a record to make it breathe. Their musicianship was the musical equivalent of a laminated menu — tidy, coated in something vaguely sticky. But you can't blame them — musicianship is mirror of the material itself, and the material was like a hungover best man: something borrowed, something blue, and precious little of what was true. At the center of it was Nicky, without a compass, without a co-writer. Not a soul to push him, provoke him, complete the musical sentence before he'd even thought it. Lennon and McCartney had each other, Stoller had Leiber, Richards had Jagger — fate handed them each a twin flame. But Nicky? No such luck. And say what you want about genius, but even genius needs someone to toss the match in.
The hard truth was that Nicky Hopkins could write songs — fine ones, true ones — but only when the world gave him a chance to breathe. When his circumstances were steadier, when the pain stayed at bay, then songs came out — lyrical, structured, fully his. That was how The Tin Man Was a Dreamer was born: out of a small seven-months space of calm. But life rarely gave him that space. His health betrayed him more often than it spared him. The work — endless, scattered — pulled him from studio to studio. He had no circle to hold him, no steady companionship to protect his talent. And a man cannot keep creating from nothing — even genius needs a place to land. That is why No More Changes collapses: there was no reservoir of original pieces to carry the album, only fragments and compromises.
If we ask why Nicky Hopkins never thought to study songwriting as a craft — to take lessons, to make it something deliberate and built — the most honest answer is that the world never gave him a reason to. From the moment he left the hospital at 21, he was in demand. Every studio, every bandleader wanted him as he was, almost greedily. There was no external pressure, no lost work, no "you need more craft" message from the people paying him. His life, from the start, confirmed that what he had was enough. And when a man's gift is answered at every turn, he doesn't stop to wonder how it might be made stronger — until the silence comes, and it is too late to ask.
***
The center of gravity was off on No More Changes, and Mercury didn't have the cultural competence to spot it. They did what every label does when they hear "solo" — push an artist toward songs with a vocal narrative. As though Nicky Hopkins had spent his life honing that exquisite, explosive piano voice just to be shoved behind a curtain while his own throat had to do a frontman cosplay.
Time was another factor. 1974, the year that should have been his own — the year he might have stayed home, quiet, turning inward — was chopped into other people's projects. He began the year in Munich, with the sessions for It's Only Rock'n'Roll. There are photographs from that time. They show a beautiful, haunted man — fine-boned, sharp, rings on every finger, a face caught between strength and torment. The pain of his illness and the wound of the crumbled Columbia deal lived close to the surface. And there was his own genius, restless and unspent, pressing at him from the inside. You can see all of it there, in the set of his eyes: the endurance, the fatigue, and that faint, unspeakable knowledge that the future was shifting under him. As Morrison had said a few years before, "The future's uncertain and the end is always near." Nicky Hopkins lived with that truth every day, and still went on playing.
In 1974 the world couldn't stop asking for him. There were sessions with Peter Frampton, Martha Reeves, John Lennon in New York for Walls and Bridges, Ringo Starr in Los Angeles, and the strange, crowded Flash Fearless project in London, where Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, and John Entwistle each took their turn at the spectacle. And when the year drew to its close, he was back again in Munich, at Musicland Studios, for the Black and Blue sessions with the Stones.
He didn't play live much that year. There were a few dates with Martha Reeves (a fellow Strasner client) — Atlanta, September, the Electric Ballroom — enough for the papers to take notice, to print a few lines about the quiet Englishman behind the keyboard. But the truth was simpler and heavier. The constant travel, the endless movement from city to city, from one record to another, left no room for thinking over his own work.
A real record needed continuous days where he would live inside its weather, with days strung together, each holding up the next. But Hopkins was commuting across atmospheres and bringing the wrong air home. Without a steady schedule and a house band to settle into, there is no shared continuity of ideas. So on No More Changes each track stood alone, and the record never came together as a single thing.
And then there was his health. It hung over everything he did, though no critic ever wrote of it as more than a footnote. Yet it was not a small thing. It shaped his music, his choices, his very way of being. With Crohn's disease, pain comes like weather — some days mild, others merciless. And on the bad days, it doesn't take away talent — it takes away daring. Chronic pain trains a brain to pick the short path: what can be done today without a fight. On pain days you don't open the center and don't go where the art really lives, because it costs more strength than you have to spend. When energy is a ration, you choose "doable" arrangements and "finished-sounding" textures because they close the loop today.
Hopkins could still play night after night on most difficult, demanding tours through the kind of pain that would have sent another man home. He could do it because playing for others was his natural state. It was what he knew — to sit at a piano and lift someone else's song into the air. That kind of giving cost him, but it also sustained him. It was service, and he was built for it. But building his own album was another matter. To defend his standards would have meant saying no to sessions, fighting label people, scrapping songs, and risking a flop. He didn't have the health for that fight. And his "managers" didn't have the wisdom.
And finally, the patchwork masquerade of No More Changes let him avoid the central terror of artistic life — sustained self-exposure. The arrangements, guests, genre templates were a way to dodge sitting too long with his own center until it burns. A session musician can always say the song or the singer limited him, but to accept full responsibility for authorship means you have no alibi if things go wrong. And to avoid the possibility of visible failure, he chose guaranteed smallness. He may have feared that if he staked his truth and failed, he would be annihilated. Better to fail with something half-hearted than risk being rejected when speaking from the core. In that sense, No More Changes can be read as a defensive failure, an unconscious strategy to avoid a prospect of putting everything in and discovering it wasn't enough. In other words, the album was the sound of a man protecting himself from the terror of being fully seen.
***
Hopkins was sharp, quick, reliable at the piano. Play him a sketch once and he would spin it into something radiant. He improvised with the exactitude of a classical mind and remembered harmonic movements like a trained composer. This wasn't some scatterbrained savant act. It was focus — pure, disciplined, muscular. But off the bench, the focus failed him. His health: mismanaged. His career: rudderless. His days: loose, leaky, unclaimed. While working for others, he was laser-focused; in his own life — disorganized. And when it came to representing himself — not the Stones, not Lennon, himself — the reverence for music vanished. He compromised. So the album reads as self-disrespect. Self-disrespect disguised as disrespect for audience.
***
But let's consider, with cold eyes, the context — what was actually happening to rock in 1975. Because it wasn't just Hopkins sleepwalking into kitsch on his own, surrendered to fatigue and cynicism. In 1975 kitsch was having its coronation: Fleetwood Mac cooing, Queen discovering the joys of music-hall camp, the Stones bouncing around in soap bubbles in sailor suits like a RADA end-of-term showcase. Marc Bolan, Slade, Sweet, the Bay City Rollers: the air reeked of kitsch dressed up as futurism.
So Hopkins, for all his sensitivity, or perhaps because of it, gave 1975 exactly what was in: a safe, soft record. Yes, punk was grumbling in the basement, and jazz-rock was busy doing handstands in 17/8, but rock's main current — the soul-core of it — had slouched backwards into the arms of pop. Even Led Zeppelin were writing songs that sounded like something you might hear leaking out of a bingo hall — "Night Flight," "Down by the Seaside" were miles from the cosmic doorway they once tried to force open. Even their grand gesture, "Kashmir," sounded like a Broadway overture: incense and dry ice, but also a lighting rig. So when Hopkins reached for middle-of-the-road, he wasn't falling behind — he was right on cue. He met it on purpose, on time, and at the door.
In 1975 the dream of the counterculture hadn't merely died — it had been disclaimed. Bands and execs alike stopped pretending otherwise. They ran, panting, back to pop — not just back to Mum and Dad's record collection, but to Mum and Dad's values.
And it's telling — symbolically neat — that Hopkins dedicated this record to his mother: the woman who sat him at the piano at three, who marveled as he began picking out tunes at four, and who filled the house with Sinatra and his kind — the velvet-voiced, sentimental crooners. The kind of music that left a forever imprint on both Nicky's taste and his future musical blind spots. From them he learned a certain grammar: soft, tidy, non-transgressive. That Nicky absorbed this doesn't mean he was limited by it — he never was — but it means that this code of sentiment in his playing, especially in ballads, surfaced time and again as polished pathos even in some of his serious work: "You Are So Beautiful" being a textbook example. By 1975, on his own No More Changes, that buried inheritance — the ballroom, the crooner, the genteel ache of the aspirational classes — rose up again.
***
The counterculture, of course, didn't collapse all of a sudden in 1975 — it had been quietly decaying for years.
Hopkins arrived in California too late to take part in the first serious steps of psychedelia, which was rock's sharpest, most artistically radical edge. By the time he sat at the keys beside Grace Slick, it was 1969. Woodstock, which he played, and which is now lacquered in myth, in reality marked the beginning of the cultural downturn. On Airplane's Volunteers he played beautifully — perfectly — but within the frame of tradition. "I listened to Volunteers once or twice afterward, but didn't like it," he told Basabru in 1977. He knew he'd joined Airplane not in flight but in descent — heading back to the parlor, the porch, and the politics of the possible.
Which is interesting, historically speaking, because only a year earlier on Beck-Ola, on "Rice Pudding," Hopkins was doing the opposite — locking into Beck's demolition of blues-rock, driving it to the edge where structure starts to convulse. That's the opposite to parlor piano — it's modernist intensity, sound pushed against its own tradition, as advanced as anything in "art music." And with Jefferson Airplane, the same man who'd once made the blues detonate, now tamed psychedelia's sprawl, giving it a harmonic hearth. His piano did no longer tear — it tidied. And that was not his impulse — it was Airplane's own. Sustaining "expanded consciousness" and at the same time keeping the other foot in the music business proved too heavy a lift for the band.
Beck wanted Hopkins as a co-conspirator in rupture — push harder, tear it open, take the music to the point where it begins to come apart. The Airplane, by contrast, wanted glue by 1969: keep it together at Woodstock, provide harmonic scaffolding on Volunteers. Each role activated a different side of him. With Beck, he edged toward the abyss. With the Airplane, he settled into petit-bourgeois ballast — not transcendence, but tasteful containment.
On Surrealistic Pillow the guitars and voices hover, drone, loop — a trance pitched toward interior revelation. Hopkins would have loved to participate in that — in risk, brinkmanship, in sustained tension, in the sound of holding the moment open until it breaks through to something beyond. But by the time he got to San Francisco, the portal had already closed, and what remained was the afterglow.
And who knows — had he played on Surrealistic Pillow, that album which dissolved the line between art and life (the avant-garde ideal Bürger later called "art as life-praxis"), perhaps that memory would have made him pause before approaching No More Changes the way he did. But even the Airplane couldn't hold on to what Pillow represented. It asked too much — to live at the brink.
***
The radicalism of Surrealistic Pillow or Exile on Main St. was in the raw inner experience expressed without compromise. These weren't just records — they were psychological states. And the existential stance could not be sustained because it didn't come with instructions. If offered no method, only a way of being. The drug intake, the lifestyle implosion, the instability of the self were not side-effects — they were structural requirements. And of course, nobody could keep it up as a daily practice. To continue would have required accepting that popular music had become metaphysical art, demanding seriousness equal to philosophy or high literature. And the broader culture did not want such radicalism from popular music.
This left rock musicians with two choices: personal martyrdom or retreat. And rock, being rock, blinked. It chose pop hooks, personality cults, kitsch spectacle — because that was less terrifying than staring down the long corridor of inner truth. Regression to pop was the escape route from psychic ruin. For a flickering moment, rock threatened to become a permanent avant-garde of interiority, a true art of the self. But the culture itself pulled back, frightened of what it had opened.
But what is really tragic is that such direct, absolute soul-state as Surrealistic Pillow — or even Exile on Main St. — never had a serious scholar in its corner. No one to amplify, explain, or champion counterculture's achievements — when it stood at artistic and spiritual edge, at the highest precipice of truth — to the global culture.
There have been others, of course — Rimbaud, van Gogh — who created from the same edge where art and real life blur and burn. But they lasted years. Surrealistic Pillow didn't make it past the first breath. 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 fan talk and culturally illiterate rock journalists into marginality.
However destructive their personal lives, Rimbaud's and van Gogh's work still ended up being absorbed into the safety net of high art: publishers, collectors, academies, museums. Their stance was named, classified, debated, and stabilized into a school. Airplane had none of that. They worked inside the ad-world of pop — labels, agents, managers — a system hostile to seriousness and deaf to anything without a chart position. And there was no intellectual class waiting to translate their work for the world. That's quiet tragedy of rock: at its most radical, it was orphaned. Modernism had Stein, Apollinaire, Greenberg. Rock had Rolling Stone magazine.
***
In 1965, Hopkins played piano on "My Generation," which was everything rock promised: urgency, humor, a defiant refusal to compromise. By contrast, No More Changes, a decade later, feels processed through a machinery of cultural administration. Not just a failure of taste, but a symptom of a cultural defeat: the moment when rebellion became paperwork. The same story ran through Nicky's life: his continuing marriage to Lynda was another slow shrug of defeat. Both spheres showed the same inability to defend himself. In his marriages, in choices of managers, in many of his collaborations, he attached himself downward rather than upward. Some men are built with strong walls around them. Nicky wasn't. That is why he gave gold to everyone else and left nothing behind for himself.
And there was also, always, his mischievousness — as anyone who truly knew him will tell you. For all his sharpness of mind, he was a man who had never entirely shut the door on childhood. This playfulness gave his piano a lightness no conservatoire graduate could match. But it also meant he treated serious matters — contracts, records, marriage — with the same unseriousness.
Third, unlike Jagger, Page, or even Elton, Hopkins never sought to lead. He never organized a band around himself, never demanded the spotlight. He wanted to play, not to command. Modesty endeared him to peers but doomed him as a solo figure — left him defenseless in a world that rewards the loudest voice. A more ambitious man would never have let No More Changes reach the world in the shape it did. Hopkins did. And that, too, was part of who he was.
Hopkins was a man of the moment, not of the plan. He could summon brilliance in an instant, but he could not structure his life. His finest work came in bursts — in the flash of a jam, the unrepeatable magic of a take caught on the wind, the improvisation that lived and vanished in the same breath. It also explains why his long-term output as a composer was fragile. His nature was instant invention, not sustained rock song authorship.
***
Nicky's nature can be described as clearly as anyone's. He was open, trusting, mischievous, improvisational, both composer and session man, both luminous child and cynical adult. Each side negates and deepens the other. Together they form his character. His genius and his undoing both sprang from the same root: openness without defense. That means whenever you try to define him, another truth slips out of your hands. This quicksilver slipperiness makes him feel like a dangerous object to hold.
And finally — most seriously — Nicky Hopkins lived in the borderland between mass culture and high art. That borderland is always unstable because this is where meanings blur and allegiances collapse. It inherits the contempt of both sides: the classical world dismissing him as popular, the rock world treating him as ornamental. To handle his story is to handle that instability itself. That's why it feels volatile.
What he should have done on No More Changes, had he followed the deeper rhythm of his own being, was to refuse to involve mediocrities. He should have placed the piano where it belonged — at the center of each track. Let vocals be color, not chassis. That he let the piano drift to the margins on so many tracks — recalls a moment in a Leonardo da Vinci's letter to a nobleman, full of military engines and clever siege designs, only at the end, as an afterthought, hurriedly mentioning that he, after all is a painter — as though it were a secondary skill. Hopkins in the same way forgot his own center. He should have thrown half those songs to the wind, let them scatter. Then begun again, in slow solitude. He should have slept, eaten, taken the medicine the doctors gave him. He should have stood still long enough to hear the truth within him rise. He did not. And the album bears the wound.
***
The record came out in May 1975, and by June, Nicky was already on the road promoting it. On August 1, The Atlanta Journal dutifully reported from the July 30 show at the Electric Ballroom: six-piece band, Hopkins on keys and vocals, Lynda on backing vocals and "percussion," and a clutch of Stones in attendance: Jagger, Richards, and Wood, in town for their Omni gig. "I've had a good time," Nicky said. You suspect he meant it. Briefly.
Soon after it was over. The Houston Chronicle, August 15: weekend dates cancelled. Reason given, in Nicky's own voice — and to his credit, it wasn't dressed up: "Too tired." Nine years later, to Bob Carlton of The Birmingham News, he elaborated: "I like being part of a band. I don't like carrying the whole weight. I tried it, and didn't feel comfortable. I put a band together to promote the 1975 album. It lasted three weeks, and that was it. Didn't like it. Didn't want it. I don't know, it just doesn’t feel comfortable." Then he laughed.
"Carrying the whole weight" meant being responsible for the lot — the bookings, the rehearsals, the presentation, the mood. He had seen what that burden did to people like Jagger and Garcia. He wanted to play, not run. His tone suggests: I know I am supposed to have a clean, professional answer, but all I have is a feeling: it didn't feel right. Which is a quintessentially Hopkins construction: Truth over trajectory.
And already by the end of September 1975, barely four months after No More Changes was released, Nicky Hopkins performed arguably the finest, most liberated music of his entire life. Those nights with Jerry Garcia don't sound like a man flattened by mediocrity. They sound like a man reborn. His left hand had never been steadier, his comping more elastic, his solos more structurally expressive. The intimacy, clarity, and liveliness of his playing with Garcia in those weeks show not a man in retreat but a man standing again at the very precipice of musical truth. Unguarded and entirely himself.
No More Changes was a studio artifact — built in fragments, surrounded by poor collaborators, governed by weak industry logic. The Garcia shows were live: no intermediaries, no marketing logic, no Lynda. Just Nicky, a piano, a band with ears, and the night. The music was there all along — undiminished, waiting. And the tragedy of No More Changes was a failure of frame, of company, of self-protection, not erosion of talent. The Hopkins you hear on the Jerry Garcia Band album Let It Rock is fully alive. He just needed someone to hold the frame with respect. Someone who would see that he was delicate, elusive, unguarded, but also one of the most extraordinary pianists the 20th century ever heard.
