EastWest Review

People thought it was going to come down like lightning — the first solo record by the piano man who, by 1973, had grown into near-myth. Who had given shape and lift to the great albums of the age: the Stones, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Lennon. The musician who was not only the bridge that carried classical music into rock, but who was the break itself between old tradition and counterculture.

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So the expectation was voltage. Fans and fellow players imagined a symphonic drop from the sky, a kind of record that plants a flag and dares you to move it. Instead, The Tin Man Was a Dreamer — Nicky Hopkins’ first serious solo album — floated in and stunned everyone with half of the tracks barely raising their voice, glowing like fragments of half-remembered childhood dreams. No strut, no pose — just a voice that said: You can all drop your costumes now.

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And in the era when rock shouted loud, this album did something radical: it came to cleanse your soul. It took you to a quiet room, poured you a glass of water, and reminded you that you didn’t have to twist yourself into someone else to deserve love. Don’t need to trade away the truth of who you really are.

 

The album offered no ego, not even performance of modesty. And it was strange in the way kindness is strange in the shark tank of professional rock.

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Of course, by then Hopkins had absorbed his own lessons: from Lennon in bare, earnest humility on Imagine; from Jagger and Richards — since 1967 — in rolling sarcasm; from Brian Jones — in atmospheric self-dissolve while working on The Degree of Murder soundtrack. He’d taken it all in, the whole syllabus of what rock could be. But on this record he was not trying to be anything but himself. Because he had already been everything and came back as Nicky Hopkins. And this loyalty to self — that refusal to outgun or outshine — makes the album radical in a way you can’t replicate.

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Hopkins took five months to record The Tin Man — from September 1972 to January 1973. He was working on it mostly at weekends — first recording at Apple Studios in London and then mixing at Wally Heider in California. The weekdays he gave to George Harrison's Living in the Material World and the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup (where recording took place in Jamaica — a location which left him weary, drained, irritable). Harrison’s album was mellow to the point of wallpaper-like and Goats Head sessions, by contrast, brought out something up from the pit in Jagger and Richards — a sound from before the cultural grid: pre-coded, pre-human. All of it was later scrubbed out of the final mix, but that surge of the unconscious — groans, howls, chants, mutterings — can be found on bootlegs which carry that animal breath.

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Placed between the two poles of those albums, The Tin Man emerged entirely unperturbed by either — insulated both from Harrison’s Krishna-inspired benignity and from the Stones' descent into the primal. But that was always Hopkins's way, and more than that, it was what people asked of him: to give from the center of himself what the music needed.

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Harrison, as well as Mick Taylor, Bobby Keys, and Jim Price — the old Stones crowd — and Klaus Voormann, among others, are playing on the album. (The Japanese pressing misfires by crediting Ringo Starr). Jerry Lynn Williams, a Texan songwriter who would later hand over a few gems to Clapton, Robert Plant, B. B. King, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, is listed as co-writer on four tracks: “Banana Anna,” “Dolly,” “Speed On,” and “Lawyer’s Lament.” And you can hear the difference, especially on the first three. When Williams comes in, Hopkins allows the walls of his private room to swing open, and it feels like Grand Central Station suddenly entering a cottage in Cornwall, the sound of the collective where once there was only the sound of the tide.

 

Hopkins knew it, and he wasn't the least bit reluctant about it. "The album is very commercial," he would say, matter-of-fact, in interviews. He understood that his idiosyncrasy, and those moments when he deliberately let the market in, were both ways of making the work saleable. And the album certainly would have sold more if not for the untimely twist of corporate fate: Clive Davis, the Columbia executive who had signed Hopkins and backed the record, was abruptly dismissed just as the album appeared. With Davis gone, the support for The Tin Man simply evaporated, and what might have been a proper run was cut short almost at once.

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The names of the album were big, its spirit — at times gentle, at times a precisely detonated cluster of energy. But the whole gang held back from empty show. And that holding back is what marks the finest musicians from the rest.

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The opener, "Sundown in Mexico," is a prelude where Hopkins lays the cards on the table. He tells you who he is, where he's from, and what he's made of — Romanticism, straight out of the classical tradition. The melody speaks like a voice: phrases emerging and then breaking off, suspended, before the next line continues the thought. These are almost vocal lines, lucid and economical, and the piece stops short just before the final word. And you immediately know that this the statement: I will not give you the whole of me; You may hear the turn of thought, but not its end. You sense the reason at once: the end is private, sealed away in his lifelong dialogue with God, about the illness that wrecked his body, the fate of being always the sideman, the marriage that exhausted him.

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But more than anything, the Romantic piano of "Sundown in Mexico" declares his awareness of what it means to stand as a man of the classical world. It means knowing that phrasing is the primary carrier of affect. It means knowing that shaping of line, articulation, resolution — or sudden refusal to resolve — is never merely musical, but a stance toward reality.

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"Waiting for the Band," which follows, is English to the point of ache. It is poetry made of the ordinary, heartbreak drawn from the mundane, reaching for something he knows he can’t quite reach — a dream perhaps, or a memory. The voices — his and Williams’ — that carry it are private and unpleading, hovering above the song with grown men’s lyricism that somehow still preserves the dreaming child within them. Inside — sorrow, wrapped in wistfulness, and never in display. Hopkins sings beautifully because he is serious, and because there is no poise, no claim to power.

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In its composition the song moves perfectly — poetic, but never without momentum, enough of it so that Hopkins could have carried it on three times longer. And the fact that he doesn’t is astonishing in its restraint. There is no grand, swelling solo at the end, only the piano — clear and pure as poured water — refusal to claim authority.

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"Waiting for the Band" doesn't set out to dazzle, or even to be admired. It simply places something gentle and true into the world and lets it speak for itself. Here Hopkins is not showing mastery, doesn’t assert cool, he doesn’t proclaim, “Look at me — I am clever.” And what is most staggering about this song is its absence of ego. Not absence of it in the Syd Barrett way — pre-individuated, abstract. And not in a sense in which Brian Jones steps up with his flute on “Ruby Tuesday” which wanders like smoke, without selfhood at all, like memory of season. It’s a different kind of ego-less-ness — deeper, starker, wiser. It’s ego that knows itself and decides to step back because it knows too much about itself.

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Many English bands have tried to tap into this feeling, tried to catch it and hold it, but none had set it down as plainly, or struck so directly at the heart, as Hopkins. Here is the sacred essence of the English soul — its most intricate expression, for all its seeming simplicity — not only in this record, but in the entire era. And the effect is like a cleansing — soul detox.

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The version of "Edward" that comes next is something Nicky first wrote in his days with Quicksilver Messenger Service, a California band he joined for a time and returned to now and then. A piece of this strength never belonged to Quicksilver — they didn’t have the weight for it. Nicky gave it to them out of generosity, and they put it out under the name "Edward, the Mad Shirt Grinder." But Nicky himself would later say that it found its true shape here, on Tin Man.

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This is Hopkins in full flight, maybe the best he ever was: a work that carries Romantic piano, jazz, and rock, and holds them together with a sweep of force and imagination that no one else even tried. The riff at its center is gorgeously driving, binding all those worlds together into a panoramic vision of music that feels centuries wide. And the heartbreak is that he never chased this line of composing further, never built the future it pointed toward.

 

Bobby Keys’ saxophone does here what John Cipollina’s guitar never did in the Quicksilver version: it lifts the whole thing and sends it soaring. You can feel Keys pointing toward Tattoo You — a lot of which, let’s remember, was written in the same time capsule as The Tin Man. Harrison drifts in with some tasteful guitar noodling, but the real adventure is Hopkins. He’s the one pushing at the theme from every side, testing it from every vantage, turning it over through different prisms, discovering in each refraction a new perspective. His crystalline trills, the conservatoire-grade chops, the sheer nerve of his technique married to expansive compositional imagination — it's the stuff that shakes your soul awake.

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“Dolly,” which follows, is a tribute to Hopkins’ wife at the time whose real name was Lynda but who chose the monicker to signal something she wanted people to see in her — perhaps glamor, perhaps an attempt to put a feminizing varnish over a character which was far from gentle. But whatever was the reason for Lynda becoming Dolly, Hopkins is most certainly not concerned with it when he sings her name in a way which makes it the most intimate, most heartbreakingly ethereal part of the song — hauntingly beautiful, and sincere to the depth that makes your heart stop for just a moment.

 

It’s not Lennon’s playful call “Oh Yoko,” it’s not Jagger’s outward-directed, desperate call “Angie” (both of which Hopkins had played on beautifully) — it’s something more haunting, more vivid, more real, the way his call “Dolly” curls inward — as if fearful of what would happen if she were to respond with her entire being.

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And then the song shifts strangely. After that invocation, the music drifts into a mild, pretty trope — a lovely surface, but empty, a cliché burnished smooth, with none of the depth of that first call.

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Williams had a hand in writing it, and it shows — the melody’s contour is the kind that can be dropped into dozens of mid-tier 1970s pop songs without anyone noticing. Elton John’s arranger Dal Newman added strings to it (slightly kitschy, slightly factory-produced), and so a song that was meant to be intimate ends up being the work of three men. And Hopkins doesn’t mind. The reason why the song is forgettable is not because it is poorly made, but because it is not his own — it comes from what he thought he owed Lynda, a surface obligation — diluted, half-hearted. He could have made this into something larger, sure, — the melody could carry a more serious arrangement, a grander setting — but he chose to leave the song small.

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What is most striking is the displacement at its core: to address his wife, Hopkins brings in two other men, as though even the gesture required mediation, as though intimacy itself had to be translated into a language acceptable for public hearing. He never returned to the song, never sought to deepen or revise it. It remains a kind of resigned sigh, the expression of a man who longs to love but whose truest needs are humbler and more elemental: nourishment, quiet, and the assurance of care.

 

Lynda’s famous rages turned the music scene off her, but she fought Nicky in the same breath as she fought for him — squaring up to the Stones to demand they pay him properly, badgering Columbia to give his record the push it deserved. Like most women tethered to great rock men of that era, she was brushed off, laughed at, treated as a nuisance. Anita Pallenberg raged the same way when feeling disempowered, but Anita had her cosmopolitan armour — her art world connections, her pedigree, her own output — to make people take her at least half-seriously. Lynda didn’t have those things. And Nicky, with the gentleness that was both his strength and his curse, pitied her for it.

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Lynda knew that in the world she’d married into, the only real currency was creativity. So she tried, with gusto, to wedge herself into The Tin Man — contributing to lyrics, inviting her friend John Hunt to paint Nicky for the cover, telling journalists that her name wasn’t credited because another Linda — McCartney — already had the wifely-collaborator slot on the scene and she didn’t want to look like a copy. What she wanted was to be co-significant, and that’s dangerous in a world that only rewards brilliance. Her shouting at Nicky was the sound of someone who knew, deep down, she would never be what he was.

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The contrast between Linda and Lynda could hardly have been starker, or more unintentionally comic. Even after Nicky’s death, Lynda’s fury did not abate; where most might have gone inward to reflect and explain, she simply pressed harder. It was grief, sure — but grief directed less at loss than at absence: the absence of the creative life she had yearned for, and that, despite proximity, had never truly been hers.

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Since then, Lynda has been flattened into a cartoon villain by writers unwilling, or perhaps unable, to manage complexity, and who saw only meanness of spirit where there was really frustration. Her screaming became rock-and-roll lore, but almost no one — apart from Hopkins himself, who never spoke badly of her — stopped to recognize that the noise was also an attempt: to convince herself that the relationship still breathed, and to make the outside world take notice of Nicky Hopkins. Part of it could have been the widespread belief of the 1970s that rage and drama are marks of bohemian freedom, bravery, even sophistication.

 

Some people at the time saw Anita Pallenberg rage and thought it chic, missing that it was, in fact, helpless — the aftertaste of post-war Europe. Lynda’s fury, by contrast, sprang from another soil: not Rome, but New Jersey — without a network to hold her. Hopkins might have fashioned "Dolly" into an anthem for her, but he chose not to. But despite it all, one thing seems certain: had Lynda stood in that hospital room in 1994, when doctors were failing him, she would have screamed the roof down to bring him help.

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But before we leave Lynda, it is only fair to grant her this: without her, the recognition and the joy — and the sheer relief — might not have been so complete when her opposite entered Nicky’s life. Vanna Bonta — actress, writer, inventor — was everything Lynda was not, and everything Nicky was: a figure of her own professional standing, of a public reputation, with a network of allies, an artistic language, intellectual authorship, cultural capital, and, above all, her own center of gravity. Her inner child met his with such guileless directness that those who saw them together called them "the innocents." The glow that surrounded them was in part the radiance of deliverance — the light that followed after the storm Nicky had survived to reach it.

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Vanna was a woman who didn’t need to own a man to validate herself. They were equally strange, equally singular: both played the piano, both given to spiritual imaginings, both carried fierce, childlike idealism, refused to treat love as a bargain. The granddaughter of a Florentine knight and author Luigi Ugolini (who found in the poor farmers around him truer gentlemen than any in the city) and a niece of an Italian children's writer Lidia Ugolini, Bonta was of continental artistic heritage. She had enthralling stories to tell about her childhood — of journeys across Italy and Egypt, and of her time in Thailand while her father was stationed there. He had served with the 11th Airborne Division, one of the first American units to leap into hostile skies, parachuting into fire, men who were called, with a kind of solemn irony, the “Angels.”

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“Star in my life” Bonta called Nicky Hopkins in her book of poetry Shades of the World published in 1985, “I treasure your goodness.” And she goes on saying in that book about 1982, the year they met: “I pack them in / A million moments into each / And I swear / I won’t forget / I won’t forget.”

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Hopkins was capable of raucous piano statements — big, bold, dancing, expansive. He sounds like this on Exile — take “Rocks Off” or “Rip This Joint” where he burns the house down, holding up the entire structure of these tracks. “Speed On,” though, is nowhere near that league. Williams half-sings, half-shouts over a jumble of male and female voices, Harrison tosses in a loopy little solo, and the strange part is that Hopkins doesn’t even take one. What you get instead is a track that doesn’t just sound dated, but sounds like a parody of some bad early-1970s habits — faux party vocals, communal yowling, everybody trying to sound like they’re having fun. It’s an awkward anomaly of the album, a specimen of that early-1970s barroom rock where R&B subtlety got replaced by sanitized bravado. And it’s a reminder of how even great musicians like Hopkins could be undermined by label expectations, collaborators who aren’t your real friends, or the ambient pollution of the era. It’s a rare moment where the Tin Man for a moment becomes Tin Ear.

 

Which is why “Pig’s Boogie” hits like a shock to the system by comparison. This is the Hopkins boogie-woogie masterpiece, the one that shrugs off the fashions, sneers at the fake affectations of the early 1970s, and throws down against illness, against industry expectations, even against time itself. It’s just sheer release: virtuosity turned into light, the sound of life refusing to fold. Here is Nicky the cat — loose, fierce, full-throttle — his right hand tossing high notes like sparks and his left hammering out chords with a kind of authority that makes you grin and think at the same time. And yes, the title comes from one of his cats, Pig, itself named for the gloriously ridiculous pig of P. G. Wodehouse novels.

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His interplay with Bobby Keys is a gas — natural, easy, nothing forced. Keys rides the sparkling drive of the track sounding so childishly playful you never near him this way on any of the Stones records. It’s the sound of friends pushing each other along, and the real drag is that the cut ends just as it feels ready to really lift off. Hopkins had already pulled this trick once, back on “Sundown in Mexico,” and here he does it again—setting you up, then pulling the rug before the jam can sprawl. If you want to hear what “Pig’s Boogie” can really do, though, go to Let It Rock, his 1975 live record with Jerry Garcia. There it stretches out into a monster, Hopkins chasing it as far as his imagination will carry him. That’s the way it ought to be.

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“Banana Anna” lands in the same file as “Speed On” — a flashy boogie on the surface, but underneath it’s all formula and goof. Williams sings it with cartoon grit and nasal twang. The heart that should be there isn’t, but what we get instead are some stylish Bobby Keys solos doing their best to dress it up. Hopkins himself barely gets a look in — his solo skitters on the high notes, more doodle than declaration.

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“The Dreamer” is another story entirely. It shrugs off all the rock-star trappings before it was even cool to do that — music and lyric both stripped bare, not just of glamor but of the usual need to convince you the guy singing is fascinating. The track floats in a kind of “Fool on the Hill” haze — viscous, woozy psychedelia — and opens with half-comic, half-exhausted lines: “Lord, it’s awful / God, I’m tired / Useless waiting.” What makes them strange is that he is not abandoned, and nor is Lynda, who sits beside him as co-writer. “Dreaming of you but what can I do” is just one side of him talking: the private, solitary side that lived more in imagination than real-world fulfillment.

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His singing here is tender, lyrical, almost too delicate for 1973 — it belongs in 1967. And it confirms the title: he is, quite literally, a dreamer. The song lays bare the paradox of Hopkins — a musician capable of summoning grandeur and brilliance almost effortlessly, yet choosing in this moment on his first serious solo record to turn so far inward that he becomes nearly opaque.

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That lurch — from the barnstorm of “Pig’s Boogie” to the hushed drift of “The Dreamer” — is what makes the record, and Hopkins himself, compelling. He wasn’t afraid of sounding naïve if the alternative was sounding false.

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“Lawyer’s Lament” is one of the real paradoxes on the record. It starts with a piano intro that’s flat-out gorgeous — clear as Chopin, aching but lucid — and then rolls into a beautifully shaped melody, arches rising and falling with heartbreaking grace. For once the arrangement actually does its job and Mick Taylor drops in some sparse pedaled guitar that gives it that Tattoo You shimmer everyone swoons over. Hopkins could have blown this up into something massive, but he holds back. Maybe he thought this was the shrewd, “commercial” move.

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Hopkins' voice here is unmistakably a singer's voice, though one that refuses the stagecraft. It sits close to the speaking register, clear and even. No cultivated inflections, no rasp borrowed from the blues, no tremor lifted from folk song. The phrases flow without ornament, each note carried cleanly, but this lightness is not frailty — it’s control, even when he lets his sidelong hiss on the ‘s’ slip through — a trace of a lateral lisp that makes every line sound half-smiling, half-subverted.  He never forces the tone, never opens the throat for effect, yet the sound lands with unexpected directness. It is a voice that makes you feel its plain humanity entire, and the effect, in its candor, is uncanny.

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Musically, the song is one of Hopkins’ loveliest: spare, lyrical, touched with just enough mourning. It could have carried words of Schubertian weight, but instead the lyrics give us a caricature: a lawyer feeding empty lines to a client. The disconnect feels absurd — almost sabotage, but at the same time this is Hopkins saying: "Don’t take me for a confessional troubadour. I will not open up to you."

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Hopkins’ restraint here isn’t that American brand of false modesty. It’s English to the bone — T. E. Lawrence, Britten, Elgar, even Auden. In a rock world dominated by American-style “sincerity,” his whole style was oppositional, practically a cultural rebuttal. He knew he could write devastating music, but he had no interest in putting on the “serious singer-songwriter” persona. So he armored the melody with ridiculous words. And it’s a very English joke: the Bertie Wooster / Jeeves move where a grand form gets wasted on a trivial subject. A beautiful melody undermined with absurd text. You can almost see him and Lynda giggling over Wodehouse and then deciding to slip the gag into a record.

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The problem is, what works in private doesn’t always translate when you stamp it onto vinyl. Domestic whimsy doesn’t equal universal charm, unless handled with extreme craft. Had they gone abstract — images, atmospheres, surreal fragments — the collision with the music might’ve opened into mystery. Maybe even poetry. Instead, they imported their in-joke straight into the song. That was the split running through The Tin Man: either he could step into the “serious songwriter” costume or he could shrug and lampoon the whole thing. He tried to do both, and that’s why the record swings between heartbreaking and strange. That’s why it’s funny, confusing, and oddly ahead of time.

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Hopkins nods to Free on "Shout It Out," beginning with the same gospel-tinged piano figure that opens "Oh I Wept" — a phrase that first steps upward, as though reaching, before sinking back down, a rise-and-fall contour which yearns, then resolves. Williams' voice deliberately channels Paul Rodgers' blues-rock growl, and you know none of this is accidental: it’s a sly quotation / homage, both to Free and to the tradition where Free have borrowed their vocabulary from in the first place. Hopkins’ piano, though, is something else. It’s all crystalline clarity, every phrase cut to shape, the timbre rich, the lines muscular but tender. And while the allusion begins in Free’s melancholic register, the music quickly expands into Hopkins’ own blend — pop and blues and rock, lifted by the undercurrent of his nuanced gentleness.

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The delicate, ornamental tin containers from Nicky’s collection — early 20th-century packaging that once carried sugar, tea, or spice from India, Ceylon, or the Caribbean to England — appear on the record’s back cover. They glow with the intimacy of the collector’s eye, that instinct for the small and the overlooked, a kind of nostalgia not for empire but for design itself. These are scraps of tenderness, private codes of memory pressed into the fabric of daily life.

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The world’s greatest design museums carry such objects to explain how art has always touched commerce, how beauty has always mingled with trade. Nicky kept them only for himself, as part of the weather of his own home, an atmosphere he carried with him — a reminder of how the ordinary object can shelter both memory and meaning.