“I thought, Wow, this one’s geeky,” Holt recalls. The band’s singer, Ashley Holt, marveled at the sight of the lanky kid in a school uniform two sizes too small. In 1965, at age 16, he auditioned for a big band that played community centers across the English countryside. Growing up a poor, only child in a working-class home, he entertained himself for hours a day at the family’s piano. “If you believe it’s not the end,” Wakeman recalls, “then it isn’t.”įrom the beginning, Wakeman believed in music. That night, homeless and alone, it was his dream-of knights on horseback, a sold-out ice rink, and a band of friends rising from a humble pub to conquer the world-that kept him going. It’s one of the great untold sagas in the history of rock, the tale of a man who bet his fortune to realize his wildest dream: a fantasy so overblown and outrageous that it makes the real-world excesses of Wakeman’s prog-rock days seem tame by comparison. But his crazy ride, incredibly, was crazier even than legend has it.
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