The Wizard

Ken Hensley wrote "The Wizard" from a dream. Not a metaphor. An actual dream, the same one, returning to him every night for about a week in late 1971. "I just followed what I had seen in the dream, along with a little amateur philosophy," he said years later. He never had that dream again. What came out was a gentle, semi-acoustic ballad about a wanderer who meets "the Wizard of a thousand kings," carried by 12-string acoustic guitar and a melody that sat apart from everything else Uriah Heep was playing that year.

Hensley wrote it with Mark Clarke, the band's bassist for one strange three-month stretch. Clarke had just watched his old band Colosseum fall apart when Hensley rang and asked him to learn a full set for a gig in Scotland the next day. Clarke stayed long enough to tour, co-write this one song, and play on it, then walked away from exhaustion before the album was finished. His replacement, Gary Thain, became part of the five-man lineup the world remembers as classic Heep. But the bass on "The Wizard" is Clarke's. So is the voice in the bridge. David Byron couldn't reach the high notes the part required, so the band handed it to the man already on his way out the door. It remains the only Uriah Heep song to carry his name.

Bronze Records released "The Wizard" as the first single from Demons and Wizards on March 10, 1972, two months ahead of the album. It reached number 8 in Switzerland and number 34 in West Germany, modest next to what "Easy Livin'" would do for the band a few months later. It also became the first Uriah Heep single to get a music video. None of that has mattered much to the song's afterlife. More than fifty years on, fans still name it among the band's most loved recordings, the one that proves Heep could be as tender as it was loud.