The tipping point that solidified me as a lifelong Queen fan was a cassette version of the double album “Live Killers.” One full-length album on side one and another on side 2? Perfect for me and my Walkman and my torturous 40-minute school bus ride.
The kicker on this was the twelve-minute version of “Brighton Rock.” Most bands will offer up instrumental breaks from some of the musicians during their live shows, sometimes to give the rest of the band a break from the grueling performance, sometimes to indulge the ego of a particular member whether they had the virtuosity to deserve the solo spotlight or not, or sometimes, like in the well-documented case of Def Leppard, to engage in some lighting round shenanigans beneath the stage with Aqua-Net drenched female fans.
Even at the beginning of the “Brighton Rock,” Freddie prefaces the performance by saying “We’re gonna do something a little special tonight.” At first impression you might just think that means they planned on digging out a song that usually didn’t get played live, but what they did was take a song that was already a showcase for Brian’s guitar playing and blew it up into an instrumental carnival ride. The singing cuts out where you would expect it to according to the original song, then Brian noodles around on the guitar for a minute, just picking out a melody overlayed with effects which eventually faded into the background as Roger takes over for an extended…wait for it…tympani solo.
At the time, I thought a tympani solo was super cool, for a number of reasons. First of all, I knew how to play the tympani. Truth be told it isn’t one of the harder instruments to master in the percussion section — you just use the soft mallets to beat the living hell out of these humongous metal drums, which you’re supposed to do pretty loud because any time the tympani ever makes it into a song it arrives with dramatic purpose. Secondly, Roger can be heard constantly changing the pitch of the drums with foot pedals as he played. This blew my mind and convinced me that Roger Taylor was a musical genius. It escaped me to think how anyone would be able to simply guess the right note without a pitch pipe, as our band director required us to do. It never crossed my mind that Roger probably couldn’t have cared less about how close to pitch he was playing since he was just riding the pedals and making it up as he went. Like I said, tympani isn’t hard, but there are a good number of things you can do while playing them that would make them seem to be more involving than they really are.
Brighton Rock didn’t really come to life until the tympani was over and Brian took back over. Throughout his solo he has some kind of echo effect going on, which layered his guitar sound on top of itself at least half a dozen times over, and somehow he knew enough about which notes he was playing and layering over and over to construct a row, row, row your boat version of a guitar solo that had him playing in perfect harmony with several versions of himself. Now, I’ll concede how likely it is that someone who knows how to play a melodic instrument might be able to structure a piece of music like that with very little preparation, and surely a man considered one of the world’s premiere guitar players had to be up to the challenge and then some. But I was a drummer. This meant that even though I could pound out flams and paradiddles with the best of them, all I knew about harmony was that it sounded nice when it was done right. The first time I listened to that solo, and I mean actively listened to it instead of just hearing it as a part of the song, was during a high school football game. I had to be there as a part of the pep band, which was a fun way to earn social cred for being at the football game without actually having to watch it, so it make perfect sense to me to stuff my Walkman into a jacket pocket and listen to music during the first half when we were all required to remain in our sections in case points were scored before our halftime show. “Live Killers” was in my rotation quite a bit then, so I packed it up and brought it with.
The thing of it was, I had only really listened to side one of the cassette at that point. I mean, sure, I’d played side 2. But each side was a whole album, and much in the way that you can sometimes only hear the first three songs on an album if you always put it on in the car and usually travel the amount of time it takes to play those three songs, you always stop listening before you get to really know the rest of it. Side 1 was just long enough for me to survive the bus ride to school, and I was really into it, and didn’t need side 2 yet.
For whatever reason I put side 2 on at that fateful football game. “Don’t Stop Me Now”…I knew that from “Jazz”…not a bad song, but kind of unusual in a musical theater way instead of a rock song. “Spread Your Wings”…one that seemed like a nice generic ballad that later became terribly meaningful for me.
Then came “Brighton Rock,” and that solo. Just at about the ten minute mark, Brian starts playing through this drawn out cascade of screaming notes, all falling in line with each other harmonically like something painstakingly choreographed. With the volume up loud enough to drown out the Friday Night High School noise surrounding me, I listened, and I heard what was going on. I rewound the cassette a few times over just to play that section, recognizing I was experiencing an epiphanal moment I didn't want to end.
Brian May was the guy who introduced me to the idea that a guitar solo could be a composition all on its own instead of just forty seconds of flash in the middle of a pop hit. He was the one who convinced me of the belief, still held to this day, that a strong guitar player is the most essential element in determining whether or not a band has the potential to truly be great. Great drummers and bass players exist for certain, but are commonly overlooked and under appreciated due to their roles of serving the foundation of the song. Great keyboard players are out there by the thousands; I could name several of them who play with a superhuman virtuosity that defies description. But in most cases of a rock band, the keyboard serves as mostly support or melodic counterpoint, occasionally featured in a prominent role, but often adding depth to the song to let the guitar sound take over and drive.
Anyway, after that, I was hooked for good. Queen leaped out of the growing crowd of bands and singers that were coming to define my high school music experience, and far beyond those classic rock bands who had originated in the 70s and were still making occasional grasps at relevance. Maybe the 70s had been when they’d produced their most creative, divergent, and eclectic works, and maybe the disco-thump of 1980s “Another One Bites the Dust” made their album “The Game” the symbol of their commercial peak, but Queen were still around, they were still making music, and they were still brilliant.
(continued tomorrow....)
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