Just as I had found my way into Queen superfandom, “The Works” was getting a little radio airplay in the Cities. (By which I mean some but almost none. I will argue anyone into the ground that the Minneapolis/St. Paul radio market has always been one of the most boring and homogenous of the industry.) It was very much a rock album and showed they were adapting to keep up with the times while still maintaining their voice, or voices as it were, since each member of the band still took on songwriting responsibilities independently.
I was thrilled in January of 1986 when their song “One Vision” — originally written as a reflection on their experience of playing at Live Aid, a show that featured dozens if not hundreds of performances from the top artists of the time period, and a show at which Queen were widely acknowledged as the band who had delivered the strongest performance of the day, was included on the soundtrack for the half-assed, Reagan-era jingoistic and ridiculous movie “Iron Eagle.” (Seriously, this was a movie of plucky high-school aged military brat misfits working with an inside man on a military base to steal a fighter jet, so a kid who was barely old enough to drive his Jeep could fly to the middle east and rescue his father, who had been taken prisoner). The movie did okay, but there were enough rumors in the media by then about the fairly open secrets regarding Freddie’s sexuality, and Twin Cities radio wouldn’t play the song, no matter how often I called requests lines.
I was a good number of years into college before they released a follow up album, “The Miracle,” which yielded one minor hit, “I Want it All,” which was seen as more of an aberration than any sign of a true comeback. I was almost out of school when the next album, the last one of Freddie’s lifetime, was released. It came out with such little fanfare that even a super fan like me was unaware of it until I saw a copy in one of the music stores at the Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud. I bought it on cassette so I could listen to it right away in the car. On the way back to my apartment I was greeted by the drum roll and slightly intimidating slow burn build of the title song, “Innuendo,” one of the most openly progressive songs Queen had released in decades. I loved it on the first listen and it remains a favorite today.
“Innuendo” had me hoping whatever the creative resurgence was that led to its level of quality was going to be enough to finally drive the band back into the public eye where they belonged. I don’t fully know why I was so insistent on cheering them on as I was — I know as a true fan that it’s your job to support the band but Queen was still plenty successful throughout the rest of the world. They had enough gold records to wallpaper the multiple mansions each member of the band owned, several times over. I think I just always wanted more. It was knowing the band would remain viable, and wasn't in any danger of reaching that point when their record label would have dropped them for poor sales, even though they had signed a huge deal with Hollywood records that had seen the re-release of their entire discography only years before, complete with superfluous bonus remix tracks in each package. I took sales and chart positions as signs of life, indicators that the band was healthy and still in shape to be around for a good, long time. Innuendo was showing signs that, even if America was too clueless to acknowledge it, Queen still had the creative drive to hold on for the duration. History told a different story though, as Innuendo turned out to be, from a certain perspective, their swan song. At least as a four-piece.
It was the evening of November 24, 1991. I had been out of college for six months and substitute teaching for three. I was watching the 10:00 o’clock news with my parents and my sister when the talking head anchoring the broadcast announced that Freddie Mercury had died from AIDS. There had been rumors of his illness since the release of Innuendo, particularly after his gaunt appearance in the videos that band had made for the album — videos I had never seen because MTV too closely followed the dictation of American radio that Queen wasn’t an act worthy of receiving airplay. In later years when I did finally catch up with them, it was unavoidably easy to see where the rumors came from, since Freddie had gone through a noticeable weight loss and looked more frail than his stage-prowling self of yesteryear. As I caught up on my retroactive reading, I’d see articles saying how even though Freddie’s vocal performances on Innuendo had taken great physical tolls on him, often leaving him exhausted between takes, he powered his way through each one with the awareness of someone who fully knew, even if the band still hadn’t been at a point of openly discussing the inevitable, that his days were numbered.
The reaction to Freddie’s death was all over the media map, and I have to rely on the media for comparison here because there weren’t many people around me who understood how greatly I was feeling the loss. It was still the early nineties so there was a fair amount of homophobia circling the announcement. A great number of outlets treated Freddie and the legacy of the band with the respect they deserved, which pissed me off a fair amount of the time, since these same people had been the ones ignoring them months earlier. The biggest tributes, and the ones that mattered the most in my eyes, came from the popular musicians of the day, many of whom treated both the music of Queen and Freddie’s singing with more reverence than simple respect, often citing the band as one of the most influential in their careers. It felt great to hear this proclamations, since even though I had never been a musician as a creative endeavor myself, I had always considered Queen to be My Beatles.
It was only months later when the Concert for Life was announced, as many of these bands signed up to play in tribute to Freddie’s legacy in a day-long concert held in England, with the money raised being earmarked for charities supporting AIDS awareness. Metallica, who had once recorded a cover of Stone Cold Crazy, opened the show. Extreme played a medley of Queen hits, much as Queen often had in concert. Def Leppard, U2, Guns and Roses all played. The surviving members of Queen took the stage, supported by a turnstile of guest performers and singers, including Joe Elliot and Slash, Axl Rose, James Hetfield, George Michael, Robert Plant, Elton John, and David Bowie, who even led 72,000 people in the Lord’s Prayer after performing “Under Pressure.”
Years later when Elton John came to the Cities on tour, he performed a solid version of “The Show Must Go On” as a tribute. Everyone is all too aware of how “Bohemian Rhapsody” found a second life in the “Wayne’s World” movie. I thoroughly enjoyed that moment in the movie and seeing them on the charts again, even if so many of the young fans who laughed along with the movie had no idea who Queen was. It was an easy transgression to forgive though, since it had been a cursory awareness of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that had originally ignited my curiosity enough to dig through the record collection to find Paul’s Greatest Hits album.
Years later, “Queen” began some international touring again. I have to type in my air quotes there since it was even less of Queen than ever, with Paul Rodgers of all people stepping in as the singer, and John Deacon choosing to enjoy a comfortable retirement of unseen wealth instead of tour. But Brian May and Roger Taylor were there, and if seeing half the band was the best I was ever going to be able to do, I was hopeful. It had been decades since they had performed in North America, so it was a lightning bolt of an announcement when the word came out they’d not only be touring America again, but would even be stopping in St. Paul. Of course I bought tickets.
I knew the setlist pretty well since they strictly followed the songs played on the live album they had released early in the tour, but still found myself in general surprise when the show began. I distinctly remember everyone standing up a the beginning of the show when they ripped through “Tie Your Mother Down,” and the next thing I knew the whole section was sitting down except for me, while I stood there, alone, not dancing but just staring slack-jawed at the stage thinking “Oh my God that’s Brian May and he’s in the same room I’m in and he’s playing his guitar and I’m hearing him play it and this is actually happening right now.” I’ve been to dozens, if not hundreds, of concerts in my lifetime. There have only been two or three moments like that when I was so overwhelmed by what I was seeing that I was transported somewhere else.
If anything, Queen cemented themselves into the role of a musical legacy act by hiring former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert to sing. The guy’s got a good voice on him, but I disagreed with the choice at first; in my opinion, the only other singer who could have been able to take over should have been George Michael. Unfortunately time rolls on though, and now that we’ve lost him as well, I suppose Adam Lambert gets the job done. At least well enough to get good reviews from my mother and her sister, when my sister and my cousins sent the pair of them to see Queen + Adam Lambert perform at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas as a Mother’s Day gift a few years ago.
As I’m finishing this post, I just checked online to find that the biopic about Freddie and the band, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” exceed box office expectations and made more than $50 million dollars in its opening weekend.
I guess I’m just happy that the rest of the world finally caught up to those of us who have been fans all along.
No comments:
Post a Comment