November 24, 1991, Part 3: The Show Must Go On

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.

November 24, 1991, Part 2: A Little Magic in the Air

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....)

November 24, 1991, Part 1: As It Began

I remember the day I became a Queen fan. 

I’d always been aware of Queen on the same level I was aware of Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones or Black Sabbath or Pink Floyd — bands with deep libraries from their tenure on the world stage who had been around long before I caught up with popular music. The number of classic rock standards the band was been responsible for leaves no option other than their inclusion as part of the cultural wallpaper: “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Another One Bites the Dust” “Bicycle Race,” “Killer Queen,” “You’re My Best Friend,” to say nothing of “We Will Rock You,” “We Are the Champions,” or “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It would be impossible to listen to an eight-hour shift of classic rock radio without hearing at least one of their songs. 

It was summer of 1984. I was hanging out with a few friends in the senior hallway at our high school while summer marching band practice was about to begin. We were a month shy of starting our junior year, and even though we were responsible enough to commit ourselves to being voluntary participants in summer marching band, we weren’t committed to participating all that actively in rehearsals, especially when there was a new crop of sophomores in the drum section who were more than capable of keeping a beat on a snare drum, bass drum, or cymbals, which frankly covers 87% of what drummers have to do in marching band. From our perspective, it seemed like a much better idea to hang out in the hallway and fulfill the time-honored tradition of drummers not taking things too much seriously. The director knew we’d be there on performance day and would supply the A game since we’d known the songs for two years, so he wasn’t that concerned about how much practice we were doing. Plus there was a flute player I was working really hard to impress because a mutual friend was making rumblings about setting us up; when you’re seventeen years old you solidly believe that the best way to impress a girl is to make a complete ass of yourself. This was something that came very naturally to me at seventeen. It didn’t occur to me that if I was goofing off in the hallway I wasn’t in the band room with her, but again — seventeen. 

We were taken with the acoustics of the empty high school hallways, and were talking loudly to test the echoes. This evolved into shouting, which evolved into singing. And what song would be better to sing loudly when you’re testing the echo factor of an empty high school than the operatic chorus of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” 

We didn’t have the song memorized by any stretch, but like I said, Queen was part of the cultural wallpaper, so we knew enough snippets to bounce off of each other and fill in the blanks fairly well. It was just an excuse to be goofy (seventeen), but by the time we were done I had enough of the actual song stuck in my head that I was starting to think about it in ways I hadn’t considered before, realizing that not only was it weird but complex and melodic, and it rocked — at least parts of it did. 

If something like this occurred to me now, I’d either look up the song on iTunes or YouTube. Back then these weren’t options. You had to own a physical copy of the single or the album if you wanted to hear it at your leisure. I did not have these choices available to me then.

Or so I first believed. 

For about a year after my cousin Paul had graduated from college with his psychology degree, he lived with my family so he could job hunt in the Cities. It’s due to that time that, even as close as I am to my cousins on that side of the family, Paul has always been the one most like an older brother to me.

He ended up staying longer than he had planned and eventually abandoned his job search to pursue a further degree for a career in education. (He was just hired as an elementary school principal in Arizona this year.) When it was time for him to relocate a new apartment, he packed his clothes, his books, his Baltimore Colts insulated mug, and a good part of his record collection.

But not all of it. For reasons that only fate itself will ever understand, he left behind his copy of “Queen’s Greatest Hits.”

It wasn’t long before I dug it out and gave it a good listen — not just Bohemian Rhapsody (track 2, side 1) but the whole thing. It was an astonishing collection of songs. Too often a greatest hits album ends up being little more than a cash grab with an opportunity for the artist to dump on some newer “bonus tracks” that they had stored away, enticing the super-fans to spend their money on songs they already owned. But Queen’s Greatest Hits, at least the original 1981 version of it, really laid out for the world just how great of a band they were. I was surprised to discover I already knew almost all of the hits, and quickly took to the newer one they’d tacked on at the end — a duet with David Bowie called “Under Pressure.” I think most people are probably familiar with that song by now.

I’m sure I had been sucked into one record and tape club or another at this time, so I slowly began my collecting my way through their back catalogue. I studied the liner notes of each album added to the collection, learning the lyrics as closely as I could, paying attention to which member was credited with writing which songs and eventually seeing stylistic patterns. Freddie Mercury was theatrical and bombastic. Brian May was either lyrically literate or had heavy guitar riffs, or sometimes both. It was easy to tell when Roger Taylor wrote a song because it was usually one of the token ones from each album where he took over lead vocals. The only one hard to spot was John Deacon, since he didn’t write as many but still manage to craft some pretty big hits.

“The Works” had been their most recent album, so it was one of the first I added. I heard “Radio GaGa” enough times on my own clock radio to feel connected to its message, which proved to be all too prescient as we all try to find our ways through the I-Heart-Radio landscape that America has become. Every song on the album was strong, with “Hammer to Fall” building up to be a favorite. Enough of a favorite, in fact, that I just interrupted writing this to get up and listen to three different versions of it: The original studio version from “The Works,” the live version with Freddie from “Live in Wembley ’86,” and the version with Paul Rodgers stepping in to sing lead vocals for their post-millennial “Return of the Champions” tour.

Other albums came along. “The Game” was one of the first I bought since the biggest hits of the day were on it. The Flash Gordon Soundtrack came soon as well; eventually the movie became such a “so bad it’s good” favorite of mine that I own on Blu-Ray even today. “A Night at the Opera” of course, because if you’re going to paint yourself as any kind of a Queen fan you damn well better have the album that gave birth to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I bought “Jazz” at The Last Place on Earth in Duluth, back when the drug paraphernalia it sold was confined to the back wall of the store instead of the dominant portion of the inventory. Try to imagine my surprise to find a fold out poster of the event that inspired the song “Bicycle Race” tucked in the sleeve. Look it up if you’ve got an internet connection and don’t mind having a panoramic NSFW moment.

My mind was sufficiently blown by that. Again, seventeen years old. 

(continued tomorrow....)