Today is the second April snow day I've had off in the past two years. On one hand, this is a huge problem, especially the way things have gone this year: It marks the 7th day my district has had off due to extreme weather this winter, which pushes instructional pacing back by over a week. Not a great thing when state testing begins in three school days. However, I'll openly admit that I'm willing to endure another week of pseudo-winter if it means getting a random day off from work, especially if it means getting a day to breathe and relax during what is traditionally one of the most stressful months of the academic year.
Having a major snowstorm in the middle of April does seem out of place, though. It often begs the question: WHY DO WE LIVE HERE? When the weather can turn on a dime and usually in the worst of all possible ways here, what is it about living in Minnesota that is so great it makes the climatic disorder of our region endurable? Come on, people! Let's think positive! There are many things!!
(1) SNOW DAYS
Speaking as a teacher, there are few feelings as welcome as discovering you have a surprise day off. It's like waking to an extra Christmas morning without any of the subsequent depression.
(2) CABINS
What could be better than giving yourself a duplicate set of housework chores for a place where you might spend 19 out of your 365 days each year?
(3) THE MALL OF AMERICA
It really is a fascinating wonder of a landmark, and not just a black hole of a tourist attraction where locals bring the out of town visitors they secretly wish had just stayed home.
(4) HOCKEY
Our sport. Our birthright. Not an athletic cult. Nope. Not at all.
(5) CHANGING SEASONS
We have winter, when the world extracts its revenge on humanity for all of the climate change. We have spring, also known as the three weeks between the final snowstorm and the first of the 85ยบ temperatures. Then there's summer, the time of year when the whole world is either crispy from drought or defined by nightly storm warnings. Wrapping it up is everyone's favorite, autumn, when we witness the world slowly dying off, although there’s probably going to be a nice weekend when you can see fall colors while you pay to have your kids wander aimlessly through a field of corn which you can only hope has been cut to form a maze with an actual solution so you'll see them again someday.
(6) SPORTS TEAMS
Our teams rule! Yeah! Go teams! If you take all of our local pro teams, we've had FOUR CHAMPIONSHIP SEASONS in the past ten years! Of course, all four of them came from our WNBA team The Lynx, which far too many sports fans here treat as an afterthought. But hey! They count!
(7) MINNESOTA NICE
More like Minnesota introverted passive-aggression.
(8) THE OUTDOORS
What better place to be than where all of the sunshine, mosquitoes, and ticks can be found? Because none of those have ever been associated with life-threatening diseases.
(9) WONDERFULLY MAINTAINED ROADWAYS
You know they have to be in great shape if they're being worked on starting the first day each year the highway department thinks they can safely begin working, and work continues until two weeks after the first major snowfall settles in. To say nothing of the expediency involved in repairing spring potholes, none of which ever get so big or deep that they'd have their own tides when filled with snowmelt.
(10) SAFETY
Let's face it. We're pretty close to the center of the continent. In another twenty years, we'll be one of the few remaining regions that isn't underwater.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Butterfly Day
Early in the school year, I saw a video at a district meeting that got me thinking about things I could try in my classroom. The video, called “Austin’s Butterfly,” documents the reactions of several groups of students as they’re shown how a first grade boy named Austin improved his initial drawing of a butterfly through several attempts after receiving helpful feedback from his classmates. The improvement from his first drawing to the final version is remarkable.
Video: Austin's Butterfly
The first thing I thought upon seeing this is how it was a perfect analogy for revision, and the reason why writers benefit from working with critique partners as they try to improve a manuscript. It also made me feel a little disappointed that I don’t teach writing, since a video like this could be such a great way to illustrate to students how continuously trying to improve their work can make a difference, and how important it is to listen to the feedback others provide. Then I started thinking: Why does that only have to apply to writing? There must be some way I can bring that mindset into math.
The ideas of that video stayed in the back of my mind as the school year settled in. Later in the fall, my students took a math unit test, and, as is the case with many unit tests, the results were mixed. A test like this is supposed to represent how well they had mastered the skills we’d been studying, but not all students are going to learn in the same way or at the same rate. We still needed to move to a new unit to keep pace with the curriculum though, even if there were a number of kids in class who weren’t done learning those skills.
It never seems right to think that a test taken in the middle of October should represent the total amount of learning any student does during an academic trimester when that trimester is only half over. After a few weeks of pondering what I could do to better address that problem, Butterfly Day was born.
I began scheduling each Friday as a break from the current unit, giving the students a chance to spend that day practicing skills they had not yet mastered. Of course, having dozens of students in class means dozens of different academic needs to address. Instead of investing endless hours in spreadsheet analysis to determine which students should be practicing which skills (something I don’t always have tons of faith in), I presented them with a list of topics we had already studied: addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, decimal operations, multi-step problem solving, data analysis, and place value. From there, they needed to do some self-assessment and decide which skill set would be the best for them to practice. Everyone made their choice and signed up for one of what we were calling Butterfly Groups, named after the concept of how working in these groups would give them opportunities to continue making improvements, much like young Austin did with his drawing.
As the first Butterfly Day approached, I began to appreciate exactly how ambitious of an project this truly was: I would have to write six different lesson plans for one day, which small groups would be able to work through productively without much guidance since I’d be bouncing between groups the whole time, trying to keep everyone engaged while only able to spend a few minutes at a time checking in with each.
When the first Butterfly Day arrived, the whole thing went surprisingly well. The students understood what to do and why they were doing it. They took ownership in what they had decided to learn. The activities were just enough outside of our routine to hold their attention. Both of my classes contain a good number of students who could be generously described as rambunctiously distracted, so it was gratifying to see them making the active choice to work on developing the skills they chose.
The second week came, then the third. The classes began anticipating Butterfly Day and were excited when it arrived. The moment when I gave out the group assignments for the day became a big reveal. A few weeks into the routine, some people began telling me they didn’t feel they needed their groups anymore and were ready to work on different concepts. When I gave everyone the chance to rethink their group assignments, some chose to move on while many stayed where they were.
We continued on through the end of the trimester. Just before my grades were due, I wrote up a series of small tests, basically giving them second chances to demonstrate what they had learned about the skills they'd been studying in Butterfly Groups before I finalized report cards. Not everyone showed significant improvement, or much at all. But a lot of people did. In many cases, the improvement they showed was enough for me to raise them to a higher grade than what they’d earned back on their original unit test.
One of the things I noticed the most was how Butterfly Day affected my own energy level. A lot of time and effort goes into planning and preparing so a project like this will keep its momentum and success, but instead of feeling worn out from it, I was re-energized, particularly on the actual Butterfly Days themselves. I'll feed off of the gradual bits of success I see happening, and the authentic curiosity of the questioning taking place, and the mostly cooperative nature of the groups. I’m not going to say everything has gone perfectly, but in the overview I’ve been happily surprised by how effective the idea has been and how widely the students have embraced it. For the past several Fridays, I’ve been going home feeling invigorated instead of exhausted.
We just returned from winter break and started with new groups, most of which are based around fractions and decimals, since that was the big part of the last test we took. A lot of kids walked away from that test feeling they had significant gaps in their knowledge until we looked at things from the long view. When they realized they still had time to keep improving, they began self-assessing what they needed to work on the most. We generated seven group topics for this round. Neither class ended up using all seven groups — the rule was that a group had to have at least two people signed up for it or it would be closed off as an option. A big part of what they were doing, I reminded them, was benefitting from the feedback they’d receive from working with other people.
As I pointed that out, I had an uncomfortable moment upon realizing I hadn’t given them much specific direction on HOW to provide the kind of helpful feedback they’d need from each other. To address that, I started building a new activity into their daily warm-up routine: I’d write an example problem, with a correct solution, on the board for them to examine. There’s nothing specifically wrong with what I show them, other than the strategies I use may not be the most efficient or logical or coherent ways to arrive at a solution. Their job with this is to analyze my work and tell me what they notice about it. This week we managed to have a fifteen-minute discussion about the choices I made in one division problem and one multiplication problem. Having that experience as a touchstone made it a lot easier for me to remind them about the kind of feedback they could offer each other once we made it to Butterfly Day.
That’s just the beginning, though. Whenever I’ve had ideas like this in the past, they usually start out with a first try, followed by any number of changes or tweaks needed along the way to make things better — not so unlike a first grader drawing six versions of a butterfly before he really gets it right. In that spirit, I think I’m going to at least semi-regularly blog about where Butterfly Day takes my classes throughout the rest of the year, as a record for my own reference as much as anything else.
I should probably cut this post off, because I have a week of lesson plans to write (including seven for the next Butterfly Day) and some reading I need to get to this weekend about training students how to better provide feedback.
The ideas and practices can always be improved.
Video: Austin's Butterfly
The first thing I thought upon seeing this is how it was a perfect analogy for revision, and the reason why writers benefit from working with critique partners as they try to improve a manuscript. It also made me feel a little disappointed that I don’t teach writing, since a video like this could be such a great way to illustrate to students how continuously trying to improve their work can make a difference, and how important it is to listen to the feedback others provide. Then I started thinking: Why does that only have to apply to writing? There must be some way I can bring that mindset into math.
The ideas of that video stayed in the back of my mind as the school year settled in. Later in the fall, my students took a math unit test, and, as is the case with many unit tests, the results were mixed. A test like this is supposed to represent how well they had mastered the skills we’d been studying, but not all students are going to learn in the same way or at the same rate. We still needed to move to a new unit to keep pace with the curriculum though, even if there were a number of kids in class who weren’t done learning those skills.
It never seems right to think that a test taken in the middle of October should represent the total amount of learning any student does during an academic trimester when that trimester is only half over. After a few weeks of pondering what I could do to better address that problem, Butterfly Day was born.
I began scheduling each Friday as a break from the current unit, giving the students a chance to spend that day practicing skills they had not yet mastered. Of course, having dozens of students in class means dozens of different academic needs to address. Instead of investing endless hours in spreadsheet analysis to determine which students should be practicing which skills (something I don’t always have tons of faith in), I presented them with a list of topics we had already studied: addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, decimal operations, multi-step problem solving, data analysis, and place value. From there, they needed to do some self-assessment and decide which skill set would be the best for them to practice. Everyone made their choice and signed up for one of what we were calling Butterfly Groups, named after the concept of how working in these groups would give them opportunities to continue making improvements, much like young Austin did with his drawing.
As the first Butterfly Day approached, I began to appreciate exactly how ambitious of an project this truly was: I would have to write six different lesson plans for one day, which small groups would be able to work through productively without much guidance since I’d be bouncing between groups the whole time, trying to keep everyone engaged while only able to spend a few minutes at a time checking in with each.
When the first Butterfly Day arrived, the whole thing went surprisingly well. The students understood what to do and why they were doing it. They took ownership in what they had decided to learn. The activities were just enough outside of our routine to hold their attention. Both of my classes contain a good number of students who could be generously described as rambunctiously distracted, so it was gratifying to see them making the active choice to work on developing the skills they chose.
The second week came, then the third. The classes began anticipating Butterfly Day and were excited when it arrived. The moment when I gave out the group assignments for the day became a big reveal. A few weeks into the routine, some people began telling me they didn’t feel they needed their groups anymore and were ready to work on different concepts. When I gave everyone the chance to rethink their group assignments, some chose to move on while many stayed where they were.
We continued on through the end of the trimester. Just before my grades were due, I wrote up a series of small tests, basically giving them second chances to demonstrate what they had learned about the skills they'd been studying in Butterfly Groups before I finalized report cards. Not everyone showed significant improvement, or much at all. But a lot of people did. In many cases, the improvement they showed was enough for me to raise them to a higher grade than what they’d earned back on their original unit test.
One of the things I noticed the most was how Butterfly Day affected my own energy level. A lot of time and effort goes into planning and preparing so a project like this will keep its momentum and success, but instead of feeling worn out from it, I was re-energized, particularly on the actual Butterfly Days themselves. I'll feed off of the gradual bits of success I see happening, and the authentic curiosity of the questioning taking place, and the mostly cooperative nature of the groups. I’m not going to say everything has gone perfectly, but in the overview I’ve been happily surprised by how effective the idea has been and how widely the students have embraced it. For the past several Fridays, I’ve been going home feeling invigorated instead of exhausted.
We just returned from winter break and started with new groups, most of which are based around fractions and decimals, since that was the big part of the last test we took. A lot of kids walked away from that test feeling they had significant gaps in their knowledge until we looked at things from the long view. When they realized they still had time to keep improving, they began self-assessing what they needed to work on the most. We generated seven group topics for this round. Neither class ended up using all seven groups — the rule was that a group had to have at least two people signed up for it or it would be closed off as an option. A big part of what they were doing, I reminded them, was benefitting from the feedback they’d receive from working with other people.
As I pointed that out, I had an uncomfortable moment upon realizing I hadn’t given them much specific direction on HOW to provide the kind of helpful feedback they’d need from each other. To address that, I started building a new activity into their daily warm-up routine: I’d write an example problem, with a correct solution, on the board for them to examine. There’s nothing specifically wrong with what I show them, other than the strategies I use may not be the most efficient or logical or coherent ways to arrive at a solution. Their job with this is to analyze my work and tell me what they notice about it. This week we managed to have a fifteen-minute discussion about the choices I made in one division problem and one multiplication problem. Having that experience as a touchstone made it a lot easier for me to remind them about the kind of feedback they could offer each other once we made it to Butterfly Day.
That’s just the beginning, though. Whenever I’ve had ideas like this in the past, they usually start out with a first try, followed by any number of changes or tweaks needed along the way to make things better — not so unlike a first grader drawing six versions of a butterfly before he really gets it right. In that spirit, I think I’m going to at least semi-regularly blog about where Butterfly Day takes my classes throughout the rest of the year, as a record for my own reference as much as anything else.
I should probably cut this post off, because I have a week of lesson plans to write (including seven for the next Butterfly Day) and some reading I need to get to this weekend about training students how to better provide feedback.
The ideas and practices can always be improved.
Sunday, November 4, 2018
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)