Tag: queen (Page 5 of 8)

What is this, this wearying and gleeful obsessiveness I bend over for every time, catching bands like colds and fixing my ears to accept one sound, and to just complain when it’s not there. Taking my time, taking my power; snatching from me my finest hour. All it is, is TotD gaga.

I see what you did there.

I’m writing about The Works! It’s the eleventh album by Queen.

The eleventh album is so often the best one.

Sure.

Wait, eleven?

I skipped Live Killers and the Flash Gordon soundtrack.

Why?

Live Killers is best viewed in the totality of their official live output, and how shitty a job they’ve done of it; Flash Gordon isn’t an album so much as it is the title track and 40 minutes of synth noises and guitar sounds, so it goes with Highlander.

Sounds right.

Anyway, it’s 1984: the last album, Hot Space, was a dud saved only by the last-minute accident of Under Pressure. (David Bowie was recording down the street in Montreux, came by to do cocaine with Queen, and they ended up writing Under Pressure in one night. Again: what did you do the last time you were in Montreux doing cocaine? Did you write Under Pressure? No. No, you didn’t.)

The group was not made up of easygoing people: Queen was a fightin’ band. They didn’t throw punches, just tantrums, but it was just as ugly; every interview with them (or other Rock Stars or Rock Star handlers) from the time features several “jokes” about how many arguments there were.

It may have been the songwriting arrangement, especially in the studio: each member would come in with a song, and then “direct” the arrangement and recording, exercising veto power over the others’ contributions. It’s as if they were trying to design a system that would generate the most conflict. Or, maybe they were all coked-up jackasses.

Except for John Deacon, who never did anything wrong. Look at him:

No one in this band could dress themselves.

So: The Game. Unlike the last album, which was done in Munich, they recorded this one in Los Angeles.

Reminder to the Younger Enthusiasts: Munich was not in Germany in 1982, it was in West Germany. Also, ’82 means that Munich’s nightlife would have been full of the children of WWII–whatever the German for Baby Boom is–and so the place had an edgy vibe. Los Angeles in 1982, Younger Enthusiasts, was exactly the same as it is today, at least the part of LA that Queen was hanging out in.

The studio was the Record Plant, and it was (and still is) on West Third, in between Fairfax and La Cienaga, and it is firmly ensconced in what I always called Our Little White LA: Hills down to the 10, La Brea to the ocean. That Los Angeles, that one-reel town, has not changed in a hundred years except for the cars: it is where the sun lives, and no one has anything to do in the afternoons, and a party at night. It is not Munich.

They made this record there:

And it’s a good one, though certainly firmly in the “New Queen” mold. No more songs about fairies or dragons or Jesus, and there were synths everywhere, but the harmonies were back, and so were the hits: Radio Gaga and I Want To Break Free both got to the top of the charts everywhere in the world except for America.

I have no idea why 1984’s America–a country in which the press secretary for the President felt comfortable making fag jokes at his podium when asked a question about AIDS–rejected I Want To Break Free, and its attendant video.

No idea whatsoever.

The drag stuff was a parody, actually, of a long-running British soap opera called Coronation Street, but MTV outright banned it.

No, it’s not just you: Roger Taylor is a hot chick.

Break Free is a great song, though–maybe their last one–simply due to its melody. Go listen to it again, or even better just turn off the music or whatever’s playing: you can sing the whole song through, can’t you? And once you start, you can’t stop. That’s a good melody. John Deacon wrote that one. Respect John Deacon, motherfuckers.

(Yes, the production is terribly dated. Or is it vintage? Checkmate, motherfucker.)

Stop calling the nice people motherfuckers.

You’re back?

I never leave.

Creepy. Anyway, that’s The Works. They did a tour, and then some Irish guy called them up to do a charity show at Wembley. Middle of the afternoon, and they’d only have 20 minutes. Obscure performance.

And then came The Game, which was both the high water mark of Queen’s American success, and the beginning of the end of Queen’s American success. It was their only #1 album here, mostly off the strength of Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Another One Bites the Dust, and it is those two songs that illustrate my point.

Crazy Little Thing was a rock song–an Elvis goof, for Christ’s sake!–and in the video, Freddie looked like this:

Which cannot, to our present-day eyes, look anything but incomplete and possibly photoshopped, but in 1980 this was an acceptable look for the general American public: lots of Rock Stars had been cutting their hair, and the leather was fine–Elvis wore leather, for Christ’s sake!–and Freddie wasn’t doing anything different from what he usually did.

By the time the album came out, however, Freddie looked like this:

In 1980, Freddie Mercury achieved his final form, and became glorious. Freddie’s mustache was his lightsaber, even though he didn’t like Star Wars. And from today, he is nothing but beauty and strength, but in 1980?

In 1980, that there was a faggot.

We speak now, again, to the Younger Enthusiast: 36 years is a long damn time. Marriage equality didn’t just happen, and the country used to be an openly and institutionally homophobic place–remember that the Stonewall riots had only taken place 11 years before–so gay folks tended to cluster together for protection. Boston had the South End, and Los Angeles had West Hollywood, and San Francisco had the Castro; as you might expect, a fashion sense emerged.

(That is not some sort of cheap gay joke: that’s how humans behave. The cool, good-looking people wear something, and then everyone copies them to the point where it’s a statement to not look like that, and then there are new cool, good-looking people; they have new clothes, and the cycle continues.)

America had one rule: don’t come out of the closet. Be as gay as humanly possibly just as loud as you can, wear clothes influenced by the gay scene, explore themes of your sexuality through your art, but just don’t say the magic words out loud. Elton John did once, in Rolling Stone, and then he scampered right back in the closet for a decade or so. (In Elton’s defense, he has a very nice closet.)

And that’s what that mustache (and haircut) was: a declaration, one that could not be misinterpreted. No man in 1980 would look like that were he not gay, except a man who was unafraid of being thought gay, and those men did not exist in 1980: either you were gay, or you would punch someone for suggesting you were. It was a different time, Younger Enthusiast.

(Ironically, the country’s homo-hatin’ eye only turned towards Freddie once he began dressing like a boy: when he dressed like a girl, in a leotard with long hair and makeup, no one cast a second glance.)

The disco did not help, either. The Game only had one disco tune on it, but it was Another One Bites the Dust, which was a worldwide #1 hit; this makes the argument, “Let’s do more dance tunes,” far more agreeable. John Deacon wrote Bites the Dust, after stealing it from Chic, but the rest of the band followed him down the synth-and-drum-machine path, and Hot Space is the result. It’s terrible.

(I know I skipped Flash Gordon. I’m gonna cover that with Highlander. Trust me; I’m a professional.)

The Game had Save Me on it, at least: Hot Space is an aggressively underdone offering. The songs are all half-written sketches, just drum machines and farty synth squibbles. (The Yamaha DX7, for the true Rock Nerd out there.) Lyrics include poetry such as:

You know a gun never killed nobody
You can ask anyone
People get shot by people
People with guns!
Put out the fire
You need a gun like a hole in the head
Put out the fire
Just tell me that old-fashioned gun law is dead!

Before Brian liked badgers, he did not like guns.

Even when Roger’s actually playing the drums, they’re processed to sound like a machine’s doing it.

Ugh, Jesus: this thing is fucking dire. When I first got into Queen, and bought all their CD’s, I saved Hot Space for last, and then put off the purchase for a while; I was correct in my apprehension. Las Palabras del Amor is for their Spanish fans, just as Teo Torriate was for their Japanese supporters; fittingly, it’s a direct ripoff of the first song, too.

Under Pressure got slapped on the album at the last minute, and saved it from sinking entirely in America, but Freddie had seen the razor and the damage done; this tour would be their last one in the States.

The tour looked like this:

You will note the gong: when drummers become Rock Stars, they are given their gong, much like when a Jewish boy turns 13, he receives savings bonds.

Most Queen biographies will pin America’s loss in interest in the band on the video for I Want to Break Free, but it was the mustache. Freddie’s face was now too in people’s faces. They would continue to sell out enormous soccer stadiums in the rest of the world, but would no longer play Peoria.

Dave Marsh hated Jazz. I’m unaware of his opinions on jazz; I assume they’re easily accessible, but I can’t be bothered. He wasn’t alone, either: all the Important Rock Critics hated Queen with a passion, and when you read these old reviews you get the feeling that the IRC’s saved up all their meanest lines for the whole year, scribbling them in their notebooks, just waiting for the new Queen record to come out.

Important Rock Critics liked the music of the people: Dave Marsh worked for Creem, which was based out of Detroit. That magazine championed a young man named James Osterberg, who assumed a ridiculous stage name and liked to show people his chest and cock; you can see how they would find Freddie’s act vulgar.

Queen was also guilty of breaking a sacred commandment of Important Rock Criticism: technical proficiency is to be distrusted; virtuosity is to be dismissed. There was nothing worse than a guy who knew how to play, according to the IRC: songs required three chords and the truth, even if sometimes the truth is complicated, and requires weird chords like F#aug11.

PUNK! the young men yelled as they chose their clothes with precisely the same amount of care that Queen did, and that was the rock landscape that Jazz was released into in 1978.

They looked like this:

Everyone out there still playing Rock Star Bingo should check their cards for the “Standing by the private plane photo” space. Also: look how happy John Deacon is. You know he loves airplanes and knows facts about them. (I may or may not be confusing John Deacon with James May from Top Gear at this point.)

Freddie’s choice in hats becomes an important part of the story from here on out.

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols had come out less than a year before, and now there were punk bands everywhere, but not actually everywhere: less than a dozen clubs and bars in three or four cities in America and London, and the record collections of Important Rock Critics. Nobody else cared; this scandalized the IRC community. How dare the general public not warm to The Dead Boys, and their hit single Caught with the Meat in your Mouth?

Punk wasn’t about Rock Stars. They could keep calling, but the punks wanted to stay in their garage. Notwithstanding the fact that all of them behaved like Rock Stars at all times, of course. And the fact that all of them always took the money, every single time. Or died very young, which is a very Rock Star way of going about things.

Or Bruce Springsteen. Important Rock Critics loved them some Bruce Springsteen: that guy was authentic, birthed from the boardwalk down the shore, and certainly not carefully and studiously honed from thousands of bar gigs and bands. Bruce told stories, instead of prancing around the stage in little outfits. (Even though Bruce pranced around the stage in little outfits.) And Bruce played 3-hour shows, which is more moral than 100 tight minutes, somehow. (The Dead also played 3-hour shows, but the IRC’s also hated the Dead.)

The critics were right about Springsteen, and they were right about punk, too: I still listen to the Dictators. There’s two types of music, good and bad, and everything else is just some asshole in a messy apartment trying to be clever about his record collection.

But they were wrong about Queen.

So, yeah: Jazz.

Jazz is a typical Queen album, in that the album is all over the place: there’s some of the heaviest rockers of their career (Let Me Entertain You, Dead On Time), Freddie’s ballets and ballads (Bicycle Race, Jealousy), and holy shit they let Roger sing lead on two numbers?

But Jazz also has this song on it:

And God bless the punks, but none of them wrote Don’t Stop Me Now.

Brian didn’t like the song, the theme in particular: Freddie had interests he was exploring with a newfound and growing ferocity. This is what’s known as foreshadowing.

Tell them. Tell them how far down the Queen hole you’ve gone.

I can stop any time I want.

What are you downloading right now?

Some live stuff.

“Some?” Two shows? Three?

Slightly more than that.

How much more?

Ten gigabytes.

Jesus, man.

In my defense, that’s only nine or ten Dead shows.

But these aren’t three-hour Dead shows in the lossless FLAC format, are they?

God, no. MP3’s.

How many fucking shows is that?

Maybe 30? 35? Didn’t count.

You do realize they played the same set for a whole tour, right?

I know that, yes.

You bring shame to your dojo. At least show the nice people a cool picture of Freddie or something.

I can do better than a picture.

Chest, cock, and teeth.

Yup, that’s Freddie.

Reasons I Will Fight Anyone Who Doesn’t Love A Day at the Races:

• The Millionaire Waltz is possibly the Queeniest Queen song: it’s almost impossible to think they weren’t just a tiny bit making fun of themselves.
• Taking the piss, they would have called it, due to their foreignness.
• The song also features John Deacon on lead bass, mixed way up high and he keeps hitting these high notes, round and warm, way up the neck of his P-Bass, and there’s no drums at all until the drums come in WAY TOO LOUD just like drums are supposed to come in on a Queen song.
• Seriously: the song is a direct parody of Bohemian Rhapsody.
• Might actually be better than A Night at the Opera, unlike the movies the band stole the titles from.
• Also unlike the film A Day at the Races took its name from, the album contains no blackface.
• Speaking of blackface, though, White Man is probably best described at “well-intentioned.”
• The tune gets most of it right–white people were rude to non-whites–but these savages are so damn noble.
• Eh, Iron Maiden did it, too. (Better.)
• My high school band, A Bunch Of Guys From France, played Tie Your Mother Down; it is a song built for romping through in a finished basement, with the vocal mic plugged into an extra guitar amp, and the bass player and guitarist having afternoon-long volume wars that left your ears filled with trebly static for days.
• It’s also pretty easy to play.
• Not to play well.
• I’m just saying that there’s, like, four chords.
• The part at the end that goes “Big, big, big, big, big, big DADDYOUTTADOORS!” is tricky, but manageable for semi-talented high school musicians.
• And Teo Torriate!
• Queen was foreign as shit, let’s not forget this.
• When Grand Funk wrote We’re An American Band, they weren’t writing it about Queen.
• Born in the U.S.A. was similarly not written about Queen.
• Tom Petty was not thinking of Queen when he penned American Girl, for two reasons.
• You get my point.
• Queen cultivated the parts of the planet that are not America.
• (Which would turn out to be a very good decision in the long run.)
• Japan is not America; Queen went there early on, and the Japanese fell in love with them: they were enormous stars over there, and sold out everywhere they played, and caused riots.
• Sometimes, they were served tea:
• 
• (If there are any Japanese Enthusiasts reading this, I need to share a secret of the West with you: we all–just a tiny little bit–think you are fucking with us, and that all the weird bullshit is just a put-on to see how long we’ll smile politely for. No offense.)
• Look how unhappy John Deacon is.
• He wants a proper cuppa.
• None of this bloody Johnny Chopsticks business.
• That Englishman is reciting Rudyard Kipling to himself: you know it, and I know it.
• Someone bring John Deacon a chair and a bacon butty.
• Anyway, Japan loved Queen and so Queen loved ’em right back: they would have a kimono phase.
• 
• And, apparently some time in 1977, Queen performed The Mikado.
• 
• One would assume that Roger played Yum-Yum, and Freddie pretended that his mic stand was the Snickersnee.
• So half of Teo Torriate is in (butchered, one would assume) Japanese.
• It took me a long while to make that small point, and I apologize.
• And Somebody To Love is on this one, and loving that song should be the first question on the Voight-Kampf test.
• Humans love that song.
• Period.
• And Freddie hits those high notes at the end, so maybe dogs love that song, too.
• Even if dogs don’t love Somebody To Love, then they would see how happy the song made you, and then they would mirror your emotions and become happy, as well.
• Dogs are awesome like that.
• For some reason, A Day at the Races is the only Queen album not available on YouTube as just one thing, but that lets me just post The Millionaire’s Waltz by itself.
• Go listen.

You promised the nice people Thoughts on Queen.

I promise the nice people lots of stuff. Remember the podcast?

Why aren’t you writing?

Who are you, my fucking conscience?

Kinda.

Fuck off. I have discovered.

Discovered is a transitive verb. You need to pair it with an object or you sound insane.

I have made a discovery.

Better. What?

Well, Deadheads invented being obsessive about a band, right?

Arguable at best.

Dude, Deadheads literally invented the internet to talk about the band.

That is actually more than a little bit correct, yeah. Go on.

So, you know: no disrespect to Deadheads.

We here at TotD would never disrespect Deadheads.

But these Queen fuckers have their shit together. Look at this:

No matter how classy and foreign you are, one day you’re still gonna have to play Lakeland, Florida.

Right, but look at the graphic design.

Very clean and intuitive. Sidebar looks nice, too.

Better than ours.

Every site looks better than ours. The problem with Dead-based websites is that they’re made by Deadheads.

We should get Queen fans to make our sites.

Get on that. Gonna link to this place?

This place?

That place. What are you listening to?

I am listening to Night at the Opera for the second time, because I forgot to write about it the first time I listened to it, and then got caught up with nonsense.

That’s the one with Bohemian Rhapsody?

Yup.

If you had a million dollars and the Time Sheath, would you go back and hire the Grateful Dead to play a cover of Bohemian Rhapsody just for how funny it would be?

Yes, I would.

Brent or Mrs. Donna Jean?

Both. I have the Time Sheath, so I would get both. I would require as many Grateful Deads as possible to be singing in the wrong key and forgetting the words to Bohemian Rhapsody as possible.

Lotta key changes and tricky transitions in that number, too.

Yeah, and if you miss them, they don’t circle back around. Not just a train wreck: a train made out of trains crashing into a building made out of trains.

A {train} wreck.

Right: the set of all possible trains. The very category of “train” would wreck.

Well, what Queen song could the Dead play?

The ’69 band could slaughter Brighton Rock.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Good call.

Kinda proud of it myself. Fat Bottomed Girls?

Ugh, I can hear them trying.

I know, it’s in my head, too. Sorry.

Is Phil taking the high or low part?

Stop it!

Post the album for the nice people to give them something to cleanse the palates of their ears.

Anything, Jesus.

The rest of the album gets overshadowed by Bohemian Rhapsody, but here’s how great it is: even if BR wasn’t on it, it might still be Queen’s second or third-best record.

All four Queens have sterling cuts on this one: besides Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie has Love Of My Life and the Prophet Song; Brian wrote Sweet Lady (one of their more overlooked rockers), and another music hall number, Good Company; Roger added I’m in Love with my Car, which would have been stupid had it not been for the throbbing 6/8 signature that instead vaults the song up to gloriously dumb.

And John fucking Deacon, ladies and gentlemen, on the Wurlitzer electric piano with You’re My Best Friend, which went to Number One in a billion countries. It’s written in the key of C, because John Deacon wrote it as he was learning to play the piano. Did you write a Number One hit while you were learning to play the piano?

No. No, you didn’t. Respect John Deacon, damn you.

(It has been noted in many publications that Brian May’s ’39 is the only–and best–song about time dilation due to subluminal travel. Fewer sources note how eager Brian is to explain the song to people, so that they’ll know how smart he is. When anyone asked Freddie what Bohemian Rhapsody was about, he would say something witty, and then have sex with a roomful of people. Much better answer.)

So, this is ’75 going into ’76. The band looked like this:

And, as always, that is what Freddie’s chest and cock looked like.

I have no idea why Brian and John Deacon are imitating Slash and Izzy Stradlin ten years in advance, either.