Queen

Even though I lived a sheltered musical life, I didn’t grow up in a cave, so I had at least heard some popular music. None of it ever caught my ear until Mel played Bohemian Rhapsody for me (her older sister Melissa owned the album). She thought it was hysterical, and it certainly was unlike anything else I had heard. Although bookended with boring rock clichés, the middle of the song launched off into an amazing faux-opera, complete with multiple harmonies and wild histrionics. It was startling, and much more intriguing than the usual Eagles/Kris Kristofferson/Jim Croche suspects that Mel played for me. Then somebody brought the album in to share with the class during music and was able to slip it by on the strength of that song. Our music teacher had little patience for (currently) popular music and wouldn’t let us play any of it, but the strange middle section of Bohemian Rhapsody puzzled her, so she let it go by. At least until Death on Two Legs came on, and Freddie Mercury shouted out “And now you can kiss my ass goodbye”, whereupon she vaulted over to the record player and knocked the needle off and we were forever forbidden from bringing our own music in.

When I got home, I played my new record over and over and over again, the first of what would become many musical obsessions, much to my mother’s dismay (other songs I just couldn’t get enough of when I first heard them: Ultravox’s Sleepwalk, The B-52’s Rock Lobster, and J. Geils’ Love Stinks). Although she could stand Bohemian Rhapsody, the flipside (I’m in Love with My Car) made her hair bristle – an effect that was not lost on me. All bluster and guitar, I’m in Love with My Car is not a good song, but it was the first time I understood the pure visceral thrill of the snarling guitars and thundering drums of real rock music.

I eventually acquired Night at the Opera, the album that spawned Bohemian Rhapsody, and was delighted to discover that it was a lot more varied than I thought possible for a rock group. In addition to the faux-opera (fauxpera) or Bohemian Rhapsody and the pedal to the metal rock of I’m in Love with My Car, there were ballads and very experimental (and very bad) musical pastiches and several examples of what can only be characterized as music hall tunes. Perhaps this rock music wasn’t as monolithic as I thought (or, rather, as I had been led to believe). So, for better or worse, my very first record was the Bohemian Rhapsody single. And that almost wasn’t a single to begin with.

As I heard it told, Queen approached their label with Bohemian Rhapsody and wanted it released as a single. The record company laughed and, when they realized that Queen was serious, put their foot down unequivocally. It’s too weird and it’s way too long for a single, they said, end of discussion. So the band took it to a local DJ (this was in Boston, I believe), and told him that this was there new song but that, under no circumstances should he play it on the air. The DJ understood perfectly and played it several times that weekend, and the station got so many calls that the record company was forced to release it as a single. And I was forced to buy it and the rest, as they say, is history.

Produced, like most of their albums, by the legendarily anal Roy Thomas Baker (see The Cars), Night at the Opera has a gigantic sound, and is frightfully good ear candy. Even the hideously awful Prophet Song is made somewhat bearable (a couple of times through, anyway) by the inventive production. For years Queen proudly stamped “no synthesizers were used on this album” on the back of their records, partly to showcase Baker’s astonishing studio wizardry and partly to align Queen with other heavy metal bands (e.g. Led Zeppelin) and, especially, their fans who thought that the synthesizer was a wussy instrument (in a satisfying payback, Larry Fast (aka Synergy) proudly stated that no electric guitars were used on his albums, and vengeance was mine).

Queen was a schizophrenic band. They could rock like any of the heavy-hitting, ultra-macho bands of the time, but they also showed a streak of tenderness that most of those bands wouldn’t dare show. Freddie Mercury, the groups flamboyant singer, added a sense of camp theatricality to the mix and, although he stayed in the closet until AIDS dragged his corpse out of it, his bisexual politics informed much of their material – including their very name. In a surreal twist, one of their biggest songs, We Are the Champions, a gay-rights anthem, became a huge sports victory celebration staple. The irony is sweet – much like watching fiercely homophobic men waving their arms around on the dance floor to the Village People’s YMCA who have no idea what the song is really about.

Although critically panned (Rolling Stone famously called one of their albums “fascistic”), they were enormously popular, especially in England, where they were second only to the Beatles in popularity and collectability. Although they proudly touted their lack of synthesizers for years, when they decided to finally add them (on 1980’s The Game), they went whole hog, and there’s barely a guitar to be heard on that album. The Game was their last worthwhile album, and put to an end a remarkable string of records during the 1970s. In many ways, they represented everything that the punks hated about 70s rock, and the operatic facade of their music was what the Ramones et al burned to the ground in 1977.

Glamorous, theatrical, campy, over-the-top, rocking, nostalgic, earnest, Queen went places no other band dared, and reaped enormous rewards doing so. But more important than all the sales and the hits and the gender-bending and the public awareness they brought to AIDS, was the fact that they produced the very first record I ever bought and sent me, teetering between boy and man, between confident and scared, headlong into the world of music. They were the first band to befriend me, and the friendship that they offered, the musical camaraderie, has never let me down.