Where Do I Belong

Freddie Mercury died on November 24^th, 1991. He was 45 years old. At the time, I was working at the campus bookstore at California State University, Northridge.

I grew up on Queen. They were – along with King Kong, Spider Man, and The Beatles – a primary influence during my formative years in 1970s Santa Fe. His death took the wind out of me. In the administrative area of the bookstore, next to the clock and our timecards, I hung up a piece of paper upon which I scrawled, in my barely legible chickenscratch: “No beginning, there’s no ending… believe me, life goes on and on and…” It was a couple of lines from In the Lap of the Gods, a song Freddie wrote for Queen’s third album, 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack. I walked around in a funk for two or three weeks afterwards. His was one of three or four celebrity deaths that genuinely fucked with my head, that had me grieving like a good friend was lost. (John Lennon and Mel Blanc are the other two that come to mind.)

Perhaps it’s precisely because I heard Queen during my formative years that I still love them so much. I often talk to my friends about the current state of movies – namely, why do they suck so bad? It seemed like there was this special era between 1975 and 1987 when cool-ass movies were coming out every damn year: Jaws, Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Alien, Halloween, Escape From New York, Star Trek II, Return of the Living Dead, Evil Dead II, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Animal House, Sixteen Candles, etc… A good friend of mine tells me repeatedly: No, it wasn’t that the movies during those years were better than any other span of time, it’s just you; when you’re that young, everything is cool. You take that with you into your dotage.

Could be, I guess. I was listening to the opening 22 seconds of Bohemian Rhapsody on Queen Live at The Bowl tonight, and was struck again by Freddie’s tunefulness. Throughout Queen’s touring years, Freddie would take songs that he started on piano, and improvise – or so it seemed – a short intro. These intros were, invariably, sublimely etheriel. However, Roger Taylor’s cymbal flourish on the Bowl recording (0:09 to 0:13), coming at exactly the right time, indicates that these were bits the band probably went over during rehearsals, or evolved every night at the same point in the set. Regardless, all these years later, I still stand in awe of the man’s talent.

The amount of live Queen footage on youtube is staggering. I found a clip of the band performing In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited last week; it looks to be from about 1976 or so, and true to form, Freddie opens the song with a faux-improv (0:15 to 0:42) that is soaringly, achingly beautiful. The guy was just so tuneful, so fucking talented. He was all ego, I’ll grant you that – he was an obnoxious egomaniac who took everything to the extremist possible extreme, but as a dear friend of mine once said, “an asshole without talent is just an asshole.” Freddie may have been an egomaniacal creep, but the creeps I know and deal with every day didn’t write Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. Indeed, they couldn’t write Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. It takes a certain kind of genius to do so.

It’s been fashionable in the U.S. to bash Queen as a “fag band” (as a guy I know here in Santa Fe once said) ever since they committed the cardinal sin of sounding disco on 1982’s Hot Space, but that’s just sour grapes on the part of music snobs. Talent like Freddie’s comes down the pike once every 30 years or so (if we're lucky), which is to say nothing about the other members of Queen.

I don’t love the man and his music because I first heard him when I was of the age when everything sounded good. I love the man and his music because he was one of the towering talents in rock’n’roll history.