Queen at 40, part III

QUEEN II (March 1974)

The answer, if you were an avid reader of Britain’s Record Mirror, was a resounding “no.” In his review of Queen II, writer Chris Poole mercilessly attacked the album as “the dregs of glam rock. Weak and over-produced, if this band are our brightest hope for the future, then we are committing rock and roll suicide.”

This was a half-truth, actually; over-arranged is more accurate. On Queen II the band discovered their stock in trade: MULTI-TRACKING. Layers upon layers upon layers of vocals and guitars, turning every song into a prog-rock epic. The band defiantly wore critical attacks on this approach as a badge of honor, and in so doing, began formulating the Queen aesthetic: we’re going to be as pompous and bombastic as possible, and don’t give a shit what the critics think.

That, as it turned out, was a good thing, building solidarity in the ranks, bringing the band closer together. What wasn’t good – and what Poole undoubtedly meant when he called the album “weak” – was the band’s ongoing, excruciating obsession with Dungeons and Dragons lyrics. Of the album’s eleven songs (and one is an instrumental), fully seven are mind-numbing excursions into JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is a damn shame, because Queen’s sound really takes hold here. Had Freddie written different lyrics to songs like Ogre Battle, The March of the Black Queen, and Seven Seas of Rhye – had he really written about something – history would view Queen II differently. Ignoring its lyrics (“The ogre men are coming out from the two-way mirror mountain, they’re running up behind and they’re coming all about; can’t go east ‘cos you gotta go south”), Ogre Battle is a grand, grand 70s metal song with a killer hook, tight-as-shit bass and drums, and superlative vocals from Freddie. After sounding somewhat hesitant on Queen, here Freddie pushes himself, finally truly confident of his range and tone.

Black Queen, Freddie’s obligatory bazillion-parts mini-opera, is beautiful stuff, replete with sublime melodies, soaring Queen harmonies and Brian May playing the beejeezus out of his Red Special. But along come the abominable lyrics, everything from “water babies singing in a lily-pool delight” to “the city of the fireflies.” It could have been brilliant. It really could have. The same goes for “Seven Seas of Rhye.” Fleshed out into a proper song here, it positively slays – that is, until you catch the line “I challenge the mighty titan and his troubadours…,” and you slowly, reluctantly go back to the lyric sheet, and you realize that Freddie is once again hammering away, ceaselessly, nay, relentlessly, at his fantasy role-playing game motif. Seven Seas of Rhye is, in fact, where this Queen yin and yang of rocking music/shit-all stupid lyrics reaches its crescendo. At 2.47 it’s a crazed microcosm of what this band was capable of, a majestic blast of careening piano and slashing Brian May licks that landed the group their first top-10 single in England.

But then the “lords and lady preachers,” “privy counselors” and “shod and shady senators” show up, depriving Freddie of the Seven Seas of Rhye. Natch’. It’s enough to make you seriously wonder what the guy was getting at, and why - and yet, it gets worse. The album’s nadir is The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, Freddie’s two minute, 41 second homage to Richard Dadd’s mid-19^th century painting Fairy Fellers’ Master-Stroke. A dense, unique work of art, Dadd later helpfully wrote a bizarre, 3,718 word essay/poem called Elimination of a picture and its subject - called the feller's master stroke, explaining each character in the painting. It is from this screed that Freddie lifted most of the lyrics for his song: politicians with senatorial pipes, a dragonfly trumpeter, and the tale’s arch-magician. Unlike Seven Seas of Rhye, Stroke’s music is cloy and grating, the kind of thing your fucked up friends – the ones who still game, even though they’re in their 40s – would force you to endure after tricking you into a weekend with the Society for Creative Anachronism. It hurts. Bad.

Nevermore is a short, pretty piano ballad about love lost, but is tainted again by prog rock lyrics. Speaking of love lost, Funny How Love Is is the first of seemingly hundreds of dull, pointless lyrics about love, falling in love, being hurt by love, looking for love, dreaming about love, etc., that Freddie and Queen would write for the next 17 years. It begins a troubling pattern for the band, a pattern that guaranteed Queen would never be taken seriously by snobby music fans of the real stuff: Queen lyrics are too literal. They're always literal. There’s nothing to ponder, no subtext, no layers, no poetry to songs like Funny How Love Is. The band weren’t incapable of writing something weighty, as they proved beginning on their next album. But all too often it seemed like Freddie’s blasé attitude towards Queen’s “disposable” songs was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or maybe they worked so tirelessly on the music that the lyrics became the redheaded stepchild of the creative process?

American ex-pat Paul Gambaccini once said, "one reason why Queen were never taken seriously by the press in the pop world was that they were not leaders of a social movement. They didn’t stand for anything, except themselves. In that sense, which is normal in a person’s employment, they may have even seemed a bit egocentric."

Saying the band was "a bit" egocentric is being unduly kind. Queen was always about one thing: Queen. And you can trash them all you want for this blatant, gratuitous egocentricism, but I look at it this way: at least they were honest about their single-minded pursuit of money and fame, and at least they had the chops to back it up. They weren't trying to change the world, and they never, ever pretended that was their goal. They just wanted to play in a rock band and get laid. In that sense, these guys were the real deal. (More real than, say, Led Zeppelin - a band always counted amongst the great Rock bands - that always feigned profundity.) No pretenses, no kowtowing to the Lou Reed crowd. And the lyrics bear this out on every album.

But in a world of opposites and wide open spectrums, I embrace as much as I can. Sometimes, it's simply ok if a band's lyrics don't match up to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. They can't always. And what the snobs of the world won't admit is, they shouldn't always have to. And really, most don't. Even those that try. Sometimes it's the music itself that alters your life's trajectory, and lyrics are secondary.

The rest of Queen II, Side White (on the original vinyl, Freddie’s songs were all on – and this is some spooky shit – Side Black), consists of four May songs and one Roger Taylor song. With the exception of Procession, a short multi-tracked guitar instrumental, each one encapsulates the Queen II paradox: great music, spot-on performances, and a maddening lost opportunity with lyrics. Taylor’s song, The Loser in the End, is a poor man’s She’s Leaving Home, and is, thank God Almighty, one of two songs on Queen II not invoking castles, monarchs, fairies, or any other Lord of the Rings castoffs. Lyrically simplistic, it at the very least sports a nice melody, and was Taylor’s last warm-up before he came into his own on Sheer Heart Attack. Father to Son is May’s answer to Freddie’s March of the Black Queen, a long, multi-part epic that calls to mind John Boorman’s Excalibur. White Queen (As It Began)’s verses find Brian May laying down the kind of arpeggios that bands like Metallica would later lift for their 90s and aughts Metal Power Ballads.

Some Day One Day is the exception here, and is an object lesson in how production and arrangement can completely alter a song. Brian May is trying here, truly, and nearly delivers the goods in a non-D&D song about doomed love. The melody is beauteous, and the lyrics manage to approach something meaningful: "Today the cloud it hangs over us and all is grey - but some day, one day…" But the band's headlong rush into multi-tracking works against them in this one instance. Some Day One Day should be sparse - guitars, bass, drums, vox. Or even guitar and vox.

Queen II landed at number five in the British charts, but only eked it out to number 49 in the U.S. On the plus side, Roy Thomas Baker’s production, with an invaluable assist by engineer Mike Stone, is leagues beyond Queen. The first album’s cardboard drums are crisp and full here, and a lot of time was clearly taken with the mix – these guys sounded like a bona-fide band this time around. On the down side, Chris Poole may have been right; what’s the point of finding your sound and writing great music, only to round it out with vacuous lyrics about chalice quests? Whereas Queen sounded like a band struggling for identity, Queen II sounded like tremendous talent wasted. The next album, already being recorded and readied for release later that same year, would decide, finally: was Queen the Gary Gygax House Band, or a real band?

Queen at 40, part II

QUEEN (1973)

In the revisionist-history wave that has swept the Queen legacy since Freddie Mercury’s death, the band’s debut album emerged as a rock’n’roll mini-classic, and a harbinger of the greatness yet to come. The latter point is debatable, but the former isn’t, so let’s just get the truth out of the way here at the beginning: Queen, the band’s first album, recorded in late 1972/early 1973, and released in the summer of 1973, is crap.

Mostly, anyway. The first two songs, Keep Yourself Alive and Doing All Right (both written by Brian May), are undeniably great rock’n’roll, and unlike most of the rest of the album, are within acceptable rock’n’roll song lengths (around four minutes), and contain less than a bazillion parts.

But then begins Freddie Mercury’s harrowing three-song descent into a prog-rock game of Dungeons & Dragons: Great King Rat, My Fairy King, and Liar. The whole band’s unfortunate fondness for evil monarchs, fairies and seers atop moonlit stairs would infect their lyrics all the way through the first four albums, bringing an avalanche of harsh criticism from much of the music press. Which is not to say that music fans should care at all what music critics think, but how, as a Queen fan, do you convince skeptics to take Freddie seriously as he sings in a merry falsetto (preceded by Roger Taylor’s piercing falsetto shriek), “In the land where horses born with eagle wings, and honey bees have lost their stings”? Or how about this: “Someone has drained the color from my wings, broken my fairy circle ring, and shamed the king in all his pride.”

The third song of this unholy triumvirate, Liar, is easily the best, and gained some unexpected street cred when The Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, now over 40 and not caring anymore about keeping up punk appearances, confessed his love for the song, particularly Brian May’s guitar playing. In what would become a pattern for Freddie throughout Queen’s first three albums, Liar boasts about eight or nine parts, but May’s guitar is heavy and the riffs are plentiful, so lines like “I have sailed the seas, from Mars to Mercury” are a little easier to endure.

Most bizarre of all is Jesus, Freddie’s bafflingly straight take on Jesus’ birth and healing of lepers. With its choral-like chorus, the song is utterly incongruous on what is essentially a hard rock album, inspiring not so much critical rancor as confused head-scratching back in 1973: what kind of a band was this?

It was hard to say. The rest of the album’s songs – The Night Comes Down, Modern Times Rock’n’Roll, Son and Daughter, and Seven Seas of Rhye – are a mixed bag. Seven Seas of Rhye, at one minute, seventeen seconds, isn’t a song so much as a snippet of an idea Freddie was working on. The up-tempo Modern Times Rock’n’Roll, drummer Roger Taylor’s first contribution to the Queen oeuvre, livens things up a great deal, but Taylor would return to its theme – young, restless rebel gets laid a lot but wants to get out of this dull berg and rock – throughout his career, completely poisoning the well by the time of 1980’s buffoonish Rock It (Prime Jive).

The Night Comes Down is an innocuous, moderate-tempo 1-4-5 paean to innocent youth through the eyes of an angst-ridden Brian May, and Son and Daughter is May’s contribution to the burgeoning heavy metal sweepstakes, a slow, heavy aping of Zep/Sabbath that the guitarist abandoned by Queen II. Neither song is bad, but neither is anything other than filler.

Throw in a pretentious collage of band photos on the back cover, and you’ve got a debut that doesn’t set itself apart. In fact, the opposite can be said; with Freddie’s prog-rock lyrics and May’s heavy metal riffs, the band didn’t arrive with any sort of identity. They appeared, instead, to be latching onto whatever was currently in vogue, more intent on fitting in than establishing a unique, identifiable aesthetic.

But for the patient listener, there was something happening on Queen. Keep Yourself Alive has a great hook, tunefully unorthodox chord progressions, and an out-of-nowhere break in the middle with a crushing couplet (“Do you think you’re better every day? No, I just think I’m two steps nearer to my grave…”). Part gorgeous ballad and part exhilarating rave-up, the outstanding Doing All Right heralds Brian May’s arrival as a gargantuan force to be reckoned with, even more than Keep Yourself Alive. The rhythm section of John Deacon and Roger Taylor is tight, and throughout the album, Freddie’s vocals, even when singing about Dungeons and Dragons scenarios, are alternately brawny and soulful.

And really, Liar - lyrics aside - is gorgeous stuff. The riffs are equal to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and the outro, commencing at 5:38 and running 48 seconds to song's end, is transcendent, the beginning of ten year's worth of sublimely beautiful guitar playing by Brian May.

Clearly there was a lot of talent here, with enormous potential. The question, as Queen headed into 1974, was whether or not they could find their own way, and actually realize that potential.

Queen at 40, Part I

On September 15^th, 1982, Queen played the second of two nights at The Forum in Los Angeles, California. After the post-show party, the four bandmates and their road crew packed their bags and equipment and flew back to England.

What was already a long tour then got longer; despite having spent 57 days in North America, playing 33 dates in support of their latest album, they turned around and flew back to New York, honoring a commitment to perform on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

The next month found the group in Japan, playing dates into early November. At that point, tired of the schedule, and even tired of each other, the four bandmates decided to split up and clear their heads. It would be over a year and a half before Queen toured again.

And none of those three final tours – tours that took them all over the globe, raking in money hand over fist – would find the band back in America. No one knew it at the time, but Queen’s SNL performance was the last time the group played a live set in America.

America turned on Queen in 1982. The band that two years earlier owned the country after a few massively-selling albums and huge hit singles suddenly found themselves persona non grata, and engaged, too late, in some eleventh-hour damage control. First came the decision to release the Calling All Girls single in North America, in lieu of Staying Power, the single that went out to the rest of the world. Then came the curious decision to play Crazy Little Thing Called Love on SNL, a song not only not on the album they were currently touring and promoting, but a song that was three years old at that point, having been released as a single in October of 1979.

But the damage control failed. And although they thought they would posthumously and eventually win favor again in America, Queen largely ignored the U.S. from 1982 on, an ostracized band with zero respectability in a country still willing to make millionaires out of the likes of Journey and Styx.

***

The album Queen was touring in late 1982 was Hot Space, and it is the album that haunted the band for the rest of their lives. Americans embraced the disco/funk sounds of 1980’s Another One Bites the Dust because it had a great groove, and we were willing to cut some slack to the band that gave us Sheer Heart Attack and Bohemian Rhapsody.

But Another One Bites the Dust did strange things to Queen’s collective head. Maybe they took the song’s massive worldwide success as a sign that fans wanted more disco? That funky disco grooves were the wave of the future? It's hard to say. One thing that is indisputable: Americans took home Hot Space in May of 1982 and couldn't wait to get rid of it. Most didn’t even make it to side two, where at least some more Rock-sounding songs resided (including the aforementioned Calling All Girls), because side one was quite simply the end of the world: five jarring disco/dance floor songs, replete with synthesizers and godawful sound effects, seemingly gift-wrapped for a genre that was already long gone by that point.

The result was an album that stalled at #22, the first Queen album not to make the U.S. top 10 since 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack, and the last to come anywhere near the U.S. top twenty. America’s love affair with Queen was officially over. It was bad enough pulling the sleeve out of 1980’s The Game to see Freddie Mercury with short hair and a brand new, stereotypically 70s-chic moustache. The guy who wrote Death on Two Legs was doing a permanent Glenn Hughes impression? But then, the capper: a disco album and the accompanying asinine video for the appalling Body Language single, featuring Freddie-As-Leatherboy, half naked sweaty dancers, and a shot of a woman's ass in a bathing suit, blasted by a firehose. These were the We Will Rock You guys?

Responding to the tidal wave of criticism following Hot Space’s release, Freddie somewhat disingenuously told fans at Milton Keynes Bowl that “it’s only a bloody record.”

He’s right: it is. And it also isn’t. Bands release a lot of records, and our favorite bands inevitably release duds at some point in their careers. And we put up with it because even our heroes have bad years. But they themselves don’t get this, allowing ego to overwhelm simple reality. Freddie insulated himself against critical vitriol by insisting, time and again over the years, that Queen’s songs were “utterly disposable… People can discard them like a used tissue.” But this was just an unconscious affirmation of his own profound insecurities. Whether Freddie and goons like Gene Simmons want to admit it or not, rock’n’roll is art. And Queen had a long history of writing and recording all sorts of good rock’n’roll.

However, it is not wholly inaccurate to say Hot Space wasn’t just a dud. It was, in fact, more like a bewildering misstep for a band that started life playing hard rock, and made guitar-driven Rock their bread and butter. Two years after Hot Space, bassist John Deacon showed up on the cover of The Works sporting one of the most ghastly-looking, worst-permed mushroom haircuts of all time. Why was this band – always bombastic and egocentric, but rocking nonetheless – suddenly trying so hard to look and sound so un-rocking, and playing disco/funk songs with tons of synthesizers?

Not a bad question, that. And as Hollywood Records re-issues the entire Queen catalog, perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning.