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.