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.