The Life of Coleman Francis - Part II

THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (1961)

The Beast of Yucca Flats is 54 minutes long and never seems like less than three hours. Whereas 1950s sci fi films like Day the Earth Stood Still, Them and Godzilla reflected society’s fear of nuclear radiation and war, Francis simply exploited nuclear paranoia as a pretext for filming a once again woefully miscast Tor Johnson stumbling around the desert near Saugus, CA.

That is if, in fact, Francis was even thinking about exploiting anything for his own personal gain. One gets the sense with Beast – as one also does with The Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba – that there wasn’t actually a script anyone was working from. Or even a treatment. Francis’ movies have the feel of some middle-school friends taking a camera out into a field and filming whatever comes to mind that particular day, then heading out the next day and doing the same, wholly unconcerned with what was shot the day before.

The Beast of Yucca Flats is ostensibly about Russian defector Joseph Javorski (“noted scientist,” as the narrator intones at least three times) flying to an undisclosed location outside of the Nevada Proving Grounds with a briefcase full of “secret data.” After nearly being assassinated by altogether inept Russian spies, radiation from an unexpected bomb test turns him into the Beast, and he embarks on a murderous rampage.

But this is where any semblance of coherence ends. The rest of the movie’s 45 minutes is a baffling montage of cars driving through the desert, men climbing over and around endless rocks in the desert, and the world’s dumbest family road tripping through the desert. There is no plot. There is no continuity. There is no point. After the Beast kills his first two victims (his only two victims, excluding the film’s opening sequence), we see a boy selling newspapers with the headline “BEAST KILLS MAN AND WIFE.” But no one is called out to find the Beast – not the Sheriff, not detectives, not the National Guard. Only patrolman Joe Dobson (Larry Aten, who went on to two appearances in The Fugitive) and his partner Jim Archer (Bing Stafford, in his only film role) are on the case, and Joe has to go retrieve Jim from his house, in what appears to be a day-for-night shot. “Better come with me,” Joe’s emotionless, overdubbed voice says in a long shot where we can’t even see his face. “Trouble up the road. Murder.” “Be right down,” Jim says.

Tor Johnson plays the “beast.” As Joseph Javorski he lumbers around the southern California desert looking confused and out of sorts. As the Beast he lumbers around the southern California desert looking confused and out of sorts, but his clothes are torn and some cut-rate make-up on his face is supposed to make it look as though he lived through a nuclear bomb test. Here, then, is the titular Beast of the movie’s title, the proverbial star of the show.

And yet a sizeable chunk in the middle of the film – from 26:53 to 42:42 on your DVD – follows Jim Archer as he attempts to gun down distraught father Hank Radcliffe (Douglas Mellor, who somehow landed an uncredited cameo in 1987’s The Lost Boys) from an airplane, mistaking Radcliffe for the Beast. That’s nearly sixteen minutes of Beast that has nothing whatsoever to do with Joseph Javorski, his stolen scientific data, or the Beast itself. It’s a film-within-a-film – Death From The Air? – and serves as Francis’ statement of intent: nothing in this movie makes any sense and I couldn’t give a good goddamn if that makes watching it unpleasant. I couldn’t give a good goddamn about you. I have nothing to say, but I’m going to say it anyway.

For instance, Beast’s opening shot of a woman getting out of the shower and being strangled by an unknown assailant while a clock ticks deafeningly loud exists in a vacuum from the rest of the film. We never come back to it. It’s unclear if it happens before the events of the movie itself. We assume the murderer is the Beast, but we never see his face. Interestingly, it’s the best shot of the entire movie. It’s just solid enough to make you wonder if Francis wasn’t on set that day, if perhaps the director had a 2^nd unit shooting this scene while he wandered the desert with the rest of the cast.

The Beast of Yucca Flats was shot MOS – no sound – and for the most part, Francis didn’t bother going back and dubbing in everyone’s lines. Many scenes were comically shot to avoid showing the actors’ faces altogether (this way he didn’t have to waste valuable seconds synching) so in the few instances where actual dialog is being spoken, we don’t even see the mouths speaking the lines. We just hear the voices, which were clearly overdubbed in post. For the most part, a monotone narrator attempts to make sense of the confusing onscreen images, and succeeds only in making things worse. It is the narration that has become the stuff of legend amongst Francis’ fanbase, tirelessly muddying the already confusing goings-on onscreen:

(During a long car chase sequence): “Flag on the moon. How did it get there? Secret data. Pictures of the moon. Secret data, never before outside the Kremlin. Man’s first rocket to the moon.”

Wheels and whirlwinds of progress and justice are two themes the narrator returns to:

“Joe Dobson. Caught in the wheels of progress.”

“Jim Archer, Joe’s partner. Another man caught in the frantic race for the betterment of mankind. Progress.”

“Vacation time. Man and wife. Unaware of scientific progress.”

“Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.”

“The pilot dropped his man. If Joe Dobson moves north, Hank will be caught in the middle. An innocent victim, caught in the Wheels of Justice.”

Violent death is another preoccupation:

“Hours in the broiling hot desert sun. With no trace of the killer. To put Jim Archer’s paratroop training to good use is the only answer. A trip up into the skies, and jump. And if the killer is on the plateau: Kill him.”

“Always on the prowl. Looking for something, or somebody to kill. Quench the killer’s thirst.”

“Joseph Javorski. Respected scientist. Now a fiend. Prowling the wastelands. A prehistoric beast in a nuclear age. Kill. Kill, just to be killing.”

“Twenty hours without rest and still no enemy. In the blistering desert heat, Jim and Joe plan their next attack. Find the Beast and kill him. Kill, or be killed. Man’s inhumanity to man.”

And some good old-fashioned Colman Francis nonsense:

“Touch a button. Things happen. A scientist becomes a beast.”

“A man runs, somebody shoots at him.”

“Vacation time. People travel east, west, north or south. The Radcliffs travel east, with two small boys, adventurous boys. Nothing bothers some people. Not even Flying Saucers.” (There are no flying saucers in The Beast of Yucca Flats.)

Online chatter points to Francis himself as the film’s imperturbable narrator, but it’s largely academic. Here is a movie where a man casually walks away from his gun-totting assassins, as though he’s just gotten off the bus and walking to work. Here is a movie with the director’s wife and two sons, none of whom are actors, in major roles. Here is a movie with Tor Johnson in his final leading role, throwing huge rocks. Here is a movie where a man is shot dead by a high-powered rifle, and then a minute later gets up and walks away, none the worse for wear. Here is a director’s debut effort where inside of nine minutes, a naked woman has been strangled, and a Russian defector has landed in the desert outside of the Nevada Proving Grounds, been chased by gun-wielding KGB agents, and subjected to a nuclear bomb blast.

Here is the strange, strange world of Coleman Francis. The Beast of Yucca Flats cost an estimated $34,000 to make, and there’s no telling how much – if anything – it grossed. Presumably the director at least turned a small profit, because his sophomore effort – 1963’s The Skydivers – sported a bona-fide soundtrack, relieving him of dubbing duties. Coleman Francis was moving up.

The Life of Coleman Francis - Part I

Back in 2008, the original cast and crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 gathered for a panel discussion at Comic-Con in San Diego. In the hands of a James Lipton or a Charlie Rose this might very well have been legitimately interesting and produced some fireworks, shedding new light on the actors and writers of the beloved show.

Instead, the event – like so much of what is fed to the masses to keep everyone neatly pacified – was a watered-down affair, hosted by funnyman Patton Oswalt, who reminded everyone to watch The King of Queens, and then proceeded to boldly lob grapefruit after grapefruit at the panel, which they effortlessly hit out of the ballpark, to the delight of the assembled sycophantic fanboys and girls. If you’re looking for a discussion with MST’s principles regarding creator Joel Hodgson being driven to quit because of producer Jim Mallon’s obstinacy, you’re better off simply googling “jim mallon dick,” rather than watching the footage on the 13^th MST box set.

However, despite the carefully tailored sterile tone, there was one truly instructive moment, a moment pregnant with subtext, heavy with the burden of history, that went completely unnoticed by the audience, the world at large, and even the panel members themselves.

“Was there ever a movie,” Oswalt asks early in the discussion, “you started to sit down and watch and thought, ok, this is gonna be great, and then you realized, oh, this is actually a hidden gem, this is pretty good, or… was there ever a movie that was so bad, so horrifying, that you’re like, this would be – we can’t even make fun of this. This would be cruel.”

“Manos the Hands of Fate,” Bridget Jones Nelson pipes up. The crowd erupts in applause. A lost film from virtually the moment it was released in 1966 by El Paso fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren, Manos was re-discovered by MST writer and cast member Frank Conniff, ridiculed during MST’s fourth season in 1993, and has been an infamous cult classic ever since. 2011 saw a Manos special edition DVD, featuring the original movie, the Mystery Science Theater episode, and the 30-minute documentary Hotel Torgo.

Twenty minutes later, Frank Conniff throws in his two cents on Manos: “That seems like of all the films we did, that’s kind of the one we brought to the world in a big way, um, that otherwise – and I also like to think that, when people talk about directors who made bad movies like Ed Wood, I like to think that we contributed to the fact that maybe Coleman Francis’ name comes up.”

A scant smattering of unenthusiastic applause greets the mention of Francis’ name. The loudest clapping comes courtesy Kevin Murphy, the voice of Tom Servo for nine of MST3K’s ten seasons.

Coleman Francis’ last credit in a movie – acting, directing, or otherwise – is from 1970. He is billed as the “Rotund Drunk” in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Less than three years later he was dead at the age of 53. If his partner Anthony Cardoza is to be believed, Francis was found in the back of a station wagon with a plastic bag over his head, and a tube either around his throat or in his mouth. He is interred in the Columbarium of Remembrance Mausoleum, near Cecil Kellaway, at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles. His tiny nameplate reads simply: “Coleman C. Francis. 1919 – 1973.”

***

There are no books written about Coleman Francis. There are no documentaries about his strange Hollywood career, no webpages devoted to explaining the three movies he directed. Ed Wood fans chafe at the mention of the Medved brothers’ The Golden Turkey Awards, but that’s where most of them first heard of Wood. The book at least brought Wood’s name to a whole new generation of fans and researchers. None of Coleman Francis’ movies come up in the Medved’s book. Francis himself doesn’t come up in the Medved’s book.

It’s as though the coffee-obsessed, portly friend of Russ Meyer never existed.

In a world where a movie as ghastly as 1997’s Titanic wins academy awards for best picture and director, and Elmer Bernstein starts his career by scoring Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster, you would be right to characterize the absence of Coleman Francis from most scholarly works on American cinema history as cosmically unfair.

You would also be right characterizing all three of Francis’ movies as nearly unwatchable. He knocked out three in six years as a director: The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), The Skydivers (1963), and Red Zone Cuba (AKA Night Train to Mundo Fine, 1966). Individually they are the nadir or filmmaking, and watched in chronological order, seem to somehow get worse as you go.

But this is no reason for Francis to be forgotten. As shockingly bad as his triumvirate is, any one of them is still much, much better than, say, Ted V. Mikels’ Astro Zombies. Yet, it is Mikels, not Francis, who gets his own chapter in ReSearch’s famous Incredibly Strange Films issue.

So who was Coleman Francis? Sadly, there really isn’t much to go by as far as surviving participants in the three movies he directed. The testimony of his welder friend/partner Anthony Cardoza, who was involved in all three movies, is tantalizing but clearly biased.

And then there are the movies themselves. Inscrutable, impenetrable, nonsensical, they stand as Francis’ legacy to the world, and perhaps ultimately the best source of biographical material. If we know nothing else, we certainly know this: coffee and light aircraft were very important to this man. The more unsubtle points of the director’s personality are there, however, embedded in the frames of his movies, waiting for the truly fearless to sift through them and make some sense of it all.

Mail Bag!

Dear Margie from Glasgow, KY:

Thank you for your email of May 15^th. We apologize for taking so unconscionably long to reply – we’ve been getting used to our new digs in Snyder, TX.

Yes, the entire Rantin’ Russell staff has seen Fritz Kiersch’s 1985 masterpiece Tuff Turf – a few of us over ten times – and we’d like to say in all sincerity that this is one of the most important films of the last 30 years.

We could hardly agree with you more: Tuff Turf truly is a watershed movie, launching, as it did, the careers of a young James Spader and an even younger Robert Downey, Jr. And you are right again – Kim Richards dances provocatively to the same Jack Mack and the Heart Attack that played at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 summer Olympics bombing. And yes, that is Robert Downey, Jr. playing drums for none other than the Jim Carroll Band in the elaborate warehouse sequence.

But to the Rantin’ Russell staff, Tuff Turf is so much more than just Spader, Downey, Richards, and Jack Mack and the Heart Attack. Kiersch’s nuanced movie operates on multiple levels all at once, revealing new secrets to the viewer every time it's popped into the DVD player. It is a prodigious work of art that cannot be understood in a mere two or three viewings.

For instance, although countless essays have been written about Jim Carroll’s and Jack Mack and the Heart Attack’s roles in Tuff Turf, how many people remember that there were actually three bands contributing to the Turf’s eclectic soundscape? Dale Gonyea carries the day in the film’s unforgettable country club scene, playing, as J.R. & The Z-Man, the most mind-melting version of The Isley Brothers’ Twist and Shout any of us on staff have ever heard. We’ve come to see that scene as the focal point of the whole movie: a scene played for laughs, which is somehow still unintentionally funny.

It’s also a joy seeing Art Evans as the high school security guard, proving to his critics that he’s more than just the loveable Morgan in the Nine to Five TV series, or the “intern” in Scott Baio’s tour-de-force, The Boy who Drank too Much.

Additionally, in the age-old tradition film noir, much of Tuff Turf is shot on location in LA, lending a vibe of gritty realism to Spader’s existential journey through Los Angeles as a stranger in a strange land. The absolutely gorgeous crane shot of Sandy’s Burgers was shot at 6235 Lankershim in north Hollywood. The montage of Spader driving Mones’ (Nick’s) car through LA finds us in Santa Monica, at Superba & Pacific Coast Highway. The Hiller family home was also in Santa Monica, at 12951 Panama St.

Finally, the movie’s most iconic building – the liquor store where Kim Richards’ befuddled father works – still stands at 5900 N Figueroa St, in Highland Park, with the “Coldest Beer in Town” sign intact. (Discerning viewers will recall Tim Roth living across the street from this same building in Reservoir Dogs.) Built in 1921, the building was on the market for $4 million in 2012.

But the film’s most subversive moment comes towards the end, at the 1:13:05 mark on your DVD, when veteran TV actor Panchito Gomez turns the whole works on its ear by brazenly breaking the fourth wall. Throw everything you thought you knew about Tuff Turf straight out of the window. In just a few seconds, Gomez takes a straightforward narrative and implodes it, leaving the viewer reeling: why does Gomez look at the camera – if even just for a second – while Spader and Richards argue about her marrying Paul Mones? Director Kiersch’s instincts pay off in spades here, framing Spader and Richards in the background while Gomez fills the foreground, eavesdropping, knowing their every thought and move. We know what evil is creeping up on our protagonist, but we’re left with more questions than answers. Was Gomez ad libbing, or was this actually in the script? At press time, emails to Kiersch have gone unanswered.

And the endless barrage of lines that inform and infect our daily lives here at Rantin’ Russell. “Why don’t you learn to use it before you cut your balls off”; “Your pants are still… dry”; “Get outta here, get outta here, I said. Eddie – get outta here…”; “Life is not a problem to be solved, it’s a mystery to be lived”; “Nick what Nick what NICK WHAT NICK WHAT!!” “Lookit that. Talk about bawls”; “Nice dress”; “…But you know I never wanted to go to any of those goddamn schools in the first place”; “Where the hell’d you get Nick’s car, man?”

It’s worth noting, too, that Olivia Barash holds her own amongst the Turf’s standout cast, one year after playing the adorable Leila in Repo Man, and just a few years ahead of checking into AA.

And then the sundry smaller moments: Matt Clark awkwardly pawing his wife’s shoulder before dinner, as though he’s never really been comfortable around her and fears intimacy. Spader finding keys in the ignition of a Porche convertible near a bunch of porn shops. Michael Wyle mercilessly mocking Paul Mones while dozens of uninhibited youth dance to the Jim Carroll Band. The famed Spader-is-dead scene at the beginning of the movie, where our seemingly comatose protagonist suddenly springs to life and obliterates cockroaches with his dart guns.

All of this and we’ve said nothing about director Fritz Kiersch, who counts Gor amongst his credits. What we can tell you about Gor: It makes a mere 90 minutes feel like three fucking weeks with the in-laws, is more misogynistic than Otto Weininger, and finds Oliver Reed – Oliver Reed, for fuck’s sake – hysterically screaming “SEIZE HIM!” in the time-honored tradition of tragically stereotypical Saturday afternoon despots.

So yes, Margie, we at Rantin’ Russell join you in calling on the Library of Congress to register Tuff Turf as one of the most important American films of the last 100 years. Thank you for your email!

Queen at 40, Part IV

Sheer Heart Attack (November 1974)

“Above all, however,” writes Greg Kot, “there was an intense and effervescent musicality abetted by producer Roy Thomas Baker, a flood of excess that presaged the Queen stadium-rock bombast on the albums for which the band is best known.”

Kot was writing about Sheer Heart Attack, and like so many out-of-the-closet Queen fans, felt the need to pepper his love of Queen’s third – and first truly outstanding – album with certain words, such as “excess” and “bombast,” code-words aimed at preserving some street cred with his colleagues whilst simultaneously indicating he kind of likes the damn thing. “I know they’re absurd, mates, but these couple of songs over here are kinda good for this reason…” That sort of thing. But after Sheer Heart Attack, there was no longer any need to consider Queen any kind of guilty pleasure.

It’s a strange attitude to take nowadays anyway. After being the critics’ whipping boy during their actual operational years, it’s become very fashionable in the last 20 years to talk about what a brilliant band Queen was. And these johnny-come-latelyies are excused for suddenly loving Sheer Heart Attack, the best album of 1974.

Not all vestiges of their chalice-quest days were purged their third album, but lyrics about Neptune of the Seas and magical spells are kept to a bare minimum, and what emerges – at long last – is a genuine rock’n’roll band.

It almost doesn’t make sense, considering how quickly Attack followed Queen II. You’d think a band so addicted to Great King Rats and Fairy Fellers would need a good year or so in detox, but instead, as easily as throwing a light switch, Queen turned a keen eye towards teen angst, historical references, Chuck Berry-worship, and full-bore (Freddie) narcissism just eight months later.

None of this is immediately evident listening to the ominous album opener, Brighton Rock, a ballad of young love at the carnival courtesy of Brian May. Probably not the best pick to open the album after the trauma of Queen and Queen II. Dig this: “…There’s still a little magic in the air, I’ll weave my spell!” And this: “O Rock of Ages, do not crumble love is breathing still; O Lady Moon shine down a little people magic if you will.”

Boy howdee, friends, the first minute-and-a-half of Sheer Heart Attack sounds like little more than a continuation of the dead-on-arrival pointless flailing of Queen II. But the SCA-inspired lyrics are incidental to Brian May’s long-ass guitar solo, lasting just about three minutes (from 1:35 to 4:33), a curious bit of self-indulgence dating back to his 1968 song Blag with Smile, the first band May and Roger Taylor formed. It’s HEAVY, man, and features Brian’s first experimentation with delay and the repeat effect, which he’d utilize more sublimely five years later on Queen Live Killers. Says Brian: “I’d gotten away from listening to Hendrix quite a bit by that time, and I’d like to think that that was more sort of developing my style really.” It’s unmistakably Brian May, a bloody lovely bit of 70s guitar-driven ROCK, and despite simpleton George Purvis’ critique of Freddie’s octave-jumping vocals (“makes for a jarring listen,” he sniffs), Freddie does in fact sound even more in command here than he did on Queen II. If no studio effects were required to help Freddie hit those octaves, it’s all the more impressive.

How far Freddie Mercury had come becomes very clear indeed on the next track, Freddie’s Killer Queen, Sheer Heart Attack’s first single, released a few weeks ahead of the album’s November 1^st street date. After two years and three albums, here is Queen’s Statement of Intent, the song that, more than any other in their 18-year career, sums up the band’s sound and aesthetic. Exactly three minutes is just what’s needed to roll out everything that made Queen one of the world’s greatest bands between 1974 and 1980: three-part vocal harmonies, three part guitar harmonies, unorthodox chords and chord progressions, guitar/bass/drums/piano arrangement, some judiciously-used effects, a crackerjack rhythm section (John Deacon emerges as the bands’ unknown secret weapon on this song, laying down a monster bass line), Freddie Mercury’s vocals (‘nuff said), and gloriously deep production. Notably, it is also a huge departure for what was, for all intents and purposes, a heavy metal band (70s definition) to this point. “…With this single, you almost expect Noël Coward to sing it,” Freddie remarked, before pointing out, “it’s about a high-class call girl. I’m trying to say that classy people can be whores as well.”

As a boy, I always thought it was a bit darker than just being about a high-class whore (shit, we’ve got dynamite, gelatine and gunpowder in the chorus), but it certainly was very different from Liar or Seven Seas of Rhye, and Freddie made it seem completely natural. The song shot to number two in the UK, and broke the top-20 in the states, their first single to do so.

The single’s success assuaged Brian May’s fear that it was too light a single for an album as “heavy and dirty” as Attack (“…it was a hit, so fuck it”), but he needn’t have worried; far from somehow pigeonholing Queen as a cabaret act, it revealed a band at last flexing their muscles, showing they could work outside of the hard rock idiom with brilliant results.

Although, not always “brilliant,” perhaps; Roger Taylor’s piercing falsetto through the first ten seconds of In the Lap of the Gods is plenty disconcerting. Awful, even. And Freddie’s lyrics are all sound and fury, signifying nothing whatsoever. But I take a different approach to Lap of the Gods. It’s a fine piece of music, no doubt, but on Attack’s patchwork side two, where short songs bleed into one another, where oftentimes what you’re hearing is more an idea than a fully realized song, Lap of the Gods is an overture of sorts. Freddie goes through a couple of verses in a stylized, charmingly absurd vocal (“lips” here becomes “leeps”), and the outro commences, Brian’s guitar tone sounding unlike any other in popular music, moving ethereally from octave to octave (2:42 and 2:48), and then the song unexpectedly changes key and ends, on a confounding stutter-beat, leading straight into Stone Cold Crazy.

Not a song, but an introduction, a beautiful red herring, lulling you into a false sense of sereneness before the band (Stone Cold Crazy is, oddly for this period of the band’s history, credited to all four members) abruptly shifts gears – actually, grinds gears is more apropos – and lays down one of the seminal 70s hard rock riffs.

It’s revealing that when Metallica covered Stone Cold Crazy in 1992, they didn’t come anywhere close to capturing the frenetic, barely-controlled chaos of Queen’s original version. Stone Cold Crazy is unmistakably in the key of G major, but holy shit, each time the band hits that B flat chord during the main riff. Holy SHIT. It’s so big, so fucking huge, it’s the biggest B flat major chord of all fucking time, it’s all the stars in heaven and everything beyond, all the universe’s dark matter and gasses floating through time and space, colliding and forming bigger, brighter stars before collapsing into black holes and white dwarves – it’s so blistering, Freddie howls deliriously at 0:47 and then after only one verse and chorus Brian lays down an incendiary lead, over a key change, no less; the simple home key of G is insufficient for the amount of kinetic energy exploding out of your speakers, so the whole band moves up to B for a frenzied couple of bars, settling back down to G just long enough for a 2^nd verse and chorus before blasting off into B again, this time for a longer, far more hectic detonation of Brian May insanity. “Hit it, mon!” Freddie commands, and May does just that. And then a final verse/chorus, where Freddie wonders, “they’re gonna put me in a cell, if I can’t go to heaven will they let me go to hell?” End of song.

This is really all you need. In life, I mean. It’s a desert island song. Really, if this were the only good song on the album, it’d still be worth the $16.85 amazon is charging as I write this. You can’t put a price on these special moments, these songs that grab you roughly from behind and yank you back from the precipice. It’s rock’n’roll made to be played LOUD, and it’s as crazed as anything recorded at the time.

It’s easily the highlight of side two, but the variety here finds Queen pushing the envelope far beyond the self-imposed restrictions of the first album. Dear Friends is a short, pretty Brian May ballad that is a good early indication that the guitarist suffered from depression his whole life. Deacon’s Misfire is also short (not even two minutes), and if you want to hate it intensely, with its ludicrous guitar vamping and awful lyrics (Freddie, singing in falsetto: “Your gun is loaded, and pointing my way; there’s only one bullet, so don’t delay”), go right ahead, I certainly see your point, but it’s somehow deliriously hypnotic, and how can you not dig the four, count ‘em, FOUR, key changes? Absurdly brilliant.

Freddie’s Bring Back That Leroy Brown steals its title from Jim Croce’s Big Bad Leroy Brown, but Croce never had it in him to piece together this pastiche of British Music Hall and Tin Pan Alley. High art it definitely ain’t, but enormous fun it most assuredly is, all silly lyrics, barbershop quartet harmonies and ukulele-banjo strummin’, courtesy the mighty Brian May, one of the great guitar players of the 70s and 80s.

She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos), awash in reverb and unexpected chord progressions, is one of the more gorgeous songs of the 70s. Brian May’s vulnerable vox, contrasted with Freddie’s and Roger Taylor’s (on Tenement Funster), bring a texture to Sheer Heart Attack and Queen in general that was – and still is – unique. The Beatles also had this, with three different lead vocalists (four, I suppose, if you count Ringo), but having three lead vocalists in the band, all of whom also sang harmony like angels, gave Queen a depth that most bands would’ve given their left nuts for.

The aforementioned Tenement Funster, sung with preposterous conviction by Roger Taylor, is the drummer’s first truly great song with Queen, fine tuning the theme he would return to frequently: I’m a badass rocker who needs to escape all this boredom and go ROCK – even though he touched on this sentiment in Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s pretty damned silly listening to Taylor singing about the groupies lining up to fuck him at “Smokies,” but some subtle humor (“I got a way with the girls on my block, try my best to be a real individual”) goes a long way with the song’s great melody, and with only two lines during the song’s chorus, Taylor dials more directly into every feeling of angst you ever felt between the ages of 13 and 17 than the Sex Pistols or Nirvana could ever have hoped to.

Flick of the Wrist is Freddie’s wonderfully sadistic take on who knows what the fuck. Many Queen fans argue that it’s about the indignities of dealing with all aspects of the music industry, and this seems somewhat plausible given Queen’s management woes. But who cares? Check out Freddie’s octave-jumping vocal multi-tracking during the verses when he helpfully instructs “INTOXICATE YOUR BRAIN WITH WHAT I’M SAYING, IF NOT YOU’LL LIE IN KNEE-DEEP TROUBLE.” Marvelous. This is what I live for. This is what we should all live for. And if you’re one of those who always accuses Queen of being lyrically blank, and you want something deep, man, the line “prostitute yourself he says, castrate your human pride – sacrifice your leisure days, let me squeeze until you’ve dried” is a dead-on indictment capitalism’s drudgeries and having to find a god damned job, submitting to a stupid fucking boss just to pay the fucking bills. “BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT FREDDIE WAS REALLY SINGING ABOUT,” you slobber. Yes, of course. All great art has any number of interpretations. That quality is what makes great art. You’ve got your interpretation, I’ve got mine. Bugger off, yeah?

Before taking a look at each side’s closers – Now I’m Here and In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited) – there’s this business of Lily of the Valley. Lily of the Valley is Queen’s penultimate Dungeons & Dragons song, and would’ve been right at home on Queen II if not for Nevermore, which is pretty much the same song. The same MO plays out on both albums: Barnstormer song (Ferrie Feller’s Master Stroke on II, Flick of the Wrist here) leads seamlessly into short, pretty ballad (Nevermore on II, Lily of the Valley here) evoking dead medieval crops and Neptune of the seas, setting us up for Epic Rocker (March of the Black Queen on II, Now I’m here on Attack). Yes, that’s Freddie Mercury singing “my kingdom for a horse” without a trace of irony in Lily of the Valley, long after we’d hoped he’d hung up his twenty-sided die for good. Realizing (lyrics aside) what a pretty song he wrote, Mercury would cop Lily of the Valley’s chords and insert them into Jealousy four years later on the Jazz album.

Now I’m Here is Brian May’s homage to Chuck Berry and is stunning. In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited) is Freddie Mercury’s homage to Freddie Mercury and is stunning. How on earth Brian May came up with the riffage in Now I’m Here between 0:49 and 1:00 – more than any mortal soul should be expected to produce in one lifetime, never mind one song – is beyond me. As time wore on and Queen lost focus and drifted further and further into disco/synthesizer hell, May remained the one member capable and willing to write guitar-driven rock’n’roll songs, and Now I’m Here is one of his numerous high points along Queen’s long and varied road. A snippet of Little Queenie, a kindly nod to Mott the Hoople (with whom Queen toured earlier that year) and hook after hook make Now I’m Here one of the indispensible 70s Rock songs.

In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited) sounds nothing at all like In the Lap of the Gods, and was Freddie’s way of putting the world on notice: slag these boys off at your own risk, because writing catchy, anthemic songs came as naturally to Freddie as winning a game when he was down by 9 points with four minutes left to play in the fourth quarter came to Roger Staubach. This was just the raucous warm-up to the far more self indulgent We Are the Champions. And the apocalyptic explosion erupting at Revisited’s end was Mercury’s jarring way of driving this point home. Queen had arrived. And were already better than everyone else with eyes set on conquering the world. And they were just barely warming up.