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year or so in detox, but instead, as easily as throwing a light switch, Queen turned a keen eye towards teen angst, historical references, Chuck Berry-worship, and full-bore (Freddie) narcissism just eight months later.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.