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year or so in detox, but instead, as easily as throwing a light switch, Queen turned a keen eye towards teen angst, historical references, Chuck Berry-worship, and full-bore (Freddie) narcissism just eight months later.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

Mail Bag!

Dear Ted Purefoy from Hernando, MS –

Thank you for your email of April 9^th. We apologize for taking so unconscionably long to reply – we’ve been picking up the pieces after the incident (of April 2013), and moving into our new offices here in Snyder, TX.

You are absolutely correct (and must be a long-time fan of Rantin’ Russell) – founder Russell Bladh did indeed write back in 2007 right here at Rantin’ Russell that The Clash’s London Calling was one of the three most overrated albums of all time (the other two were The Who’s Tommy and The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street).

To answer your first question, the post was not taken down due to negative reader reaction. Although it’s true that readers’ responses were overwhelmingly critical, Mr. Bladh took down the post after the friend of a financier complained that the piece reflected badly on him. And no, the post will not be put back up.

To answer your second question we forwarded your email to Mr. Bladh and got lucky – although he’s currently immersed in very intense psychotherapy, he took the time to send the following response:

“Hi Renee –

“Thank you for forwarding me Ted Purefoy’s email of April 9^th.

“Please tell him that no offense was intended with my ‘Three Most Overrated Albums of All Time’ piece back in 2007. It was an honest assessment of three albums I felt simply did not measure up to the hype that’s surrounded them for years.

“Truthfully, I’ve always felt The Clash – in addition to recording one of the most overrated albums of all time – are one of the most overrated bands of all time.

“The first album is unquestionably stronger in its bastardized American version, wherein ‘Clash City ‘Rockers,’ ‘Complete Control,’ ‘(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais’ and ‘I Fought the Law’ are included to satisfy CBS’ desire for a ‘radio friendly’ record. The original British version contains the great ‘Deny’ and ‘Cheat,’ but is otherwise lackluster. I’ll never understand the hordes of fanboys who say ‘Janie Jones’ is one of the great punk songs (to these ears it’s wholly unremarkable), and songs like ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’ and ‘What’s My Name?’ don’t register at all.

“Give ‘Em Enough Rope was the classic sophomore slump, and London Calling barely contains enough songs to make a good single album, much less the double album we’re left with. I’m fully aware of the legions of critics and fans citing London Calling as one of the greatest albums of all time, but aside from the title track, ‘Spanish Bombs’ and ‘The Guns of Brixton,’ I don’t see what the big deal is. The lyric ‘Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust’ in ‘London Calling’ is easily one of the most asinine lyrics of the 20^th century. This, from ‘The Only band that Matters?’ Pure rubbish. There are probably really only an EP’s worth of good songs here, if we’re being honest. ‘Death or Glory,’ ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’ and ‘The Right Profile’ bore me outright, and will Clash sycophants ever broach the unpleasant subject of ‘I’m not Down’ blatantly ripping off The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset?’ Probably not, is my guess. Probably the great unenlightened masses of Clash fans will continue obsequiously fawning over the unconscionably hideous steaming liquid shit this band churned out from 1977 to 1982, willfully ignorant of what good music actually is.

“Once again, please tell Mr. Purefoy no offense was intended.”

We hope you enjoyed your personalized response, Ted. Thank you for reading Rantin’ Russell.

Rantin’ Russell 2.0

The staff of Rantin’ Russell would like to thank our blog’s thousands of readers and well wishers who sent us emails of support during the incident (of April 2013) that led to us being evicted from our offices in Throckmorton, TX, and our blog’s General Manager, Russell Bladh, taking an extended leave of absence. Although Russell is on sabbatical for an indefinite period of time on doctor’s orders, he leaves behind a dedicated staff at Rantin’ Russell to carry on the irreverent pop culture criticism that defined the blog’s early years.

Throckmorton Mayor Will Carroll made it clear in no uncertain terms that Rantin’ Russell was no longer welcome at the junction of 380 & 183/283, so we pulled up stakes and moved to Snyder, TX. Although we leave behind dozens of close friends and even more fond memories in Throckmorton, the community of Snyder has welcomed the Rantin’ Russell staff with open arms, and Russell Bladh texted his unconditional support from an undisclosed location in Magoffin County, Kentucky.

Over 3,000 emails piled up in staff’s inboxes between March and October of this year, while we were responding to the fallout from the incident (of April 2013), so even though we have a laundry list of articles we’re wrapping up for posting in the near future, we’ll start the Rantin’ Russell re-launch by answering some of the myriad questions from you, our ever resourceful, curious, and oftentimes brilliant readers.

Once again, thank you from a grateful staff here at Rantin’ Russell. We look forward to an ongoing dialog of all things historical and pop culture.

Renee Müller

Executive Editor, Rantin’ Russell

An Intolerable Spiritual State

In eighteen day’s time it will be 50 years since John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, TX. On that day, the shrill voices of the conspiracy cottage industry, spawned the same day JFK was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital, will dominate forums and news programs, pointlessly smug in their abject ignorance, screeching as always about a sinister conspiracy that took the 35^th president’s life. 50 is a round number, and JFK is still the most popular American president, so in an effort to drive up ratings, major media outlets will pander to the lowest common denominator, giving paranoid-obsessive conspiracy nuts the biggest soap box in the world for one day. Maybe even a whole week.

Thankfully, it’ll be over by 2014, but even then we go back to a painfully embarrassing status quo: a vast majority of adult, functioning Americans – many with educations – certain that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in broad daylight in front of dozens of people by a cadre of evildoers, within and without our federal and local governments.

It’s depressing enough that the assassination of a first-term President with enormous potential was caught on film, a ghastly color relic of one of the darkest, saddest day's in the Union's history. And then, once the technology was available, digitally cleaned up so we can all sit in the comfort of our homes, ghoulishly watching JFK’s final moments in an endless loop on our DVD players, processing it more as entertainment than for what it is – the gruesome, harrowing murder of the man entrusted by voters to lead their country.

But what is even more depressing is our inability to finally, fifty years later, come to grips with reality. It’s a measure of the pervasiveness of mental illness in American society that dozens of new books are being published to coincide with the anniversary, all purporting to have uncovered new “evidence” definitively proving a conspiracy. At last count, there were 35 on amazon.com, some already out, some coming out towards the end of November.

And – as has always been the case – many have wholly different conclusions. They all claim to be the final word, but they can’t agree amongst themselves. Who killed JFK? Was it LBJ? Castro? The Mafia? The Joint Chiefs? The CIA? Evil homosexuals from New Orleans? There are as many JFK conspiracies as there are flavors of ice cream.

And all of the books tread over the same worn-out ground that every other conspiracy book written since 1963 has trod on unremittingly. The author of Ecclesiastes 1:9 might as well have been addressing all the conspiracy books written in the last 30 years. Their writers have, to borrow from Rob Salkowitz, “beaten the horse to death, then performed a voodoo ritual to exhume the carcass and started beating the zombie horse.” The preposterous “theory” that LBJ had Kennedy assassinated goes back dozens of years. As do the theories of CIA and Mafia involvement.

It would be easy to laugh all of this off as the confused ramblings of colorful, misguided, eccentric minds on the fringe, but it’s mainstream thinking, brought to us by mainstream personalities. Oliver Stone’s whitewash of history JFK, a stunning piece of political propaganda that distorted, twisted, and flat-out lied about the events of November 22^nd and it’s protagonist, the disturbed Jim Garrison, was an international hit. Director Alex Cox, whose Sid and Nancy and Repo Man have seen special editions released by the esteemed Criterion Collection, just wrote the conspiracy book The President and the Provocateur: The Parallel Lives of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald. American journalist Ron Rosenblaum, who has written for Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine, recently wrote for slate.com: “I’ve written frequently on JFK theories, recurrently changing my mind on that morass of mystification; to my current belief Oswald was a shooter, though not ruling out the possibility of a second one, or silent confederates egging Oswald on to do the deed.”

But what Rosenbaum and the rest of the conspiracy culture simply can’t fathom is that there is no “morass of mystification.” It’s just an old-fashioned smokescreen, conjured up by 50 years’ worth of conspiracy literature. And like the proverbial house of cards, it teeters precipitously on a nonexistent foundation, ready to collapse at the first sign of rational, coherent thinking.

Every last scrap of evidence points directly back at Lee Harvey Oswald. No evidence points anywhere else. It has always defied credulity that anyone other than Oswald shot at the president on November 22^nd, 1963. The only person ever prosecuted in connection with some far-fetched conspiracy theory was New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, whose sham trial was staged by the aforementioned New Orleans Distract Attorney Jim Garrison. In less than an hour the jury found him not guilty. “When Jim Garrison conducted his whole charade in New Orleans,” said investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein, “it showed how easy evidence could be manipulated, and how dangerous it was to listen to what various authors and demagogues had to say on this subject.”

But the demagogues have always stood front and center in this discussion. This is largely because sane people realized all the way back in 1963 that there was no conspiracy and got on with their lives. Obsessive-compulsive conspiracy buffs are incapable of such circumspection. Their mission is to destroy anyone who doesn’t agree with their bizarre version of events. They bide their time, lying in wait until another scholarly, well researched book is published (Posner’s Case Closed; Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy), at which point they spring from their dark holes, using all media at their disposal – books, blogs, youtube videos – to bring their ad hominem attacks to a naïve populace only too willing to swallow their delusional missives hook, line and sinker.

“Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.” Conspiracy buffs find themselves marooned in both states, doggedly apathetic towards taking even a halfway sincere look at the research of bona-fide journalists and writers, and paranoid that anyone who even remotely suggests that JFK’s death was not the result of some grand conspiracy is, at best, brainwashed, and at worst, and agent of the Illuminati.

It is the duty of all United States citizens to be thoughtful and well-informed about their culture and history. The truly mentally ill are excused from this, and are free to write books like Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics: Revelations from CIA Records on the Assassination of JFK (Peter Dale Scott) and Carlos Marcello: The Man Behind the JFK Assassination (Stefano Vaccara). For everyone else, there are no excuses. Seventy percent of Americans are consciously shirking this duty. It is time - finally - they lived up to the ideals set forth by the founding fathers.