Machismo of a long forgotten age

The first time I heard Queen was in my mother's station wagon in front of the Citizens' National Bank in Gordon, Pennsylvania. That's not technically true--I was vaguely aware of the song "Killer Queen" thanks to its Top 40 radio exposure, but wasn't impressed enough, around the age of 10, to place much value on it.

No, that moment in front of the bank was like looking at a girl I had previously thought was cute and suddenly realizing, in a nauseous, love-struck bolt, that she was the most beautiful girl on earth.

It was a quiet summer day and I had decided to ride down to the bank in Gordon, another small town two miles away from my hometown, Fountain Springs, with my mother. Even then, I hated banks and opted to stay in the car while she went in and did her business. As usual, I insisted that she leave the keys so I could listen to the radio.

I turned to some top 40 AM station. As usual, I must not have been too impressed. Then this sweet-sounding a cappella number came on. Those floating harmony vocals: "Is this the real life/Or is this just fantasy."

Wow, that sounds good, I thought, especially when the piano came in. I had been raised on a steady diet of Elton John, and the song had that melancholy simplicity of his better ballads. I was immediately smitten.

Then the piano fell away: "I see a little silhouette of a man." Scaramouch, I did the fandango. My jaw dropped when Queen careened into the operatic section of "Bohemian Rhapsody." I had never heard anything like this, at least not in the context of a rock record. I laughed. Not at Queen--with them, at Freddie Mercury's sheer audacity to attempt something like this in the context of a Top 40 single.

Just when I had enough of the galileo/figaro/magnificos, the song cut into a blazing, guitar-driven finale as hard as anything going in those hammer-fisted metal 70's.

Afterwards, I sat there, literally breathless. This song had everything I loved in rock music, hard and soft, along with some bizarre opera shit thrown in to confound everyone. I couldn't believe what I had just heard. Luckily, the DJ back-announced the track, and I had a new favorite song, one that still holds up to this day. In the 10 minutes it took my mother to make a bank transaction, I had been irreversibly transformed. What changed? Nothing major--just the reassurance that however strange people thought I was in that small town, there were wild cards like Freddie Mercury in the world to remind me that I still had a long way to go.

Brian Wilson said at the time that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had scared him with its vocal brilliance and complexity. Of course, Brian's brain was so fried on bad acid and frightening childhood memories that "Chopsticks" would have scared him. But it means something that one of the true innovators in pop music, especially in regards to vocal arrangements, would compliment a song that was scoffed at by music critics.

In short order, I became a big Queen fan, although the first album I bought wasn't "A Night at the Opera", but its slightly more subdued follow-up (and still my favorite), "A Day at the Races". These guys did it all, as so many bands of the 60's and 70's did, and so few do now. Each Queen album had its own identity, and within that identity was a lot of stuff going on: opera, hard rock, pure pop, Beach Boys and operatic harmonies, waltzes, punk, British music hall, ballads, folk. I knew that every time I bought a Queen album, there would be a variety of styles that few bands could match in terms of writing or singing talent. Most bands needed two or more guitarists to sound like Brian May.

So why were critics so down on them in the 70's? A few reasons. Most critics in the 70's had established themselves in the late 60's, and if they hadn't, they toed that line created by the front line of music critics who, admittedly, had some of the greatest music of the 20th Century to write about: Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Motown, Stax/Volt, etc. They took their music seriously and established a bedrock set of critical values to comprehend and evaluate what were basically new forms of music (and journalism), to the extent that a flamboyant, over-the-top band like Queen must have seemed like a joke to them, just another glam band wearing too much make-up.

What they failed to acknowledge with all their sober, learned analyses was that one of the cornerstones of rock was a flaming, Bible-thumping, bouffant-haired, bisexual black man named Little Richard who rarely got deeper than, "Tutti fruity/Oh Rudy." Any band of the 70's that was: a) fun and b) successful was automatically suspect in the eyes of most critics, and for good reason, although bands like Queen, ELO and ABBA have since turned some unmarked corner to become respected 20 years on. It was as if they were being punished for not being as brilliant as their predecessors, although hindsight has shown damn little has lived up to the truly revolutionary music of the 50's and 60's.

Before there was ever a Right Said Fred, Mercury took the first bold steps on Rock's cat-walk.

Along with being wildly successful, Queen was something more, thanks to lead singer Freddie Mercury: subversive. It's easy to look back at the 70's now and see all the sexual over- and undertones in performers. Take my word for it, it wasn't so easy then. Take David Bowie for instance. Bowie openly admitted to being bisexual and reveled in an androgynous image. While he may have knocked out hard-edged numbers like "Suffragette City" and "Diamond Dogs," he made it clear that wearing a dress or make-up was no big deal to him, although he clearly understood the shock value of it.

Despite this image, and even open acknowledgment of his bisexuality, there was something bizarrely "macho" about Bowie, not to mention Mick Jagger or Rod Stewart. This is a whole aspect of rock that seems to have disappeared with eight tracks, to the point now where a clever thief like Marilyn Manson can pull half of what artists like Bowie and Alice Cooper did and come off like the antichrist. (All those metal hair bands of the 80s? Most of them went out of their way to stress their less-than-obvious masculinity, which made them look even more silly, insecure and false.) Musical images now seems more rigid, and most of its male performers too timid and unimaginative (or too worried about profit margins) to experiment the way someone like Bowie did.

Getting back to the 70's and Freddie Mercury, I can vividly point out this strange feeling. One of the toughest kids in my school, naturally, was a big metal fan who lived for Circus magazine. Circus wasn't bad, but it was a little too fawning, especially compared to its superior competition, Creem, which was staffed by smart-ass writers who knew how to have fun with the music industry. If a kid preferred Circus over Creem, that was his way of saying he was more into the metal side of rock, and he had that pseudo-serious take on music a lot of teenagers get before they realize their taste in music is only a temporary lifestyle choice.

Guess what was proudly taped on the inside of the toughest kid's locker? You got it: a centerfold poster from Circus of Freddie Mercury in a silver lame, spandex leotard, cut down to his pubic hair in the front and ass in the back, with the piece de resistance, a pair of pink ballet slippers.

Now, today, a kid in the same circumstances as the toughest kid (working class, willfully unintelligent, abusive, infamous bully) wouldn't dream of hanging something like that in a public place. But in the 70's? Honestly, he didn't know any better, and neither did I, nor did a lot of people. Freddie seemed a bit effeminate? That he did. And he kicked ass on songs like "Now I'm' Here" or "Death on Two Legs."

And, make no mistake, it was that macho/metal side of Freddie that the toughest kid was responding to. Yet, you have to wonder if that kid sensed anything else going on there. Whether he was somehow acknowledging a more feminine side to himself. Believe me, to have pointed this out to him at that time would have meant certain death at his bare hands. But it was that vague sexual acceptance of the 70's that helped make rock, and maybe its fans as an extension, a little more interesting. I can't figure out whether or not today that aspect of rock has simply died away, or been so inter-woven into society that we don't even notice it anymore.

Freddie wasn't alone in this, especially after disco rolled around, and an act like the Village People took over America. I can still recall the tone of a few conversations friends and I had at the time:

Friend: The Village People. Look at those freaks. I'll bet they're a bunch of fags.
Me: Yeah, man. A bunch of fags.
Friend: (after a meaningful pause) Uh. But you know what?
Me: Yeah, what?
Friend: Not that I'm going to run out and buy it. Or start sucking dick tomorrow. But I kind of like that song about staying at the Y.
Me: (after a meaningful pause) Uh. Yeah, me, too. Let's not spread this around.
Friend: Fuck no! That kid with the Freddie Mercury poster in his locker would kill us!

Disco was prone to invoking conversations like that among rock fans; I had more than a few concerning Blondie's "Heart of Glass." But Freddie Mercury and Queen were different because they were a full-on rock band most of the time. As an sidenote, it's interesting to see that the most popular sports stadium anthems these days seem to come from performers who were either gay or bisexual: "YMCA" (Village People), and "We Will Rock You" and "Another One Bites the Dust" (Queen). "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" (Steam, and the Nylons) is a song that any good drag queen knows by heart.

What does it all mean? It must be good in some sense, although I don't think too many people pause to notice all the cultural cross-wiring in operation here. A 280-pound defensive end sacks a quarterback for a 20-yard loss; the quarterback lies dazed in a fetal position. The stadium speakers erupt with the drum/handclap beat from "We Will Rock You" while the crowd goes insane. Maybe someone stops to note: "Don't you think it's odd that we're watching this violent sport and clapping along to a song made popular by a flaming bisexual prone to wearing leotards?" And, hopefully, this response: "Who cares? It's a great song."

Queen had dozens of great songs, written by all four band members. I imagine they could have hobbled on after Freddie died, but Freddie was far more than a lead singer and songwriter. What he did with his life simply in terms of his music was phenomenal; what he helped do in terms of altering society's views on sexuality is a more hidden accomplishment that, like I said, I'm not sure if people are afraid of or feel no need to acknowledge.

I took it for granted myself. The last Queen album I bought, the lackluster "Live Killers", put me off Queen permanently, or so I had thought. I was at that age where New Wave was exploding all around me and felt a need to move on. Queen moved on, too, and seemed to lose their way a bit in the 80s. I remained aware of them, but after a friend played 1982's "Hot Space" for me, I said, "Wooh, I got off that train at the right stop!"

Anyone with a mustache must be tough, right?

Their last album, "Innuendo", came out in 1991, and I didn't even consider buying it. I had seen the video for Freddie's song, "These Are the Days of Our Lives," and while I thought it was a pleasant enough song, it didn't grab me. He looked terrible: gaunt, sickly and emaciated. Literally everyone I know who saw that video put two-and-two together and figured Freddie had AIDS. The band constantly denied it, but something was clearly wrong. On November 22nd of that year, Freddie finally issued a statement that he did have AIDS. Two days later, he was dead, clearly having waited until the last possible moment to let the world officially know of his condition.

Why did he wait so long? Who knows. In a recent MOJO interview, Brian May stated that Freddie had said, "I don't want people buying our fucking records out of sympathy." It also seemed to be part of Freddie's image that he was too interested in having fun to want to acknowledge he had this disease. Whatever the reasons, he spent the last few years of his life in rapidly diminishing health and worked tirelessly against the brutal, ravaging symptoms of full-blown AIDS to put out as much music as he possibly could.

Again, sorry to say I missed that boat. But something odd happened the following year. Even with Freddie's death, I had not gone back and re-discovered my Queen albums, which were all gathering dust back in my old bedroom in Fountain Springs. I had nothing against Queen; I simply didn't have much of an urge to go back and listen to them.

Living in New York, I don't have nor need a car, so when I go back to Pennsylvania, I make it a point to get behind the wheel of any available car and just drive. Even if I did have a car in New York, driving here is so god-damned unpleasant that it wouldn't be the same. I love to drive at night down some lonely country road with a good tape or radio station blasting away. It makes me feel like anything's possible, and I don't much feel that way anymore.

I was doing just that in the fall of 1992 when "These Are the Days of Our Lives" came on the radio. I distinctly recall being on my way to a high-school football game, where I was to meet up with an old friend and his eight-year-old son, sitting in the bleachers amidst the high-school milieu, yet observing it all from the far reaches of adulthood.

In some way, it was like being back in my mother's station wagon, at least in terms of the emotional impact. It hit me right then how brave Freddie Mercury had been, how the emotions he expressed in that song were the best one could possibly do as a human, that he had nailed something important in a pop song, and did it all so casually that I was too stupid to see it the first time around. He had shown a strength beyond masculine or feminine and stated simple truths in a way that I found humbling. And it took his dying to bring this all home to me. Before then, I hadn't fully understood what the song must have meant to him, that he could see how good his life had been and still felt that way despite his illness. After his death, I hadn't really listened to that song until that moment driving through the woods at night.

I didn't pull over and weep uncontrollably, but I did have to wipe a few tears away and sit in the car a few minutes to get myself together when I reached the stadium. That would have been a good one:

Friend: Bill, you look funny. What's wrong?
Bill: I just had an emotional catharsis thanks to a dead bisexual rock star. It was beautiful!
Friend: Uh, er, Bill, maybe you've been living in New York too long.
Bill: Yeah, you're right. Let's go watch a bunch of teenage boys in tight pants hug and cuddle when they're not trying to kill each other.

Sheer Heart Attack

That night kicked open the door, and I foolishly went out and bought all those albums again on "remastered" cassettes. This past month, sick of the lousy, sound-bleeding quality of them, I threw caution to the wind and bought their "Crown Jewels" box set, which features their first eight albums, i.e., the ones I had on record before the quality tailed off a bit. The set is fantastic, even with that one "campy/this one's for Liza" Freddie song per album that I still can't stand, even now, despite his far more numerous sublime moments.

But, make no mistake: in its own warped, subversive way, Queen was the ultimate "guy band," in ways most guys would not care to get into. And I could do a lot worse than to live my life with half the courage and resolve that Freddie Mercury showed in his.