Review/Copyright © 1992, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
LONDON, April 20, 1992—Arrivederci, Mercury. Adios, Freddie. Sayonara. Auf Wiedersehen. Bene vale.
Whatever the language, and wherever spoken, the English rock band Queen tonight gave most of the planet Earth a chance to say goodbye to their singer Mercury (a.k.a. Farrokh Bulsara, Larry Lurex, Mr. Bad Guy, The Great Pretender).
Indeed, between 6 p.m. and 10:32 p.m., British Summer Time, with God, MTV, BBC 2, Fox Television, Radio One, K-Rock, 72,000 in-the-flesh ticket holders, you, me, and for all I know the (real) Queen looking on, Wembley Stadium here boomed with the finest rock 'n' roll toast since the day Elvis made that birthday record for his mother.
Billed as "The Freddie Mercury Tribute: A Concert for AIDS Awareness," and called "A Concert for Life," the high-stakes, multi-million-dollar, history-making extravaganza attracted an audience of about one billion.
Which means that some Buddhist monk in Lithuania won't have to wait up all night to hear what songs Metallica played, and a guy who drinks his beer out of a can and is on a two-hour coffee break in Jersey City right now can check out George Michael's huge hoop earring.
Seven satellites beamed the event to over 70 countries, including the U.S., Europe, the Far East, South Africa and Australia.
On this Easter Monday on which all rocky roads lead to London, more countries broadcast the show live than any pop music event heretofore. The satellite link-up also provided feeds back to Wembley Stadium of U2 in Sacramento, Cal., and Mango Groove in South Africa.
The media coverage was a low bow to a man—and a band—that the press has generally underrated and overlooked for two decades. With several of the greatest rock musicians in the universe paying Queen the ultimate tribute of their talent, the message zipped loud and clear across umpteen time zones and postal codes: Queen is a world-class band of primo talent.
It was a long-deserved triumphal moment for Queen, a day of laughter and tears and music and nostalgia and footsteps.
But the day offered another message as well, and that was the importance of people becoming involved in the fight against AIDS. The 45-year-old Mercury had died on Nov. 24, 1991, of bronchopneumonia resulting from AIDS.
Paying far more than lip-service to the cause, the entire event was non-profit, with international TV rights, ticket sales, and merchandising contributing precious cash to help those with the disease. Millions of dollars are expected to flow from the concert.
As rock concerts go, all in all, the 80’s had "Live Aid"; the 70’s had the "Concert for Bangladesh"; the 60’s had "Woodstock"; the 50’s had the "Nineteen-Fifty-Six Elvis Presley, Anywhere."
And, I would submit, the 90’s had "The Freddie Mercury Tribute: A Concert for AIDS Awareness."
It's a lead-pipe cinch that there will never be another day like it this century—or maybe next.
Since it was a super day in a big bowl, the event ought to have a Roman numeral after it, like Super Bowls do. Of the five decade-marking occasions above, I'd put this one somewhere between I and III.
I mean, on the premises—and in tip-top form—were people with names like Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey and Axl Rose and Elton John and David Bowie.
Calling that kind of talent an "all-star lineup," as the press release here does, is like calling the Sistine Chapel an "all-right ceiling." If you owned Fort Knox, you couldn't pay for all that talent on one bill.
Along with the registered legends, there was a striking range of musical colors from the rock 'n' roll rainbow—an astonishingly balanced blend of styles and ages.
Some performers were so young, relatively speaking, you wondered if they were doing the show as part of a requirement for becoming an Eagle Scout. A few of them probably had to show ID to get served at the Wembley Hard Rock Cafe that was backstage.
Still, both the young and the not-so-young, the howlers and the hummers, delivered the goods. They played out of a surreal web spun of a legendary band, a mythical stadium, a video-captured ghost, and several thousand long memories.
Anybody without AAA-1 talent on that stage today would have stood out like a freshman in a beanie with a propeller on it.
In essence, the 272-minute concert wended its way into rock history because of the quality of the performances; the stylistic and age range of the performers; the financial contribution to international charities; the effort to raise awareness among the young about a relentless global epidemic; and the depth of sincerity of each performer's tribute: every single musician was proud to perform for Freddie Mercury . . . and so gave everything.
With all that said, the big discussion among many journalists right now is how—despite all that talent, legendary and otherwise—almost nobody even came close to filling Mercury's shoes.
As a billion or so people click off their TV sets, and the 72,000 who thronged this stadium now file back home, the press is baffled that just about no singer could match the winged voice of the winged-named vocalist.
I, for one, don't happen to see anything unusual about the sentence, "Almost no one could sing as well as Freddie Mercury today." If that's a news bulletin, then so is, "Two plus two equals four," "The sun sets in the west," "Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit" and "A horse will win the Kentucky Derby."
Maybe some press people didn't know it's virtually impossible for anyone in the business to sing as well as Freddie Mercury, but someone by the name of Elton John knew it.
When he sang Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" tonight, he didn't even try to hit Mercury's notes. His policy toward the song was as hands-off as the Monroe Doctrine. Artist that he is, he knew very well that you don't play around with a classic. There was more chance of him chipping away at the Pieta than there was of him trying to improve upon—or even imitate—the singing of that song.
Actually, if most vocalists had tried to match Freddie Mercury note-for-note this evening, they would have gotten cut up worse than if they'd tried to ride a shark and sprung a nosebleed.
It would have been as dangerous as making a U-turn on the New Jersey Turnpike. The best almost anyone could hope to be was peccable. Ninety-nine percent of rock singers on this particular planet wouldn't have a prayer if they tried to out-sing Freddie Mercury. David Bowie didn't try to this evening, and he even knelt down and said "The Our Father."
Fact is, Mercury, the element, may be Number 80 on the Periodic Table, but Mercury, the musician, is closer to Number 8—probably higher—on the table of all-time great rock 'n' roll singers.
That's not just my opinion, by the way: that's also the opinion of Roger Daltrey, a man who understands rock 'n' roll lead-singing and losing a bandmate in equal measure.
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After the concert, I had to pick my way through a courtly gathering of rock royalty backstage. It had been a long evening of deep feeling and I wondered what this lead-singer—who had earlier sung Queen's "I Want It All"—had on the tip of his tongue about the lead-singer who was missing.
In a voice thick with emotion, Daltrey told me: "When we lost Freddie, we not only lost a great personality, a man with a great sense of humor, a true showman, but we lost probably the best, the really, the best virtuoso rock 'n' roll singer of all time. He could sing anything in any style. He could change his style from line to line and, God, that's an art. And he was brilliant at it."
Over the years, Daltrey inspired respect with his singing. Jim Morrison inspired mystery. Paul McCartney inspired affection. Janis Joplin inspired quest. Mick Jagger inspired lust. Bob Dylan inspired thought. Grace Slick inspired cool. Bruce Springsteen inspired faith.
But Freddie Mercury inspired awe. To see him in full throat—the bazooka-length microphone held with a lover's grip; the deep dark eyes giving him a boy-next-door demeanor (if you lived next door to a coffin in a cellar in Transylvania); the tendon cords popping out the sides of his neck like red springs; the voice hitting notes so high, they came out with ice caps on them—was to witness not just excellent ability, but epic.
Freddie Mercury didn't perform, he feasted. He used a microphone as if he were tasting wine out of it. He didn't sing rock 'n' roll, he decanted it.
His charisma was enormous. Charisma is the difference between a singer you wouldn't cross the street to see and a singer you'd cross an ocean to see.
When Mercury took a stage, it was Gable beating down the door to Scarlett O'Hara's bedroom. When he got off the stage hours later, he left you with a dramatic yet subtle sense of cliffhanger, like the latest installment of a Dickens' novel heading into a foreign 19th Century port.
Mercury was the precursor of stadium rock because it took stadiums to hold him. It got to the point where seeing him sing in anything smaller than stadiums would be like seeing Rembrandt paint fingernails.
As much as anyone who ever grabbed a microphone, Freddie Mercury was a trail blazer, a standard-bearer. He sang every form in the business—rock, pop, blues, country, soul, disco, opera—without disgracing any of them.
Music loves to dance in the voice of a great singer and Mercury had a superlative voice—a voice so classical, you figured it was on touring loan from the Bettman Archive, the Smithsonian, or the Louvre. The guy had to stifle his sneezes because of the stained glass in his throat.
It was as if he didn't really "hit" notes: he would more or less sweep them. His voice could go from teddy bear to bear in a millisecond. For your average singer, the only way a throat could drop that suddenly would be if it fell through a trap door.
Leave it that, as rock 'n' roll landmarks go, the Mercury voice had the range of the Matterhorn and the complexity of the Eiffel Tower.
Singing seemed natural to him. You got the feeling that if he hadn't been singing Wembley for a living, he would have been a singing waiter. Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, raised in India, metamorphosed in England, beloved by millions, headed for immortality, he taught himself the arcane principles of singing. He was as obviously as right for music as Pele was for soccer, Monroe for movies, Churchill for politics.
During his twoscore and five years on Earth, Mercury was often called "flamboyant." But his lifestyle would have had to have simmered down quite a bit before he could merely be called "flamboyant." Calling Freddie Mercury "flamboyant" is like calling The Wizard of Oz "nonfictional," or like saying the Johnstown Flood was "wet."
He was, by report, a man with a ripping laughter—a guy who said and did outrageous, eccentric, ostentatious, unpredictable, havocsome things. Mercury came on strong—had a character of many facets, and none of them dripped.
He was one-of-a-kind, but not selfish. As Queen's field general, he didn't use his rock music skill as a self-glorifying pas seul that would lead to better things. Rather, like Jim Morrison before him, he was proud to be part of a rock 'n' roll team.
Not for nothing (and not just for rock 'n' roll senior citizens, either), think back to some rock masterworks and consider what they reveal about their creators.
The Stones sent a red-hot sympathy card. Springsteen hit on running as a birthright. Dylan rolled back a stone and wanted you never to forget how it does feel. John Lennon just imagined. Zep climbed a stairway beyond the stars. Clapton pictured a guy on his knees and pleading.
No surprise, then, that Freddie Mercury rhapsodized bohemianly. 'Tis said he was magnificent to watch but impossible to figure out. No one could get a thermometer on Mercury.
His bearing could go from Machiavelli to Mary Poppins in a finger snap; from Lord of the Flies to Lilies of the Field. He was reputedly as vain as Napoleon, yet as generous as Santa Claus.
In his life's work, he sang songs and performed shows and wrote music and lyrics just how he wanted to. He never sold out. There was more chance of seeing a "For Sale" sign on the Mona Lisa than there was of seeing one on Freddie Mercury.
His lyrics—like his voice and stage show—unveiled stunning vision. The man's written words are about as different from most rock lyrics as broken English is from Queen's English.
To listen carefully to "March of the Black Queen," for example, is to meet someone who knows more secrets than Merlin the Magician. The late singer's writing furnishes one more key facet of his blue-chip talent.
Blue-chip talent and blue-sky weather were the forecasts for Mercury's tribute this April 20 (or IV/XX) and both calls were on the money. Usually, for an event of this magnitude, the pre-concert worries center on logistics related to performers, equipment and crowds.
But, this being Great Britain, the biggest worry was that it would rain on the Rock 'n' Roll Easter Parade. There was a good chance, in other words, that people would turn on the television channel and think they were seeing the English Channel.
Instead of seeing a swan song, they would just see swans. I figured it was about a 70-30 chance I'd be wearing a wet suit to the gig and wind up filing a surfing piece. For my money, the wettest autumn I ever saw was a summer I spent in England.
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