As it turned out, we were granted that rarest of British commodities: a mostly sunny day. By 5 p.m., an hour before showtime, a small breeze was lazing its way through the superstadium known as Wembley.
It was turning into a fine bright spring evening and Wembley's double domes gleamed like giant icebergs in a warm-blooded sea of humanity. The stadium makes most rock 'n' roll venues look like a phone booth.
Wembley has become a classy showcase—rock music's Wimbledon. The last time Queen tunes bounced around here was 1986. But the place still drips with Queen memories. The band's music has stayed on the stadium seats like a coat of paint.
So it was not unexpected that Wembley would be the chosen site for this tribute. What was unexpected, at least to these eyes, was that Queen was attempting to do the show at all.
What a daring endeavor: to bring back the spirit of Freddie Mercury for an encore! Given Queen's vast repertoire and Mercury's vast voice, trying to fit the man's career into one evening would be like trying to shoehorn Texas into a mud puddle in Maine.
This concert-tribute-party-benefit was on the drawing boards for five months. Six days after the lead-singer's death in November, Queen guitarist Brian May, one of the authentic gentlemen of rock, was already talking about it.
"One of the things I would definitely like to do," May informed me, "is a memorial gig for Freddie. A lot of people have already told me that they would love to appear, you know, singers all over the world have said they would love to come and sing a song for him. Which I think would be just the way he would enjoy it: the biggest that's ever been done—the biggest and the best."
When May said those last words, a FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT sign lit up in my head. All I could think was that Queen had every intention of pulling out all the stops for their friend and bandmate of 20 years.
The day the tickets for tonight's show went on sale, the mad dash couldn't have been madder if they'd been tossing bales of money out of the Tower of London.
There has been much media ballyhoo over the fact that the show sold out in three hours, and without any of the guest performers being announced. But Queen fans are a special breed: they didn't scoff up all 72,000 tickets in a wink for the guests; they scoffed up all 72,000 tickets in a wink for Queen.
You see, in politics, Queen means royalty. In rock 'n' roll, Queen means royalty AND loyalty. These are people who have cleaved to the band for much of their lives and marked important days in their lives by what Queen single or album had most recently been released.
I've known fans of many bands and sports teams, and I'd say Queen fans are among the most loyal in the world. You tell Queen fans you're going to write a piece about their boys and they look bemused. You get the feeling they're certain that the only reporters who could possibly get the story right are named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Today's show—Queen's last ever—was scheduled to start at 6 o'clock Monday night. Tickets for the stands had seat numbers on them; tickets for the field were on a first-come/first-in basis.
To secure a spot near the stage, Queen fans started setting up camp outside the stadium at 6 o'clock Sunday morning. These were people who knew Queen's work, and respected it, and were willing to endure a 36-hour wait to be as close as possible to the band, or what was left of it.
The waiting ended, on schedule, and the wonder began. Framing the stage were two gargantuan-sized, kaleidoscopically-splashed towers. Both towers extended beyond the stadium roof. Next to the towers hung a couple of colossal video screens.
At exactly VI o'clock, the speakers crackled, the lights lighted, the notebooks opened, the cameras pointed, the crowd cheered, the videotape spun, and the four sky-gazing faces of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" video loomed up on the screens.
The opening piano notes of the song drifted across Wembley's outsize acreage and warmed the crowd like a wave of sunripples.
The video proved to be a collage of mostly Mercury images. As it ended, the three Queen bandmates walked onto the stage, without their instruments, and faced the audience from behind three microphones, as if they were waiting for Alex Trebbek to fire the first Jeopardy question at them.
The applause snapped from every nook and cranny of the stadium. Someone on the long flat field unfurled a banner that said: "Goodbye Freddie. We Will Love You."
Drummer Roger Taylor was exuding so much nervous energy, he seemed prepared for a decathlon, while bassist John Deacon stood there looking more like a certified public accountant than a certified rock star.
Brian May, a guy so technically adept he could take a guitar apart while still playing it, told the crowd: "We are here tonight to celebrate the life and work and dreams of one Freddie Mercury. We're going to give him the biggest send-off in history!"
Roger Taylor's message to the crowd was "Cry as much as you like," and the words appeared to suit the band's emotional state.
Maybe it was that this would be the first time the group ever took the stage without their lead-singer. Or maybe it was that this would be Queen's swan song.
Or maybe it was just that the lighting was so good that it couldn't have gotten any better if they'd booked the show at the North Pole, but I thought the band's faces bore the signs of long emotional wear and tear.
They looked hollow this Easter Monday, like chocolate Easter bunnies, ready to crack. They had every reason to crack, of course, having lost Freddie Mercury and then spending most of the next five months organizing this concert.
The concert was organized in two parts: the afternoon session and the evening session. The afternoon session featured performers doing mostly their own material.
Included were three songs each by Metallica and Def Leppard; two songs by Guns 'n' Roses; a Queen medley by Extreme; and one song each by Bob Geldof and Spinal Tap. There were also the satellite feeds from California and South Africa, and a speech about AIDS from Elizabeth Taylor.
The evening session—the marrow of the concert—put forth Queen playing Queen songs with guest vocalists and some guest musicians.
Singing three songs each were Robert Plant and George Michael; singing two songs apiece were Elton John, Lisa Stansfield, David Bowie, and Axl Rose; singing one song each were Roger Daltrey, Joe Elliott, Ian Hunter, Seal, Paul Young, Brian May, Zucchero, Annie Lennox, Gary Cherone, Liza Minnelli and James Hetfield.
Guest musicians included Bowie on sax; Slash, Mick Ronson, Tony lommi and Chris Thompson, guitars; Mike Moran, keyboards; and the London Community Gospel Choir, back-up vocals.
From the moment the first guitar riff pealed across the bright blue London sky, it was evident that this concert would be different in at least one important way.
Since the man of the hour was a memory, not a man, the participants avoided the usual all-star-show gunslinging. That is to say, none of the musicians tried to push his reputation up a notch on the old six-string belt by out-playing someone else.
There was interplay, not gun play. The guys of lesser reputations didn't try to challenge the fastest legends in the west. Everybody remembered they were in London, not Dodge City, and that it was a show for AIDS awareness, not ego-energizing, even if a mere billion people were looking on.
They kept in mind that the movie helping to trigger the recent Queen Renaissance was called Wayne's World, not John Wayne's World.
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The World-At-Large heard Queen's John Deacon introduce a thrash-metal band called Metallica and the TV World was suddenly staring at a guy who looked back at them like he was making faces at a tiger.
It was lead-singer James Hetfield doing a song called "Enter Sandman," all the while appearing so grizzled you could scratch a match on his forehead. Even his voice seemed to have fuzz on it.
But, all the same, the band got the mammoth crowd jumping. By the end of the set, people were rhythmically punching the air over their heads. At one point, Wembley's Press Officer, Marty Corrie, took a long look at the crowd and said he'd never seen so many people on the field for any event.
Next up was a Boston funky-metal group called Extreme. Guitarist Nuno Bettencourt and his band blinked in wonderment that they were there. I had the feeling that, if they hadn't been asked to take part in this little picnic, they would have stood in line to buy tickets.
Despite their admiration for Queen—or more likely because of it—Extreme pulled off the gutsiest move of the day: they played a medley consisting only of Queen songs, both electric and acoustic.
Most bands would climb the Grand Canyon in high heels before they'd do a long medley of a famous group's tunes for that group's audience. There's always the extreme chance that the imitators will fall flat on their faces by not embodying the spirit of the songs exactly right for the band's followers.
But Extreme took the chance and went over big. The acoustic songs slid through the crowd like a fresh seabreeze. For the faster electric tunes, lead-singer Gary Cherone used youth and speed and gesture and energy and motion to deal with the hearts of Queen fans.
He was all over the stage, running around like Charlie Chaplin being chased by the cops. For the most part, Extreme seemed to feel as at home on Queen's turf as an Eskimo on a ski slope.
Between sets, while roadies changed band equipment, the audience was treated to video interludes on the big screens. The videos displayed a vigorous Freddie Mercury and his three rock 'n' roll brethren.
During performance sequences—Mercury flashing sharp eyes like a circling eagle—the crowd would applaud and sing along. During interviews, the crowd became enraptured and quiet, so much so that at times the place sounded more like someone shuffling a deck of cards than like 72,000 people at a rock 'n' roll gig.
The third band in the show (a real band now, not a video) was Def Leppard, a British heavy-metal group. In three songs, lead-singer Joe Elliott took the crowd over like a blonde rooster in a giant barnyard.
Bob Geldof, producer of 1985's Live Aid concert, then did a traditional Irish folk song he had written with Mercury. It's a good thing he was introduced before he came on because, in his sunglasses and sunflower-powered suit, he could have scared King Kong back up the skyscraper. With his homemade ditty (called "Too Late God"), he effectively played the audience as if it were an old upright piano.
Spinal Tap followed, executing the role of court jester on Queen's royal stage. They performed their “Majesty of Rock” segment as if it had been directed by P.T. Barnum, and treated their own presence at the show with all the seriousness of Bob Hope playing for a troop encampment at Christmas.
The afternoon session's last band, Guns 'n' Roses, didn't capture the audience: they leveled the audience. As Slash's lightning-rod guitar streaks road the afternoon breezes, lead-singer Axl Rose bolted around the stage like a raging bull.
You didn't know whether to listen to him or fight him off with a cape and sword. I was glad I wasn't wearing red. He danced and whirled and roared and went knockin' on Freddie's door with a voice as ripping as a chain saw. Talk about being on the cutting edge! He left little doubt about why he's one of the foremost rock singers today.
As the afternoon shadows lengthened and the concert neared its halfway point, the next personage to be presented at court was (How's this for amazing garnish, Freddie?) Elizabeth Taylor.
In America, there was outright shock that Queen got Liz Taylor for their stage. Most Americans who thought about it at all, figured they'd get Roseanne. After all, wasn't this the band that released an album in 1976 and got a congratulatory telegram from Groucho Marx?
Understand it or not in the other-worldly U. S. of A., here she was, the world's most famous queen of beauty, standing at a podium in England, to talk about the nastiest four-letter word in any country: AIDS.
What she told the crowd, fundamentally, was to keep yourself alive. "You are the future of our world," she said. "You are the best and the brightest. You are the shining lights that will illuminate a better world tomorrow. Protect yourselves."
She was just building momentum when—sacre bleu!—some of the people in front, with all the manners of Krushchev at the U.N., started shouting at her.
"Get off!" someone yelled. "Let's have some music!" hollered someone else—someone who sounded as if he had packed away more than his share of the 26,000 pints of beer consumed at Wembley this evening.
Apparently, a few people thought they could divorce her, so to speak, from the matter at hand. But it didn't happen. She stared and pointed toward the noisy area and said forcefully: "I'll get off in a minute. I'll get off. I have something to say."
The crowd cheered and the speech continued without further interruption.
As the audience listened to Taylor under the darkening sky, I recalled reading that it was on a clear, calm April evening, exactly 80 years ago, that a ship called the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic.
Since the ship was supposed to be "unsinkable," it was equipped with enough lifeboats for only half the passengers. So 1,595 people perished. As the ship sank, those lucky enough to make it to lifeboats could hear the band playing stoically.
With tonight's AIDS warnings in mind, I reflected on how many music listeners in this sea of people might believe that their sexual lives are "unsinkable" . . . and won't take precautions . . . and will perish.
In actuality, the Titanic put up a better fight against sinking than a lot of people are putting up against AIDS. At least the Titanic knew it was in trouble. Most of the earth still hasn't figured that out so far as AIDS is concerned.
There are people, at this moment, not protecting themselves and, in so doing, buying first-class, round-trip cruises on the Titanic—maybe even applying for the position of ship Social Director.
I began to appreciate how Queen had split the focus of this concert in half. It wasn't just "The Freddie Mercury Tribute," but also "A Concert for AIDS Awareness."
The band used this night to try to make brothers and sisters of all the people of the world—to create one family to fight this holocaustic disease. For people who left the stadium—or turned off their TVs—with a decision to be more careful because of AIDS, this concert was the most important four-and-a-half hours of their lives.
Queen can't make it into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame yet because it hasn't been 25 years since their first record release. But their efforts to raise AIDS awareness and proceeds put them in a much bigger class, the Humanity Hall of Fame.
Their humanitarian gestures would make them one of the greatest groups in the world, even if they'd never had a hit record, or the singer couldn't carry a tune.
Carrying the responsibility of bringing the concert to a Mercurial climax was the second-half session with Queen playing back-up to several vocalists who would sing Queen songs.
(continued on page 3)
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