Twilight began to settle on England. The evening sun dappled the stadium with flecks of zodiacal light as the three bandmates kicked the concert into warp-drive.
Admirably as they played, the trio seemed jangled to be performing without their missing friend. As the heavy-hearted musicians rocked before a heavy-lidded sun, I wondered about the thinking they were doing this night.
I started wondering if they were wondering, in the mist of memory, how they'd ever arrived on this London stage, under a late sun, playing rock 'n' roll for a good slice of the so-called civilized world.
Could it have really been as long ago as 1973 that Farrokh Bulsara, Brian Harold May, Roger Meddows Taylor and John Richard Deacon released an album called Queen?
And, alas, many critics promptly said the record wasn't worth making. The only guy who got attacked more than Queen that year for keeping a tape recorder going was Richard Nixon.
The next year they came out with Queen II. The band knew it was up to something special: that's probably why they used a Roman numeral, like Popes do.
One of the best albums of all time, the songs were highly poetic. The media's general response, in this case, was that the group had gone from bad to verse.
Thus were the beginnings of a band-press relationship that Dickens would have understood perfectly: Queen was having the best of times, and the press was calling it the worst of times.
I have a theory that, in rock 'n' roll, imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery: abuse is. They made Elvis put on a tuxedo and sing "Hound Dog" to a hound on network television—to a real-life basset hound.
They booed Dylan at Forest Hills in '65 when he walked out on stage with an electric guitar. They put Jimi Hendrix on the same bill as the Monkees. They made the Stones change their lyrics for an Ed Sullivan Show.
I ask you: where else but in the rock arena can you get inducted into a Hall of Fame that no one has yet been able to get around to building?
If abuse is flattery in rock 'n' roll, then Queen might just be the most flattered band in the history of the music. For a while, they all but cornered the dissed market.
No rock band so great ever got so attacked. And no rock band so attacked ever got so great.
The central reason the band could stay so strong-minded was self-explanatory: each band member had a strong mind. First off, they were about as open to interference as the House of Hapsburg.
Secondly, this was one of the most well-schooled rock groups ever. Each of the musicians had a degree—as well as a pair of eyes that told you there was a mind in back of them working double-overtime-and-a-half.
This is the band that could appreciate a Shakespearean sonnet as much as an Easter bonnet. They know that the Trojan War isn't a corporate battle between condom companies.
They think in cosines. They don’t just play out of rhythm and blues, but logarithm and blues. The first thing guitarist Brian May did when he got a 16-track recording studio in his home wasn't an all-night-super-boogie-jam: he wrote the music for a theater production of Macbeth.
From the moment Queen first appeared as Queen at the College of Estate Management, London, in June of '71, they had a terrible problem: they believed that music should be original and that it should be created only because the musicians feel like creating it.
They believed, intrinsically, that rock 'n' roll should be fun. In one of rock's most endearing quotes, Freddie Mercury described Queen this way: "We're the Cecil B. DeMille of rock 'n' roll. We always want to do things bigger and better."
Queen's first stab at being "bigger and better" was to blend hard rock and harmony—to be as heavy as, say, Led Zeppelin, but as harmonious as, say, the Beach Boys.
In attempting this oxymoronic yoking of seemingly disparate musical forms, the group developed a pulsating crystalline sound that had the gloss of high-finished marble. They didn't just write and record a song: they superstylized it. The finished product was defiantly original, and would stay that way.
All four musicians composed the songs and, as time went on, the band thrived on experimenting with new styles. "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song with more changes than a month-old baby, was covered by the London Symphony Orchestra and interpreted by the British Royal Ballet.
"Another One Bites the Dust" spun its way into discos. "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions" have become anthems on stadium loudspeakers in many nations. By not keeping to one style, Queen broke through a spate of musical boundaries.
Just as they wouldn't create and record by formula, the band also raised live-performance rock to a new standard. With their dry ice and stage lighting and catwalks and smoke bombs and stage sets, Queen practically invented stadium rock.
In 1977, their live act tendered a 5000-lb. "crown" of lights. Fifty-four-feet wide and 26-feet high, the dazzling crown would lift and drop at the opening and closing of the performance, flashing like a royal spaceship.
If the road-show stage sets had gotten much more elaborate, they would have had to do their tours on aircraft carriers.
As for the performances themselves—apart from the stage rigging—Queen wasn't just superb: they were routinely superb. You had the feeling that this group regarded playing poorly as a hanging offense.
Whether performing at the Ingliston Royal Highland Exhibition Hall in Edinburgh, or the Farm Arena, Harrisburg, Pa.—whether playing Tokyo or Toronto—this was a band that could charm a rope out of a basket, make a snake do "The Twist."
At Live Aid in 1985, without a sound check let alone a 54-foot-crown light show, Queen couldn't have stolen the show any better if Mercury had a cutlass in his teeth and a jolly roger across his shirt.
On a bill that included Sting, U2, Madonna and Neil Young, Queen was named best act of the day by the show's organizer, Bob Geldof, as well as by a TV audience poll.
Besides advancing methods of studio recording and concert performance, Queen also helped inaugurate the use of music video. Released in 1975, the Bohemian Rhapsody video was an unprecedented feat of sight-and-sound craftsmanship.
The group continued to enhance the medium throughout their career. The most recent Queen video, Innuendo, was awarded the Gold Camera Award at the U.S. Film and Video Festival.
Instead of giving Queen the star treatment for such work over the past 20 or so years, many rock critics often just gave it the treatment.
The first album in 1973 was critically affixed as just another Glam Rock entry in the Gary-Glitter-Marc-Bolan-Slade mold. During the course of Queen's first ten years of recording, the only year that a Queen album wasn't knocked, slammed, flayed and otherwise dragged over the coals was 1983—and that was because there was no Queen album that year.
From the outset, many critics thought the band was trying to be a Zep copy, pure and simple. So Queen became The-Band-That-Was-Not-Led-Zeppelin, rock's Hindenburg, and, critically, sunk like a flaming disaster.
Because the songs were so well-produced, the group drew fire as being a soulless conglomerate that could only manufacture, not create.
In rock music, rugged spontaneity supposedly signifies sincerity and so, conversely, polish is often taken to mean slick contrivance. On reconsideration, accusing this meticulous gold record band of being "too polished" was like accusing a meticulous gold medal Olympic runner of being "too fast."
Anyway, because the songs encompassed so many different styles, the group was accused of having no identity; the stage sets and dry ice and lighting effects were seen as too glitzy and farfetched—when actually they were far-sighted; that "oxymoronic yoking" of hard with harmony was viewed as simply moronic; putting out videos made them "hype" artists, not artists; Mercury's line about Queen being the "Cecil B. DeMille of rock" turned out to be more endooming than endearing: it was like saying "It's all showbiz"—the worst sort of blasphemy to those who believe rock 'n' roll is High Art.
To purists, the line belonged right up there with Leo Durocher's "Nice guys finish last."
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To most other people with ears upside their heads, it was plain that Mercury had the nerve to state the truth: at its root, rock 'n' roll is showbiz—it is an entertainment. Done well and originally, it can be art, too. But it has to be accessible and enjoyable.
Queen knew that instinctively and that's why they went for everything: the overt showmanship, the artful videos, the painstaking production, the immense staging.
It wasn 't that Queen was more interested in the show than the music—or more interested in selling than rocking. It was just the opposite: because the group cared so much about the music, they worked on the other stuff as a showcase to enrich the music, not to divert from it.
Critical understanding of that particular idea—or of Queen as a band—was at its worst in America. In the 70s, the U.S. knew who you meant by John-Paul-George-and-Ringo, but wouldn't know Queen even if you gave out their last names.
To most Americans, Mercury-May-Taylor-and-Deacon were a planet, month, job and church official, not a rock band. There were probably more Americans who could recite the Pythagorean Theorem than could tell you the names of the four guys in Queen.
The only time you saw an American newspaper with the headline, "MERCURY CONTINUES TO SOAR," it was a hot day in mid-summer.
For many Americans who had heard of the band, it was considered rock 'n' roll's Loch Ness Monster: a mythical yet submerged creature of utterly unknown and vicissitudinous qualities.
The main burr under the Queen saddle in the U.S. was some of the public's homophobic misreading of the band's name and image, and subsequent mishearing of the group's music.
The band called itself "Queen" and the lead-singer was a guy wearing black fingernail polish, silk capes, eye make-up, tight jump suits and silver bracelets.
The suspicion was that "Queen" was not just the name of the group, but a description of the band's sexual orientation. In the macho world of 1970’s rock, such a stance would catch flak, to say the least.
Even so, Queen acquired an American following and would probably have prospered in the U.S. were it not for the 1984 release of a video called I Want to Break Free.
The video was a parody of a British soap opera, Coronation Street, and showed Queen's four musicians dressed in drag.
While English viewers understood that it was a joke, American viewers did not. Still not altogether sure about the band's name and the lead-singer's taste in nail polish, many 1984 Americans deemed the video out-and-out hissable.
The only way the group might have enamored itself less in America would have been if they'd produced a video showing themselves setting fire to butterflies, or maybe pulling the wings off parakeets.
The video didn't help extinguish the homophobic fire in America: it poured gasoline on it. So far as Queen's "popularity" in America was concerned, it appeared at the time that they had sipped hemlock out of a pink slipper.
Fortunately, the yardstick for measuring greatness in rock 'n' roll is not steadfast world popularity and it's not critics. You are measured by the original quality of your work. And they don't come down the road much more original than Queen.
Critics who kept attacking the group might as well have gone up a mountain and shouted "Stop it!" at their echoes. For two decades, despite the underwhelming support of America in the mid-to-late 80’s, the music just kept on coming.
In England, Queen stayed as popular as the Queen. In fact, for the past couple of decades, Buckingham Palace has been getting a good deal of the band's fan mail by mistake.
With dedication, patience, fortitude and perseverance, Queen established itself as not just a great band, but a tough one.
Today, there is a long-long-long-long overdue Queen Renaissance internationally. The myths about the group and the reality of the group have reached a media flashpoint.
What's cutting through the heat of that flash and finally putting the reality before the public's eyes, of course, has been the inclusion of the Bohemian Rhapsody video in the Wayne's World movie.
Millions of young people—people who weren't even born when Queen began—are picking up on, and buying, Queen albums.
These are people for whom Queen isn't an acquired distaste. They're just listening and liking what they hear—no image problems or critical onslaught or anything else about it.
How oracular that Queen's first single was "Keep Yourself Alive": the band has had to make a career of that enterprise.
It takes a certain generosity of spirit to make a marriage or a friendship work, and it's the same thing with rock bands. It is that spirit which makes a band a team, instead of a motley of musicians, and Queen had it.
In point of fact, Queen has been a band of generous spirit in many ways. Not only are all the proceeds of tonight's benefit going to charity, but four days ago the group donated $1.76 million to the Terrence Higgins Trust, an English charity for AIDS sufferers.
The money was from the royalties earned on the re-release of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on CD. Also, Queen has raised millions for the British Bone Marrow Donor Appeal. The organization assists children dying of leukemia or related diseases.
That kind of generosity tells the story of what the group Queen is about, tells it even better than a glance at their accomplishments, record-setting as they were.
Under the setting sun of a Monday evening in London, the surviving Queen musicians began the part of the show that the fans had been waiting for.
The three bandmates played their instruments as they've played them scads of times in concert before. Roger Taylor turned his drumset into a musical launchpad, playing so hard he probably developed second-degree burns on his fingers.
John Deacon, looking clean-cut as a Disney movie, hammered out his dependably solid basslines. Brian May generated his customary ultra-precise sounds, not so much by playing the guitar as operating on it: Brian Surgery.
And, as usual, the fans listened intently to that guitar, as if mesmerized by a crackling fireplace.
The three musicians played their songs, made their moves, did their jobs, and the sound rang loud and tight and upbeat.
But there was that one thing different and it showed in their faces throughout the night: that wasn't their bandmate at the center-stage microphone.
Hard as they would play, cheerful as they would try to look, Wembley Stadium's 5000 stage lights caught the emotional sunset in their faces.
At times, they seemed to be looking straight ahead at something no one else could see. It was as if they were listening for footsteps.
Stepping into Freddie Mercury's shoes to pitch Queen music into the invading night was a veritable galaxy of starry voices.
Elton John—rock's "Iron John": a fellow who has spent his lifetime with crowds looking up at him—demonstrated his sensational skill with "The Show Must Go On."
Roger Daltrey, brandishing his smoldering blue eyes and whiplashing the microphone cord over his head, was fabulous on "I Want It All."
George Michael, his chin capped in the usual piece of #4 sandpaper, was in overpoweringly good voice on his three songs, especially "Somebody to Love."
David Bowie, the Man Who Fell to Earth, sang two songs in his ever-amazing way, then fell to one knee, bowed his head, and recited "The Our Father." The prayer cut into the audience's heart like a Bowie knife.
Axl Rose, careening left and right like he was in a canoe race, scorched his lungs to deliver an astounding rendition of "We Will Rock You."
Earlier, he had teamed up with Elton John and the duo tried valiantly to do justice to "Bohemian Rhapsody." When they crossed arms at the end of the song, it looked less like a sincere joining of limbs than an amateur pickpocket practice.
The night came quickly, tossing billions of microscopic blue coins upon the stadium. As the evening darkened, the mood of the crowd deepened. The feeling of celebration gradually changed to one of remembrance. Eyes adjusted imperceptibly to the night light, and minds adjusted imperceptibly to the actual reason for this gathering—a death.
(continued on page 4)
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