Tuesday, April 30, 2019

The Show Must Go On: The Queen + Adam Lambert Story (ABC-TV, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was an odd documentary on ABC with the awkward title The Show Must Go On: The Queen + Adam Lambert Story, which as you might expect from the title was about how the three surviving members of Queen — guitarist (and one of the band’s two principal songwriters) Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor (their original bassist, John Deacon, left in 1997) — revived the band after the death (from AIDS complications in 1991) of their original lead singer (and the other principal songwriter), Freddie Mercury. I ended up watching this show even though I’ve never been a big Queen fan — during their heyday they were a band I sort-of liked but never enough to buy any of their albums, and I thought some of their songs were great (I did have the single “Bicycle Race” b/w “Fat-Bottomed Girls,” which I got free as part of the slush pile from the student radio station at San Francisco State, and among the songs featured in the usual bits-and-pieces snippets last night was “Fat-Bottomed Girls”) and some were at least pleasant ear candy. I had no idea how revered they were in some circles — one of the interviewees on this show, Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters, even called Queen the greatest rock band of all time — greater than The Beatles? I don’t think so! A number of people on the program, including Adam Lambert — the more or less openly Gay singer who placed second on the 2009 American Idol competition after rumors about his sexuality started to surface, and who definitively came out after the show ended and he landed a record deal (where he made a disappointing album, For Your Entertainment — disappointing, at least to me, because he basically has a rock voice but his producers steered him into dance-pop, I suspect because they made the equation, “Gay singer = dance-pop” —though judging from the snippets presented last night, his later solo oeuvre might be worth investigating). Queen had previously gone out on tour in the post-Mercury age with Paul Rodgers of the band Free as their lead singer, and that lasted for four years (2004 to 2008) but according to Brian May (who still has the great shock of long, curly hair he had in the band’s heyday, only now it’s grey) it didn’t work out because Rodgers was a blues-rock singer. (He also insisted that the “Queen + Paul Rodgers” sets include his biggest hit, Free’s “All Right Now” — a song which, quite frankly, I liked a lot better than almost anything by Queen.)

I’ve written about Queen before in my comments on the most recent Grammy and Oscar shows — the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won the Best Actor Academy Award for Rami Malek, who played Mercury (and who irked me for saying in his acceptance speech that Mercury was Gay — for the last time, folks, Freddie Mercury wasn’t Gay, he was Bi! — though I haven’t seen Bohemian Rhapsody and it’s possible the film’s writers omitted any scenes of Mercury sexually involved with women) — and my impression of Queen at the time of their initial success was they were a band uneasily perched between progressive-rock pretensions and a devil-may-care campiness. I generally liked them better when they were just being entertainers and writing clever songs like “Another One Bites the Dust” and the retro-rockabilly “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” and I hadn’t heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” until I saw the film Wayne’s World. The moment I heard it, my thought was, “This is what the Beach Boys’ Smile album would have sounded like if Brian Wilson had finished it in 1967.” I still hear a great deal of Beach Boys’ influence in Queen in general and “Bohemian Rhapsody” in particular — the close vocal harmonies of the opening are pure Beach Boys and the sound effects aren’t that different from what Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were working towards on the Smile project — and one should remember that in the late 1960’s, while most American rock fans had written the Beach Boys off as impossibly retro, British rock musicians (including Paul McCartney!), critics and fans were hailing Brian Wilson’s ground-breaking genius. What makes “Bohemian Rhapsody” work, at least for me (though it’s hardly on the level of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” or the Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up” as a multi-theme rock song with major production effects), is that it’s at once an expression of progressive rock’s pretensions and an hilarious send-up of them. I suspect the reason I wasn’t all that big a Queen fan was that I could never get a handle on them artistically: they radically changed their styles and experimented with a lot of different sounds, as did The Beatles, but where with the Beaties I had the impression that they were growing artistically and deepening their sound appropriately, I didn’t have the sense that Queen were making a similar artistic progression. It seemed more like Queen was just throwing out any sort of music they thought they could make and hoping some of it would stick, artistically or commercially.

The film Bohemian Rhapsody ends with a climax depicting Queen’s supposedly show-stopping performance at the 1985 Live Aid concerts — which I vividly remember watching at the time and not being particularly impressed by: the band I remember falling in love with after Live Aid was one I’d never heard before, U2, and compared to their tight musicianship and the emotional fervor of Bono’s voice on the two songs they performed there, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and “Bad,” Queen’s set just sounded silly. (Ironically, in addition to the band’s set at Live Aid Freddie Mercury sat at a piano and played a solo song, “Is This the World We Created?,” which reflected the social purpose behind the Live Aid concert — to relieve famine in Africa — and was just about the only time in Mercury’s career he wrote a socially conscious song. The simplicity and haunting power of its refrain and the understatement with which he sang it — so different from the over-the-top performances he was known for as the lead singer of Queen — make it still by far the best thing I’ve heard from him.) The Show Must Go On documentary cut back and forth, in the usual fashion of music documentaries (do people who make these movies think there’s a special circle of hell to which they will be consigned if they actually show a complete, start-to-finish performance of a song?), between snippets of Queen with Lambert, interview segments with the surviving Queensters (as well as Spike Edney, who’s in the current touring incarnation of Queen but is just on salary instead of being a full band member) and various people involved in the music industry, and archival clips of Freddie Mercury’s interviews. Mercury makes some gnomic observations about music stardom but what’s most interesting about hearing his speaking voice is his strong Turkish accent (he was part-British and part-Turkish, and he said he identified with Jimi Hendrix because Hendrix was also mixed-race, part African-American and part Native American), which he completely eradicated when he sang (much the way the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and most of the other “British Invasion” bands of the 1960’s eradicated their British accents when they sang and sounded like natives of the American South).

In the interview segments Adam Lambert talks about the difference between being an openly Queer musician in the 2010’s and being one in the 1980’s — there was still enough homophobia in the music business that Elton John’s career had plummeted when he came out as Bisexual in the 1970’s (his record sales only perked up again after he married a woman — his German sound engineer, Renate Mueller — and even then they never regained their former stratospheric heights) and Rob Halford, founding lead singer of Judas Priest, was fired from that band after he came out. Of course, Mercury was Bisexual and Lambert, at least by his own account, is Gay — and there’s a big difference between them even now. All too often Bisexuals feel torn between the straight and Queer camps, and fully accepted by neither; when I attended the San Diego Bisexual Forum meetings one of their most frequent complaints was “Bisexual invisibility” — and the continued insistence of people who write about Freddie Mercury referring to him as “Gay” instead of Bisexual (including Mikal Gilmore, whose Rolling Stone profile of Mercury post-mortem may be the best thing ever written about him but who called him “Gay” even though his own article documented at least two long-term sexual relationships Mercury had with women) is Bisexual invisibility big-time. (Other famous Bisexuals who frequently get referred to as “Gay” include Oscar Wilde, Leonard Bernstein, Anthony Perkins and James Dean.) I suspect Lambert would have had a harder time starting and sustaining a career if he were Bi than he’s had being Gay — there’s still a lack of trust of Bisexuals in both the straight and Queer communities, at least in part because (as Lindsay Maracotta put it in her late-1970’s account of the singles bar scene) dating a Bisexual means “twice as many people to be jealous of.”

The continued popularity of Queen remains an enigma to me — judging from the bits and pieces of it in this show, I suspect I’d find a live Queen show overwhelming in all the wrong ways: all those flamboyant costumes, all those stage effects, all those pyrotechnics. One of my biases in music is that an artist who tricks up his or her stage show that way is doing so to conceal basic shortcomings in their purely musical talent — and when I see a bizarre, flamboyant show from someone with real musical chops, like Michael Jackson, Madonna or Pink, I’m likely to think, “You don’t need to do that. You’re a good enough singer just to project on the basis of your voice alone.” (At the same time, Madonna has — as feminist Camille Paglia noted in her intellectual defense of Madonna —turned her elaborate stage spectacles into social critiques of women’s sexuality and how it’s been perceived by men over the centuries.) Queen are having a comeback now due to the success of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie — this show was, among other things, intended to promote the 2019 Queen + Adam Lambert tour — and I’m having a hard time understanding their peculiar longevity even though one point some of the interviewees made is that they’re rekindling interest among young people in rock as a musical form even though, as the music of the young, it’s been as thoroughly displaced by hip-hop and electronic dance music as rock once displaced big-band swing and vocal pop as the music of the young in the 1950’s.