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.
