American Idol last night featured Queen (Rock on!) with a great guest spot by Adam Lambert.
Anyone else remember Idol's Queen Night in 2006? It's stuck with us all these years later. The best night of Idol's best season.Here's the best performance from that epic session:
Simon is wrong.
'Owwwwwwww...you gonna take me home tonight!' Bucky's singing style and gravely voice are perfect for the refrain.
In his review of Bohemian RhapsodySteve Sailer notes:
In an album rock era, Queen’s eclecticism made them a great singles band, the successors to Three Dog Night. But the combination of three straight instrumentalists with high IQs (guitar god Dr. Brian May earned his astrophysics Ph.D. in 2007), the English equivalent of Rush, and one gay pianist/genius singer did not make for a cohesive artistic identity. Compare May’s hockey-arena stomper “We Will Rock You” with Mercury’s Studio 54 ode to cocaine and sodomy “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
That's right. Freddie made Queen. Without him they have succeeded, they may even have been an arena-rock band-like Styx* or Journey or god forbid Rush, which is what Sailer calls them pre-Freddie.
In Queen you've got a guitar god and thundering drums, but with a fabulous gay man preening up front, which is how you get songs like Millionaire's Waltz.
*Interesting in their own right, but not as talented as Queen. In fact they're kinda annoying.
It looks like Bohemian Rhapsody cleaned up last weekend, taking in 151 million world wide.
Alert readers may recall we like Queen.
With that in mind here is our list of favorite Queen songs:
One Vision (A Kind of Magic): A stirring call to arms. Fat Bottomed Girls (Jazz): Just a wonderful riff, great chorus, a celebration of guitars. Someone to Love (A Day at the Races): A thunderous chorus. Bohemian Rhapsody (A Night at the Opera): Do we really need to go through this again? Gimmie the Prize (A Kind of Magic): Queen's heavy metal bash. Keep Yourself Alive (Queen): Their first song. All the elements are there. Fun. Innuendo (Innuendo): A dying man's plea. Invisible Man (The Miracle): Great beat, see Brian May's cascading guitar. Tomorrow we'll be going into some deep tracks.
Kurt Loder reviews Bohemian Rhapsody. Nut graph: a paint by numbers biopic well executed. Loder liked the film.
For Gen Xrs that's a hell of an endorsement.
This Sunday we recall a day in 2006. Back then we were a more or less everyday sub at Bernards high. A student we liked very much recommended Queen's A Night at the Opera. We knew Bohemian Rhapsody of course, but had never listened to the album on which it came. That student assured us the album was a tour-de-force.
We can't believe we waited 33 years to listen to A Night at the Opera.
The album is a brilliant musical statement, opening up with the savage Death on Two Legs, and following with an old fashioned British pub song, then a sweet love letter to bassist John Duncan's wife (Your my Best Friend), I'm in love with my Car, and finally a science fiction folk song, '49. That's just the first twelve minutes or so.
Each song stands out from those around it in style and substance. They are completely different from one another, yet somehow fit together to make a coherent narrative.
A Night at the Opera is the album that made Queen, separating them from the rest of the 70's era hard-rock pack.
...You're not as punk as you think you are. Freddie did bring ballet to the masses, in 1976's A Day at the Races. This was the follow up to the epic A Night at the Opera. Queen lived up to that though, giving us two classic songs, the hammering Tie Your Mother Down and the thunderously melodic Someone to Love. Millionaire's Waltz is Freddie's ballet track. It manages to do some of the same things as Bohemian Rhapsody without sounding self derivative. Which is hard to do.
It takes a lot of talent to be a really good rock band. Punk? Not so much.
Queen began as a 70's era hard-rock band but gradually evolved as musicians and with the times.
By the late 70's Queen did songs that had a Disco feel, like Another One Bites the Dust. This would have been the first Queen song we ever heard. It was cool when you were eight.
By the Mid-80's, as Heavy Metal grew in prominence, Queen returned to it's hard-rock roots and even sounded kind of metal.
Which is why when we were a teenager we kind of thought of Queen as a hard-rock/metal band.
Queen did three songs which stood out to us as not only metal, but have parts that border on thrash.
The first is 1989's I want it all, (lead starts at 2:20) Here the drums thunder in 3/4 time and May shreds.
The next, going back to the Iron Eagle/Highlander soundtrack is Gimmie the Prize. May opens with an ascending riff, then pounding power-chords. The lead (3:10) sounds a bit like the Flash Gordon soundtrack and brings images to mind of the cavalry coming to the rescue.
For us, the best of these metal tracks is 1991's Innuendo. The lead starts at (4:40). Drums and guitar combine to make the band sound almost like Metallica.
Note the importance of Roger Taylor's drumming, he just hammers at the listener.
The Queen bio-pic, Bohemian Rhapsody comes out this Friday. We look foreword to it.
Like a lot of men our age, we discovered Queen in the mid-80's. That means we discovered the Iron Eagle/Highlander version of Queen.
Our first Queen album was A Kind of Magic which is also the Highlander soundtrack and has one of our favorite Queen songs ever:One Vision.
This is a very special album to us and helped us through a very tough time in our youth. We've listened to A Kind of Magic a thousand times.
Tell me the opener to One Vision doesn't sound like a squadron of choppers taking off, and tell me the rest of the song doesn't sound like a call to battle. It is. One Vision is about Martin Luther King. We often took great inspiration from the song and the album, and we feel it today when we write out combat sequences.
Later we were a HS senior when the whole Bohemian Rhapsody/Wayne's World thing happened. The timing was just perfect. So was the release of their last album, Innuendo. There's more serious songs on the album, but we'd like to call attention to Headlong.
Back in the day, we'd drive our '86 Celica GT North on Route 9A, out of Briarcliff down 'Killer Hill' toward Croton. Near the bottom of the hill, 9A makes a long, swooping downward right curve into Croton. We'd hit the gas with Headlong blaring. If we timed it right, we could start coasting at about 3:00 and really explode out at 3:20. God it was perfect...
Sometimes, if we hear Headlong in the minivan, we'll still hit the gas.
...and thanks for making me so damn happy over the decades.
Yesterday was Freddie Mercury's birthday.
God we love Queen.
We were 18 in 1992 so, you know....
But we'd already been into Queen for a while.
Queen was a band that adapted. In the early 70's they were a guitar driven rock band. By the end of the decade they had a dance sound. By the mid-80's they were using a lot of power chords and in the late 80's, well, they sounded kind of metal.
Given our age, alert reader(s) can probably guess which Queen album was our favorite when Freddie died, and it's not A Night at the Opera (though it is now).
Part of our love comes from time and place. We were 18 and a senior in high school during the whole Wayne's World-Freddie Mercury tribute. But we already loved Queen before that, ever since 1986 and Iron Eagle, discussed here previously.
With love for Queen in our heart, here's a list of Queen deep tracks,which the casual fan may enjoy.
From The Miracle (1989): Invisible Man. Watch for Brian May's guitar solo, its very interesting.
From A Day at the Races (1977): Long Away. A forlorn song with a nice chord progression and great harmonies.
From the posthumous Innuendo, the title track: This song gives me chills. When Queen did American Idol one of the contestants did this song, which they never performed live.
Here it is on Idol:
Also from Innuendo, Headlong:
One of our 'driving' songs. We used to like to punch it about the 3:15 mark.
In Radio-Ga-Ga Freddy Mercury sings about radio being his 'only friend through teenage nights'.
Well in a senior year filled with disappointment and pain A Kind of Magic was our friend. Twenty-five years on it still is.
First the lead song, the theme song for Iron Eagle:
A call to arms if we ever heard one.
Not until we were much older did we get into earlier Queen, so for a good portion of our life we thought of them as a hard rock-metal band. Between the Wayne's World moment and albums like A Kind of Magic one can see why.
For Gen-X sci-fi geeks, A Kind of Magic is more properly called Highlander, as half the songs were in the 1985 film.
Lately we're in mind of mental/rock songs that are anthems, that tell the listener, 'This is why we got in this business. These song sing to the lonely 14 year old in his room. He hates school, he hates extracurricular activities, he's got no prospects with girls and he knows he'll not have them for years.
[Autobiographical much?-ed?]
Shut the fuck up, ed.
Here gos:
The Answer,Battle Cry. Best line, 'You are the static across the night sky, you are an anthem on the radio...[Fuck yeah]. Halford,Made in Hell. Best Line:In Henry's and in mother's where I'd go to bang my head The feeling took a hold of me with every word I said. Queen, Radio Gaga (obvious, I know, but still)Best Line: I'd sit alone and watch your light My only friend through teenage nights.
Ahhhh Iron Eagle. Yeah, yeah, I know. Still its a lot of fun and God Bless Queen.
Twenty Five years ago I was listening to this sound track everyday. Queen does a song here for Iron Eagle, but also Highlander.
Check out Brian May's solo at about 3:00. It has a heroic feel, an almost operatic feel to it. Then he just hammers the listener.
Back then, when I was 18 mind you, I was writing about galactic alliances and such. I've held on to a few of the ideas I had and got them in print. Anywho with the One Vision opening I used to see helicopters rising out from a hill, the morning sun behind them. Very Apocalypse Now, I know. That massive sword fight in the middle, well that used to make me think of space dreadnoughts trading fire, one volley after another.
The interesting thing about Queen was their ability to adapt. In the early 70's they sound like a guitar driven classic rock band. By the end of the decade they're heavily influenced by Disco. By the mid-80s they sound kind of metal. Which was no fluke. Brian May is on my top ten guitar players list. Heavy was always in them, oh stop snickering.
Queen also has a special place in my generation's heart. Well, you know:
Before Wayne's World one only heard Bohemian Rhapsody on the musty classic rock stations, 92.3 and 102.7 in the NY metro area. As it happened Freddie Mercury died a few months before this came out, so this was kind of his swan song cum tribute. Yes, my friends and I drove around in my 86 Celica doing this. Heck, we do it when DJ's play the song at weddings.
