Easy come, easy go...I could have seen Queen live in the ’80s, but said no, no, no
Some thoughts about youthful regrets: Don’t do this kids
During a pivotal scene in Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek (portraying the legendary Queen frontman Freddie Mercury) tells his bandmates that they have to play London’s Wembley Stadium, the setting for the 1985 rock concert known as Live Aid. They did not want to wake up the next morning and regret missing out, he said.
Queen did play that day and made history by putting on one of the greatest live performances in the history of rock music.
Malek’s line struck home, painfully, because I was one of those people who lived with his own regrets. I was a long-haired, idealistic rock fan who chose not to see Queen in concert when I had plenty of chances.
Forty years later, I wish I could go back and kick myself in the ass.
Queen performed at different concert venues in neighbouring Detroit, Mich. back then and I remember my older brother seeing them at Cobo Arena in the late 1970s. I can still see his ticket stub: $6 for Tier C, nosebleed seats. But he was there.
When I was old enough to go to concerts, I would see a lot of the greats: Rush, Alice Cooper, Journey, Kansas, Jethro Tull, Yes and more. Rock shows were affordable and I lived in a golden age of music so I grabbed up all the concert tickets I could. I also purposely avoided Queen. My sense of rock purity and artistic integrity would not allow it.
It started after Queen released their album Live Killers in 1979. I remember recoiling in horror at hearing the band perform “Bohemian Rhapsody” with a taped recording of their operatic section. It was the pre-Milli Vanilli age when music was true and pure, we thought, and that tape recording struck me as tantamount to lip synching. So I boycotted the band — at least their live performances — even though I loved everything about them. I even played a few of their songs on the drums in a garage band: “Tie Your Mother Down,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and that forgotten John Deacon gem, “Need Your Loving Tonight.”
I also avoided Led Zeppelin but for a very different reason: After watching the 1976 movie The Song Remains the Same and listening to the soundtrack, I concluded they just sounded bad live. They were sloppy, too undisciplined and probably too high.
I respected Queen as a band that did not compromise. Their sense of integrity certainly comes through in the movie during the scenes when the band refuses to back down on their demand that “Bohemian Rhapsody” be released as a single or in their anger at learning they would have to lip-sync their performance of “Killer Queen” on BBC in an early TV appearance. Their artistic purity also shines during that wonderful scene where they’re shown patching together all kinds of crazy things (e.g. coins on a drum) to get a certain sound in the recording of “Seven Seas of Rhye.”
Why, their earlier album liner notes proudly declared “No Synths!” were used in the music. To the mind of this young music listener, that phrase was a giant one-finger salute to an industry that at the time was seized by dreaded disco.
How could you not respect that?
So I stayed away and missed out on all that. No Night at the Opera or Day at the Races for me. No “We Will Rock You” or “We Are the Champions.” No “Bicycle Race,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” or “Radio Ga Ga.”
It was all so youthful wrongheaded of me, the way I thumbed my nose at the band. If there’s any saving grace, it would be that I was young at the time and naive.
That can’t be said of all the adult bashers of bands like Queen and Rush over the years, and I remember them well. The so-called music critics who were more in love with the sound of their own bullhorns than rock and roll piled on with their negative reviews, shown in the movie during one scene that depicted numerous newspaper headlines all trashing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Sadly, the small-minded angry scribes didn’t entirely go away even after Queen proved them wrong and reached the heights of critical and popular success. Take this Rolling Stone review of their album Jazz. The lyric “you’re a sewer-rat decaying in a cesspool of pride” comes to mind.
My entire family watched “Bohemian Rhapsody” and jabbed eight big thumbs up in approval. My children, who probably consider Queen the greatest band of all time, can’t understand why I never saw them back in the day.
What can I say? I was young and stupid. I guess I must have had a lot of water in my brain, I had no common sense.
Don’t make the same mistake kids. When you get a chance to see greatness, seize the day.
Since we can’t see Queen with Freddie Mercury anymore, there is still the music and the movie. It’s worth seeing, despite all the naysayers and anachronisms. We would all be wise if, like this Queen fan and critic, we let down our guards and took it all in, in all its bohemian, rhapsodic excellence.
As Freddie’s too-short life shows, this world has only one sweet moment set aside for us and none of us will live forever, even if we wanted to.
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications for more than 30 years. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
