Freddie Mercury - free at last

Rip, 1992

In 1989 a radio station in England asked its listeners to nominate their best and worst records of all time. Winner in the best category was a song called "Bohemian Rhapsody," by Queen, first released in 1975. Winner in the worst category was also "Bohemian Rhapsody." The man who wrote and sang the song was Freddie Mercury, and this polarized response could not have surprised him. All his life he got extreme reactions—the price you pay for being an extreme performer. His reward, though, was extreme record sales. Only three albums have spent longer in the British charts than Queen's Greatest Hits Volume One—Fleetwood Mar's Rumours, Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, and the soundtrack to the 1965 Julie Andrews movie The Sound of Music.

Of the three, Mercury was probably proudest about rubbing shoulders with the Julie Andrews collection, although his own songs regularly bore traces of the Meat Loaf album's grandiosity and something, too, of Fleetwood Mac's feel for a melody. He once said his main influences were Jimi Hendrix and Liza Minnelli. It would be hard to think of two entertainers further apart in style, yet Mercury somehow managed to personify a little of each. And quite casually it seemed too. He wrote Queen's first American hit, "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" (1976), while lounging in his bath in his suite at the Munich Hilton. Later he would say of that song, "It's not typical of my work, but that's because nothing is typical of my work."

Frederick Bulsara was born in Zanzibar, Africa, on September 5,1946. His parents moved to London when he was 13, where he completed a clothes design course at college, ran an antique clothing stall in a London market and, in his spare time, sang with a rock 'n' roll band called Wreckage.

In 1970 a friend introduced him to a fledgling drummer called Roger Taylor, and his pal, Brian May, a guitarist who had built his own instrument out of wood salvaged from a 19th-century fireplace. This, when played with a coin for a pick and the strings left loose, gave off a unique purr; and the would-be axe hero was looking for a singer, he said, bold enough to play off and against his noise.

He found it in the soon to be renamed Freddie Mercury ("Named after the stars, darling!" he once explained). The combination of May's distorted, aching guitar with Mercury's own manic, operatic vocal style would become the linchpin of what we now recognize as the quintessential Queen sound—full of bold swoops and smooth, dramatic glides. Sometimes the voice took on a bizarre comedic tinge, lending the vowels an absurd stateliness, flirting with the words, then clipping their ends off. Consider Freddie's delivery of their 1977 hit "We Are the Champions," one of several sturdily phrased anthems in the band's repertory, now taken up at sporting events across the world: "You gave me fame and fortune and everything that goes with it," vamped Mercury breathlessly, in a space really only designed to fit a quarter of those words—an effect that also tipped you off to the self-mockery inherent in the song. When, in 1987, Freddie recorded an album of duets with Montserrat Caballe, the Spanish opera singer is said to have been mightily impressed by the rock singer's technique and discipline.)

Freddie's partners in Queen held degrees in science (bass player John Deacon), biology (Roger Taylor) and electronics (Brian May), but Freddie Mercury appeared to have majored in stardom. Here was an operatic rocker who went public about his bisexuality; who had the nerve to challenge the traditional macho associations of loud guitar music by calling his band Queen.

As he himself once proclaimed, "The reason we're so successful, darling? My overall charisma, of course."

By 1975 Queen were so popular in the U.S., they had to play two shows a day to keep up with ticket demand. Their best-known and biggest-selling single was, of course, "Bohemian Rhapsody." Lasting just short of six minutes and featuring three tempo changes and a passage of cod operetta topped off with a noisy explosion of guitars for the finale, "Bo Rap" is generally acknowledged these days as Queen at their apotheosis—their "Stairway to Heaven," if you like (and even if you don't, come to think of it).

The song was included on their fourth album, A Night at the Opera (featuring the Queen crest on the gatefold sleeve: designed by Mercury himself to incorporate the quartet's birth signs), and their record company was reluctant to release a single so long, fearing that radio stations would be disinclined to program it. But London's Capitol Radio repeatedly played a demo pressing, finally convincing them to take the risk. British filmmaker Bruce Gowers was paid less than $10.000 to shoot an accompanying promotional film. The finished clip showed the band's heads whooshing around in triplicate, interspersed with performance shots—no great shakes by today's standards, but at the time the format was still unexplored and. in retrospect, the film may now legitimately be viewed as the dawning of rock's vid age. Meantime, the single stayed at Number One on the U.K. charts for nine weeks. The extent of the band's success was mirrored by the presence of all four Queen albums in the U.K. Top Ten at once.

Queen's future, though, might easily have stopped there, had the American public become as smitten as their British counterparts with the sudden and violent advent of punk. A reaction against the glamorous, the ornate, the overblown, punk might well have been a movement founded specifically to eradicate Queen. Ironically, in December 1976, in what turned out to be a symbolic bit of symmetry, it was Queen who pulled out of a scheduled TV appearance at the last minute, thereby making way for a band of hastily drafted replacements called the Sex Pistols to make their very first appearance on British TV. (Mercury later met Sid Vicious, and their brief exchange went as follows. Sid: "So you've really brought ballet to the masses then." Freddie: "Ah, Mr. Ferocious. Well, we're trying our best, dear.")

Yet Mercury and Queen survived. "Somebody to Love," featuring gospel vocals and camp theatrics inspired by Mercury's love for Aretha Franklin and May's talent for finely wrought pomp and ever more ear-bending guitar solos, reached Number Two on the U.K. charts in December 1976. The accompanying album, A Day at the Races (named, like its predecessor, after a Marx Brothers movie), shot straight into the Number One spot, and Groucho Marx even sent a telegram of congratulations, which was read out at a celebratory party in London.

In the U.S. Mercury continued to take to the stage in ermine-trimmed velvet gowns, flinging them off to reveal altogether tighter outfits designed in leather or chiffon, or both. His favored microphone stand had no base; it was essentially a rod with a clip at the top end, almost as though it had been created with Mercury's antics in mind. He amused himself during instrumental passages by holding it at his waist and thrusting away as if it were a guitar; while at other moments it might take on the properties of a magical scepter, perhaps, or a dandy's cane (or even, some said, a penis). In fact, the origins go back to one of the band's earliest gigs in 1971, when the mic stand collapsed mid-song one night. Without panicking, the singer merely pretended it was part of the act, carried on regardless, discovered he liked it that way and decided to keep it.

But then that was Freddie Mercury, daaarling. Forget EIton John. To hell with Mick dagger and David Bowie. Even when called upon to sit at the piano, Mercury resorted to a sort of compressed cabaret, rolling his shoulders exaggeratedly, bringing his fingers off the keys to a ridiculous height, crooning like a choirboy on crack.

A cursory listen to Duck Soup, an excellent bootleg recorded in Seattle on March 13,1977, reveals Freddie and the boys to be at the very height of their powers— the black-fingernailed main man making the stalls stomp and howl with his kimono-removing antics during an encore that includes whip-cracking versions of Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock," EIton John's "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-a-Lula" and—1 jive you not, juve—an unbeleeeeevably camp version of Shirley Bassey's kitsch classic, "Big Spender." (They say the end of tour party in New Orleans that year featured mud wrestlers, fire-eaters, jugglers, and boy and girl groupie services. The party's center-piece was a vast salver of raw liver, which quivered the way raw liver does—especially when there is, as there was here, a naked body beneath it. But then, while it is fairly standard practice for big rock groups to throw ornate parties, nobody ever threw them quite as far as Freddie Mercury and Queen.)

It was this period that also saw Queen became prime developers of what would come to be known as stadium rock. Mercury's pantomime could be said to have reached its crowning point in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in February 1981, where (in what was, at the time, a world record for a rock event) he managed to stand out in a crowd of 231,000.

In America, however, none of their post-1980 albums would reach the Top 40. The band continued to be a big draw on the live circuit, but a string of mediocre releases—the fey and prissy Jazz (1978), the ignoble Live Killers (1979), and the just plain awful 7?”e Game (1980)—compounded by incidents like the one at Madison Square Garden in 1979, when they took to the stage nearly two hours late, only for Mercury to saunter on dressed as a New York beat cop, announce that the audience were "all c?!ts, anyway," then pour a magnum bottle of champagne over the heads of the front rows, meant that Queen's days as a headline act in America were numbered. (The line with which he finished a concert at Knebworth in England in 1986, "Thank you, you beautiful people. Good night, sweet dreams, we love you," was much more typical of his patter in the '80s.)

But while American success receded faster than Mercury's hairline, back home in Britain the hits ran on into the '80s, frequently coupled with striking videos. ("Radio Ga-Ga," from 1984, showed a host of raised hands indulging in some orchestrated clapping, which, from then on, was duplicated by crowds at Queen's live shows all over the world; while for 1 Want to Break Free," in 1984, Mercury dressed as a housewife with a vacuum cleaner, and was convincing in every detail except for his thick black mustache.)

Brian May always went out of his way to assure the music press that Queen's heavy days were not over yet, but with the exception of a few brief flurries on The Works (1984) and parts of Live in Concert (1988), that statement proved to be false.

In August 1984 the group embroiled themselves further in controversy by playing eight nights at the notorious Sun City, in South Africa. They were promptly placed on the United Nations cultural blacklist, and it was only an appearance at Bob Geldof's Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium a year later that redeemed them. Many of the stars who played on that occasion did so as buskers in makeshift combos. Queen, on the other hand, shut themselves away in a rehearsal studio for two weeks solid prior to the event, honing their stage-show to a punchy 20 minutes. Consequently, their set was one of the highlights of that memorable day— slick, compact and funny.

Later in the decade Roger Taylor would form the Cross, John Deacon for a brief time fronted the Immortals, and May produced a number of younger artists. But none had much success away from the band. Mercury, meanwhile, had a hit in the U.K. as a solo artist in 1987, with a version of the Platters song "The Great Pretender" that said much for his vocal skills, and he contributed three songs to the critically acclaimed London musical Time.

Freddie Mercury's last tour with Queen, though none of them could have known it at the time, was, fittingly, of the largest stadiums in Europe, including a final fanfare before 72,000 adoring fans at Wembley Stadium, in the summer of 1987. Keeping with their own outlandish tradition, for their final end of tour party all the waiters dressed as bellboys were in fact wearing nothing more than a coat of paint, thanks to an ingenious body painting specialist Mercury had flown over from Germany.

In the two years following the diagnosis of his HIV status, Mercury rarely left his home in Kensington, London. There were to be no more Queen tours, though he did use what little time was left to him to cram in as much recording work as possible—much of which surfaced on the 1991 album, Innuendo, which also marked Queen's 20th anniversary together. Even though they were unable to tour to promote it, the record still leapt straight into the U.K. charts at Number One. There is thought to be "at least" one more full album's worth of material, according to an informed source, which will likely surface sometime in 1992.

The day before he died, Freddie Mercury issued a statement "for my fans and friends around the world," confirming he was suffering from full-blown AIDS syndrome. The statement read: "I felt it correct to keep this information private to date in order to protect the privacy of those around me.'

Queen's last single was called "The Show Must Go On," and the video that accompanied it was an assembly of images from the group's past—an indication, perhaps, that Mercury and the rest of the band saw the end coming in time to plot a small closing routine.

Mick Wall