Brian May – Life After Queen

Rip, September 1993

Trial by fire, redemption, renewal, rebirth: this sums up the recent history of Brian May, the guitarist who spent 20 years playing in Queen and is now making his way as a solo artist. It's been a rough transition, personally and professionally, and "Resurrection" is one fantastic by-product. It's the heaviest song on Brian's strong solo album, Back to the Light, and today, on this Hollywood soundstage, a group of filmmakers have gathered to shoot a video for it. The clip's images will detail Brian's last five years of turmoil and growth, ending happily with Brian's ultimate emergence into light. Before that, though, there are some ugly moments. That's why the picnic cooler sitting just inches away from the deli tray in Brian's dressing-room trailer holds not beverages, but a squirmy pile of snakes. The creepy reptiles will soon end up in Brian's hair, in order to create a Medusa-like effect.

"This thing being about hellfire and damnation and some kind of journey and a figurative resurrection at the end, we decided to do the video with the traditional Dante visualization of what hell is like," Brian explains. "The snakes are part of the stuff that's eating me up."

Next to the cooler is a cage containing a bunch of rats. Thankfully these are not for Brian's hair, or even this video. The animal handler is training the rodents to run mazes in an upcoming film while the snakes wait their turn in the "Resurrection" clip.

Talk about mazes, the soundstage is black as pitch, the only light coming from the occasional pinpoint flashlight flickers of last-minute equipment checks. At the edge of the labyrinth of power cables, cranes, compressors, heavy-duty extension cords and other production gear, high-intensity beams are trained on Brian, who is playing guitar. This is "Resurrection's" climax, an inferno of flashy axe artistry. Brian will do four hours' worth of takes in this setup, bathed in brilliant white light and wreathed by smoke.

His drummer, Cozy Powell, watches the action. Fellow Englishmen, Cozy's and Brian's relationship goes back to the early-'70s, when Brian would see Cozy play with Jeff Beck and Cozy would check out Brian's shows with Queen. Over the years they followed each others' careers. Neil Murray, Brian's current bassist, was often the other half of Cozy's rhythm section in such bands as White-snake and Black Sabbath, a group Brian would also sit in with when Sabbath performed in England.

Cozy can relate to Brian's recent struggle against adversity. He's had his share of hard luck too. Take the freak accident that almost ended his career in 1991: A horse that had just finished participating in a competition suffered a heart attack and fell on top of him, breaking his pelvis. That put him out of action for six months and cost him his gig with Black Sabbath. He had to learn to walk again. While he was recovering, he and Neil were invited by Brian to play a guitar concert in Spain.

"The show gave me a goal to go for," Cozy says. "There was a period after that when the phone stopped ringing, because a lot of people didn't know I was available or thought I was injured. You think, 'Shit, nobody wants to hear me anymore. My career must be over.' I suppose everybody goes through periods of doubt, no matter how good or popular you may think you are. I was doing tracks for a solo album, and Brian heard some of them, liked what he heard, and said, 'Could I use a couple for my album? We'll rearrange 'em, and I'll write some lyrics.' We ended up working on a couple of those tracks, which then ended up on Back to the Light. 'Resurrection' was one, the one we're doing here today." And it's obviously Cozy's personal favorite off an album full of great material. "It's not the sort of song you put on before you go to bed," he smiles. "If you've got to go from A to B in a hurry, you put 'Resurrection' on!"

His career revived, Cozy came to the conclusion that when "one door slams in your face, two more open just down the road." He empathizes with the twisting course of his pal Brian's life, which has now led to him becoming a frontman. "It's obviously very difficult to go from lead guitarist to frontman," Cozy observes. "The difficulty for a frontman is that you not only have to be able to sing, but you've got to communicate with the audience. You've got to introduce the songs. You've got to be their link with the music. And with Brian, he's not only singing, he's playing as well. Brian's done an absolutely brilliant job of going from guitar player to frontman. Not many people can do it. I know many who have tried and not succeeded."

Yet a series of tribulations almost prevented Brian from ever getting this far, a point he makes when he at last takes a break from shooting. Brian admits he's "been through so many piles of shit in the last six years. At the beginning, when I was trying to find my way about five years ago, it was all a mystery. All I knew was that I was in pain and couldn't see my way out. By the end of it, when I was doing 'Resurrection,' I felt like I understood what all these things meant, and there was some glimpse of the light I was looking for. It's all metaphors, really. [The song] 'Back to the Light' was supposed to be me looking for a way out, finding optimism again. In 'Resurrection' I thought I'd really found it."

Brian divulges that even though he appeared to be a man who had everything, "everything changed. First, my dad died. I was always very close to him I hero-worshiped my dad and thought he was perfect. By comparison, I always felt very imperfect and guilty because I couldn't get my life in proper shape. He was very upstanding and was regarded by everyone as completely dependable and trustworthy and emotionally stable— all those things which I find it hard to be. I hadn't really managed to find out what made him tick. I had this awful feeling I hadn't had time to say enough to my dad about how I felt. It was all over too soon."

Shortly after that Queen vocalist Freddie Mercury told the band he didn't want to tour anymore. "I didn't realize it, but Queen was a huge part of my self-identity," Brian confides. "Queen was a cross between a family, a circus and an army. We'd go out there and conquer the world. There's a powerful feeling of belonging attached to all that. The interdependency's a big thing. You feel needed. You get swept along by this stuff, and you don't have time to think about what your real needs are."

To quit touring "wasn't really like Fred," Brian says. "There was a little switch inside my brain, and I thought.

'There's something wrong here.' It was years before we found out really why, but I'm sure at that point he was already starting to deal with the fact that he knew he had AIDS. He knew his energy level wasn't as high as it had been, and he didn't want to go out there and be anything less than he had been."

Then came the situation Brian still calls "the most cataclysmic of all. My marriage had survived all those turbulent years of touring, but when Queen stopped touring, it all went wrong. We discovered we hadn't really done the repairs we might have done along the way. It was too late. It's still hard for me to understand and hard to put into words. There was an irresistible force pulling me away. I would try and push it away and just close the doors and sit in the family home and lock it out, but every time I tried to do that, I kind of died.

"I fell in love with this lady," Brian continues. "I think falling in love at the point that I did drew together a lot of threads. There were a lot of things in me that had never been quite right, and that was the final thing that just made it impossible for me to stay where I was. I had to get out and grow'

Still, Brian would often find himself paralyzed by depression. "I could work and hide away, but as soon as I stepped outside the studio walls, I was crushed again by the complete impossibility of life," he admits. "I spun around in circles, yo-yoed back and forth, couldn't get it together and basically wasted a year and a half of my life."

But don't you learn the most during your darkest days, although it may not feel that way at the time?

"Yes," Brian acknowledges. "I can see now that the process I went through afterwards of rebuilding very tentatively up to the present point was a period of great growth for me. I'm amazed to be sitting here, feeling like I do, after all that. You come through the fire, and you feel stronger. You go through all this crap. and you get to the point where you think, 'I got through that. I learned.' And then there's something else for which you're not prepared."

Brian is reminded how Freddie eventually got so sick, he struggled to do half an hour of singing a week, then half an hour every couple of weeks. "Then, at the very end, he couldn't move," Brian sighs. "You feel so helpless watching someone so fit and strong and healthy and creative be destroyed by that horrible thing."

Nevertheless, Brian is still inspired by thoughts of Freddie.

"He never succumbed in spirit," Brian says. "He was always up. He always had his sense of humor, which I find incredible. He was the first to say, 'Hey, I don't want you guys to sit around. This may be happening to me, but you have your lives to lead.' I played him 'Driven by You' when I had it at the demo stage, and I said, 'Do you fancy singing it?' And he said, 'No, no, you do a perfectly good job. Go for it and get out there.' When I was about to put it out as a single quite a few months later, I said, 'You sure you're all right about this, Fred? I'm not sure how tasteful it is for me to put this out at this point in your life'—me putting out this very jolly single and getting on with my solo career while he was wasting away. He said, 'Why should you do anything else?' And he said, 'If I pop off while it's happening, it'll give you an extra bit of publicity.' That is Fred," Brian laughs softly.

Freddie's courage fed Brian's, and Brian needed all the courage he could get when he decided to front his own band.

"It took courage to jump off that initial cliff, but having done it, it's a great place to be," Brian says. "It's been by far the most stimulating thing for me to get out and do this, because it's very different. It doesn't matter how many years I've been a guitarist and been famous and been successful, this is completely different, and I approach it with a certain amount of humility because there's a lot to learn."

Talking about his recent L.A. show, Brian relates how he "stood on that stage and could remember so clearly putting those first words of 'Back to the Light' down on tape in a makeshift studio. I did ft because I knew I had to do something to keep myself going. Singing it in front of those people was completely the realization of a dream, you know, getting 'back to the light' in so many ways."

Brian has discovered that "you have to enjoy the moment. You shouldn't always be building for the next moment, as I've spent a lot of my life doing. We played these wonderful concerts all around the world, did these great tours and had such a fantastic time. But, looking back, I think a lot of the time I was thinking, 'Yeah, this is great, but the next one'll be better. This is all a road upwards, and one day we'll get to that plateau.' But there isn't any plateau, folks. Happiness is the journey."