On Classic Queen

Background

Picture it, 1992, three 11-12 year old kids at Summer camp with almost no good music whatsoever. I just had a few books on tape to listen to and Justin had a tape with a bunch of WWF wrestlers singing rock'n'roll songs (holy shit I found it at Amazon: The Wrestling Album) (with humourous interviews with Mean Gene Okerlund in between the songs.) and the Wayne's World Soundtrack. So naturally we listened to a lot of Bohemian Rhapsody for a good week. We would put the tape on, the first song would be the Wayne's World theme sung by Wayne and Garth themselves, which was pretty fun, then Bohemian Rhapsody, then a bunch of other songs we usually got bored with pretty quickly before re-winding the tape again.

So naturally the camp counselors would get pretty damn sick of our awful music. Now the important thing to understand about the entire dynamic of myself, Justin and Taylor at camp was that the counselors and all the staff all loved Justin. So when the camp director saw how obsessed with this one Queen song Justin was, she just went out and bought him the tape of Classic Queen.

One of the counselors there, Carl, was huge into Queen for quite a while so he just thought it was fantastic that we were getting into good music. So we would ask him all sorts of questions about the history of the band, how popular were they, and of course many many questions about Freddie and what happened to him.

It was probably our first introduction to the idea of homosexuality and AIDS, and the way Carl talked about how Freddie died was, for me, the frame of reference that I would always think from later in life. Freddie was just Freddie, if he was gay or not didn't have an effect on his talent or his accomplishments, and the disease he got wasn't his fault so much as a product of the time and people not knowing.

For the three of us Freddie was our first big rock star hero. (Excepting that I had a good collection of Beach Boys tapes at home and have always loved them as well.) So we each took with us from camp the same musical hero, and enough knowledge and understanding to not be bothered by the meathead idiots who would say “you're a fag if you listen to that” and other witticisms.

Taylor and I each went and bought the tape ourselves shortly afterwards, and I know for me it was practically the only thing I listened to for a good year of my life. The diversity of the songs on the album meant that I had hard-charging straight-ahead rock songs, and a few ballads and some pretty weird songs like “I'm Going Slightly Mad” and “Under Pressure”.

Revisited

So last night I was over at Justin's place and we're listening to some tunes, as always, and another friend, Sarah, is also over. Sarah and Justin are monumentally obsessed with Pearl Jam (“Wow, what tour did you get that T-Shirt from?”) but fortunately we could only listen to Netscape Radio's Pearl Jam channel for so long before getting bored. The first album we put on was Black Sabbath's Sabotage, from his Complete Original Black Sabbath box. We got totally into that, rocking out to each of the wicket Tony Iommi blasts of original heavy metal energy. “This song sounds like an angry nightmare version of a happy Led Zeppelin song.” Then: J: “We should listen to Black Sabbath more often so we'd argue about music less”. A: “Yes, you should listen to good music more often.”

Some time after that, after a few run-throughs of Rubber Soul and some Elliott Smith, Justin goes over to his CDs, quietly takes one out and sticks it in his changer and smiles. I had no idea what he was up to. At least not until the first half-second of “A Kind of Magic” started, then I knew. Poor Sarah was in for some sad musical enthusiasm, to be sure.

Now, I hadn't listened to Classic Queen since I had it on tape and it either got lost or eaten sometime before high school. So it's been a good 10 years since I had listened to a lot of the songs on that tape. Didn't matter, though, I still knew every word and every note. I'm sure there's a cubic centimeter of my brain matter dedicated to Classic Queen and nothing else.

Even the kind of dumb songs on the album evoked enough memories and appreciation that we would catch ourselves singing along or drumming our fingers to something like “One Year of Love” or “The Miracle”.

1. Kind of Magic
J: “I had no idea this was from the Highlander soundtrack. All that “this reign that lasts 1000 years’ stuff never clued me in, either.”

J: “Is this solo hard to play?”
A: “No, it's mostly just scales. But Brian May's guitar makes it sound a thousand times better than anyone else could playing the same notes.”

2. Bohemian Rhapsody
J: “There's really no point in us listening to this album. We know it all by heart already.”

3. Under Pressure
A: "David Bowie does a great job in this song."
J: "When Freddie hits that high note after that long buildup I used to think it was sexual the amount of pleasure I'd get from listening to it. I knew I had hit puberty when I stopped being able to hit every note of this song. One day I went up to my mom and said ' mom, last week I could sing all of Under Pressure and now I can't, what's going on?'"

A: "Every time that intro would come on the radio I would think "please not Vanilla Ice, please not Vanilla Ice', and I'd be waiting for that third bar to be either relieved or sickened. Stupid sampling."

4. Hammer to Fall
A: "I had no idea when I was a kid that this song was about nuclear war and the end of the world. The music was always so upbeat-sounding."

5. Stone Cold Crazy
J: "Did you ever read the interview with James Hetfield about doing the Queen tribute show, and stepping into a room to rehearse Stone Cold Crazy and seeing Brian May and Tony Iommi there and how he had to stop for a second to believe that he was actually going to play with these guys?"

S. was especially impressed with our knowledge of the quick lyrics to this one.

6. One Year of Love
J: "Now this is a terrible sequencing decision, how do you go from the hardest, awesomest Queen song there is to this thing? What are they trying to do to people?"

7. Radio Ga Ga
A: "Oh my God that's a Trent Reznor beat! Listen to that, that's exactly the same as the drum line in 'Closer'!"
J: "Someone has to record the words to 'Head Like a Hole' on top of Radio Ga Ga."

J: "Al, Trent would have loved Queen, right?"
A: "Of course."
J: "Do you think?"
A: "I wouldn't doubt it."

8. I'm Going Slightly Mad
J: "The words to this are so incredibly bizarre. I read that when Freddie was sick he would take acid and see all sorts of crazy shit, and that's what this song is about, the 1000 yellow daffodils, the knitting with only one needle, it's all about him on acid."
A: "My mom loved this song, I wonder if she knew?"

9. I Want It All
J: "This is my mom's favourite Queen song. I'd be in my room rocking out to it and she'd come in with her laundry basket, put it down and start rocking our right along with me."

10. Tie Your Mother Down
A: "Whoah, wait, we didn't have to change the side of the tape? This changes everything.. the two sides of this album have a totally different feel to them, having them run together like that is just strange."

J: "I only found out recently that 'tie your mother down' means to get totally and completely fucked."

11. Miracle
J: "Can I make a confession? I always disliked this song."
A: "Justin, the man was dying and wanted to write a song about the nice things in the world, and you're sitting there criticizing him? Have a heart."
J: "Fuck you, Al."

12. These Are the Days of Our Lives
J: "This is another one he wrote when he was dying, very sentimental.."

13. One Vision
J: "During their last tour they would always open the show with this song, they'd start off playing the freaky part through the sound system, then Brian would step out like a god onto the stage and start to play."

14. Keep Yourself Alive
J: "This is the first ever queen song, on Queen I. The rock stuff was always the best, when they sounded kind of like Led Zeppelin."

15. Headlong
A: "This should be on the Greatest Hits album with 'Rock You' and 'We Are the Champions'. But shit I love this melody."

16. Who Wants to Live Forever
J: "OK, now we're into the really sad songs."

A: "I always never knew if he was singing to an imaginary woman or man in his love songs. I think he still liked the idea of singing to women, and that aesthetic.. but I always found the idea that it wasn't concrete almost comforting.. that it didn't matter."

17. Show Must Go On
A: "I can never listen to this song without wanting to bawl."
J: "I know, I'm gonna feel bummed in a second."

J: "Do you think when Brian wrote this song it was a message to Freddie that he knew he was dying, but it didn't matter?"
A: "Jesus, that would be intense singing those words that your bandmate wrote for you.."
J: "And his voice is still incredibly powerful in this song, not a hint of weakness at all.. OK, now I feel bummed."

I wouldn't normally write this much about just one album, but it took up quite a significant part of my musical background that I just wanted to put our comments when re-listening to it down do I could have them for myself.
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