Does 12 or 13 count as an early age to become disillusioned? Maybe it was once on the young side for lost innocence. On the other hand, maybe I was just a slow learner.
That said, it’s the perfect age for listening to Queen’s signature song, the fantabulous, preposterous, ludicrous work of 22-carat Barnum known as “Bohemian Rhapsody.” There’s the maudlin self-pity of the first section and at the end a good walloping bash of fist-pumping, head-bobbing hard rock, both elements fine-tuned to adolescent male sensibilities. But what makes it utterly perfect for the teen boy brain is the middle section, a puffed-up and pompous pseudo-operetta that indulges young rockers in the conceit that, along with all the sweaty leather and searing electric guitars, they’re benefiting from culture and uplift.
In other words, I liked it. A lot. And so it was with no little anticipation that I took my seat in the Phoenix basketball arena for what would be my first rock concert—Queen, live. Once things got rolling, I sat through tune after tune I didn’t know: I wasn’t a Queen fan but a “Bohemian Rhapsody” fan. As each song got checked off the set list my excitement grew. I knew we were getting ever closer to the inevitable, ineffable zenith of the show. We were about to wallow in an operatic fantasy.
Finally, it had begun: “Mama, just killed a man,” Freddie Mercury warbled from the piano. As the middle section drew near, I was gripped with the question: How would they do it?
How indeed. When The Moment arrived, it was announced with the most dramatic of stagecraft—all the lights went out. And they stayed out as the sound engineer pressed play on the tape deck that took over for the band.
At first I was slack-jawed: I had come to witness a spectacle and instead was listening to a recording in a dark arena. My bewilderment gave way to disgust.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” had been controversial from the get-go. When one of the record company men first heard the freshly mixed six-minute track, he sputtered, “What the f—’s this? Are you mad?” Nor was that just the view of the suits: Elton John took a prerelease listen and said, “Are you f—ing mad?”
The real madness was in building a whole album—Queen’s 1975 LP A Night at the Opera—around a studio-crafted single the band was incapable of performing live.
Guitarist Brian May did his best to put a positive gloss on the group’s inability to perform their most famous bit. When the stage went dark and the recording played, “It gave us a chance to change the frocks.”
Mercury, the front man and “Rhapsody” composer, claimed a certain virtue in the honesty with which the band relied on the recording: “We don’t cheat with tapes,” said Fred. “It’s not like we’re out there playing our instruments and trying to mime to it.”
He was unapologetic. “I mean how could you re-create a 160-piece gospel choir on stage? You can’t. It’s impossible.”
But would a live “Rhapsody” really have been impossible? Sure, if Queen had tried to re-create the overdubbed singing themselves. Even if their voices had been up to it, there simply weren’t enough of them to do umpteen Galileos at once. But what would it have cost them to hire, say, 16 gig-starved opera singers? The band could have secreted four in each corner of the arena, revealing them only at the evening’s vocal apogee. It would have created a quadraphonic prog-rock moment that borrowed a smidgen of the thrill of the Berlioz Requiem (when the previously hidden brass choirs get to the middle of the “Dies irae” and detonate the world’s biggest E-flat major chord).
Too expensive? Your average journeyman Pavarotti-wannabe probably would have worked cheaper than the roadies. Too much trouble? How could it be? Think of all the money and effort that went into the band’s hair.
I left the arena feeling cheated. I had been a chump to hand over my hard-earned lawn-mowing money for a shameless con, and I berated myself for being a stooge.
In retrospect I should thank Queen. I was getting a little old to still have scales on my eyes. It had been a few years since I had learned about the Easter Bunny. It was about time I learned that Freddie Mercury was no Enrico Caruso.
I think of that Queen concert as the evening I was ushered unceremoniously into adulthood, when I came to expect fakery as the default setting of the human condition. One might lament the loss of innocence, but then again, it’s never too early to get disillusioned.
