Sharon Clark (L) as Killer Queen with Alex Hanson in 'We Will Rock You'
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As is true of almost any epic story, this one has its downer moments in Act II when most of those involved must get mean, embarrassed, addicted or deathly ill. Bowery, who made his rep as "art on legs" for painting himself into the most deliciously outr costumes, passes on. And George, after drug treatment, sees a light in the East and takes his lot of battered friends to the bank of the Ganges, where the rapturous chorale "Bow Down Mister" is sung. Even this elevated ending cannot banish frivolity. To chants of "Hare Krishna," the gang adds Harry Secombe (co-star of "The Goon Show" on radio), Harry Ramsden (a chain of fish-and-chips shops) and Hari Kari. But no one is likely to impale himself on a sword at this retro-Romantic party. It's too much bloody fun.
One person, it turns out, couldn't join in. "Taboo" has a passing jape where it twists Madonna's "Vogue" lyric — "Gene Kelly/ Fred Astaire/ Ginger Rogers/ Dance on air" — into "Ginger Rogers/ Fred Astaire/ That Madonna/ Dyes her hair." Well, the lady Ciccone threatened to sue over this bit of frippery, provoking the ever-quotable George to snap, "I used to think she was an icon but she's more eyesore to me now." He added: "It's a shame because the song was funny but she obviously has no sense of humour. Americans don't have that ability to laugh at themselves in the way Brits do." And indeed, laughing at oneself (while mewling on the inside) is the very meat and mode of "Taboo." It even pokes a crimson-nailed finger at itself: in Act II, when George is arrested for drug possession. "I've already got a criminal record," he drawls to the police. "?Karma Chameleon.'"
So why should "Taboo" not thumb its powdered (inside and out) nose at the other new West End musicals? In his trip through the audience the night I attended, Sallon-Baker referred to "CCBB" as "Shitty Shitty Gang Bang," and offered this synopsis of the show: "a car that doesn't work and a bunch of fuckin' kids." And when the Boy George character enters a recording studio, he declares that his producer is about to hear "the best song ever written or performed." A voice from the auditorium promptly groans, "Oh, not 'Bohemian fuckin' Rhapsody' again!?"
LA BOHEME
Last month the Guinness World Records British Hit Singles book released results of a poll in which more than 30,000 people in the U.K. chose their favorite pop tunes. In the top ten were five records by Beatles or former Beatles. ABBA's "Dancing Queen" was fourth, Madonna's "Like a Virgin" fifth. And the winner, by a wide margin, was ... (drum roll, fuzz guitar riff, choir-boy harmonics) ... "Bohemian fuckin' Rhapsody."
But that six-minute "mock opera," as composer-singer Freddie Mercury dubbed it, has other achievements. It is the only song in British pop history to go to No. 1 twice in the same version — on its original release in 1975, and when rereleased after Mercury's death in 1991. In the U.S. it nearly duplicated that feat, reaching #9 the first time around, then #2 in 1992 as a beneficiary of a hit movie: "Wayne's World," with the idiot epiphany when Mike Myers, Dana Carvey and their chums sing along with "Bohemian Rhapsody" on a car radio and bang their heads on the dashboard in innocently orgasmic teen-boy bliss.
So congratulations to the British public for choosing the only song with that includes the words silhouetto, Scaramouche, fandango, Galileo, Figaro, magnifico, Bismillah (honestly, I thought that line was "Miss Miller! We will not let you go!" until the Queen Lyrics website spelled it out: the Arabic word for "In the name of Allah") and Beelzebub ("...has a devil put aside for me"; or is it "hassenpfeffer on a sideboard, me"?). The references here are elusive and allusive enough to spur a doctoral thesis. In the "We Will Rock You" musical, a young person asks an aged savant to explain this mystic meaning of the Beelzebub line. "Actually," he replies, "I think that bit is a pretentious load of old bollocks."
If "Bohemian Rhapsody" (two words not in the song) has a mystic or any other large meaning, I'm too myopic to find it. Like some Beatle numbers on side 2 of "Abbey Road," this one is composed to tantalizing bits: a drifting, floating start ("Any way the wind blows/ Doesn't really matter to me"), two verses on a boy telling his mother he committed a murder ("Pulled my trigger, now he's dead"), then some madly intricate choral work followed by the one hard-rock passage ("So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye/ So you think you can love me and leave me to die") and a final surrender to the opening lassitude ("Nothing really matters to me/ Any way the wind blows"). Instead of coherence, the song seeks emotional anarchy; the moods change convulsively, like the sound track for a troubled mind. But all four or five sections are strong, seductive. The song is its own Greatest Hits medley.
KILLER QUEEN
Queen, of course were no one-hit wonders. They enjoyed a nice little run in America from about 1975 to 1980, but in Europe they were big for a decade; they had more Top 10 singles in Britain than any group except the Beatles. And this doesn't include their two-sided, thematically related hits, like "Bicycle Race" backed by "Fat Bottomed Girls" — the lyrics of each song flicking references to the other. One pair of Queen's Janus hits has lived on, around the world, as a double anthem for fans and hooligans alike: guitarist Brian May's "We Will Rock You" is still played at sports events (the Comiskey Park DJ used that familiar drum-clap line to rally the faithful during this week's Mets-White Sox series); and Mercury's "We Are the Champions," thought to be a gay anthem, has been chanted by millions of boozy homophobes when their team wins a football game or football (soccer) match.
Queen had a large musical vocabulary. The band not only blended pop and hard rock, it ransacked early rock (Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie" in "Now I'm Here"), nursery rhymes ("Rockabye Babe" in "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy") and music-hall chestnuts ("I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" in "Seven Seas of Rhye"), with vagrant dips into the classical repertory. And I do revere the group's angelic harmonies, those fortissimo falsetto soarings in three or four or a dozen parts (on the recordings, are they all Freddie?). I love the four descending "ohs" at the end of "magnifico" and "will not let you go" in "Bohemian Rhapsody"; the playful eliding "oooohs" in "Killer Queen"; the long, strong, Slavic tonalities that open "Fat-Bottomed Girls" and the more breathless, uphill start of "Bicycle Race." Just try to sing along with these. It's hard; they're complicated.
The harmonic apotheosis comes in "Somebody to Love," set in old-time rock-'n-roll power-ballad triplets, like the Fats Domino song "One Night," memorably recorded by Elvis. "Somebody" is structured as a kind of debate between desperation (Freddie's lead) and precision (the chorus). Freddie screams out his anger, and, an octave higher, the chorus duplicates his words or offers advice. Sometimes they sing with him, sometimes a half-beat ahead or behind, while Freddie trudges valiantly on through his slough of despond. Are the choir members consoling the singer, or lightly jeering at him? Are they perhaps parodying the whole call-and-response style of liturgical and gospel music? Whichever, a tremendous amount of work must have gone into this superproduction. It paid off, though. For here is raw emotion that is at once rendered, magnified, transcended, beatified and burlesqued — in other words, the process and glory of art.
Queen was a pretty cool blend of studio band and slam-glam touring band. One could say that the quartet had the musical ambitions and harmonics of the Beatles and the sexy front man of the Rolling Stones. This would be both to exaggerate the band's achievement (they weren't near the Beatles, though they were great pretenders) and to sell Freddie short. Mercury was a meta-Jagger in his gaudy frocks, his pansexual performance art, the luscious mouth and diagonal overbite made for fellating the concert-stadium mike. The band's chief songwriter for Queen, Freddie was also its face, heart, lungs and loins — his generation's true dancing Queen. "He had everything, in extremis," said Lyricist Tim Rice ("Evita," "The Lion King"). Dave Clark, whose quintet briefly rivaled the Beatles in popularity nearly 40 years ago, called Freddie "the 80s Edith Piaf."
READY, FREDDIE
The singer's life and artifice are naturals for documentary treatment, and he got it in the feature-length, Grammy-nominated "Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story" by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, who also directed some of the band's videos and an earlier documentary, "The Queen Phenomenon." The brisk, comprehensive and ultimately affecting "Untold Story" has loads of telling archive footage, some questionably recreated scenes of the singer's youth and a dozen or so telling interviews (from which the quotes here come). Born Farouk Bulsara, in 1946, to a Parsi family on the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar — his father was an accountant with the British High Court there — he was sent at age 8 to St. Peter's English Boarding School, in Panchgani, in western India. There Farouk formed his first band, the Hectics.