Cheryl and I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody last night. It's the story of Freddie Mercury and the band Queen. Overall, I thought it was a great movie. Rami Malek gives an wonderful performance as Freddie Mercury. So what's the point? Several.
I was alive and well aware of Queen at their peak in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I watched their performance at Live Aid on TV in 1985 as it happened. This Live Aid performance is the peak moment of the movie....the band giving a performance for the ages. And as presented in the movie, it is breathtaking. But in 1985....meh......
I was not a fan. I was like the critics who excoriated Queen albums for being pompous...overbearing...pretentious. To me, Freddie Mercury seemed more like a Liberace-type front man than other great front men like Robert Plant or Mick Jagger. I just didn't get it.
Man, was I wrong..
Freddie Mercury was a truly awesome performer. And so were the rest of the musicians in the band (Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Brian May). This movie touched me a great deal. My relationship to the music and story of Freddie Mercury and Queen is not unlike so many other stories of creative people whose work is not appreciated when it is first presented, at least critically. But after the passage of time, the true genius emerges.
More than any other aspect of their career and this movie, I was touched most by Freddie Mercury's ability to connect with a stadium of 100,000 people. He had a gift for making every individual feel like they were important...part of the show. That is a very special gift. You can see it here in the Live Aid performance from 1985:
There are a number of creative liberties the filmmakers took with the true history of the band. One big one for me was the idea that Queen had been idle for several years prior to Live Aid, and they were terrified of facing such a huge audience not having played together for years. This was not actually the case. Queen released an album in 1984 called The Works, which features the songs Radio Ga Ga and Hammer to Fall, both of which they performed at Live Aid. The band had been on tour throughout 1984 and 1985 in support of this album. They were not rusty, and their laser-like performance shows just how locked in they were.
The other topic that the movie addressed in a tasteful way was Freddie Mercury's reckless lifestyle. He dove headfirst into a hedonistic pursuit of sex-drugs-rock n roll that ultimately led to his contraction of AIDS. I read a pretty graphic tell-all a few years ago about his lifestyle in the early 1980's. It left me feeling very cold and empty. The people he surrounded himself with were not concerned about his best interests. It is sad to see someone with so much talent and amazing gifts fall into the abyss.
Another thing the movie changed from real life was the timing of his sickness. In the movie, he tells the band he has AIDS shortly before they perform at Live Aid in 1985. In reality, he was not diagnosed with AIDS until late 1987. He passed away in 1991.
Brian May is a terrific guitarist. What I admire most about his playing is his sound and his control of it. Sure, he is a great player technically speaking, but his use of high octave chords with max distortion created a sound unlike any other guitarist. He also switches between lead playing and chord playing effortlessly...seamlessly. And, Brian May also loves classical music! Here is a segment from an interview he gave on June 3, 2017 with Charlotte Green from ClassicFM:
BRIAN: Ah, I love Holst, “Planets”. I think he was divinely inspired. He was a schoolteacher. How amazing, you know, and suddenly he’s written this incredible cosmic music. I’ve always loved it from when I was a kid and I was only about 10 years old I think when I wrote a little soliloquy, which I read into a microphone with the accompaniment of ‘Saturn’, and nobody’s ever heard that. Maybe they will one day. But it was designed to be a soundtrack for a Planetarium show – that was the idea – so maybe one day I’ll do that but I’ve always loved it. To me it’s absolutely evocative and as I say it is something completely out of this world. I can’t imagine how, I can’t imagine how it was imagined to be honest. You know it’s, it’s not constructed intellectually as far as I can see. It’s one of these things which some somehow he instinctively plucked out of the air. There’s so much unusual stuff in Holst’s pieces, you know. There’s a lot of dissonance, which wasn’t very prevalent at that time but it wasn’t dissonance for its own sake as it perhaps became later- well this is my theory anyway. Everything that’s in there seems to kind of jolt you into, into being out there in the cosmos. I can’t say enough about it really. It’s the most wonderful piece of music all of it you know the whole suite is brilliant. Interesting that he didn’t do Pluto and, of course, Pluto is now not regarded as a planet anyway so there’s no need to put Pluto in there. I got bit upset when somebody did that. I went to the Albert Hall and saw it all and at the end of it they played this Pluto piece, which I thought was completely inappropriate. Sorry guys, but I just thought it doesn’t work. Get it out of here. So I don’t think anyone’s going to do that anymore,.
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