Yesterday was Freddie Mercury’s birthday; he would have been 79. Sheila O’Malley has a great post about him, and you should go read it:
It’s his birthday today.
It’s hard for me to talk about my feelings for Freddie Mercury.
When Freddie Mercury moved, he cracked open the atmosphere. He’s almost frightening. When he walked across a stage, or threw his body into a note, or flung his head backwards, audiences were transfixed. In him, they saw freedom. Through him, they experienced catharsis. He went there FOR them. People talk about performers who go “into a zone.” Mercury’s zone was bigger than most.
I just got done typing a lengthy comment, and I actually want to preserve it here as well:
Way back when I regularly watched AMERICAN IDOL every season (I know, I know), there was a young contestant, probably 16 or 17 years old, a girl, who had an amazing voice but she was REALLY inexperienced. So every week out she comes to do some song someone much more famous had already done, and she would try to replicate THEIR performance, often with surprising fidelity, but also with lack of “soul” because that’s all she was doing: replicating. And she always picked songs where the original vocalists did tons of runs and melismatic stuff and vocal gymnastics. One judge (can’t remember who, might have been Simon, might not have been) started criticizing her for doing songs every week that relied on vocal fireworks. Well, one week she comes out and does a Queen song. No runs, no major musical fireworks, and one of the other judges, maybe Randy, maybe not, says to the first judge, “You should be happy now! She didn’t do a lot of runs!”
Talk about missing the point (I promise I’m getting to it!): she had come out and aped Freddie Mercury, a man whose voice was so astonishingly pure and who had such astonishingly perfect control of that instrument at ALL times, never needed to back into a grab-bag of vocal tricks and runs and who knows what else. That’s what I always think of when I listen to him singing, just the complete and utter control he had every time he stepped up to the mic, ANY mic. Studio, stage, giant stadium, small club, anywhere. He knew exactly what he wanted his voice to do, and more than that, he knew what he NEEDED his voice to do, and that’s what he did. He was the best kind of virtuoso: the one whose technique is SO perfect that you barely even noticed how perfect his technique WAS. Watching him sing was like watching, say, Vladimir Horowitz play piano: that guy barely moved, he didn’t flail around at the keyboard and rock back and forth in ecstasy, he just…played. (Not to say Freddie wasn’t a showman, because oh was he ever, but he just knew how to do it that made it look completely effortless.) There’s a reason Freddie Mercury is on my personal Mt. Rushmore of pop-rock singers (the other faces being Sam Cooke, Annie Lennox, and Ann Wilson).
Of course, I have to end a post like this with something featuring Freddie Mercury, don’t I? Well, why don’t I go back to the beginning? In 1980, there was a lot of Queen on the radio, but my first real sustained introduction came via the movies: the amazing and wonderful Flash Gordon, that gonzo space opera-planetary romance that paired comic-book imagery and earnest storytelling with a rock-and-roll soundtrack. To this day I don’t know how that movie worked, but work it did. Here’s how it began:
Somewhere in this world there walks a person who saw that and did not become a Queen fan on the spot. I’d rather not ever meet that person. Who needs that negativity!
