Go, Go, Go, Little Queenie

Frieda has been on a Queen binge ever since we saw a 2 hour documentary on BIO, so I’ve got a load of their songs rattling around in my head.  I never know which one is going to be playing on my mental jukebox when I wake up in the morning, because their catalog is so deep.  Since seeing the BIO version, she picked up the original uncut BBC DVD, called Queen: Days of Our Lives, which is far superior to BIO’s edited, censored rendering.  It really gives you a sense of the trajectory of their career and the internal dynamics of the band.  We also rented a DVD of their 1986 concert at Wembley Stadium in London.  With 90,000 seats, this is the second largest stadium in Europe, and that’s not counting the floor, which was packed for this concert.  Playing for hundreds of thousands in big stadiums like this was a Queen specialty, and they were very good at engaging and involving the crowd.  I’ve been known to get bored in concert films, but not this one.  They put on one hell of a fun show.  As a vocalist, Freddie had a range and power that most rock singers can only dream of, and Brian May was a virtuoso on guitar.

This year is the 40^th anniversary of the formation of Queen, which occurred in London in 1971 when Freddie Mercury took over a group called Smile that already had Brian May (guitar) and Roger Taylor (drums) in it, recruited John Deacon (bass), and began to apply his genius toward making the band a legend and the vehicle of his immortality.  They recorded two eponymous albums in 1973 and hit the big time the following year with the album Sheer Heart Attack, containing the single Killer Queen.  Bohemian Rhapsody, a mash up of 3 different song ideas that everyone told them would never get air play, came out in ‘75, hit #1 in the UK and the top ten in the US.  With Crazy Little Thing Called Love (’79) they got their first #1 hit in the US.  Another One Bites the Dust (’80) repeated that feat, but subsequently their success here waned.  They were never as popular in the States as in the UK, Europe, Japan, and South America (except, perhaps, now).  Many of their UK hits did not chart at all in the US.  Their hedonistic, polymorphous perverse message may have ruffled the native American Puritanism.  The infamous review in Rolling Stone (“Queen hasn’t the imagination…to play rock & roll.”) of their album Jazz (’78), now considered by their archivist to have been their best album, illustrates the lack of respect for the band in America.  At the time, American rock critics were focused on the machismo of the punk movement, and thought Queen smacked of the dreaded effeminate disco.  To be honest, I too was, at the time, focused on punk and post-punk bands like the B-52s and Talking Heads, and considered Queen to be a passé glam-rock outfit left over from the early 70s. 

But a curious thing happened on the way into the 3^rd millennium, and now Freddie seems to be having the last laugh, posthumously, because those other bands, which in their day seemed to so much better express the zeitgeist, have remained stuck in the era they embodied, whereas Queen has floated free and become timeless.  In retrospect, you have to admire their courage in pursuing their own complex, eclectic, and virtuosic vision and resisting the pressure to follow the herd.  You can bet that had I been putting together a top ten of rock bands in 1980, or in 1990, Queen wouldn’t have been on it.  But now, having the benefit of hindsight, I would put them in the top five.  Their influence on subsequent artists has been pervasive.  The clearest and most prominent example among current bands is Muse, which sometimes sounds like an outright imitator, but there are plenty of others, including many American groups. 

The other day Frieda was at the grocery check-out and Tie Your Mother Down came on the sound system.  She leaned her head back, closed her eyes for a moment, and listened to the opening guitar line, then snapped her eyes open and said: “I love Queen!”

The girl behind the counter, who barely had been born when Freddie Mercury died, smiled broadly and said, with fervor, “So do I!” 

It looks like Freddie has a great future ahead of him. 

Clear Lake, Iowa

I’ve never lived in Clear Lake, Iowa, but my sister and nephews and their families do.  Most people are probably closer to their families than I have been.  I last saw them 7 years ago, but not in Clear Lake.  I haven’t been to Clear Lake in 30 years.  I’ve kind of avoided the Midwest in general, after fleeing it in my youth.  So I was due, some might say overdue, for a visit.  It turned out to be a trip back in time.  We’re talking heartland Americana here: a big, silver water tower right in the center of town, a band shell in the park right out of The Music Man.  In fact, the creator of The Music Man, Meredith Wilson, was born right next door in Mason City and the 1962 movie premiered there.  And, except for the cars, it could still be 1962 in Clear Lake.  Crime is of little concern.  My sister parked her open convertible downtown, valuables scattered about inside, without a care.  The place feels saturated in old-time innocence.  There are no homeless people, few tattoos, no facial piercings or low-slung, baggy jeans.  The only recreational drug is beer.  There are no people of any color but white.  It must be the America the Tea Partiers are nostalgic for (we avoided the subject of politics).  But for me, it felt like what I knew growing up; it felt familiar, and warm with pleasant memories.  I relaxed on a bench in the park, listened to Dixieland jazz from a Kansas City group playing in the band shell, leaned back, looked up at that looming water tower and felt, in many ways, like I had come home.  It had been a long time, but I was finally back in the culture of agriculture.  And when evening came and the fireflies or, as we used to call them when I was a kid, the “lightening bugs,” came out to frolic on the grass, I almost felt like a kid again. 

My sister and my 2 nephews and their families, who both have homes on the lake, have made a life for themselves centered, during the summer, on sailing.  (During the winter they hatch plans about next summer’s sailing.)  My nephews race their sailboats in a regatta every weekend.   I went out in a power boat and watched the start, and then charged over to the first buoy to watch them tack around it.  At least 2 boats went over in the rather stiff breeze and had to be rescued.  Afterward we all sat on one of their porches overlooking the lake, drank Wisconsin beer, and chatted about the details of the race.  It seemed like a pretty agreeable life they’ve carved out for themselves. 

Clear Lake has a year-round population of about 8,000, and that more than doubles during the summer because it’s a resort and site for summer homes for the well-to-do living between Des Moines and Minneapolis.  Everyone knows everyone (when we walked downtown every other person greeted my sister by name), which is cozy but also means it’s hard to keep any secrets for long because everyone is in everyone else’s business.  Gossip is a mainstay. 

Clear Lake’s claim to fame is the Surf Ballroom which was the last venue played by Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper in 1959 before they all died in a plane crash trying to get to their next gig.  The night I arrived, Cinderella was playing there.  The Surf has a large sunken dance floor shaped like a skating rink with a stage at one end, rows of booths at the other, and elevated space for tables on the sides.  There are a couple of bars in the rear corners where you can get drinks and snacks.  It’s a nice venue that, when I visited on Saturday, was being set up for a wedding reception.  The walls of the lobby are covered with autographed photos of the performers who have played there; quite a long and illustrious list.  In February the annual Winter Dance Party, the event Buddy had just played before the crash, has become a celebration of his legacy.  I’ve got nothing against Buddy Holly but I don’t think I’ll be visiting in February. 

It’s a kind of comfort and consolation that a facsimile of the world I knew in childhood still exists and I can revisit it whenever I want, but it’s not a place I could live now.  The seclusion of it would be stultifying.  I’m used to an edgier, more variegated environment.  But even more than the culture, there’s the climate.  I just missed a triple-digit heat wave, with humidity to match, and the winters are even more brutal.  Decades of living in a Mediterranean climate have sapped my fortitude for such hardships.  And finally, while the lake (which, incidentally, is not clear) is fine for day sailing, as a presence it can’t begin to compete with the awesome extent and power of the Pacific Ocean.