Queens’ Tragic Rhapsody

Bulsara was in and out of a couple of groups himself during this period, and he tended to remodel every­thing about them. He liked sing­ing blues ”“ most bands demand­ed it ”“ but his influences were much broader: the compositions of British composer and singer Noel Coward; the instrumental voicings of Chopin and Mozart; the singing of Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Robert Plant and Aretha Franklin; and the histrionics of his two favorite stars, Jimi Hen­drix and Liza Minnelli. After he saw Smile, though, his ambition was to be the band’s lead singer. Sometimes at Smile shows, he would yell, “If I was your singer, I’d show you how it was done.” In early 1970, after too many false hopes, Staffell announced he was leaving Smile. May, Tay­lor and Bulsara were sharing an apartment by this time. The oth­ers were well aware that Bul­sara was a nimble and well-schooled pia­nist and was developing into an exceptional singer. So in April 1970, the three formed a new band. They went through a handful of bassists ”“ at least one of whom had dif­ficulty with Bulsara’s over-the-top style ”“ before meeting John Deacon in early 1971. Deacon was another exemplary student (he had a master of science in acoustics and vi­bration technology) and struck everybody as extremely reserved. (“He hardly spoke to us at all,” May recalled of the first meeting.) But he learned quickly, and in his audition he “plugged a gap and didn’t drop a fuck­ing beat,” in the words of a musician pres­ent that day. Deacon was hired on the spot.

Right away Bulsara began to exert his sway, persuading the others to dress more dramatically, more dandyish. He also in­sisted he had come upon the perfect title for the band. May and Taylor suggested names such as the Rich Kids and the Grand Dance, but Mercury insisted on Queen. “It’s ever so regal,” he said. “It was a strong name, very universal and very immediate,” he added years later. “It had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations, but that was just one facet of it.”

And crucially, Queen’s lead singer was no longer Freddie Bulsara. He was now Fred­die Mercury ”“ the new name a reference to the Roman messenger of the gods. “I think changing his name was part of him assum­ing this different skin,” said May in a 2000 documentary. “I think it helped him to be this person that he wanted to be. The Bul­sara person was still there, but for the pub­lic he was going to be this different charac­ter, this god.”

In queen’s early years, a legend persisted that the band had spent a year or two mapping out the stratagems of its success before anybody ever heard the music. (Deacon once boasted to friends that the group had a “10-year plan.”) For the music press, this sort of ambition showed guile rather than any true passion for the mean­ing or social possibilities of music. It was an image that Queen didn’t escape for most of their career. In truth, Queen’s rise was beset by questionable business deals and serious health problems (at one point May almost lost an arm to gangrene, and was later hospitalized with hepatitis, then an ulcer). But for Mercury, there was no fall­back. May, Taylor and Deacon could all re­sort to their original academic-bred careers: May kept working toward his Ph.D. thesis in astrophysics in the band’s early years, and Deacon later admitted that he wasn’t con­vinced Queen were truly viable until after their third LP. Mercury eventually persuad­ed the band that it was worth abjuring any other careers. “If we were going to abandon all the qualifications we had got in other fields to take the plunge into rock,” May later said, “we weren’t prepared to settle for second-best.”

By the time the group released its debut, Queen, in July 1973, the material already felt dated to the bandmates. Mercury didn’t have the patience for jams or fantasias. He believed that carefully crafted song forms with strong, focused melodies were radical enough; if you wanted people to hear your work, strive for memorable performanc­es. He also finally convinced the others that how a band looked ”“ how to dress, how a lead singer moved and commanded a stage ”“ was equally important. With his black nails, and his harlequin bodysuits and angel-wing cloaks that heightened his athletic, rounde­lay-like movements onstage, Mercury rev­eled in an androgynous splendor ”“ albeit one with an ominous edge about it. These attri­butes seemed akin to the styles being forged at the time by David Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music and Mott the Hoople, which was a concern. “We were into glam rock before the Sweet and Bowie,” May said at the time, “and we’re worried now, because we might have come too late.”