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Queen's Freddie Mercury just loves to be pampered. He says it conserves his energies for more important things. And, anyway, he likes people around him at all times—even at home in London, surrounded by his Erté prints, his Hokusai woodcuts and lacquered Japanese furniture, his Aretha Franklin and Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler records and his piano. He supposes it's because he grew up in an English boarding school in India (his father was a civil servant commuting among the colonies) and there were always people around.
These days, wherever Mercury goes on this tour, his entourage includes Paul and Dane, two assistants; David, a friend; and a bodyguard who is as discreet as a 6'8", 250-pound former college football star can be. If the size of one's retinue is any measure of status, then Freddie Mercury is unquestionably a star.
The East Coast is where Queen first broke in America, a little over a year ago, but even here it's hard to determine just who the group's fans are. At Madison Square Garden, on this, Queen's fourth tour of America, the audience was evenly divided between under-18s in ragtag street wear and those first-generation rock fans now moving into Sisley jeans affluence. It's a following as eclectic as the group's stage repertoire — a singular and highly stylized potpourri of heavy metal, rococo and English vaudeville themes, soldered together with explosions, dry ice, strobes, spots, prerecorded tapes and a workshopful of technological tricks.
From the outset all eyes were on Mercury. A slight, chimerical figure more mischievous than sexual, he strutted and scampered around the stage, using his shortened mike stand as a surrogate guitar or to machine gun guitarist Brian May or bassist John Deacon. Mercury appeared to be everywhere and everything at once, tossing thunder flashes to the four corners of the stage during "Ogre Battle," then acting the arch romantic at the piano, playing his own dreamy ballad, "You Take My Breath Away," his profile suffused in the dying glow of a single spotlight as he struck the final chord.
And, of course, Mercury's costume changes are almost a show in themselves: from stark-white haute-couture grease-monkey overalls into equally white Nijinsky leotards; then, during the taped section of "Bohemian Rhapsody," Mercury vanished backstage to exchange the white leotard for a black sequined one. (The first two nights of the tour Mercury tore his fingers and his leotards to shreds during the change. He now has two assistants to help him, and the switchover time is down to 45 seconds.) For an encore he sashayed onstage in a flowing silk kimono, which opened to reveal red shorts, suspenders and a bruise on his left thigh. The song was "Big Spender," a piece of bump-and-grind burlesque kitsch that's more a parody than a celebration of high camp, with Mercury taking great pains not to compromise his sexuality, slurring the crucial word in the crucial line: "I could see you were a man of distinction." Segueing into "Jail-house Rock" allowed Mercury simultaneously to assert the stud ethic and proclaim that whatever else he may represent, first and foremost he's for rock & roll — even though his parting shot to a Garden audience screaming for more added a bruising note of cynicism to the whole affair. "Thank you New York. It was a pleasure doing business with you...."
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Those who knew Freddie Mercury in the days before Queen, when he was known as Freddie Bulsara, describe a figure at once friendly and aloof. A flamboyant dresser even then, he had a superior air about him which antagonized a lot of people but at the same time was an unmistakable sign that Bulsara would someday be something special...
Having returned to England from India in his early teens, Bulsara spent four years at a London art college studying graphic design, at the same time singing in small, semiprofessional bands. For a while he sold antique clothes and his own paintings, among them pictures depicting Jimi Hendrix as a guitar-toting spaceman. Hendrix was his idol; Bulsara found the guitarist's electrifying and highly visual stage presence especially impressive. "I scoured the countryside to see him. He really had everything a rock & roll star should have — style, presence; he didn't have to force anything. He'd just make an entrance and the whole place would be on fire. He was living out everything I wanted to be."
Meeting up with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor — students playing part time with a Cream-styled power quartet called Smile — crystallized Bulsara's ambitions. "Freddie would come to our gigs," recalls Brian May. "He was very into visual presentation even then, telling us to wear different clothes, to set fire to our guitars. We thought he was a total idiot." Nevertheless, when Smile disbanded, Bulsara persuaded May and Taylor to join him, recruited bassist John Deacon and changed his name to Mercury.
The more cautious members of the band continued their studies, though. Taylor graduated in biology; Deacon gained a first-class honors degree in electronics and May a B.Sc. in physics. Most of the musical direction at that time came from May: he originally visualized Queen as a "heavy-rock-with-harmonies" band; he arranged rehearsals and most of the group's songs and he set up their first demo recording session. But it was Mercury's drive and enthusiasm which really kicked the band into shape and gave them some sense of their commercial possibilities.
The original concept for the band had been Mercury's, anyway. "I'd had the idea of calling a group Queen for a long time. It was a strong name, very universal and very immediate; it had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it."
In keeping with their cautious strategy, the group peddled their demo around English record companies, holding out for maximum backing and security. They eventually signed with Trident Productions, which in turn signed the band to EMI. Founded in 1968 by brothers Norman and Barry Sheffield, Trident had rapidly grown into one of Britain's leading recording studios, used by acts like Elton John, Carly Simon and Bowie. Queen was Trident's first management venture, and at the time the deal seemed promising. Four years later, the view is different: "The long and short of it," says Mercury bitterly, "is that they were a load of shit."
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Queen's first album (Queen) was a commercial failure, but the second (Queen II) — capitalizing on the group's success as a live act—made the English Top Ten. By the time of Queen the third album, Sheer Heart Attack, Queen's conflict with Trident was fast becoming irreconcilable. "We'd thought it out and we knew we needed to sink a lot of money into albums and the stage act, but we had to fight for every penny," says May. "We thought, 'Okay, we can be satisfied just as long as the act is right and we have the artistic freedom to do what we want.' But they took such incredible advantage of that. It reached the point where we had best-selling albums but we were still living in crummy basement flats on £50 a week—pretty much the same wage we'd started on."
Relations between group and management worsened in 1975 on the group's second American tour — their first as headliners. After a tour of Japan the group returned to London and finally made the decision to split from Trident.
Sitting in his London office, decorated with gold and silver awards for Queen's first three albums, Norman Sheffield denies that the row centered around his company's reluctance to finance the band. He claims that for over three years Trident invested £200,000 in Queen, "probably the largest sum ever invested in an up-and-coming band." He claims a "question of principle" was at the crux of the dispute. "They wanted money — cash in hand — on a personal basis. I said no for tax reasons."
Typically, the band shopped around for a new management deal before finally approaching John Reid, Elton John's manager. It took Reid 24 hours to accept the offer.
Certainly, Reid has the economic wherewithal to indulge the band's extravagance. He needs it. The first album under his direction, A Night at the Opera, employed six different studios at a cost of close to $80,000, while the last album, A Day at the Races, is rumored to have cost closer to $150,000.
Reid agrees that managing Queen has been a test of his mettle. "Managing Elton is like a duel," he says. "I suggest something, he disagrees, and we fight it out from there. With Queen you're dueling with four people who all share the same objective and won't rest until they reach it. In that respect they are the only true 'group' I know."
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Brian may carries a map of America with Queen's itinerary scored across it in thick black ink, timetables, stopover details and a sliding tour schedule ingeniously fashioned from cardboard and staples. As our plane banks out of New York en route to the next concert in Syracuse, he jokes that he likes to know where he is at any given time of the week. If it's Syracuse, it must be Thursday...
After gaining his B.Sc. in physics, May studied for four years for a Ph.D. in astronomy, preparing a thesis on the motions of interplanetary dust, parts of which have been published in English scientific journals. The thesis was 95% complete when May shelved it because of Queen's intense schedule. If there's a deeper perspective to be found in studio work it lies in May compositions like the elliptical morality tale,"39." May originally visualized "39" as a straightforward narrative about futuristic explorers setting off into the wide blue yonder, and then returning to their own world to find it changed beyond recognition. But a Herman Hesse story he was reading at the time seemed to illuminate the real point of the song: "Everybody has some destiny they must fulfill, but in fulfilling you must pay a price. It really applies to touring. I'm a home-loving person really; I like to have all the things that mean something to me around me, but I've had to learn to do without all that." May's voice wistfully trails into silence as the stewardess arrives with his orange juice. He reaches into his bag again and pulls out a packet of English biscuits. A taste of home.
In airport lounges May and Deacon, with their wives and Deacon's baby son, are very much the family men. Taylor hunches in a seat in front of a battery-operated portable TV or talks rock & roll with members of Thin Lizzy, support band for most of this tour. Mercury — with his retinue — remains aloof. In the evenings, while the others visit a club or drink in the hotel bar, Mercury disappears for dinner. By day he is secluded in his room or out shopping — his favorite hobby. It is a hobby which has become part of the folklore of Queen, with stories of Mercury in Japan arriving breathless at the hotel minutes before departure with a caravan of porters bearing antique furniture, objets d'art, trunks full of clothes and the traditional wooden dolls which he collects, with Mercury screaming, "Freight it..." at a harassed tour manager.
"The Japanese call it 'crazy shopping,'" says Mercury. "I walk around like the Pied Piper with hordes of people following me shouting out, 'You crazee shopping.' I'd go with the wife of the promoter. She'd have a department store left open for me after hours; all these assistants standing there and the place is entirely empty except for me. Can you imagine...?"
Everyone says that Mercury is mellower now than he used to be; less extreme. In the early days of Queen it was Mercury who would blow a fuse if the lights were out of sync or the PA system malfunctioned; who would camp it up for the benefit of journalists (wise to the news value of a few carefully dropped "my dears" or "darlings"). Brian May suggests that Mercury has gone through the height of enjoying being a star and living the part accordingly; that he's less volatile and flamboyant than he once was. In the next breath May admits that even after five years he still doesn't know the singer that well.
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Reclining on a garish yellow Naugahyde sofa, making faces at the quality of the tea, Mercury agrees that he's become less tense in the last year. "I used to have a very strong defense which I'd put up whenever strangers were around. It was inevitable, I suppose, because of the managerial troubles we had. I built up this barrier; this feeling that anybody wanting any sort of involvement with us was bound to rip us off in some way. It gave me a very cold exterior."
He has lived with his girlfriend, Mary Austin, for the past six years. He doesn't smoke or take drugs and drinks only in moderation. He enjoys the ballet and painting. He gets bored very easily. "I always have to be doing something. On tour everything can be sublimated to the performance where I can let loose, but at home I need to be constantly doing things to get my creative juices flowing." When the time really starts to drag he amuses himself by nothing more exotic than rearranging furniture — he says he is very house-proud — and, of course, shopping.
Mercury studied classical composition for four years as a child and has always composed on the piano. Recently his playing has become the focal point of Queen's act. Clearly he's no longer content to be recognized simply as frontman for a rock band; many of his more recent compositions seem as far removed from the hard-rock genre as Brian May's are a part of it. Consequently, recognition of his songwriting abilities has become more important to him. "I've got a lot of ego; awards are very important to me. Getting something like a Grammy nomination means a lot. Everybody would like an Oscar, wouldn't they, and I'd be foolish to say I wouldn't."
He recognizes that such rewards do not come without effort. His career to date has been governed by a strong work ethic, an almost puritanical attitude which has him talking animatedly about the necessity for dedication and self-discipline and the idea of being a slave to one's art. Discussing the idea of a star as the embodiment of an audience's fantasies, Mercury seems momentarily taken aback when I ask what his fantasies are. "Fantasies? I don't really have any. Oh dear, how boring....Perhaps I'd like to be Rudolf Nureyev..." Why? "The things that I admire are the things that require total dedication — 12 hours of work a day, sleepless nights."
For most of the conversation Mercury has remained on the sofa, occasionally springing to his feet to glance from the window at the traffic moving ten stories below. "I think I've got everything under control, but can you ever really say that ? Anything can happen. I've got a very reassuring feeling because of the people around me. I don't feel I have to tear my hair out and scream anymore. It's taken a long time, but I think we've finally hit the right note, and from this point we can only go up."
There is a knock at the door and an aide enters to remind Mercury that he has a shopping expedition planned. Mercury springs off the couch. "You know, it's like Roger Taylor says," he smiles. "We're spoilt brats. Everything we do comes up trumps. Our goal is to get to the top, obviously. We're not there yet; nowhere near it. And I don't want anybody to tell me I'm there either."
Then off he goes, crazy shopping...
[From Issue 238 — May 5, 1977]