Today’s Vinyl: Queen

When Queen released Jazz, I asked my mom for the album as a Christmas present. She went down to the mall – probably to Hastings or some other now-defunct mall record store – and, as she was paying for the record, the clerk asked her if it was a gift for her kid (I guess this implies that my mom didn’t look like your typical Queen fan in 1978, which is true; I think she was actually going through an Anne Murray phase). She said yes, and he proceeded to let her know that there was a poster secreted away in the sleeve that an 11-year old might find objectionable or, worse, titillating. Thus were dashed my first hopes for parentally-provided soft nudity. The clerk discarded the poster (or took it home and put it on his wall, for all I know) and I got bubkis. So, I’m left with this incomplete, censored cultural artifact; still, I have to give her credit for telling me she took it out – redaction, I guess, is preferable to omission.

Last night, I spent about an hour with my daughter watching Queen videos on Youtube; there’s a treasure chest of high-definition videos and concert footage out there, not to mention a Muppet version of Bohemian Rhapsody, a song so inherently absurd on its own that it makes parodies seem perfunctory. Jazz hit big with Bicycle Race and Fat Bottomed Girls, but I think Mercury’s Don’t Stop Me Now holds up as well as any track on here, sounding every bit like an entire Broadway musical unto itself, played at double speed. Queen may not have had the influence or artistic range of the other big rock acts of the seventies, but that sound - Mercury, the backing vocal harmonies, and May’s Red Special (yes, it has its own goddamn Wikipedia page) - remains one the most instantly recognizable in any genre of music.