#rock it prime jive

[evachuart]

Queen Songs Where Roger Taylor Sings LEAD!!!

These are all the songs I found where he sings lead on ~half or all of the song.

I was trying to find this but couldn’t really so I just figured it out myself lol. Includes B sides & deep cuts. I didn’t include anything from the Flash album or live albums. The songs are also in chronological order! Lmk if I missed anything. Brian May version posted here.

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1. Modern Times Rock And Roll - Queen - 1973

2. The Loser In The End - Queen II - 1974

3. Tenement Funster - Sheer Heart Attack - 1974

4. I’m In Love With My Car - A Night At The Opera - 1975

5. Drowse - A Day At The Races - 1976

6. Sheer Heart Attack - News Of The World - 1977

7. Fight From The Inside - News Of The World - 1977

8. Fun It - Jazz - 1978

9. More Of That Jazz - Jazz - 1978

10. Rock It (Prime Jive) - The Game - 1980

11. A Human Body - B Side - The Game Deluxe - 1980

12. Hijack My Heart - B Side - The Miracle Deluxe - 1980

13. Ride The Wild Wind - Early Version - Innuendo Deluxe - 1991

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Honorable Mentions

Let Me Live - Made in Heaven - 1996 (just bc he has a solo part :)

No One But You (Only The Good Die Young) - Queen Rocks - 1998 (mostly Brian on lead but I still count it)

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[allthe-queens-men]

Check out the playlist

[best-queen-song]

Okay Queenies! All 88 91 polls are up now! They're each open for one week, so by this time next Sunday (3/3) Monday (3/4), they will all be closed. Here's the list of all Round One polls. Now's the time to spread the word, scatter them to the tumblr winds. Feel free to argue your choices' cases in the meantime!

Great King Rat / It’s A Beautiful Day (Reprise)

Crash Dive On Mingo City / Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon

Who Wants To Live Forever / Let Me Live

Stone Cold Crazy / Fight From The Inside

Escape From The Swamp / In The Lap Of The Gods

My Life Has Been Saved / I Want To Break Free

Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy / Hang On In There

We Are The Champions / Friends Will Be Friends

I Was Born To Love You / Cool Cat

Princes Of The Universe / The Night Comes Down

The Ring (Hypnotic Seduction of Dale) / Don’t Try Suicide

Arboria (Planet Of The Tree Men) / Brighton Rock

Keep Passing The Open Windows / The Invisible Man

Under Pressure / Calling All Girls

Crazy Little Thing Called Love / The March Of The Black Queen

Dreamer’s Ball / Tenement Funster

You’re My Best Friend / Flash To The Rescue

Don’t Lose Your Head / Seven Seas Of Rhye

I’m Going Slightly Mad / Get Down, Make Love

In The Lap Of The Gods… Revisited / Spread Your Wings

Funny How Love Is / Fun It

Misfire / All God’s People

Action This Day / These Are The Days Of Our Lives

Sheer Heart Attack / God Save The Queen

The Hero / Body Language

Ride The Wild Wind / In The Space Capsule (The Love Theme)

Made In Heaven / The Loser In The End

‘39 / Modern Times Rock ‘N Roll

Sweet Lady / One Year Of Love

I Can’t Live With You / Leaving Home Ain’t Easy

Need Your Loving Tonight / Delilah

Pain Is So Close To Pleasure / Las Palabras De Amor (The Words Of Love)

Jesus / Chinese Torture

Football Fight / Save Me

In The Death Cell (Love Theme Reprise) / The Kiss (Aura Resurrects Flash)

One Vision / The Miracle

Father To Son / Don’t Try So Hard

Fat Bottomed Girls / Liar

Who Needs You / Marriage Of Dale And Ming (And Flash Approaching)

Khashoggi’s Ship / You Don’t Fool Me

Bicycle Race / Battle Theme

Vultan’s Theme (Attack Of The Hawk Men) / Dear Friends

Tie Your Mother Down / It’s A Hard Life

I Want It All / Flash’s Theme Reprise

White Man / Dancer

Radio Ga Ga / Bijou

Gimme The Prize / Bohemian Rhapsody

Death On Two Legs (Dedicated To…) / Dead On Time

Scandal / I’m In Love With My Car

Back Chat / Tear It Up

Some Day One Day / More Of That Jazz

The Millionaire Waltz / Breakthru

You Take My Breath Away / My Melancholy Blues

All Dead, All Dead / Man On The Prowl

Untitled / Now I’m Here

Jealousy / Flash’s Theme

Somebody To Love / You And I

Sleeping On The Sidewalk / It’s A Beautiful Day

The Hitman / Execution Of Flash

We Will Rock You / In Only Seven Days

Another One Bites The Dust / Staying Power

Too Much Love Will Kill You / My Fairy King

Is This The World We Created…? / Don’t Stop Me Now

Seaside Rendezvous / Machines (or ‘Back To Humans’)

Sail Away Sweet Sister / Keep yourself alive

No One But You (Only The Good Die Young) / Teo Toriatte (Let Us Cling Together)

Love Of My Life / A Kind Of Magic

Party / Headlong

Rain Must Fall / Mustapha

Ogre Battle / I Go Crazy

Mother Love / Doing Alright

Put Out The Fire / The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke

Nevermore / Lily Of The Valley

Procession / White Queen (As It Began)

Hammer To Fall / Seven Seas Of Rhye [unfinished]

Bring Back That Leroy Brown / The Wedding March

Was It All Worth It / Killer Queen

It’s Late / If You Can’t Beat Them

Flick Of The Wrist / Play The Game

Rock It (Prime Jive) / Innuendo

Thank God It’s Christmas / The Prophet’s Song

Long Away / My Baby Does Me

Coming Soon / Son And Daughter

A Winter’s Tale / Heaven For Everyone

The Show Must Go On / Ming’s Theme (In The Court Of Ming The Merciless)

Life Is Real (Song For Lennon) / Drowse

Dragon Attack / Let Me Entertain You

Good Company / She Makes Me (Stormtrooper In Stilettos)

Mad The Swine / Soul Brother

Hijack My Heart / A Human Body

Lost Opportunity / Stealin'

[longliverockback]

Queen The Game [SACD] 1994 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab ————————————————— Tracks: 01. Play the Game 02. Dragon Attack 03. Another One Bites the Dust 04. Need Your Loving Tonight 05. Crazy Little Thing Called Love 06. Rock It (Prime Jive) 07. Don’t Try Suicide 08. Sail Away Sweet Sister 09. Coming Soon 10. Save Me —————————————————

John Deacon

Brian May

Farrokh Bulsara “Freddie Mercury”

Roger Taylor

* Long Live Rock Archive

[bcofl0ve]

non spoiler bottoms review! spoilery one coming later today- as it’s gonna take me a little longer to put together and also *be* longer probably. 

rapid fire thought that i can take out if y’all think it’s spoiler: not as nearly as vulgar as some people- both fans and puritanesque folks, were making it seem. the vulgarity is pretty much solely in the language/jokes. which tbh make sense when this is at the end of the day a movie about highschoolers!

overall- i loved it and will be rewatching 100 times when it hits prime, but i will also be very honest that i am the pinnacle of the target audience, a young queer girl who would follow rachel sennott to the ends of the earth and loves her style of humor. i don’t know how much people outside of the target audience are going to really jive with it, but i was surprised at all the demographics in my (sold out) showing, which without revealing too much about where i live was in the midwest. middle aged and up! gen z! men! women! and it was a really fun theater audience too, lots of laughing and cheering and just having a good time. the woman next to me who i think was maybe late 30s or early 40s laughed so hard she cried.

i found myself wishing i hadn’t watched all the clips that have been coming out on twitter bc it would’ve been fun to hear those jokes for the first time on the big screen like it seemed most of my audience was. but it was still VERY funny, there’s an ayo monologue in the first act that started right after i took a big swig of my milkshake and i started choking.

kaia thoughts without being too spoilery. am i making sense if i say that she’s very much a gretchen to isabel/havana’s reginia george? and this is very much part of the joke, there’s a little quip about that exact thing but. the moments she does have i think she did really well and like i said yesterday, found her “thing” with dry comedy. i think if ppl who want to “harp on her” over something say *anything* it’ll be screen time jokes- but there is *so* much going on in the movie (there are some plot twists i was not expecting!) and i think her character was given just enough to be funny and serve her purpose. also on a fangirl note there’s a brittany outfit that isn’t in any of the trailers and it was my fav brittany outfit bc she looked HOT. 

josie and isabel are the main ‘b plot’ outside of the whole fight club thing and without saying too much they are *precious* and i loved that b plot more than i thought i would. ayo edebiri for president of the world. josie is my little baby pookie and i want to rock her in my arms. pj pissed me off- even though she was funny- but i’ll leave that at that and save the ‘why’ for my spoilery interview. 

[queenofclogs]

The Game

Artist: Queen

Release date: June 27th, 1980

Length: 35 min 37 s

Tracklist rating:

Play The Game ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Dragon Attack ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Another One Bites The Dust ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Need Your Loving Tonight ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Crazy Little Thing Called Love ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Rock It (Prime Jive) ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Don't Try Suicide ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Sail Away Sweet Sister ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Coming Soon ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Save Me ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Total: 4.4 (44/50 stars)

[uncletomcobblyandall2]

Queen - Rock It (Prime Jive) (Official Lyric Video)

This day 2024 this song popped into my head ,😅

great song great times, Queen at no 1 album chart position that summer and a Roger Taylor song blasting on the radio !

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

The Best of 50s Jumpin' Jive 1986 Rock & Roll / Doo Wop / R&B

Not nearly as adventurous as The Best of 50s Jukebox Rock comp from this Priority Records series that I listened to yesterday, but still plenty of golden oldies here to enjoy for sure. With rock & roll's emergence in the mid-50s, popular music as a whole had found itself at a critical turning point, and this comp seems to capture the moment pretty well as the genre's inherent uptempo liveliness sometimes found common overlap with both doo wop and R&B. Plus, there was a point in the early days of rock & roll in which the sax was used a whole lot more prominently than the guitar too, and a song like Billy Bland's "Let the Little Girl Dance," which was actually released in early 1960, and is also probably this comp's most obscure selection as well, serves as just one prime example, with its own sweet sax solo at around the midpoint.

Pretty standard-issue 50s comp otherwise, though. Two great Little Richard songs, probably my all-time favorite 50s hit in Lloyd Price's "Stagger Lee," Bobby Day's terrific "Rockin' Robin," and a pair of tunes that utilize one of my favorite sounds to come out of the 50s too—the Bo Diddley beat—which is used on The Johnny Otis Show's "Willie and the Hand Jive" as well as Dee Clark's "Hey Little Girl." Never mind the uncomfortable facts that Johnny Otis was actually a non-black guy of Greek heritage who openly lived and presented as a black man, or that "Hey Little Girl" is about lusting after a high schooler 😶‍🌫️; Bo Diddley's unique approach to creating his own brand of rock & roll with an eponymously raw and signature rhythm is the thing to pay attention to and marvel at here—not the controversially strange lives that the people who've used it might've led or the gross lyrics that've been paired with it.

Anyway, if you want something that does a better job of providing less remembered high-quality 50s hits, Priority's Best of Jukebox Rock is a better offering, but if you want more of a cheat code surface-scratching thing that satisfies easily because almost everything on it is both fantastic and well-known, you should give this a listen instead. Lots of essential classics here to satiate an oldies craving or to get a good oldies 101 experience 👍.

Highlights:

Little Richard - "Lucille" Chuck Berry - "Rock and Roll Music" Johnny Otis Show - "Willie and the Hand Jive" Billy Bland - "Let the Little Girl Dance" Lloyd Price - "Stagger Lee" Silhouettes - "Get a Job" Dee Clark - "Hey Little Girl" Bobby Day - "Rockin' Robin" Wilbert Harrison - "Kansas City" El Dorados - "At My Front Door" Huey "Piano" Smith & The Clowns - "Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu" Little Richard - "Long Tall Sally"

[astrophysicist-guitar-god]

After the cut, the Rolling Stone article that elicited a response from Roger, written on an airline motion-sickness bag.

Queen Holds Court in South America: On the road with rock's royal spectacle (x)

James Henke, June 11, 1981. Buenos Aires, Argentina

We are the champions – my friends And we’ll keep on fighting – till the end – We are the champions – We are the champions, No time for losers cause we are the champions – of the world – —Freddie Mercury, “We Are the Champions”*

It was to be the Big Event. Queen, coming off its most successful year ever, was setting out to conquer South America and wanted to make sure the whole world knew about it.

That, certainly, was no surprise. After all, this was the band that had made a career out of creating spectacles. A couple of years ago, for example, when they were launching a U.S. tour in support of their Jazz album, Queen threw a bash in New Orleans that featured snake charmers, strippers, transvestites and a naked fat lady who smoked cigarettes in her crotch.

The real surprise was that Queen – a group with a history of hostility toward the press – had agreed to do interviews and had invited journalists from the U.S., England, Spain, France and other countries to come along for the first shows.

So here I am at Ezeiza airport, outside Buenos Aires. The place looks like a military installation. Young, peach-fuzz-faced boys who can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen are stationed along the concourse that leads through customs into the baggage-claim area. They’re all in uniform: big black leather shit-kicking boots that reach halfway up the calves of their legs, and regulation tan pants, shirts and helmets. And they’re all armed with submachine guns.

In Argentina, the military – and terror – reigns supreme. According to Amnesty International, about 15,000 people have “disappeared” since 1976, when Juan Perón’s second wife and successor, Isabel, was thrown from power in a coup d’état. Since then, a guerrilla war has been waging between the dictatorship and opposition groups, mainly Perónists, and citizens have routinely been plucked off the streets or out of their homes, taken to secret detention camps and systematically brutalized. But as VS. Naipaul writes in his book The Return of Eva Perón, “Style is important in Argentina; and in the long-running guerrilla war – in spite of the real blood, the real torture – there has always been an element of machismo and public theatre.”

Editor’s picks

Amid the hubbub at customs, I notice a middle-aged man in gray – gray suit, gray tie, gray hair – making his way through the crowd, shouting something in Spanish. The only word I understand is Queen, and sure enough, he’s looking for us. He takes our passports, whisks us past the inspectors without so much as one bag being opened, and leads us upstairs to the bar for an early morning cerveza. He speaks little English, but there are two words he knows quite well. No matter what anyone asks for, his response is the same: “No problem.”

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

By the afternoon of day two, none of the writers has yet been introduced to any of the band members. We while away the time in the hotel bar, but in this country, where the annual inflation rate is around 100 percent, a bottle of beer costs the equivalent of twelve dollars, keeping us sober against our wills. Finally, Jim Beach, Queen’s business adviser, allows a few of us to attend the sound check at Velez Sarfield.

The Argentines have a rather nifty concept of crowd control, as I find out when I reach the stadium: a moat, about six feet wide and three feet deep, runs around the perimeter of the field and is filled with foul-smelling water and patrolled by dragonflies. Queen has brought its own artificial turf so that the promoters will allow people onto the field.

Up onstage, Queen – lead singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor – is rehearsing “Rock It (Prime Jive),” a track off The Game. And it sounds simply awful. The acoustics are horrendous in the 3500-seat stadium: there’s a thirty-second delay as the music drifts across the length of the field and reverberates off the scoreboard. Nor does the band’s musicianship seem inspired. The rhythm section is sloppy and sluggish; May’s guitar playing is limited to heavy-metal/hard-rock clichés and patented, though by now boring, harmonic lead breaks; Mercury’s singing is lackadaisical and without conviction.

Related

“They’re not even up to the par of some third-rate New Jersey bar band,” another writer comments to me, and indeed, I’m somewhat mystified about what it is that makes this group so popular.

When I return to Velez Sarfield that evening for the show, the stadium is swarming with kids – and cops. These are crusty, corpulent tough guys – not the boot-camp boys I saw at the airport. And it doesn’t take long to find out that they mean business. When one American writer snaps a photo of the twenty-odd billy-club-wielding policemen who are cordoning off the backstage area, he’s pinned against a government-owned Falcon and threatened at knife point with the loss of a finger until he yields his film. “No problem.” Sure.

“Un supergrupo numero uno,” the emcee anounces as the lights dim, and with a burst of smoke, Queen appears onstage and begins hammering out its anthem, “We Will Rock You.” Mercury – dressed in a white, sleeveless Superman T-shirt, red vinyl pants and a black vinyl jacket – frequently stops singing and dares the audience to carry the weight. And carry the weight they do: the fans seem to know all the lyrics throughout the 110-minute show – which, if for no. other reason, is impressive for the number of hits the group is able to offer up, such as “Keep Yourself Alive,” “Killer Queen,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Bicycle Race.”

Though the band-audience interaction is remarkable, the crowd responds with such unquestioning devotion I get the feeling that if Freddie Mercury told them to shave their heads, they’d do it.

The musicianship still seems pedestrian, but what the group lacks in ability, it makes up for – at least to the fans’ satisfaction – in gimmickry. Smoke shrouds the stage at regular intervals; flash pots illuminate the audience at key moments and end the set. Compared to Kiss‘ fire-breathing antics, Queen’s use of special effects is in relative good taste, and after all, a Queen show is supposed to be a spectacle.

For the encore, the band reprises “We Will Rock You,” then bounds into “We Are the Champions.” Mercury, by this time wearing only a pair of black leather short shorts and a matching leather policeman’s hat, struts around the stage like some hybrid of Robert Plant and Peter Allen, climactically kicking over a speaker cabinet and bashing it with his microphone stand. Pretty ridiculous in this day and age, but the kids love it.

Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas. —Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone

What do I think about critics? I think they’re a bunch of shits. —Freddie Mercury

Queen’s relationship with the music press has been about as cordial as the secret police’s relationship with the Argentine public. Even so, the band hasn’t exactly suffered from the continual pans of its records and shows: eight of its ten LPs have been certified gold (the exceptions are the Flash Gordon soundtrack and Queen II), and its last three studio efforts – News of the World, Jazz and The Game – have gone well over the million mark in sales.

“I have some very strong views of some of the things the press do, such as The Rolling Stone Record Guide,” Roger Taylor says, looking out his hotel-room window. It’s day four, and the long-promised interviews have finally been arranged. “Now, I’ve never read the book, but I saw an ad, and I thought, ‘What the fuck is someone doing bringing out a book like this? Who the hell are they to say what albums are good and what albums are bad?’ I think it’s entirely a personal choice.” (For the record, Queen didn’t fare too well in the book; four of the seven albums reviewed were awarded two stars, a designation that means “records that are artistically insubstantial, though not truly wretched.”)

The shots at Queen have not been fired by just the press, however. When the punks came to fame in England in the late Seventies, Queen was one of the groups most often singled out for attack. Taylor and John Deacon, the two band members who seem most attentive to musical trends, apparently feel some of the criticism was justified. “It gave us a kick up the ass,” Taylor says. “It was so angry, so different, so outrageous. We were recording News of the World in the same studio the Sex Pistols were recording their first album in. I mean, the first time I ever saw John Rotten, I was really shocked, cause I had never actually seen the whole thing in person. He sort of crystallized the whole punk attitude, and there’s no doubt about it, the guy had amazing charisma.”

If the band’s pomp-and-circumstance delivery has recently fallen into disfavor among the rough-and-ready New Wavers, it wasn’t really in vogue either when Queen inaugurated its grandiose stage presentation in the early Seventies. “That was the time of the supergroups, like Cream and Traffic,” Brian May explains, “and it was more the thing to get into your music and not worry about the audience. Then, for a period, it became very cool to do a show. Now, the wheel has turned again. But we just think that kind of show is part of being professional. People are giving you two hours of their time, so you have to give them everything for those two hours. We want every person to go away feeling he got his money’s worth, and we use every possible device to achieve that.”

From the beginning, Queen wanted to put on a show that would be different. “We had a joke that we wanted to be the biggest,” Taylor says. “It was a joke, but underneath, it really was true. Number one is much better than number two. And we’re still working at it.”

To accomplish this goal, Queen opted for an unusual route. Rather than work their butts off playing the club circuit – something Taylor and May had done without much success in a band called Smile – they chose to spend two years rehearsing while they were still in school. May nearly completed a Ph.D. in astronomy; Taylor has a degree in biology; Deacon, one in electronics; and Mercury, a diploma in illustration and design.

Mercury and Taylor supported the band by selling artwork at a stall in Kensington Market, and it wasn’t until 1973 that Queen released its first album and had enough money – thanks to record-company support – to take the kind of show they wanted to do on the road. The LP, titled Queen, gave the band its first hit single, “Keep Yourself Alive,” and set the stage for what was to come. As Roger Taylor says, “It’s been quite a fairy tale.”

I just hate this,” Freddie Mercury says, “especially when that thing’s on.” He points to my tape recorder, sits down across from me and lights up a Salem. “There came a point where I was misquoted all the time,” he continues, “and they had the piece written before they even started. I’m not afraid of criticism – I don’t want to come across as Goody Two Shoes all the time – but it’s been purely vindictive.” A deal’s a deal, however, and Mercury, obviously under some pressure from the other band members and their record company, had agreed to an interview. “So here I am with Rolling Stone,” he moans. “It’s like being forced to talk.”

Up close, Mercury is more petite than he looks onstage: he stands only a fraction of an inch under five feet ten and is relatively slender. His short-cropped hair and mustache are jet black, and his eyes are a piercing dark brown. In addition to being the group’s lead singer and one of its main songwriters, Mercury is also most responsible for Queen’s image. He’s known for his flamboyance and debauchery both onstage and off: at a birthday party a couple of years ago, for example, he swung naked from a chandelier, and on one of the band’s Japanese tours, bored with the tedium of playing night after night, he appeared onstage with a bunch of bananas atop his head.

“The Carmen Miranda of rock & roll,” he says, chuckling. “But what can I say? I’m a flamboyant personality. I like going out and having a good time. I’m just being me. The media pick up on certain things, and a lot of things get overexaggerated. I’m quite easy to get on with, really. I can be a real bitch at times, but that’s okay. I’m not that vicious. I use my influence. Why not? I’m not afraid to flaunt it.”

Thirty-four years old, Mercury was born Frederick Bulsara in what was then Zanzibar. His father was a British civil servant, and Freddie left home when he was seven to attend boarding school, first in India, then in England. “You learn to fend for yourself at an early age. I was quite rebellious, and my parents hated it. I grew out of living at home at an early age. But I just wanted the best. I wanted to be my own boss.”

Shifting around in his seat, Mercury tugs at his upper lip and reaches for his pack of Salems. “For a nonsmoker,” he jokes, “I smoke far too much.” He tells me he’s just purchased a house in London’s Kensington Park, complete with eight bedrooms and a massive studio with pillars and a gallery. “I can have minstrels play there,” he says with a laugh. “Very la-di-da, don’t you think?”

He’s having the mansion remodeled, which gave him cause recently to go on one of his celebrated shopping sprees. Just before their South American jaunt, Queen played five shows at the Budokan in Tokyo, and the promoter’s wife, a good friend of Freddie’s, arranged an excursion for the singer and his entourage through the largest department store. “I felt like Grace Kelly,” he recalls. “I got this huge Japanese bed, a lot of lacquer things and really nice hundred-year-old stuff. I think I spent a fortune, but I don’t know. The credit card pays for it.

“I like buying things on crazy impulses,” he continues. “I hate buying for investment. But I do like a lot of Oriental stuff; it’s intricate and delicate. I also like the cultural part of it, the way they do their gardens; they put a lot of thought into it. But I’m not into all the meditation crap, or those boring tea ceremonies. The raw fish, as well.”

Early on in his career, Mercury seemed bent on incorporating his interest in different cultures and art forms into Queen’s stage shows and music. “Mustapha,” off the Jazz album, was a miserable attempt at Arabic music, and at one point, Mercury told the British press he was “bringing ballet to the masses.”

“I went through this period where I thought I was making an impact on the fashion world,” he says, “then I thought, ‘Oh, grow up.’ And now, you see, I don’t take all this too seriously – I mean, I couldn’t be serious with the things I wear onstage. I have far more fun, and I enjoy it. It’s a great release. That’s what entertainment should be.”

He feels likewise about the band’s music. “It’s just pure escapism. It’s like going to see a film. People should just escape for a while, then they can go back to their problems. That’s the way all songs should be: you listen to them, then discard them like a used tampon. I don’t have any messages I’m trying to get across or anything.”

The forty-five minutes of interview time I’ve been allocated are rapidly drawing to a close, and publicist Howard Bloom knocks on the hotel-room door and tells us to wind things up. Mercury lights one last Salem. “You see,” he says, “you can tell I’m not very good at this. To be honest, I really don’t think I have much to say.”

A couple of years ago, Roger Taylor was doing about 145 miles an hour in his Ferrari on an alpine road in Germany when suddenly one of the chains went, the cooling system died and the car caught on fire. He managed to extinguish the flames just in time – there were about fifteen gallons of gas onboard. “Burned all my clothes to a cinder,” he recalls. “Another minute and it would have hit the tank and that would have been it. I would have been vaporized completely.”

Since then, Taylor hasn’t been quite as enamored of fast cars, but he still relishes the kind of lifestyle rock & roll has afforded him. In that sense, he’s probably closer in personality to Freddie Mercury than the other two band members. “Ah, yes,” he says when I bring up Queen’s rather decadent image. “I like that sort of thing. I like strip clubs and strippers and wild parties with naked women. Sounds wonderful. I’d love to own a whorehouse. Really, seriously. What a wonderful way to make a living.”

“Roger is very much in the tradition of the successful rock & roll musician,” John Deacon explains. “He wants the things that go with it, and it is what he really wanted to be. I’m sort of the opposite of that. It was never my burning ambition to be in a successful band. It has helped my confidence a bit, but it’s different things for different people. And we are four very different people.”

Offstage, while Taylor and Mercury are out carousing, Deacon frequently spends time with his wife and three kids. Though he may seem out of place in the flashy world of Queen, Deacon is actually the band’s stabilizing presence. He oversees much of the group’s business matters – Queen does not have an official manager; instead, it employs a coterie of advisers who leave final decisions to the band.

The disco hit “Another One Bites the Dust” is Deacon’s creation. “I’m the only one in the group, really, who likes American black music,” he tells me. “And with The Game, it was Freddie’s idea that instead of arguing over which songs to put on the album, we’d split it up: Freddie and Brian would have three tracks apiece, and Roger and myself would have two. But we had arguments over whether “Bites the Dust” should be a single. In the end, it began attracting a lot of attention on black stations and in discos, so the record company wanted us to put it out. But it would never have been chosen as a single by the group as a whole.”

Given his low-key personality, I wonder how Deacon feels about the image conveyed by Mercury. His answer is blunt: “Some of us hate it,” he says. “But that’s him and you can’t stop it. Like he did an interview in one of the English national papers, and it was all like, ‘We’re dripping with money, darlin‘,’ or, ‘What’s a mortgage?‘ Brian, for one, just hated it.”

Like Deacon, Brian May is quiet and tends to keep to himself. He, too, has brought his wife and child along. When not touring, he’s an avid gardener – “I’ve been known to be out there looking for slugs at one o’clock in the morning,” he says – and he tries to keep up with astronomy by reading journals and talking with his former university colleagues.

“I think it’s essential that you have things that you get into apart from music,” he says. “You have to maintain your balance.”

May seems to care the most about the group’s audience, and he supervises the fan club. “I think people can listen to some of our stuff and actually get something out of it spiritually, if I may be so bold,” he says. “I enjoy the fact that a lot of people have written to us and said that a particular song helped them when they were in a difficult situation. That’s a great feeling.”

All in all, the Big Event was a success. The attendance was staggering: in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the group played in front of 131,000 people one night and 120,000 the next. The press had also been good: one American writer even mentioned Queen’s shows at Velez Sarfield in the same breath as the Beatles’ at Shea Stadium.

Though this tour seemed rather tame compared with previous Queen endeavors, that probably says more about South American governments than it does about the band. When the group’s advance men first arrived in Buenos Aires, for instance, their backstage passes were seized briefly by customs officials, who deemed them pornographic (they depicted two nude women embracing).

But basically, things went smoothly – not unlike some master plan. That concept was brought up again and again when I discussed Queen with some of its associates. “They want to conquer the world” was how one person put it. For a group of this stature, a group that presumably has made enough money to last a lifetime, Queen maintains a very busy work schedule. After the release of The Game last June, the band did a major U.S. tour, recorded Flash Gordon and played some more dates in Europe and Britain. Then came the Japanese shows, the South American trek and a solo LP from Roger Taylor. This June they plan to begin work on another studio album, but before that comes out sometime next year, they will release a greatest-hits package (which reportedly will vary from country to country, depending on what songs have been hits in those areas).

Trending

Four years ago, in Queen’s last interview with Rolling Stone, Freddie Mercury said, “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.” And the band still feels that way. When I asked them what they thought they’d be doing in five years, each member was convinced Queen would still be together, still reaching for something more. After all, you can’t conquer the world overnight.

This story is from the June 11th, 1981 issue of Rolling Stone.

[freddiemercurydaily]

2 September, 1982 - Queen performed to a modest audience of 6,800 at the Coliseum Complex in Portland, Oregon, US

2 September, 1982 - Queen performed to a modest audience of 6,800 at the Coliseum Complex in Portland, Oregon, USA  with Billy Squier.  ‘Hot Space North American Tour’ The Setlist:  Flash, Rock It (Prime Jive), We Will Rock You (Fast), Action This Day, Play the Game, Calling All Girls, Now I'm Here, Dragon Attack, Now I'm Here (Reprise), Get Down, Make Love, Guitar Solo, Body Language, Under Pressure, Fat Bottomed Girls, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Bohemian Rhapsody, Tie Your Mother DownEncore:  Another One Bites the Dust, We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions, God Save The Queen The Hot Space Tour started on 9 April 1982 in Gothenburg, Sweden and ended, after sixty-nine concerts, in Tokorozawa, Japan on 3 November 1982. The band performed 3 legs - 30 shows in Europe, 33 shows in North America and 6 in Asia totaling 69 impressive performances

[myimaginaryradio]

Rock It Prime Jive - Queen - 1980

[allthe-queens-men]

Songwriter Showdown

Power Duo Edition

Songs credited solely to Roger Taylor

A Kind of Magic, Action This Day, Calling All Girls, Coming Soon, Don't Lose Your Head, Drowse, Fight from the Inside, Fun It, I'm in Love with My Car, Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll, More of That Jazz, Radio Ga Ga, Rock It (Prime Jive), Sheer Heart Attack, Tenement Funster, The Loser in the End

Songs credited solely to John Deacon

Another One Bites the Dust, Back Chat, I Want to Break Free, If You Can't Beat Them, In Only Seven Days, Misfire, Need Your Loving Tonight, One Year of Love, Spread Your Wings, Who Needs You, You and I, You're My Best Friend

[sharkeysnight]

Two artists for top song!!! Queen & Depeche Depeche

ily lex <3

queen:

march of the black queen

‘39

rock it (prime jive)

depeche depeche:

dream on

useless

john the revelator

[severalpossiblemusiks]

You know the classic “parents hate rock and roll” sentiment? It started with racism.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, music was, as with all things in the US, segregated by race. There was white music and black music. There was white radio and black radio. With the postwar economic boom and the vast amount of new jobs, more black people were living into the cities, and with many radio shows moving to the new popular medium of TV, there was tons of open airspace on radio to be filled. The airspace was filled with music. Lots of music from and for both white and black audiences. Black music was largely referred to as “rhythm and blues”, and a few enterprising white DJs trying to break black music into white airspace relabelled R&B as Rock and Roll to try and work around the prejudices surrounding the title of R&B. A key element here was that white music was very inoffensive, meant for popular appeal with little potential for scandal, which resulted in a rather bland musical style that was carefully created to have the most popular appeal possible. Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennet, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como are the prime examples of this style.

Black music, not having the same restrictions as white music, were free to write songs about sex and death and political issues and racism and all the things they had to put up with. This music resonated with the new demographic of teenagers of all colours, as teenagerhood was new and so the idea of having basically 6 years of not being a child and not being an adult was kinda new and nobody knew what to do about it, so the hormonal teens had a lot of stress to deal with, and the rock and roll style appealed to that confusion and exploration of identity a lot of teenagers were going through in the 50s. Naturally the teenagers quickly became a big player in market popularity, and the rock and roll records that had to be independently produced on shoestring budgets became hit sellers, threatening the established crooner music of white adults. Some whites started copying the rock and roll style, most famously Elvis, but Bill Haley and the Comets scored the first rock and roll number 1 hit with “Rock around the Clock”. This encroachment of black music into white circles naturally led to the white record labels decrying rock and roll as degenerate, simplistic, morally corrupting “jungle music”. Parents, not really knowing what to do with the popular new style, joined the white record companies in disliking the music that caused their young ones to get up and *gasp* DANCE! (This was important as most concepts before this were sit-down-and-listen affairs, not jump-and-jive deals). Several early rock concerts ended in riots as police tried to force the energetic teens to sit down when they got up to dance. Naturally parents and authorities ignored that police interference cause the riots and said that rock and roll led to dancing which let to rioting.

Rock and roll, be it back or white, was a musical style that dealt with real life issues and subjects, resonated with a demographic that had a lot of issues, and unintentionally threatened the establishment, who lashed out against it, calling it rebellious, and the rock and rollers doubled down on the rebellion, leading to the likes of the Beatles, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Mötley Crüe, Metallica, The Clash, the Ramones, Michael Jackson, Twisted Sister, Nirvana, Korn, Slipknot, and no end of modern bands and artists.

All because a bunch of old white guys didn’t like white kids buying black music.