#85 - Mercury Rising

Mercury Rising

3/24/06 (#85)

I have very few memories that involve a specific song as the soundtrack. Sure, there are albums that spent a season or a year in residence on my turntable, or cassettes that stretched precariously under constant rotation in the car, but few songs are intrinsic to a particular moment. I recently scoured my memory for such direct links ( when the iPod batteries are dead, I have to fill my head with something while walking the dog), and came to a very unexpected realization: Most of those experiences involve the band Queen.

I was never what you (or Queen's manager) would call a "fan." I never owned a Queen album (unless you count Brian May's Starfleet project, but I bought that because Eddie Van Halen was involved), never saw a Queen show, and frankly, always wondered how Freddie Mercury could try a different haircut with every album and look equally bad in every one of them. (Me, I have that same issue with hats---it must be hell when the ill-fitting accessory is your actual hair.) I liked the band---"Bohemian Rhapsody" deserves to be listed on any list of "greatest rock songs of all time", and invariably I am emotionally moved by the bridge in "Under Pressure" ("The terror of knowing what this world is about...")---but they were always just a radio band to me, with raucous highlights such as "Dragon Attack" offset by ridiculousness like "Fat Bottom Girls". Yet despite owning a huge assortment of Rolling Stones albums over the years, including fabulous nuggets like "Memory Motel" and "Worried about you", Mick and Keith failed to connect any of their wonderful songs to particular events in my life.

"I'm in love with my car" is Queen's earliest breach of my psyche, though most of the album A Night at the Opera would likely trigger a rush of recollections. My brother Tom owned it on 8-track, and I regularly heard its strains emerging from his basement bedroom when we first moved to Maine in 1978. It was a rental house, and that huge basement bedroom had green indoor/outdoor carpeting that made the room feel like a bizarre hole on a miniature golf course ("The trick to this hole is to navigate around the bed and gently roll the ball into the cup beneath the hot water heater in the closet.") I remember sitting on Tim's bed (my other brother, away at college), Tom on his, and my confusion about what the singer meant by being in love with his car. (Tom would soon purchase a blue 1968 Chevy Nova and demonstrate the sentiment with some accuracy.) While my earliest memories of rock music feature The Beatles Help! and the monumental Destroyer by Kiss, those albums were sonic curiosities that I stared at in a gallery; A Night at the Opera is my first recollection of songs as the background music to life, out of the gallery and into the streets as an integral part of life itself.

"Crazy Little Thing Called love" was the next---the first song I learned on guitar. Craig Wood was the coolest guy I had ever known, a role model of the highest order for an impressionable middle schooler. A year older (which is a huge difference when you're 14), I had seen him sitting at the piano in Mrs. Seigler's music room playing "Let it be" on piano while a bevy of doe-eyed brunette lovelies batted their eyelashes and daydreamed along. I daydreamed along too. When I saw him another day knocking out a seemingly spot-on version of Eddie Money's "I think I'm in love" (how cool was that?!), I knew I had to play guitar. When I finally got my first guitar, a gorgeous and mysterious low-end Yamaha acoustic, the simple D-chord hammer-on that begins "Crazy little thing called love" was the first thing Craig taught me. I never learned the song all the way through (it was the lesson's object because it was easy, not because I loved it), but I can't hear it today without being transported to Craig's second-floor bedroom, hearing him strum it out on his Peavey T-60. (Side note: When the lesson was over, we sat back and listened to an album by a new band called Van Halen. If you strip the subsequent layers of wallpaper and paint from that room's walls, I'm fairly sure you'll find bits of my head, which exploded during the intro to "Ain't Talking 'Bout Love", forever my favorite rock and roll riff.)

But back to Queen...

"Another one bites the dust" is the most indelible of my Queen memories. Awkward in junior high, I was doomed in the role of "teenager"---I didn't bloom until after high school. True of many, to be sure, and as it surely seemed for each of us, the maladroitness seemed particularly acute in me. I attended a dance with a couple of friends, well aware that any girl's agreement to dance with me was an act of kindness to a likeable but nearly invisible classmate. (Dancing might be an overstatement--"shifting my weight from one foot to the other" is more accurate.) Thus, when Nannette Woodbury not only asked me to dance, but ran down the hall to fetch me back to the dance floor (it somehow felt less embarrassing to be idle while standing near the drinking fountain, as if not dancing was an act of will, not a byproduct of fear of rejection), the trademark bahmp-bahmp-bahmp that anchors that song would forever be the sound of my heart beating. I swayed back and forth as coolly as I could, amazed that she would deem me worthy for such an honor. (Sure, it wasn't like asking me to dance to "Freebird", but it was a tremendous acknowledgement.) In retrospect, that might have been a chance to impress Nannette, learning later from more experienced friends that when a woman asks you to dance, it's an opportunity to be capitalized upon. But I was never such a capitalist. I simply struggled not to lose the beat, pondering if my life would ever feel as electrified as it did at that moment.

As I have dredged these songs from the crevices of memory, I have pondered whether it would be worth the money to pick up a copy of Queen's Greatest Hits---who knows what historical treasures await discovery as "Killer Queen" and "Somebody to Love" reemerge from the speakers. But I doubt I will---I worry that standing in my living room, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, the nostalgia will overwhelm me.

©2006 wpreagan