SOMEDAY, I'M GONNA BE FREE, LORD! You know that we often note here that cancer fucking sucks? So does AIDS. Freddie Mercury would have turned 65 today.
Google offers this animated tribute, and from the many performances available online I'll link to this performance of "Somebody to Love" and, of course, Live Aid. (No word, from what I can tell, as to when/whether the Peter Morgan penned/Sacha Baron Cohen starring biopic will film.)
Freddy Mercury: one of the best or the best frontmen ever?
ReplyDeleteNobody had a voice like him, that's for sure. He's in that category of people whose songs should not be covered, because, person: you are not Freddie Mercury. But 65? I can't believe that. I mean, Freddie Mercury was a very private guy off-stage, so maybe he would have retreated from the spotlight as he aged, but I cannot even imagine him potbellied and balding.
ReplyDeletethat was me
ReplyDeleteGoogle has outdone itself with this one. Wow!
ReplyDeleteAs lovely as that tribute concert they did was sometime after his death (the one with Liza), I distinctly remember thinking just that as star after star sang with the band - no one could do what Mercury did.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful. I've struggled for years to do a good Queen cover, and it's very difficult to bring something new to the table when so much is there already. Love that guy.
ReplyDeleteI've often said that if I could listen to only one singer for the rest of my life, it would be Freddie Mercury. RIP Freddie.
ReplyDeleteTo link back to last week's Friday playlist-- Queen sounds amazing in headphones. Just listened to You're my Best Friend and it made me smile so much!
ReplyDeleteMy sister and I LOVED Queen when we were kids! I still love them and wish Freddie was still with us. What a voice! What a presence!
You know, I had that album (A Night at the Opera) on vinyl before vinyl was a choice -- it was one of the seed pieces for my record collection, probably the third album I owned (after Sgt. Pepper and Elton John's Greatest Hits, so I was 2-for-3). I love so much of that album -- the vicious, underrated "Death on Two Legs," the weird epics "The Year of '39," and "Prophet's Song," the even weirder erotic machine-fetish in "I'm in Love with my Car," ("I'm in love with my car/got a feel for my automobile/with her pistons a-pumpin'/and her hubcaps all agleam") and, of course, "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "You're My Best Friend." And I spent a lot of time listening to the album on headphones, plugged with a quarter-inch jack into one of those all-analog stereos with the brushed-aluminum front and the weighted volume knob that spun slowly but that would build up centripetal momentum. I have to say, I was not a fan of the production. It was too plastic, everything mixed too close together. A lot of airy breathiness in the higher frequencies, not a lot of stability in the lower range. Some purely amateurish stuff with bouncing some channels from right to left, like what you'd get if you let a stoned intern handle the mix at four in the morning. Maybe it's something that they fixed in a remix along the way, but compared to how the album could have sounded in headphones, I feel like it really was a missed opportunity.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not like they couldn't do it right, because by the time they got to The Game, it was all low end, all the time.
THE best, bar none.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, who can touch him? Prince, maybe? I just can't put anyone above him.
Sorry I'm late to this, but I have to post this awesome "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the ukelele
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting, Janet - lovely!
ReplyDelete