Queen: The Complete Works (15 page)

The album isn’t entirely substandard, though, with such understated ballads as Freddie’s ‘Jealousy’ and John’s ‘In Only Seven Days’, easily one of the bassist’s most splendid ballads ever. Freddie, too, was writing quality material and, except for the unremarkable ‘Mustapha’, his songs were on the mark. Brian, too, was on a roll, with each of his four songs firmly entrenching Queen as both heavy rockers (‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Dead On Time’) and poignant balladeers (‘Leaving Home Ain’t Easy’ and ‘Dreamers Ball’). Roger’s songs were the least successful: ‘Fun It’ is a disturbing slice of cool funk that should never have been written, and the chunky ‘More Of That Jazz’ is nothing more than filler, certainly not capable of ending the album on an upstroke (‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ should have claimed that honour). Roger agreed
in a 2008
Mojo
interview: “My songs were very patchy.
Jazz
never thrilled me. It was an ambitious album that didn’t live up to its ambition. The double A-side single was good, but I was never happy with the sound ... it never thrilled me.”

While the diametrically different writing styles had often contributed to what made up a solid Queen album, the band were repeating a formula here, hoping to make an album as diverse as
Sheer Heart Attack
or
A Night At The Opera
, but with most of the good ideas getting lost in the process. Brian hinted at the mental health of the band at that time in a 1989 interview with the
Chicago Tribune
: “Around the
Jazz
album we were all getting into our own things and nobody much liked what the other guys were doing. To be honest, there were times when we couldn’t tolerate each other off-stage.”

Sessions for the album started in Montreux in July 1978, after a significant amount of time had been allowed for the band’s recovery from the strenuous European tour. Mountain Studios was used first, after it was decided not to record in England; this new studio would start a healthy relationship with that city, one which lasted until the end of Queen’s career. Though the band eventually purchased Mountain Studios in 1979 (when resident engineer David Richards asked what they planned to do with the facility, Freddie infamously replied, “Why, dump it in the lake, dear!”), it would for seven years become their secondary studio after Musicland Studios since Freddie preferred the nightlife that Munich offered.

Brian, especially, found it difficult to be torn away from the comforts of home: on 15 June, he and wife Chrissy became proud parents to James, but Brian was soon quickly summoned to the sessions, leaving behind his new family. This left Brian an emotional mess, and he channelled his frustrations into song, penning the beautiful and mournful ‘Leaving Home Ain’t Easy’, a song so personal that Freddie was banned from singing it. John, too, had become a father once again, when Veronica gave birth to Michael on 3 February, and a distinct line was drawn between fathers (Brian and John) and fun-lovers (Roger and Freddie). Midway through the sessions, a birthday party was held for the twenty-nine-year-old drummer, and Freddie endeared himself to the partygoers by leaping onto a crystal chandelier. Elsewhere, in his private life, the singer became more interested in the gay world, cruising night clubs and developing lasting friendships with gay men, including Peter Straker, a theatre actor who made his album debut with
This One’s On Me
, a forgettable amalgam of glam rock and show tunes. Freddie was confident enough in Straker’s abilities that he invested £20,000 into the album, and asked Roy Thomas Baker to produce the sessions, and only confirmed that Freddie was starting to lose interest in the endless cycle of writing, recording and touring.

The album was completed by October, with the lead-off single, the double A-sided ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ / ‘Bicycle Race’, being released towards the end of the month, reaching only a modest No. 11 in the UK. The album, when issued in November, charted at No. 2 in their native country and a respectable No. 6 in America, significantly boosted by an extensive stage campaign throughout the last two months of 1978, a tour which would become their last in the US until June 1980. Audaciously, the band had included with the album a free poster bearing the naked beauties from the banned ‘Bicycle Race’ video. Unfortunately for their American fans, there was a tremendous public outcry and the poster was banned; those lucky enough to receive their parents’ or spouse’s approval could send away for it.

Reviews for the album were understandably censorious – not new for Queen, but until now, mostly unjustified.
NME
said of the album, “If you have deaf relatives, buy this low-class replica of Gilbert and Sullivan as a Christmas present,” while
Sounds
offered, “I’d love to care about Queen in the same way as I did in the beginning of the decade, but now, with an album like this, it seems impossible.”
Creem
absolutely destroyed it: “Queen used to make enjoyably ludicrous records like ‘Liar’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and Roy Thomas Baker gave their music an entertaining artrock veneer that he adapted so successfully for The Cars. But now, even their best jokes – ‘Let Me Entertain You’, a parody of their own worthlessness; ‘Dreamers Ball’, an extravagantly condescending jazz-blues – are pummelled by the approach to the material. All four of Queen’s writers seem to know what a song is (they’ve learned and stolen from the worst of The Beatles just as Cheap Trick have absorbed and adapted the best) and when to stop, qualities lacking in many of their progressive competitors, and stripped of their pretentious overlays, the tunes on
Jazz
turn out to be swipes from The Cowsills, ‘Holly Holy’,
Magical Mystery Tour
,
Disraeli Gears
, Mott The Who-ple. If only Queen could lock into the simplest formula without attaching dead weights, if Freddie Mercury weren’t such a screeching bore (even his cock-rock, like ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, is flaccid), if their arrangements weren’t
on the basic level of Mel Brooks’ ‘Prisoners Of Love’, then
Jazz
could be studied as a catalogue of pop-rock sources ... Maybe Queen thinks all this is funny, that their undisguised condescension (‘rock ‘n’ roll just pays the bills’) and operatic mannerisms atop a beat more Rockette than rock is entertainment, but it’s not my idea of a good time. For me, their snappiest one-liner is on the inner sleeve: ‘Written, arranged and performed exclusively by Queen.’ As if anyone else would want to step forward and take credit.”

Dave Marsh, as ever, lambasted the album in
Rolling Stone
. “It’s easy to ascribe too much ambition to Queen,” he wrote. “‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ isn’t sexist – it regards women not as sex objects but as objects, period (the way the band regards people in general). When Mercury chants, in ‘Let Me Entertain You’, about selling his body and his willingness to use any device to thrill an audience, he isn’t talking about a sacrifice for his art. He’s just confessing his shamelessness, mostly because he’s too much of a boor to feel stupid about it. Whatever its claims, Queen isn’t here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, ‘We Will Rock You’, is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. 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.”

Even the band weren’t entirely pleased with the album. In 1984, John succinctly stated “This is an album that I dislike,” while in 1982 Brian told
International Musician & Recording World
, “
Jazz
was a European-flavoured thing. It was a strange mixture and didn’t click very well in America.” As the guitarist explained in a 1983 BBC Radio One interview, “We thought it would be nice to try again with a producer [Baker] on whom we could put some of the responsibility. We’d found a few of our own methods, and so had he, and on top of what we’d collectively learned before, we thought that coming back together would mean that there would be some new stuff going on, and it worked pretty well.”

The diversity of the tracks, even more so than on
News Of The World
the previous year, is engaging, notably the New Orleans sound on ‘Dreamers Ball’ and the Arabic undertones of ‘Mustapha’. And when Queen rock, they certainly rock: ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, ‘If You Can’t Beat Them’, ‘Let Me Entertain You’, ‘Dead On Time’ and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ are reminiscent of the Queen from past years, and all, except ‘Dead On Time’, would enjoy continual exposure in the live set list over the next few years.

As in previous years, the band went on tour after the album’s release. The autumn of 1978 included lengthy stays in America, Europe and Japan, but curiously, involved no UK dates, and finally concluded in May 1979. The band had reached a level of musical tightness and many regarded the tour as their finest. Despite the rigours of the tour, they still had energy enough to host a lavish party: the launch premiere for
Jazz
was held on Hallowe’en night 1978 in a worthy city – New Orleans. Following that night’s show, the band were chauffeured to the New Dreams Fairmount Hotel, where the festivities began. This night has gone down in Queen annals as being an evening of unprecedented decadence, perhaps the model for all Queen parties to follow.

The band personally paid for the entire evening (as opposed to sending the bill to the record companies) and they certainly spared no expense: 400 guests were invited, including executives from EMI and Elektra Records, and press reporters from England, South America and Japan as well as the US. At midnight, a local brass band marched into the hall to launch the party; from that point the diversions intensified. Naked female mud wrestlers, fire-eaters, jazz bands, steel bands, Zulu dancers, voodoo dancers, unicyclists, strippers and drag artists provided the main entertainment, while trays of cocaine were placed on the heads of dwarves and served to all who wished to partake. Record company executives were ushered into a back room, where groupies pleasured them individually throughout the evening.

The party was so eventful that the album was never even played. The next day, the band held a more restrained press conference at Brennan’s Restaurant, where the press finally took the opportunity to ask the questions they’d been meaning to ask the night before (and, one would assume, finally heard the album they had been invited to hear). The band were criticized for the excess, to which Freddie quipped, “I guess some people don’t like to look at nude ladies. It’s naughty, but not lewd.”

Thirty years later, Roger recalled the excess with amusement and pride. “I have to say that the stories from that night are not that exaggerated,” he told
Mojo
. “What memories would I be willing to share? How extraordinarily ill I felt the next day. Most of the stories you heard are true. The one about the dwarves and the bald heads and cocaine is not true. Or, if it was,
I never saw it.” After a pause and a think, he relented: “Actually, it could have been true...” Brian, meanwhile, missed out on the festivities; despite becoming a father earlier that summer, he spent the night searching for the mystical Peaches, a girl he’d met and fallen for in New Orleans back in 1974. “I didn’t find her,” he recalled sadly, “but she found me later on.”

Jazz
could be considered the final Queen album that displays a degree of diversity, although some coherence is surrendered as a result. From this point on, Queen’s albums would be more polished and planned, unfortunately resulting in songs that would sound similar to one another. There is no way the band could have recaptured the freshness of their first three albums, or the grandiose studio trickery on the ‘Marx Brothers’ albums, or even the hodgepodge assortment of songs on
News Of The World
. With that in mind,
Jazz
is the odd man out as it manifests a band trying to achieve new sounds and falling just short of success. It was time for a new and exciting approach, and after bidding a final farewell to Roy Thomas Baker, the band eagerly packed their bags for Munich.

LIVE KILLERS

EMI EMSP 330, June 1979 [3]

Elektra BB-702, June 1979 [16]

EMI CDS 7 46211 8, December 1986

Hollywood HR-62017-2, November 1991

‘We Will Rock You’ (3’16), ‘Let Me Entertain You’ (3’16), ‘Death On Two Legs (Dedicated to ......’ (3’33), ‘Killer Queen’ (1’57), ‘Bicycle Race’ (1’29), ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ (2’01), ‘Get Down, Make Love’ (4’31), ‘You’re My Best Friend’ (2’10), ‘Now I’m Here’ (8’42), ‘Dreamers Ball’ (3’42), ‘Love Of My Life’ (4’59), ‘’39’ (3’26), ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ (4’00), ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ (4’28), ‘Spread Your Wings’ (5’15), ‘Brighton Rock’ (12’16), ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (6’01), ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ (3’41), ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ (3’35), ‘We Will Rock You’ (2’48), ‘We Are The Champions’ (3’27), ‘God Save The Queen’ (1’32)

Musicians
: John Deacon (
bass guitar
), Brian May (
guitars, backing vocals
), Freddie Mercury (
vocals, piano, maracas
), Roger Taylor (
drums, percussion, backing vocals, lead vocals on ‘I’m In Love With My Car’
)

Recorded
: January–March 1979 at various European dates

Producers
: Queen and John Etchells

1979 was considered a year of temporarily suspended activity for Queen. They had been working virtually non-stop since 1970, and they had weathered quite a lot together: financial woes, managerial disagreements and harsh words slung by the press. As Brian would later admit, there were times when the band thought about packing it all in, but by this time, they had established themselves as canny businessmen with a keen eye on the music industry market.

They still believed that they were a studio band more than anything else, and found the prospect of releasing a live album tedious. Queen’s live shows were more about presentation and theatrics than actual performances; they weren’t masters of improvisation like The Who, The Grateful Dead or Little Feat, and their live performances were best seen in person or, at the very least, on a cinema screen. No wonder, then, that the band were less than thrilled about releasing a live album. “Live albums are inescapable, really,” Brian lamented not long after
Live Killers
came out. “Everyone tells you you have to do them, and when you do, you find that they’re very often not of mass appeal, and in the absence of a fluke condition you sell your live album to the converted, the people who already know your stuff and come to the concerts. So, if you add up the number of people who have seen you over the last few years, that’s very roughly the number who will buy your live album unless you have a hit single on it, which we didn’t.”