For Queen, 1980 must have been a weird year.
Four years earlier, the band had issued their legendarily extravagant masterpiece of indulgence, A Day At The Races (1976), only to be blindsided by a UK punk scene that had practically called out the band by name, taking them to task for their musical flamboyance and lavish, jet-setting ways.
No one song was more a proverbial poster child of said extravagance than the band's now-legendary track "Bohemian Rhapsody", which, even now, sounds like it should have taken years to complete in the studio.
The fact that it didn't should have been to the band's credit, but by the time punk swept the UK, the press was having none of it and the band was quite literally forced to downsize or continue to be slagged by both the punks and the press.
While punk was still a glaring no-show in the States, receiving only the most sporadic coverage by the national media, Queen's response to the thrashing they had taken from the punks back home came in the form of "We Will Rock You", a song so minimal that all one needs to recreate it is their feet, their hands, and their voice.
It was as if Freddie and the boys had issued a challenge to punks everywhere: "Top that."
If that weren't enough, the flip-side of that single, "We Are The Champions", was relatively free of flamboyant frills and went on to top the charts throughout the solar system.
That should have silenced the punk community once and for all, but the band's continuing success only added to the "us vs. them" mentality that defined punk in the first place.
Despite one slice of hard rock perfection ("Fat Bottomed Girls"), 1978's oddly-named Jazz album was a conflicted effort hampered by an almost serial sense of musical variety. While the album peaked at #6 here in the States, when combined with the mixed critical reviews, it almost felt like a failure.
So when the band returned in June of 1980, looking very Ramones-y in their leather jackets on the cover of The Game, and having traded producer Roy Thomas Baker for up-and-coming knob-turner Reinhold Mack, one had to wonder what sort of musical experience awaited them.
Very few, I suspect, felt that this might just be the band's best album, but, in truth it was.
Instead of going into the studio with a producer who was more than happy to indulge the band's perfectionism, the band found themselves working with someone more likely to let the chips fall where they may and simply edit out what didn't work rather than painstakingly re-work such sections.
Even though the band boasted in the liner notes that this was the first Queen album to feature synthesizers (!), the result was an album that bristled with the energy of a live band going for broke.
Of course, the band was working with their most consistent batch of material yet, with not a clunker to be found in the bunch.
If an album is to be judged by its weakest track, then, by all means, just try to find the weakest link among this bunch of inspired compositions. Putting it in terms that viewers of "Survivor" can understand, this writer would probably vote "Don't Try Suicide" off the island, but that's not to say the song itself is bad.
Hamfisted, maybe? A little too earnest for its own good?
Even songs you just knew were more than likely toss-offs ("Coming Soon", "Prime Jive", "Sail Away Sweet Sister") brimmed with an energy and bravado of a band making its first album and, in a lot of ways, that's exactly the mindset that Queen was in.
Like many other bands who had enjoyed a quite fruitful '70s, but knew the new decade would not be a walk in the park, Queen were fighting for their professional lives at a time when the very punks who had dismissed them had, by and large, jumped off the punk bandwagon themselves, giving the band's smash hit "Another One Bites The Dust" a certain poignancy.
Without that challenge from the punk movement, though, one truly doubts whether Queen would have gotten to this point on their own.
Sadly, it would all soon go south as the band hitched their wagon to an ill-fated movie franchise ("Flash Gordon") and then follow that with arguably the worst album of their career, Hot Space, but, for a brief, shining moment, Queen were at the top of The Game.
Tags:
punk gets schooled