The show must go on.
November 25th 1991, a Monday, started like any other weekday. Barely a month into my legal separation from The Ex, and finally on my own for the first time ever, I woke up rested and stress-free in my new apartment. As my cats Hoshi and Ami tucked into their breakfast, I absentmindedly noshed on some cereal. I showered and shaved. (Back when I had to shave every day... never again!) I made the short drive to my software development job after stopping for my regular weekly kickoff jumbo soda.
When I got off the elevator, I cut through the operations center to get to my cubicle. First thing in the morning, people from many different departments would be hanging out in this central hub, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze. As I was rounding the block of cubicles and saying my good mornings, my co-worker D.J. yelled out at me from across the room, waving at me with his omnipresent mug. "Hey Don!"
"Yo D.J.!" I returned his salute with my soda. "What's up?"
"Did you hear Freddie Mercury died?"
I know that stock "record scratch" sound effect that comedically signifies a person's mental discombobulation has become a very, very tired trope in movies and TV shows, but it's the only way I can adequately describe what happened to me right then. Reality as I knew it skipped a beat. My leg froze in mid-step. I cocked my head like a confused dog. My poor brain spun as it desperately tried to make sense of what I'd just heard.
"Wh... what?" was all I could squeak out.
"He died yesterday. AIDS." And with that nonchalant bomb dropped, D.J. went back to sipping his coffee and kibbitzing.
The rest of that day is a blur. Seriously, one big blank spot. I distinctly remember that short conversation, but everything that came after... POOF! I don't remember walking to my desk. I'm not sure I ate lunch. I have a very vague sense of staring at the same block of code all day long without typing a single character. Somehow, I made it home without crashing.
Hours later I was laying in bed, trying to go to sleep, but my brain wouldn't let me. I was still trying to process the horrible truth that Freddie Mercury was dead. But no matter how hard I tried to deal with those feelings, the loudest thought in my head was a very selfish one: how could I possibly live in a world without...
QUEEN.
Growing up, I had plenty of friends... at school. In my isolated neighborhood, however, geography forced me into being a lonely kid. For a while I had been able to geek out with my friend Monty, playing with Mego action figures and reading comic books. But his family moved away in third grade, and from that point onward, I didn't live near a kid my own age, let alone one who shared my interests. My brother was into comics and stuff too, but he was four years younger, and had a slew of local peers that he knocked around with almost daily. So when I got off the bus after school, I was pretty much on my lonesome.
That all changed when I met Tom.
I touched on meeting Tom in my very first column, but it's time to get into the details. Truth is, Tom was the friend I'd been pining for for years. We were from different backgrounds, but pop culture-wise, we were soul brothers. We had so much in common. Comic books! Science fiction and horror movies! Video games! Goofy humor! If I liked it, Tom liked it just as much.
The one thing we didn't share, however, was music. Although I'd listened to the radio a lot over the years, I didn't really have a favorite band. I briefly flirted with jumping on the KISS bandwagon in fifth grade, but just like Hall & Oates and ELO and The Cars and other groups, I mainly liked their radio hits. I didn't really own a lot of records as a kid. I hadn't latched onto any one band with any sort of zeal.
But Tom had already found his favorite band ever: Queen. And he was more than happy to share with me his love of the group and their music.
I've often wondered, had Tom been nuts about ABBA, or Molly Hatchet, or Slim Whitman... would my budding bromance have ensorcelled me to the point where they became my favorite? I'd like to think that I wasn't that easily swayed, and that it was more the strength of Queen's songcraft that won me over. And not only their tunes, but the fantasy elements that were a big part of their early work. Like many rock bands back in the early 70s, Queen sang about all sorts of mystical stuff: fairies and ogres and magical flowers and rat kings and an entire make-believe land called Rhye. Mix all that nerdiness with the incredible songs, the powerful voice of Freddie Mercury, and the singular tone of Brian May's homemade Red Special guitar, and you've got the recipe for a magic musical potion that hypnotized young Don immediately.
So for a good two and a half years, thanks to our mutual devotion, pretty much every day was a Queen Day. Tom and I immersed ourselves in our own fantasy world, a world that revolved around everything Queen. We dreamed up ideas for new albums, complete with cover art. We concocted plots for a series of movies based on their fantasy world of Rhye. We turned the band members into superheroes. We designed sets for a stop-motion video for the song "Fat Bottomed Girls". Naturally, we'd be listening to Sheer Heart Attack or Queen II or A Night At The Opera while we were doing all this.
You can laugh if you want. Maybe we should have been doing more "manly" stuff. Playing sports. Or working on cars. Or chasing girls. (For what it's worth, we did chase girls. It's just that they outran us.) But we found a happy place, Tom and I did, where we could be creative and have some fun. After years of searching, I'd finally found a best friend, and he was bringing a newfound joy to my life.
Me and Tom on a science class field trip in 1981. We were just fetuses!
Even when I moved on from high school, Queen continued to loom large in my life. Despite the seismic disappointment I had with Hot Space in 1982, when The Works was released two years later, right as high school was ending, I was back in. Their soundtrack for the film Highlander, titled A Kind Of Magic, was a big part of my college life in 1986. Just a couple of weeks after I graduated in 1989, Queen unknowingly celebrated my big achievement with the release of The Miracle. And early in 1991, Queen partnered with Hollywood Records to distribute their new album Innuendo in America. (Tom was working at Record Bar and saved me a copy.) It seemed that Queen was always there with me, the promise of a new album always on the horizon.
Then, without warning... Freddie was gone.
As the week following Freddie's death dragged on, the American papers and nightly newscasts were finally paying attention to Queen again, and I devoured every scrap of info I could find in the pre-Internet world.
Apparently Queen's absence from the live stage since 1986 was because Freddie had been diagnosed with AIDS, and he made it clear he didn't want to tour anymore. After his last public appearance, accepting a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution To British Music with the rest of the band in 1990, all anyone could comment on was how thin and fragile he looked. As the disease ravaged him, he pledged to continue making music until he could no longer physically do it, going so far as to put a bed in the studio so he could rest up between recording sessions. After several months that was too much for him, and in mid-1991 Freddie retired to his estate in London, where he eventually passed away quietly in the company of friends.
I remember as a kid laughing at people who were wailing at the gates of Graceland when Elvis died in 1977. I was a dopey eleven year old punk, making fun of adults who couldn't keep it together because "The King" died on the toilet. And yet there I was, staring at the photos of Freddie's front gate, swamped with flowers and artwork and candles and letters, desperately wishing I lived in England so I could add my own heartfelt tribute to that immense, colorful altar of love and admiration.
My own personal King - or should I say Queen (pun intended) - was dead. And there I was, as despondent as all those people I'd made fun of in my youth. That's some Alanis Morissette-level irony right there.
Now, here's the weird thing about my period of mourning: I didn't listen to a note of Queen's music. You'd think I'd be walking around with headphones on, drowning my brain in Queen, but I couldn't. It was too painful. At home I avoided my music collection. When I was in the car, if I heard the opening strains of a Queen tune, I'd change the station lightning fast. That first week of our new post-Freddie world, I put an extraordinary amount of effort into avoiding hearing his voice.
But when the weekend rolled around, and I found myself at loose ends, I decided I couldn't put it off anymore. I scanned my shelf, trying to figure out which album would be the one to break the sad ice. I chose Innuendo, mainly because it was what I figured would be their last album ever, but also because it was the only Queen CD I had at that point, as opposed to tapes. (Queen CDs were expensive British imports before Hollywood Records started distributing their back catalog in the US.)
As the thundering title track kicked in, I flipped through the booklet. Looking at Freddie's photos, even though they're doctored with cartoony details and heavy filters, it's obvious from his drawn face that he wasn't well. Getting all depressed again, I put the liner notes aside and just let myself concentrate on the music. The quirky pop of "I'm Going Slightly Mad", the dreamy nostalgia of "These Are The Days Of Our Lives", the straight-up rock of "Headlong", the playful feline praise of "Delilah"... After two decades of recording, Queen had put out one of their strongest collections of songs in years. I was actually enjoying the music, not feeling the depths of despair into which I was afraid I was going to plummet. Since I knew every word by heart, I was even singing along at times.
But then the final track of the album, "The Show Must Go On", began to play, and I locked up. I knew what was coming. What had seemed at the time of its release in early 1991 like a song in which a successful performer looks back at his career, now took on a painfully different meaning in the wake of Freddie's death. Lines like "whatever happens, I'll leave it all to chance", and "I'll soon be turning 'round the corner now", aren't just flippant comments about approaching the next stage of his life. They're the words of a man who knows he doesn't have much time left.
And the song's finale, where Freddie strains with all his might to belt out "I'll face it with a grin, I'm never giving in, on with the shooooow...!" Holy crap. Had I known about Freddie's illness earlier it would have been obvious. But there, sitting all alone in my apartment, barely a week after his passing, it was chillingly clear. This was Freddie's farewell to his bandmates. To his friends. To his family. To his fans. To the world.
Freddie knew that his illness was about to bring down his curtain. But he was determined to continue the show until the very end.
When Freddie died, I was twenty-five years old. Not that this is anything to brag about, but at that time in my life, I'd hardly experienced any loss at all. My grandfather on my mom's side died just as fifth grade started, but I wasn't that close to him, so it really didn't affect me. Between junior high and the end of college, I lost my beloved beagle Duchess and my two cats Zonker and Spaz. In the middle of 1991 my first marriage came to an end, but that was my doing, and it probably saved my life. And that's pretty much the extent of my hard knocks as 1991 was drawing to a close.
I had lived such a charmed life, where almost every person and relationship I cared about was alive and well, that it never dawned on me that nothing lasts forever.
So there I was, facing the loss of one of my idols for the first time. Actually, Freddie was a bigger icon than some of my other pop culture heroes like George Lucas and Jack Kirby and John Cleese and Douglas Adams. Movies were certainly important to me, as were comic books and TV and books. But Queen was everything. The band was vital to my everyday functioning. Queen was the fifth nucleotide that made up my pathetic DNA.
What was it that made Freddie so special to me and all the other fans? That's hard to quantify. But to me, his stage presence was probably the main thing that elevated him from "good singer" to "worldwide beloved artist". There have been many legendary front men in rock... among them Robert Plant, Jim Morrison, Bono, Kurt Cobain, and of course the one and only Mick Jagger. But (and this is a big opinionated "but") whereas those guys could command a stage, Freddie reached out past the edge of the riser and embraced the audience in a special way that those other performers didn't/don't. Freddie laser-focused on the people listening to him. And he playfully, shamelessly flirted with them. His audience participation sing-alongs made every single person in the arena feel as if they were up on stage too. Maybe I'm biased, but you don't pack 250,000 people into a stadium just because you're a celebrity. Freddie got every one of those asses in those seats because he made us fall in love with him.
In fact, back in the summer of 1980, Tom was forced to go a Queen concert because his middle sister got sick, and his oldest sister couldn't go without losing money on the extra ticket. So Tom got dragged along against his wishes... only to walk out of what he calls a "life-changing" experience. That's a testament to Freddie's larger-than-life persona right there. In the span of two hours, Tom went from not giving a flying fig, to proselytizing about Queen's greatness to anyone who would listen.
I'm so glad I was one of those people.
And yet... as much as I adored Freddie, at no time in those first couple of years did I get to the point where I out and out cried. I certainly got emotional, but unlike the Elvis fans I mentioned earlier, I never found myself curled up in a ball sobbing. Weeks later, months later, even years later, I could see a photo of Freddie, or one of the album covers, and I'd get this weird twinge in my solar plexus, this powerful recognition of his absence. But never once did all that emotion push me over the edge into outright tears. Maybe that makes me sound like a fair-weather fan, but I somehow kept a balance between my adoration for Freddie and his art, and what that realistically meant in my day-to-day life. I never stopped loving the man, I just didn't break down over him.
Fast forward to twenty-seven years after Freddie's death, when I found myself sitting in the theater watching Bohemian Rhapsody. As a big fan of Queen, it kills me to say... the movie's a mess. Having just finished adapting a true crime book into a screenplay, I understand that you have to take some artistic liberties in order to nail the drama. But BoRap (as us fans call it) takes those very same liberties and bends them over a gas station bathroom sink. As the movie unspooled, I found myself getting more and more aggravated. I mean, I was over the moon that Freddie and Queen were finally back in the public eye, but the inconsistencies in the storytelling kept me from feeling anything close to what I did during my adolescence, when Tom and I were geeking out over Queen.
Towards the end of the movie, as Freddie was captivating and romancing the Live Aid crowd, the camera suddenly soared past him, and out over the thousands and thousands and thousands of adoring fans in the stadium, each one clapping in unison as he belted out the chorus to "Radio Ga Ga". That one powerful moment jolted me. I remember feeling jealous of that huge digitally-created crowd. I wished I'd been able to see that show in the flesh. Becoming a fan when I did, I never got to see Freddie live. And, dammit, I never would.
And that's when it happened: I lost it.
I lost it big time. I couldn't stop it. It was everything I could do to hold back four decades' worth of throat-choking sobs. I was a bigger mess than the 14 year old girl blubbering next to me in Titanic back in ‘97. I kept biting my lips, trying to suppress the emotion that was washing over me like a tsunami. In that moment, I had the Pulp Fiction "moment of clarity". It finally hit me, the realization that Freddie Mercury - the genius songwriter, the dynamic performer, the greatest frontman in the history of popular music - was gone from my life. From the world. And he wasn't coming back.
This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of Freddie's death. I can only imagine what the guys in Queen were thinking and feeling once Freddie was gone. They knew it was coming, but still, once the moment arrived... everything changed. Not only did Queen lose a family member, they lost a business partner. Every personal and creative and financial facet of the band was thrown for a loop. How would they - how could they - move forward?
The same thing happened to my family when my dad died (although on a much smaller scale). I remember the morning after Dad's memorial, as I was putting gas in the car, I was so frustrated seeing everyone else getting their day started. Just grabbing coffee and driving around as if nothing bad had happened. I wanted to scream at the world, "Stop! Please! Just for one day!" I wanted every single human on earth to acknowledge the fact that my dad was gone!
But, no, the people ignored me. The world was going to keep spinning, no matter how big my grief was. And boy, did it spin. There was a delightful marriage. Scary hospital stays. The death of friends old and new. Heartwarming pet adoptions. Crushing medical diagnoses. Milestone birthdays. The slow, lingering passing of my mom. A big move out of Los Angeles. Career successes. More family illnesses. And in between all that, the usual day to day aggravations, like bills and neighbors and making ends meet and all that stuff. Suzie and I met every challenge head-on, though, working as a united supportive Dynamic Duo that was determined to make things go our way.
That "never give up" attitude is how I found myself sitting in the LA Forum years later with my friend Andy, another Queen maniac that I was lucky to meet when I moved to Los Angeles. (The Universe seems to bring me another Queen fan when I need them most!) We were squirming in our seats like teenage girls as Queen and Adam Lambert triumphantly took the stage. After bassist John Deacon retired, Brian May and Roger Taylor dealt with their loss, revitalized the band, and returned to the world stage, where they gave it their all for fans like me. Fans who had their own share of setbacks and struggles. Fans who could have thrown in the towel but dug down deep and moved forward.
No matter what life throws at you, you can't give in. I'm telling you from experience, you just can't.
Your show must go on.
A dream come true! Andy and me at the LA Forum, about to nerd out. The show must go on!
If you want to read a really great book about Freddie, grab a copy of "Somebody To Love: The Life, Death, And Legacy Of Freddie Mercury". Not only does it cover Freddie's life and the rise of Queen, in parallel it chronicles the advent of the AIDS crisis. It's a well researched, fascinating read.
BIO
Don Stroud is not the famous actor and world-class surfer of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning film editor and - finally - an award-winning screenwriter. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his long-suffering wife. You can follow him on Twitter, where he pops up sporadically, at @DonStroud2.