2/15/1975 The Boston Globe The Rock Folk: Nathan Cobb Queen for a Day The rented Lincoln carrying the four members of Queen was squirting through the traffic of downtown Boston one afternoon last month. Three local radio stations had already been visited since lunch, but the man from Elektra Records who was piloting the car had his mind set on four. This, after all, was the English band’s third attempt to perform in Boston, and the label was pulling out the stops to insure full promotional mileage. “The last time I was here I turned a nasty yellow color,” guitarist Brian May recalled, succinctly describing the hepatitis which befell him in Boston last year, sending him home on a horror-filled night flight and prematurely ending Queen’s first American tour. Since an earlier attempt to play in town had also failed when a member of then-headling Mott the Hoople became ill, Boston had not yet been confronted by the fast-rising glam group. “And then, after I got home, I got an ulcer,” May said as the car stopped quickly at a traffic light. “So for four months last year no one heard of us. People actually thought we were dead.” The driver, perhaps imagining the terrifying things which could still prevent his hot cargo from playing for 6000 Bostonians two nights later, pulled away slowly. At WRKO, the band members eased into the office of a program director Christy Wright, where a strategically-placed poster of themselves loomed from behind her desk. In fact, almost everything in the room seemed to have come courtesy of a record company: a Leo Sayer drinking glass, an Elektra paperweight, a life-size Elton John stand-up. Even the shirt on Ms. Wright’s back displayed a rock and roll logo. “It’s like a toy shop in here,” May observed, while vocalist Freddie Mercury, drummer Roger Meddows-Taylor and bassist John Deacon poured over the goodies. In the meantime, pleasantries were exchanged and Meddows-Taylor even managed to acquire a much-admired Jeff Beck pin. But everyone in the room knew that the purpose of the visit was singular - to help get Queen’s songs on the air. “Going to these places is all right, and we’ve got to do it,” Mercury allowed as the elevator later descended. “But I wouldn’t want to do it every day, that’s for sure.” That night, Freddie Mercury stood along one wall of a rather plush Beacon street saloon, his purple polished nails clutching a drink. He is, like the other members of Queen, extremely subdued to the point of being almost withdrawn. Nothing like the high energy image the band offers on stage, you understand. None of the glittery posing and high-stepping mania. But tonight Mercury had to pose a bit, because Elektra was throwing a party to allow local media types to mingle with a band which some suspect is going to be a genuine monster someday soon. It already is a monster back home in England, and the label had five people aboard the two-month American tour during its stop in Boston to insure that the group’s third LP, “Sheer Heart Attack,” was never far from peoples’ minds. So here was Mercury, being quietly charming and doing things such as warily accepting a strange-looking envelope from a bulky, pasty-faced admirer and hastily passing it along to one of the tour’s 15-man crew. As he was ushered along the bar to meet yet another invitee, the last person to whom Mercury had been talking excused himself, as he put it, to allow the singer to do his “job”. “My job?” Mercury replied softly. “My job is to play, though sometimes you wouldn’t know it.” Click, click and click. Two cameras made their way around the second-floor dressing room of the Orpheum Theater, where the first show of the evening’s pair had just concluded. It had been a rather average performance by the “nasty Queenies,” as Freddie Mercury referred to them on-stage, hampered by a blown fuse at the beginning (“There’s a tendency to want to knock things over when something like that happens,” Brian May observed) and an audience which didn’t always seem quite sure what to make of the polished theatrics, barrage of sound and concluding clouds of smoke. “American audiences seem to be starved for rock and roll,” May said as he slumped in a chair, draped in a white terry cloth robe. “They seem to want to be pulled out of their seats, as if they’re just waiting to burst.” The other band members, dressed in identical robes, quietly made their way in and out of the small room like intruders in their own house. Much of the food and drink which had been laid out on a table was ignored, or picked at by the few visitors who sat in a circle passing the cameras. Mercury remained on the fringe. Drinking lemon and honey in order to resurrect his voice for the second performance, he occasionally closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with trembling hands. Two shows is murder, he explained. And two more in New York tomorrow night. “If I did all the things they told me to on this tour I wouldn’t have a voice left,” he said. Standing behind him, Roger Meddows-Taylor was explaining the band’s stage showmanship. “To tell you the truth,” he confided, “the music’s on the albums. The shows are half music and half, well, you know, just trying to get the people up out of their seats.” Mercury rubbed his eyes some more, while May slouched further into his seat. For Queen, finally getting the people up in Boston had been anything but high glamor.
