The other day I decided to listen to Queen II for my daily commute. Granted I only have about a 5 minute drive to work (small town problems--after living in the city and having a 25 minute trolley ride to work I haven't fully adjusted to living in a town where there is one traffic light between me and my place of work) so I only got to listen to maybe the opening track on the way to work.
That track, however, opened up the door in the memory vault to the first time I heard the album when I was in high school.
::time travel special effect::
It's maybe 1987 or 1988 and I work at a small local restaurant bussing tables. While I' grabbing a full bin of dirty stuff from behind service area behind the bar, I notice a song by Queen is playing and I start singing along. (It wasn't Bohemian Rhapsody, Wayne's World wasn't even out yet so that song wasn't getting the HUGE amount of airplay it would in the year's to come.) One of the bartenders, Rose we'll call her, notices me singing along and asks if I like Queen.
An enthusiastic, "Oh, yeah!" falls out and she tells me I can listen to some records sometime (No this wasn't due the resurgence in vinyl that we see now, this was back when you could still walk into a Sam Goody and by actual albums and cassettes at the local mall.) We set up a time for me to come over when we're both not working so she can share some of her Queen records with me.
Before you all start hearing Mrs. Robinson in your heads, I was in full dork mode, and Rose is a lesbian so, no, no shenanigans, just the sharing of music.
Rose lived in an old Victorian house on the East Side of downtown. Victorian houses have a particular smell to them in the summer, faintly dusty, smelling of old wood polish, and summer heat (which isn't really a smell but maybe you know what I mean.)
Rose takes out Queen II and puts it on the turntable. There's that sound of the needle settling, the little pops of dust, and then "Procession" starts.
I felt giddy because this wasn't radio Queen, it was gritty and dramatic and like nothing I had ever heard, and my life was changed in that moment. Rose smiled and said, "Yeah, man, you got it!" and we sat in her parlor (it's an old Victorian house, they had those) and listened to the rest of the album.
::time travel special effect::
So there I am in my car, listening to the opening notes of "Procession" and I can smell the old wood polish, and the faint dust, and the heat of the summer and I just basked in gratitude that I met Rose when I was in high school and that she shared that little window of her life with me.
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