Queen FAQ by Daniel Ross

Author:Daniel Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Backbeat
Published: 2020-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

The official program for the U.K. leg of the Hot Space tour. Martin Skala, QueenConcerts.com

22

“I’ll Pay the Bill, You Taste the Wine”

Queen at Leisure

Lorenzo Costa’s “Reign of Comus,” which resides in the Louvre in Paris. Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Queen’s reputation as rock’s foremost bacchanalian and Dionysian practitioners of their generation is well-founded, but perhaps a more suitable Greek god to characterize their collective attitude toward revelry would be Comus, the god of festivity. In the mythology, Comus was famed for his nocturnal exploits in particular, always intoxicated, and wearing a floral wreath on his head. Attendees at his gatherings would swap clothes no matter their gender. In a painting titled Reign of Comus by Lorenzo Costa, one of Comus’s legendary shindigs is well under way, and the debauchery is clear to see: guests in various states of undress gambol in and out of a lake, their limbs and actions presumably loosened by copious amounts of wine. A lyre player is visible in the foreground, surrounded by adoring revelers.

Many bands in the supposed golden age of rock ’n’ roll of the 1960s and 1970s would lay claim to being the most extreme when it came to partying and more still in the 1980s by the time hair metal had made it onto MTV. The stories that came out of this culture of sexual and substance abuse, exacerbated by the extreme on-the-road boredom suffered by touring (always male) musicians, are spectacularly varied in their methodology but united by a strongly depressing and pernicious undertone of grubbiness and victimization. Led Zeppelin sexually assaulting a groupie with a mud shark, Steven Tyler legally adopting and impregnating a sixteen-year-old female fan, David Lee Roth paying roadies to convince audience members to come backstage and have sex with him in specially designated camping tents: all of these oft-repeated stories have definite victims.

It would be missing the point to claim that Queen had any kind of moral high ground over and above these examples, but their distinctly Comusian methods of partying certainly seemed to result in a more wholly positive and uplifting brand of debauchery. It would also be tempting to conclude that the most outwardly peacockish member of the band, Freddie Mercury, was the main instigator of the band’s legendary soirees, but they were too collaborative a group to allow Mercury to take the reins every time they needed to cut loose. Queen’s sustained and prodigious program of excessive celebration was borne not just from a desire to transgress but equally from a need to publicly flaunt their spending power and fine taste. A Queen party, at least when the doors opened, was not a grubby occasion but rather more an exquisitely planned disaster with impeccably gauche styling.

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