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The Garden of Intellectual Fungus
“We’ve had a lot of ups and downs in our career,” Roger Taylor remarked from the podium. “This is certainly a big, big up. It means, actually, more than all the Grammys we never got,” he joked dryly to great laughter.
It was a Monday night at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Queen were being inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and they were not going to be missed a second time. I was there.
An older cousin suggested the medieval fantasy of Queen II, particularly “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.” The all-consuming affinity for Queen started while listening to that album for the first time. But the Boston date on the Hot Space tour never worked out for us, because an untimely train schedule would have meant leaving before the concert was even half over.
Maybe next time.
Queen’s US popularity dropped throughout the ‘80s, and they would never again perform in the United States. Five years before Queen + Paul Rodgers toured America, the 2001 Hall Of Fame ceremony was the first appearance of any configuration of the band on a US stage in twenty years. Queen were not going to be missed again.
Popular culture and life events rejuvenated their US popularity during the early ‘90s, but longtime fans never forgot the band. Queen—Roger Taylor, Brian May, John Deacon and Freddie Mercury—made such an impact on fans and influenced several generations of musicians with their distinctive sound and incomparable style.
The history of Queen has been fully documented through multiple media formats. Albums and DVDs, books and the Internet, the story of the band is continuously being told to new fans. Rather than repeat the chronology of the band, Planet Rock instead turned to the eyes and ears—and memories—of four accomplished musicians who surprisingly happen to be tremendous Queen fans. This is the story about one of their favorite bands...
