Will people spark up their lighters and hold them high at the cinema when Wehrenberg Theaters screens Hungarian Rhapsody: Queen Live in Budapest?
It won’t be all that surprising if people defy the fire codes and do just that. I was taken with the just-released, visually and sonically remastered film of a 1986 Queen concert in Iron-Curtain-era Budapest—but I’m just a casual Queen fan.
Daniel Nester is not. He’s the author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, exhaustive, obsessive tributes to his favorite band. “The first volume features one short poem for every track on every major Queen LP,” wrote one reviewer. “As the book explores sexuality, humanity, and vulnerability, the lyrical text confusingly shifts from Nester’s personal biography to the exploits of Mercury and May in a haze of poetics where it doesn’t matter what or who he’s talking about. … To bring this point home the second volume is a track-by-track series of poems covering obscure Queen albums, solo work and hidden CD tracks…”
Nester owns a previous version of the film—on LaserDisc, in fact—and he was happy to educate Look/Listen on the finer points of Queen at this point in the group’s career.
“This was part of the Magic Tour,” Nester writes, “a victory lap of sorts.” The victory was Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s 1985 concert spectacular at in London’s Wembley Stadium. Queen, according to everyone from Geldof to Elton John, simply stole the show. Footage of that concert makes it easy to see how charismatic frontman Freddie Mercury can command the attention of a vast crowd, and how Queen was made to rock arenas. At Wembley, Freddie leads 72,000 people to clap in perfect unison. In Budapest, it was 80,000, and the ’86 tour would end at England’s Knebworth, where Queen would rock an ungodly horde estimated at 300,000.
The Magic Tour was also a victory lap, though, as Nester says, because it was Queen’s last tour with Freddie, who would die of complications from AIDS in ’91.
With Freddie, there’s always the morbid fascination with his untimely death (and the morbid fascination with his rodent-like buck teeth and overbite). The world really did lose a rock god when he faded away.
The high-energy ’86 Budapest show included (but was not limited to) “One Vision,” “Tie Your Mother Down,” “Seven Seas of Rhye,” “A Kind of Magic,” “Under Pressure,” “Who Wants to Live Forever,” “I Want to Break Free,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Hammer to Fall,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” and “Radio Ga Ga.” It should be noted that Brian May dials in an execrable guitar solo that is well beneath his creative abilities.
Being a casual fan, I was not ready for what happens in the middle of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” when the entire band leaves the stage for a minute or two and a recording of the four men harmonizing in perfect lockstep booms out from the PA. Apparently, this portion of the operatic song is impossible to recreate outside of the studio, but Queen is not absent for long from the stage.
Songs that were absent: the lumbering, dance-floor disco and synthesized bullet-spray of “Another One Bites the Dust,” the hard rock of “Stone Cold Crazy,” the joyous humor of “Fat-Bottomed Girls,” and plenty of other gems from the Queen catalogue, which is, of course, too large to expect to hear each of your faves at a single show.
'Then, too, this was the '80s, and there are a surfeit of limp, synthesized ballads that may test the patience of a fan who loves Queen for its hard-rockers. Other ‘80s tropes: baggy cotton shirts that threaten to expose a shoulder, a la “Flashdance,” and bassist John Deacon’s “ridiculous white-man permanent and shorts,” in Nester’s words, looking comically out of place. (Brian May’s “slept-in-a-hayloft hair,” as one of my friends puts it, is comparatively timeless.)
Serious fans will relish hearing Freddie sing a pretty Hungarian folk song, a gift to the Hungary of the ‘80s, operating under (loose) Communist control. It must have been potent for those living in the Eastern Bloc nation to taste popular Western culture, the fruit of freedom exported to the world, live and just for them, for once. Freddie very obviously wrote the lyrics to the folk song on his hand, but, explains Nester, it had “sweated off by the time he needed it.” Like Robert Frost at JFK’s inauguration, he winged it beautifully.
The concert is preceded by manna for Queen fans, a rare 25-minute documentary program on the band’s ’86 tour and their preparations within Hungary for the show. The doc includes interviews with all four bandmates, a bit on the songs Queen composed for the sci-fi movie Highlander, and, erm, footage of Freddie shopping for antiques.
A very brief moment in a Hungarian reporter’s video interview with Freddie will turn heads. “A Hungarian journalist asks if Freddie will come back to Hungary,” explains Nester, “and Freddie pauses and goes, ‘If I'm still alive, I will come back.’”
Whether Freddie knew he was HIV-positive at that point is debatable. Some say he did not learn that until ’87, in which case he was just using a figure of speech. Regardless, it’s a chilling reminder of how brief a moment it now seems, when Freddie came to play.
The latest news from the Queen camp is cause for either excitement or horror, depending on your take. Expert mimic Sacha Baron Cohen has been tapped to star in a biopic about Mercury, scheduled for release in 2014. The film is currently in development, and has May and Taylor’s approval. (Deacon quietly retired from the music biz not long after Freddie passed.)
Hungarian Rhapsody: Queen Live in Budapest screens at 7:30 p.m. Thursday., September 20 & 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 26 at local Wehrenberg Theatres: The Galaxy 14 Cine (450 THF Blvd. in Chesterfield), O’Fallon 15 Cine (1320 Central Park Dr. in O’Fallon, Ill.), Ronnie’s 20 Cine (5320 S. Lindbergh Blvd. in Affton), and St. Charles 18 Cine (1830 S. First Capitol Dr. in St. Charles).
