Queen Live in New York City Madison Square Garden November 16th 1978
Here’s an interesting article about Queen performing in NY in 1978. Enjoy!! From Rolling Stone Magazine, Jan. 25th 1979. Why RS never liked Queen music??
If QUEEN’s Performance lived up to the promise of their entrance, it’d be the biggest event since the fall of the Roman Empire. Freddie Mercury, clad in storm-trooper black, comes out swaggering, brandishing his microphone stand like a riding crop, while guitarist Brian May unleashes a Valkyrian ride of power riffs. “Let me entertain you,” sings Mercury; it is not a request, but a command. For a moment it seems as if we will be swept away by some dark, Dionysian rite that leaves nothing in its wake but shattered champagne crystal and deflowered eleven-year-olds.
The next two hours of Queen’s set, however, don’t match the excitement of those first few minutes. Queen is a band with a cleverly constructed veneer: on the surface their music sounds profound and resonant, but underneath there’s no substance. The group’s studio work maintains this illusion of depth with dense, imaginative production and arrangements. Onstage the veneer wears thin.
Part of Queen’s problem is their musicianship. Mercury possesses a strong baritone that could be an expressive instrument, but he locks himself into a caricature. He knows only one theatrical technique: exaggeration. His head appears to be permanently cocked back, his chest swells like an operatic buffoon. And when attempting a ballad like “You’re My Best Friend” (part of an acoustic segment sandwiched between the electric portions of the set), Mercury tries so hard to act out his emotion that he defeats his own ability to communicate it. He’s like a rock & roll Enzo Stuarti.
Mercury comes across with more flair than the rest of the group. Bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor are more than adequate players on record, but onstage they are possibly the worst rhythm section in rock & roll Taylor plods. He not only has little grasp of technical nuance, but also seems to have only recently discovered the backbeat. (His solo spot consists of a long drum roll fed through a phase shifter.) Brian May, a polished, technically adroit heavy-metal guitarist, stands off to one side and plays his parts independent of the others. The ensemble results are chaotic. “Keep Yourself Alive,” one of Queen’s best songs, loses all dynamics in performance. On the record, it builds from one guitar riff to a multilayered crescendo; live, the band charges into it like four wild stallions on the rampage. They don’t build the song, they rush it, and by the end the tempo is nearly twice as fast as when the song began.
Queen’s staging is similarly confused. On this tour they’re using the standard array of arena-scale effects: smoke, strobes, a second stage that descends from above. But instead of complementing the performance, they seem more like elaborate diversionary tactics. On the second of two nights at Madison Square Garden, the band even dispatched several unclothed women across the stage on bicycles during “Fat Bottomed Girls.” How far will Queen go to keep people from noticing that it’s not only the bicycling beauties who are bare?