Recharged and Ready to Rock You

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 3, 2006

How do you replace one of rock's most beloved singers and entertainers, one remembered as outrageous, flamboyant and, yes, inimitable?

If you're guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor of Queen, you don't even try to replace Freddie Mercury, the band's powerhouse frontman and most visible member. Mercury died in 1991 at age 45 of complications from AIDS, and though the band had stopped touring five years earlier because of his illness, his passing seemed to cement the notion that a golden era of thunder and glam-rock theatricality had passed.

So there was great trepidation last year when Queen reappeared with a new frontman, Paul Rodgers. Rodgers is certainly no white-suited strutter, and his bluesy, rough-edged vocals would seem at odds with the Queen songbook. At least Rodgers's voice was familiar from his own rock classics such as "All Right Now," "Feel Like Makin' Love" and "Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy."

Some critics were thinking rock 'n' roll nightmare. Some Mercury loyalists were crying, "Blasphemy!"

On the other hand, an awful lot of fans bought tickets for last year's European tour, already memorialized in a live album and DVD, "Return of the Champions." The comeback continues for Queen + Paul Rodgers, as the tour is billed, with a stop at MCI (soon-to-be Verizon) Center on Thursday. Apparently, a kind of magic continues.

If May was ever worried, he's not letting on. "I don't really feel fear about this kind of thing," May said recently from England. "I feel very comfortable with Paul and the band. I feel it's a real band. I wouldn't be leaving my comfortable home to do this if I didn't feel confident and there was really something worthwhile to be done out there."

Which includes, May suggests, rectifying what he calls "this gaping hole in Queen's history. We kind of grew up in the states as a band, but there was a disconnection somewhere around [the early '80s] where we became current everywhere in the world except the states."

Queen slowly built a following here, beginning with the band's 1973 debut single, the May-penned "Keep Yourself Alive." Thanks to "Bohemian Rhapsody," the first headlining tour came two years later (including a show at the Kennedy Center), and the group built up to arena-level shows before Mercury's increasingly flamboyant stage presence and the band's dip into disco proved disconcerting to American fans who preferred their rock straight-up. Queen's final American tour was in 1982.

"I remember Freddie saying, 'I'll have to [expletive] die before we get back to the states and play the way we should do,' " May recalls, adding: "We were doing ever greater things everywhere else, conquering new territories like South America and Japan and Australia and the whole of Europe, becoming this stadium entity. It was blazing new trails.

"So there was this dream in the back of our minds, someday we'll take it back to the states, and of course it never happened with Freddie. It was a great sadness."

By the way, May is not kidding about feeling no pressure to leave his comfortable home in Surrey. Queen was one of the first bands to take control of its masters and management early in its career and has always benefited from substantial ongoing catalogue sales, licensing of songs and so forth. Plus they had sold about 150 million albums worldwide. That may explain why bassist John Deacon, who retired soon after Mercury's death, was listed just last year in the Financial Times as the 777th richest Brit. Until the current tour, the biggest heritage celebration had been "We Will Rock You," the Queen musical created in 2002 by Ben Elton. In London, where it's still playing the West End, the show has been seen by more than 2 million people, and there are productions in Germany, Australia and Spain, upcoming openings in Johannesburg and Zurich, and a likely road show in the United States.

Meanwhile, the real thing is hitting the road with Rodgers, offering a compendium of Queen classics and Rodgers hits from his days leading Free and Bad Company.

"To be honest with you, if you take the instant before this whole Paul Rodgers thing came up, I was quite happy," May says. "I was attuned to the fact that we'd done all that stuff in the past and I was proud of it, but I was doing different things in life and I didn't really think we'd be doing arenas again. It wasn't bothering me, except for the odd twinge when we'd talk about the Superdome and, oh yeah, we used to do that.

"I was okay, but then Paul comes along and there is this sense of empathy, this real excitement of 'this works.' It's exactly that kind of feeling you get when you're starting off in a group, when you realize, boy, I can really play with this guy, we make music together, we have chemistry, there's something going on."

May played on Rodgers's 1994 album, "Muddy Water Blues," but the seeds of the current partnership were sown two years ago when the two performed at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Fender Stratocaster at London's Wembley Arena. After that, May called Taylor to say he liked the way his guitar sounded with Rodgers's voice on "All Right Now." Not long after, the three musicians were invited to play at the UK Music Hall of Fame awards. They suspected they were onto a good thing when they got a standing ovation rehearsing "We Will Rock You," "We Are the Champions" and "All Right Now."

The biggest challenge was figuring how to replace the irreplaceable and avoid the appearance of hiring a mere impersonator for rock's most over-the-top showman or, worst of all, become a Queen cover band.

"I would have hated to go out there and be an imitation of what we were before," May insists. "Paul is great because he will never sing anything unless he can sing it from the heart. You always get the real thing with Paul, you cannot get an imitation. He's what he is: He's Paul Rodgers, he's a great creator, interpreter, and, boy, does he have the pipes. And they're better than ever!"

And, May points out, "Paul is a part of our history anyway. Free was such a big influence on us in the early days, and [guitarist Paul Kossoff] for me was a real hero, still is, such a fabulously bright talent extinguished tragically so soon." (Kossoff died of a drug-induced heart attack in 1976 at age 25.)

In retrospect, May says, it's odd that Queen never thought of working with Rodgers "because obviously you're thinking every day, damn, I can't play anymore because we don't have the [singer] anymore. And lots of people came up to us with suggestions: 'Why don't you take this man out on tour?' "

Suggestions started being made as far back as 1992's Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness at Wembley. Until last April's concert at London's Brixton Academy, that had been the last Queen performance, with George Michael in Mercury's spot. "He [Michael] was pretty much set in his ways in regards to pursuing his solo career, which really was not in the direction of rock," May says, adding: "I don't think we were ready; it wasn't the right time."

Talk subsided until 1999, when the band started auditioning would-be Mercurys for "We Will Rock You" and in 2001 when they teamed with British pop star Robbie Williams on "We Are the Champions" for the movie "A Knight's Tale."

"That was close," May says. "Some dates were actually booked, and we would have gone for it. Not as a career move, but wouldn't it be fun? I think it was really Robbie's management that pulled him out of it."

The Queen's Golden Jubilee performance in 2002 at the Buckingham Palace Gardens, which featured Tony Vincent, the musical's Mercury, performing "Bohemian Rhapsody" with and for the Queen, also featured May playing "God Save the Queen" (the British national anthem, not the Sex Pistols song) on the roof of the palace, with the queen's permission, of course.

Last March, May found himself back at the palace, which has now become a regular stop, something "furthest from my expectations," he laughs. May and fellow guitar legends Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were honored by the queen for their contributions to the music industry. In December, he was back again, this time to receive a Commander of the British Empire honor for his services to music. May reminded Queen Elizabeth II that he had been the one playing "God Save the Queen" on her roof.

" 'Oh, that was you, was it?' She had a little joke about it, said, 'It's a lot warmer down here, isn't it?' Which is true.

"She was very charming," May says, adding, "She's good at her job."

So is Brian May, of course, not only as one of the most respected and influential guitarists in rock history but also as a songwriter. People forget that Queen is the only band in rock history whose members all have written songs that have been No. 1 singles somewhere in the world; even the Beatles can't match that. Among May's better-known songs: "Fat Bottomed Girls," "Tie Your Mother Down," "Who Wants to Live Forever" and the ubiquitous "We Will Rock You," which still excites its author when he hears it at sporting events. It's two minutes of drumless foot-stomping and hand-clapping machismo built on a surging, anthem-like chorus and May's majestic guitar vamp -- the ultra jock anthem as a bid for immortality.

"It's a thrill," he says proudly. "It amuses me that a lot of young people think it was always there. We do it in the show, of course, and a lot of them think, 'Oh, they do that ?' Maybe we should make a bigger deal of it. We just treat it as a song, but it has become kind of an institution.

"I'm very happy, and I won't need a gravestone!"

Queen + Paul Rodgers Appearing Thursday at Verizon Center Sounds Like: They will, they will rock you by dipping into the Queen catalogue and Rodgers's standards from Free and Bad Company.