Day 173: One Vision

This song came out at the height of my Queen obsession. It was included in the soundtrack for the movie Iron Eagle, a terrible movie. I went to see the movie just to hear the song. I bought the soundtrack on cassette and listened to just that song.

I think it shows how much Queen had fallen since they were so big wen The Game came out in the early 80s and it was huge. Live Aid happened and they were huge for a moment, but it seems like it didn’t give them any traction in the US. Queen was not relevant until Freddie Mercury was known publicly to have AIDS. Then their albums all came out on CD with new remix extras and all the sudden they were all on the shelves again and on the radio, nostalgically.

To get on the radio in the US, they had to hitch their music to the soundtrack of a Lou Gossett Jr. vehicle. Not good. But I found it and I savored it. It was $7.99 well spent.

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Day 172: Don’t Stop Me Now

When I was in high school, Queen had dropped off the map. You could not find their music anywhere. Their CDs were not available in the US except as imports. I liked Queen a lot, and I scrounged to find their music.

My cousin Chess and I would play video games at his house and listen to records that his older siblings had left behind. Your older family’s discarded music was one of the best sources of new tunes when I was growing up, before the Internet. We listened to a lot of Queen. I will never forget Chess imitating Freddie Mercury as we played M.U.L.E. or Ultima II in his house, sweltering in the summer heat hunched in front of that little tv screen on the first floor of that big house.

I wish I could have told Miles about Queen. There was a record/video store in Wheeling called Video Village. I would ride my bike there wen I had some money in my pocket. They had some imported Queen CDs. I got News of the World and A Night at the Opera.  I also bought Sargent Pepper there on the 20th anniversary of its original release.

When I was in tenth grade, I went on a school trip to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. My favorite part of the trip was going to a record store in West Berlin and getting Queen II, Jazz, and Sheer Heart Attack. I don’t know where they are anymore. They are long gone.