Unlike their flawed first album, Queen’s second effort was nearly perfect to begin with. “’Queen II’ was the single biggest leap we ever made,” guitarist Brian May has said. “That’s when we really started making music the way we wanted to.”
Where the band’s debut suffered from a muddy mix and some stiff playing, “Queen II” was the work of a wildly ambitious group coming off of its first hit single, “Keep Yourself Alive.” Confident and sprawling, the album found the band’s — and especially Freddie Mercury’s — wildest visions coming to life. It is a musical funhouse filled with roaring guitars, baroque piano and the band’s gloriously stacked harmonies; with Shakespearian and Olde English lyrical references, wild characters like White Queens and Black Queens and Titans and troubadours and Fairy Fellers.
Mercury’s multi-sectioned song “March of the Black Queen” was the direct predecessor of “Bohemian Rhapsody”; even the album’s cover, the iconic, morbid death-mask photo by Mick Rock, was a portent of things to come, as the group would recreate it for the legendary “Bohemian Rhapsody” video three years later, which many consider to be the first modern music video.
Divided into “Side White” and “Side Black,” “Queen II” includes two of guitarist Brian May’s greatest songs, “Father to Son” and “White Queen,” yet the album’s second (aka black) side is a soaring blast of creativity from Mercury, featuring his hardest-rocking song (“Ogre Battle”), his most eccentric (“The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke”) and one of his most beautiful ballads (“Nevermore”), as well as “March of the Black Queen” and the band’s second hit single, “Seven Seas of Rhye.” The album is an arch, epic, definitively British masterpiece that should be the first visit for anyone seeking more of “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which this writer did as a 13-year-old, poring over the lyric sheet and then a dictionary for the meaning of words like “tatterdemalion” and “ostler”). Queen would never again sound so intense, wild and heavy.
So what’s in this 50-ish anniversary edition? The same sumptuous treatment that was brought to “Queen I” a couple of years ago: There’s a meticulously remastered version of the original album, of course, and then loads of ear and eye candy for fans: an overstuffed booklet with fresh interviews with May and drummer/singer Roger Taylor and four discs of deep-dive material: instrumental versions of all the songs, which provide a fascinating look at just how intricate the arrangements are; live and BBC radio versions of the songs from the album, all of which have been previously released; and most interesting of all, session outtakes — and one previously unreleased song.
There are few things die-hard music geeks love more than an unpacking of how their beloved songs came together — the most obvious example is probably watching Paul McCartney write “Get Back” on the spot in the Peter Jackson film of the same name — and you get plenty of that here: The bandmembers, especially Mercury, shaping and rehearsing the songs, laughing, bickering and making mistakes. But what’s most striking and endearing is how much it illustrates the band’s very strong personalities: an f-bomb-dropping Mercury very much in control of his songs; May more measured but just as determined; Taylor impatient and fiery; bassist John Deacon basically silent.
At one point, as they’re working out the beginning of “Ogre Battle,” they attempt the guitar-heavy beginning and Mercury says, “Stop, that’s fucking terrible. What about [May’s] chords before? Who’s going to drop those in from the sky?” But he’s just as unfiltered about himself, “My fault,” he says after a false start on “Seven Seas of Rhye,” then continues, “Because I can’t hear my piano very well, I’m playing all sorts of horrible pedal work. Would it be hard for you other fellows if all the other instruments were slightly lower?”
Those moments illustrate the band’s work ethic and process much more vividly than any interviews ever could. Like all classic bands, Queen’s greatest strength was the combination of the personalities — four very different but forceful and fiercely competitive people. It’s no accident that they’re the only band in history where each of the four members wrote a number-one single. (Not for nothing, their catalog is the only one known to have sold for over a billion dollars.)
Finally, the unreleased track, which has been floating around on bootlegs for decades under the names “Not for Sale” or “Polar Bear,” is actually a May song that dates back to the days of Smile, the Queen precursor he and Taylor performed with in the late ‘60s. It’s much more reminiscent of Queen’s first album and is hardly a classic, but it’s a full-band, if tentative performance that fills a gap in the group’s history. Also, included in the BBC sessions is a rare full-band take on “Nevermore,” that finds the group joining in for the final minute and Mercury firing up his vocal in a way he doesn’t on the album version.
Any lover of “A Night at the Opera” needs to check out the main album immediately — for those who are already fans, set aside at least a couple of hours to dig into the bounty for the eyes and ears.
