I Saw Freddie Mercury: The Concert That Started It All

The lights went out, and for some ridiculous reason, I was nervous.

I wasn't performing. Nobody in Queen knew I existed. I was just one young girl sitting in a very good seat waiting for a concert to begin. But I remember that nervousness.

Have you ever been about to see an old friend you haven't seen in a long time? There's anticipation. Excitement. That strange little flutter in your stomach while you're waiting for them to walk through the door.

It felt something like that.

Except these friends didn't know me.

I knew them.

Then, in the darkness, the music started.

“Tie Your Mother Down.”

And I lost my mind.

Somewhere beyond those lights were Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon. Queen. My Queen. The band whose albums I had collected, whose songs I had memorized, whose music had kept me company through some pretty lonely years.

They were actually there.

But to explain why that moment mattered so much, I have to go back a little further.

The Bookends

I am the youngest of seven children. My older brother David and I were known as the bookends of the family.

We had a lot in common. We were both science fiction nerds before being a nerd became something people proudly put on T-shirts. David was an artist. He could draw magnificently. I was the writer. I wrote little stories and poems and disappeared happily into whatever worlds my imagination could create.

David also had eclectic taste in music.

He listened to ELO, Paul McCartney and Wings, and all kinds of things that weren't necessarily what everybody around us was listening to. And one day, he handed his little sister an album and told me to listen to it.

Yes, children, an album.

The band was Queen.

The album was News of the World.

If you've ever seen that cover, you can probably imagine what happened to my science-fiction-loving little brain. There was this enormous robot looming over the world, holding the members of Queen in its hands. Before I'd heard a note, I was fascinated.

Then I played it.

My God.

There are moments in life when you don't know something important is happening until years later, when you look backward and realize there was a before and an after.

For me, there was before News of the World.

And there was after.

Of course, there was “We Are the Champions.” There was “We Will Rock You.” But I didn't stop with the songs everybody knew.

I went looking for Queen.

Fandom Before Algorithms

This was a different kind of fandom.

There was no Spotify waiting to suggest another song. No YouTube rabbit hole. No streaming service offering every album ever recorded because you'd clicked on one track.

If you loved a band, you went hunting.

And I hunted.

Tower Records in San Francisco became one of my favorite hunting grounds. I scraped together my little pennies and bought what I could. Albums. Singles. EPs. Anything Queen I could find. Slowly, piece by piece, my collection grew.

I learned the songs. I wrote down lyrics. I knew the obscure tracks.

I was a singer, and when I had to learn music for recitals, naturally I chose Queen songs. Not necessarily the big hits, either. I'd choose the ones where another Queen fan might hear the title and say, “Oh, you REALLY like Queen.”

Yes.

Yes, I did.

I was part of what Queen fans called the Royal Family, and for years, that band was part of the soundtrack of my life.

That mattered because those weren't always easy years.

I was a loner. I was a nerd. I was bullied. I didn't always feel particularly good about myself.

Music gave me somewhere else to go.

And Freddie Mercury was unlike anybody else.

Here was this extraordinary human being who seemed to have absolutely no interest in asking permission to be Freddie Mercury. He was flamboyant. Powerful. theatrical. Unapologetic.

For a kid who didn't always feel like she fit where everybody said she was supposed to fit, there was something powerful in that.

Queen didn't magically make the hard things disappear.

But they created a place where I could be happy.

Sometimes that's enough to get you through.

Queen Is Coming

Then came the news.

Queen was coming to town.

The Hot Space Tour.

I had to go.

There was just one small problem.

Nobody wanted to go with me.

Not my friends. Not my sister. Nobody.

Musically, I didn't fit neatly into the boxes around me. In parts of the Black community around me, Queen wasn't exactly the band everybody was talking about. Among some of the rock crowd I knew, there were other bands you were “supposed” to be listening to.

Meanwhile, there I was.

Queen fanatic.

And everybody knew it.

I begged people to go. Nothing.

I cried.

I pleaded.

I made every promise a desperate teenager has ever made to a parent when the continued existence of the universe depends upon being allowed to attend one concert.

My mother had seven children and a lot on her plate. She couldn't take me.

Her initial answer was basically: if you don't have anyone to go with, you don't go.

This was unacceptable.

There was more crying.

Eventually, somehow, impossibly...

I WON.

My mother let her very young teenage daughter take BART to a rock concert by herself.

I look back at this now as a mother and a grown woman and think:

Mom. What the hell were you thinking?

Seriously.

She might as well have packed me a sandwich and released me into the zombie apocalypse.

But this was also part of growing up when I did. There were things our parents let us do that would cause today's parents to spontaneously combust.

My mother did make sure I had a good seat. She spent the extra money for that.

And I made promises.

I would get off BART. Go directly into the venue. Find my seat. Stay where I belonged. See the concert. Get back on BART and come home.

And that is EXACTLY what I did.

I wasn't about to screw this up.

I didn't wander around. I didn't go shopping for merchandise. I barely wanted to leave my seat to use the bathroom.

I had been entrusted with the greatest mission of my young life.

See Queen. Survive. Return home.

Mission accepted.

And Then the Lights Went Out

Billy Squier opened.

And let me tell you, Billy Squier put on a SHOW.

Under almost any other circumstances, that performance could have been the highlight of the night.

But I knew who was coming.

Eventually, the moment arrived.

The lights went down.

And there was that nervous feeling.

I had spent years listening to these people. Freddie's voice had come out of the speakers in my room. Brian May's guitar had been part of my world. I knew Roger and John. I knew the albums and the songs.

These people had been with me.

Now I was about to see them.

Then I heard it.

“Tie Your Mother Down.”

The place exploded.

And Queen came out.

I have seen a lot of concerts since that night.

That one set the bar.

Freddie Mercury didn't simply sing songs. He commanded an arena. He played with the audience. He called out and thousands of us answered him. Somehow, this enormous, flamboyant spectacle could also feel intimate.

Queen understood something long before we started using the word “experience” for everything.

They knew how to create one.

I jumped. I screamed. I sang. I ran toward the stage with everybody else.

For those few hours, the lonely nerdy kid wasn't lonely.

I belonged to the Royal Family.

And I was home.

The Music Grew Up With Me

Decades later, my spouse took me to see Queen again, this time with Adam Lambert.

Of course I went.

And I loved it.

But something had changed.

Me.

The teenage girl who had once jumped and screamed and rushed toward the stage had become a grown woman perfectly happy to sit comfortably with a glass of wine and enjoy the show.

Apparently this is evolution.

The audience had changed too.

There were people from my generation everywhere, but many of them had brought their children.

That struck me.

Then Roger Taylor's son came onto the stage and played with his father.

There it was, right in front of me.

Time.

One generation beside another onstage.

One generation beside another in the audience.

And Queen was still playing.

I don't find that sad.

I find it extraordinary.

Because when I was a teenager, I couldn't find one person who wanted to go see Queen with me.

Now I meet young people who love them.

And occasionally the subject comes up and I get to say something that makes their eyes widen:

I saw Queen with Freddie Mercury.

Yep.

I was there.

I Was There

When Freddie Mercury died, I cried.

My friends called me.

Some sent flowers.

They understood that this wasn't simply a celebrity I liked. Freddie and Queen had occupied a little piece of my life for years.

And maybe that's why Queen is where I want to begin Rock ’n’ Roll Angel.

Being Gen X isn't special because we are somehow better than the generations that came before or after us.

We're not.

But we were there.

We grew up with Three Dog Night and Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire and Donna Summer. The Bee Gees. Aerosmith. AC/DC. Iron Maiden. ELO. Queen. And so many others.

We bought records. We made tapes. We stood in lines. We hunted through record stores. We watched music television when the television actually played music. We discovered things differently.

And we experienced moments that can't be recreated.

Life changed.

That's not a bad thing.

It's just a thing.

But every once in a while, a song comes on.

A photograph turns up.

Someone mentions an old television show, a concert, a record store, a commercial, a ridiculous drink we loved, or something we once thought was completely normal.

And suddenly...

We're there again.

I'm back in that arena.

The lights have gone out.

I'm young and nervous and sitting alone.

The opening notes of “Tie Your Mother Down” begin in the darkness.

And Freddie Mercury is about to walk onto the stage.

I didn't know it then, but I was about to take home a memory that would become more valuable with every passing year.

I got to be there.

And after all these years, I can still hear the music.

Welcome to Rock ’n’ Roll Angel.

Turn it up.

**

Thanks for taking this trip back with me.

What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.

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Until next time...

Keep the memories alive.Keep the stories coming.And whatever you do... turn it up.

— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)

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