Photos prove Mercury, Queen were the champions of spectacle
The Chronicle and the band Queen didn’t get off to a very good start.
The band’s visit to the Bay Area on March 7, 1977, resulted in a tight six-paragraph review — with no photo on the page — that left left little doubt about rock critic Joel Selvin’s first impressions of the band.
“British rock band Queen, sort of a bush league Led Zeppelin, performed Sunday at the Berkeley Community Theater,” Selvin wrote. “Although the show contained more than a few moments of satisfying hard rock, the bulk of the performance never rose above the ordinary.”
But Selvin, the fans and the music industry would warm considerably to Queen. By 1982, the band was welcomed warmly in San Francisco. Chronicle
photos of the Sept. 7, 1982, Oakland Coliseum Arena show, recently discovered and previously unpublished, show an electric concert, with singer Freddie Mercury commanding the stage.
The Queen articles and photos develop new life with this weekend’s release of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the decade-inthe-making Queen biopic starring Rami Malek as Mercury.
Much of the movie is heavily fictionalized. But a scene featuring scathing reviews of the band during early tours of America rings true after searching through The Chronicle’s archive.
During a recent podcast episode of “The Big Event,” Selvin had a good sense of humor about his first experience with Queen.
“When I see something like this, I wonder, ‘How high was I?’ Selvin said. “It really doesn’t have the kind of fine-point detail that I would have been more happy with.”
Selvin’s account was actually the more tempered of the two earliest Chronicle reviews of Queen. A second review in 1980, headlined “A Night With Queen: Flash, Volume and Pelvic Thrusts,” is a sex-obsessed meandering take rarely seen in a family newspaper.
“Mercury is no Mick Jagger,” Conrad Silvert’s article begins. “He’s not nearly as pretty as Rod Stewart. But Mercury does possess a certain kind of dark sensuality; he has a cute behind, which he keeps at a more or less permanently thrust out angle, and, as his red vinyl pants clearly revealed, he has a sizable and perky set of genitals.”
By that time, Queen was selling out large arenas in the U.S., getting widespread radio airplay for songs including “Another One Bites the Dust” off the 1980 album “The Game.”
Queen returned in 1982 and received even more attention from The Chronicle, which sent photographer Eric Luse to capture the night. While Steve Ringman was the most renowned and pioneering Chronicle rock photographer of the era, Luse came back with concert photos that stand with the best in The Chronicle’s archive.
Of course, the band being Queen didn’t hurt matters. The photos, which mostly feature Mercury, show performers who understand the value of a good light show. Mercury is highlighted in an ethereal spotlight in nearly every photo, as if he’s being raptured.
By the time that show ended, Selvin had come around on the band, writing a nuanced review — filled with fine-point detail.
Mercury “seemed like the only man onstage at the Coliseum, so dominating was his role in the performance,” Selvin wrote. “Dressed in Castro Street chic, he flexed his muscular body through an array of vigorous calisthenics — there is more than a touch of James Brown to this man — while supplying the piercing, high-register vocals that top off the customized Queen sound.”