GOLDMINE
10 AUGUST 2001
PART 4
Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,”
evokes good childhood memories.
What was your first record
Collectorania!
A RHAPSODY OF COLLECTIBLES: COLLECTING QUEEN
by Chuck Miller
WHETHER you collect stamps, coins, records or anything else, you never forget your first time. No, not that first time. Get your mind out of the gutter. For record collectors, I’m talking about the first record we ever bought – the record that would eventually be the rock upon which our holy musical scriptures are built. Maybe your first record was an Elvis 45 or a Beatles album. Or maybe it was something more esoteric, such as Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run or Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Walter Carlos’ Switched On Bach.
I recall my early childhood record collection was filled with kiddie 45s on the Disneyland and Cricket labels and some “sounds like the original artists” albums on the Ronco and Diplomat labels. Heck, this was even before my Grandma Betty added 45s to her flea market/yard sale search lists.
Under the Christmas tree in our house in 1975 was my first real phonograph; a beige Genral Electric Wildcat drop-changer with built-in speakers, four turntable speeds and a flip-over stylus that could play LPs, 45s and 78s. Now I didn’t have to play my Disney records on the family phonograph, which pleased my stepfather to no end (and he made no bones about how many cans of Schaefers beer that it took to get “Cruella De Vil” and “Whistle While You Work” out of his head!
A few days after that Christmas, I visited the Blue Note Record Store in Albany, N.Y., which still exists today. Avram Pock, the man who stood between the cash register and a library-sized wall of 45s, asked me what I would like to buy. I had heard this one song on the radio, a song whose title the DJ had not mentioned in broadcasts – it sounded like an opera with guitars and had words sush as “Nothing really matters” and “Any way the wind blows” and may have been by a group called The Queens.
Without hesitation, even though I provided Mr Pock with only the slightest information on the record, he quickly went to the racks and pulled out “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I remember it being a greenish-white company sleeve with the words “Electra/Asylum” on the top, and that the record label contained a butterfly, which was certainly different than the dog-and-gramphone labels in my parents’ record collection. I immediately paid my dollar for the record, received my change and a “have a nice day” from Mr Pock and headed home to test out this new treasure.
For days and days, I played “Bohemian Rhapsody” on my Wildcat drop-changer, watching as the robotic tonearm swung out to the lip of the spinning 45, then dropped with a plunk to the outermost groove. A few crackles of surface noise, then I would hear those magic words, “Is this the real life… is this just fantasy…”
“Bohemian Rhapsody” quickly surpassed any of my previous Disney 45s in etrms of popularity on my turntable. I would fiddle with the speaker balance, discovering the wonders of stereo separation as one chorus would appear in the left speaker, then the other would complement it in the right channel. I played the record at different speeds, imagining “Bohemian Rhapsody” as prformed by The Chipmunks (on 78), the Sunday morning men’s choir (on 33) and as unintelligible warbling (on 16 rpm). I was even able to determine that WTRY and WPTR,the AM radio stations that played “Bohemian Rhapsody” in our area, had a slightly different mix of the song – besides being in monaural sound, the end gong sounded louder on the radio than it did on my 45. And I also noticed that while WPTR’s copy of the song matched my version in tempo, the WTRY version seemed a little faster, perhaps as if it were played at 46 or 47 rpm (perhaps they did this with all songs, to squeeze in another commercial at the top of the hour).
Of course, every time Queen had a new hit record for sale, I would snap it up. My musical tastes were expanding as I listened to more radio stations, and eventually my record collection grew from a teenage smattering of Top 40-based 45s to the multidimensional, multiplatform, multi-this-and-that my collection represents today.
I also learned about the intangibles of record collecting through my purchases of Queen 45s and LPs. I discovered the wonders of Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab audiophile pressings when I spent $20 (a princely sum for a album in the late 1970s) to acquire an MPSL copy of A Night At The Opera. One of the first import 45s I ever acquired was a British pressing of “Under Pressure”, the song Queen recorded with David Bowie. I learned about such tactics as releasing picture sleves with differing images on them, so that a “true collector” would spend four times as much to get all four picture sleevs (in this case Queen’s “I Want To Break Free” exists as four different picture sleeves, featuring each band member separately).
Today, Queen’s magnum opus is a fairly common and easy record to acquire. The most recent price guides list a near mint copy of the U.S. pressing of “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Elektra 45297) as $8 for the butterfly Elektra label, at $10 for a short-printed red label. A seven-inch reissue (Hollywood 64725), released to capitalize on the song’s use in the Wayne’s World movie, is reasonably priced at $4 in near mint condition. Even though Freddie Mercury has long since joined the Gates Of Heaven Community Choir, collecting Queen’s music is as fascinating as collecting records by The Beatles, Elvis Presley, or The Rolling Stones.
Turn on a television and spin the dial, and you’ll hear a Queen track somewhere among your DirectTV satellite hookups: the opening theme, “Princes Of The Universe,” on an episode of Highlander, the classic ‘singalong’ scene in Wayne’s World; a Mountain Dew commercial that replicates the music vido for “Bohemian Rhapsody”; the soundtrack to the 1980’s big-budget Flash Gordon movie.
You can hear it in other artists’ works – Grandmaster Flash slipped a snippet of ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ into his megamix “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel.” Despite his protests to the contrary, Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” musically photocopies the bass line from “Under Pressure”. And you can hear it at the sports arenas – as the team rallies for another score, the stomp-stomp-clap of “We Will Rock You” blasts from the arena PA. At the first game of the season, your sports team’s new championship banner is raised to the rafters, as the sounds of “We Are The Champions” plays in the background.
If you’re looking to either complete or begin a Queen music collection, one of the best discographies can be found in the book Queen: As It Began by Jacky Gunn [Smith] and Jim Jenkins. (Hypericon, 1992) [Updated 2022[. Besides having a complete history of the band, Queen: As It Began contains a discography of all Queen’s American and UK releases, including any variations and updates (it also lists the bonus tracks on the first Hollywood CD releases).
I suppose my record-collecting history might have been different if the first music I ever purchased was “Fly Robin Fly” by Silver Convention, “Run Joey Run” by David Geddes, or Lou Reed’s Transformer album. But I kinda like the way my record collection has evolved over the years – and I’m proud that the fist 45 I ever bought for myself was Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
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