MERCURY RISING:
SUDDENLY SAD FOR FREDDIE
RANA BOSE

[Rana Bose is an author and playwright. His first novel, Recovering Rude, will be published in the fall by Vehicule Press. -ed.]

Before history got a hold of him, John Cabot, the discoverer of Newfoundland, was known as Giovanni Caboto.

Coaxed and cajoled by a friend into attending a choir recital in a state of mind 10 miles south of Montreal, known as La Prairie, I dragged myself across the parking lot and entered the secondary school perched on top of the highway. My lack of orientation in this Montreal outpost was obvious. I suppose, in part, due to Highway 132, which is the kind of route where at night if you do not know your way while heading due south, you get the creepy feeling you’re only minutes away from being stopped by an unfriendly US border guard who will take it upon himself to question your integrity, pedigree and heredity all in one (bad) breath.

When we finally entered into the parking lot, only twenty cars had pulled up. My friend, I deduced, was making this journey out of sheer politeness and tactful gentility towards a colleague. As we parked, more cars were pulling up in a steady stream of headlights that lit up the large lot. I could attest to bracing against the chill dispensed by the wind in this South Shore suburb. My growing impatience accompanied by gastric chortling wasn’t helped by the US-style shopping mall glittering grotesquely across the wide street. A deleterious blow had already been delivered to my lower underbelly. The queue was forming outside the building. It took me and my friend only a few fatal seconds to realize we were not properly attired. Most of the audience had arrived in their Saturday evening best: black dresses with silvery sequins; model-faced men in jodhpurs and women clinging to them with tanned skins and dark lips. There were middle-aged men in dark suits and crisp ties, elderly couples with heavily pan-caked faces, young maidens with assault-perfumes, and hair-on-the-chest adolescents clinging and whispering to each other in adulatory coquettishness. By the time we were inside the building, the parking lot had filled up with at least two hundred cars.

The austere, wood-veneered school interior featured an interminable corridor designed like a jail ward, with classrooms on either side. We were making our way down the claustrophobic tunnel to the auditorium, listening to our footsteps clicking along the hardware floor, when it struck me that there was nobody in the queue that looked even vaguely familiar. I didn’t recognize one face. I normally end up running into at least one or two familiar faces whenever I attend a concert or play - but not tonight. It came as no surprise when suddenly something in me felt like a corkscrew had been given a grievous twist. And then it was too late. The evening was already marred, impaired. Even sullied. Something had already happened that was no longer retrievable. And we were yet to enter the auditorium itself.

My friend is often required to remind me that I behave like a cranky dog with a bone and nobody to play with when I get into one of my moods -- just as I started getting loud with my comments. People could hear me and were eyeing me suspiciously, but I still couldn’t put the proverbial finger on the proverbial problem.

By the time we entered the massive auditorium and found two seats very near the doorway, I realized what had gone wrong that evening: out of the approximately six hundred people in that massive concrete monument, there was not a single person of color -- other than myself. , I remarked this to my friend. She would not believe it. She began a desperate search, row by row, to prove me wrong. She came up with nothing. Yes, this congregation had arrived as representative of an entire community, city and nation; and my kind didn’t figure. They graciously greeted one another as they entered. Some smiled in a prim manner. Others laughed ostentatiously. A few managed to trip and stumble on the steps while exchanging dull wit and humor. When settled in their seats they admired the sets on the stage, self-consciously pointing out the Lawrence Welk-like jaded flats and risers.

Against the odds, we continued to look for some sign of hue-friendliness, some pigment offset, some stain, some tint. Remember, only fifteen minutes away lies my beloved Montreal, a city where over 40% of its population belongs to neither English nor French stock. While granting that a fair number of them are not necessarily people of color, they nonetheless fall outside the Anglo-Saxon, Judeo-Christian straight-jacket. But here, in this barren country south of Montreal, there was not a single sign of diversity, of the ethnic ferment that challenges and sharpens the senses just across the river. The people assembled here were of a single variety: White, except those who were wearing their counterfeit West Palm Beach tans.

My mood had been mashed and mangled, my dog bone chewed to a pulp in my mind's jaws. I was sure they didn’t even date outside their realm, or breed outside their brood, or allow their imaginations to visit beyond their measured blocks and neatly rowed streets that were named alphabetically. This was their evening. Not mine. My tail wagged furiously as I sniffed around for some distraction, for something different. I wasn’t asking for Madagascar to be beamed up; it could be as understated as a half-smoked, still smoldering, pleasantly-reeking, foreign-brand cigarette that would save the evening.

The show started almost on time. The lights dimmed on a twenty second dimmer sequence, the cue for the chatter to abate in unison. The choir arrived from the rear, descending down the two aisles. A hush fell over the audience as the choir members solemnly approached the proscenium, carrying gaudy, phosphorescent candlesticks. One by one, they climbed the stage and arranged themselves according to their vocal category. And then, after an insipid exchange of inane introductory remarks by the MC couple, the choir began its repertoire. By now my friend had stopped looking for ‘otherness’ on my behalf. It was formally established there was none to be found, leaving me to wonder if at least some of them in their personal lives associate with people of color.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming this all-white audience for being white, for disappointing my expectations of a more diverse platter. If the truth be told, at some point during that interminable evening, I began to feel sorry for them because they didn’t suspect for one moment that they had been cheated or were cheating themselves of experiences that, in my view, constitutes the very stuff and substance of being alive -- notwithstanding the ragged choir I was being subjected to. But then again you never know: Montreal is just across the river, and perhaps some of them are indeed familiar with that crossing.

After a few reasonably constructed choral presentations in French, sung with some initial hesitation, a totally undecipherable Madonna song called Like a Prayer followed. (As far as I was concerned, this evening needed a prayer). Encouraged by the applause from the audience, the chorus then launched into the immortal Queen anthem Bohemian Rhapsody. This is when I registered my second distressing, spirit-unsettling incident of the evening, after the parking lot and school corridor trauma.

Yes. The credits did name Freddie Mercury in the handout. , But the moment the choir began to sing, I was suddenly overcome with a troubling sadness. Sadness for Freddie. Sadness for the meager mention of his name in the handout that completely failed to mention his life and times. He had been dead and gone since 1991. Probably no one in this audience had ever heard of Freddie Mercury, where he came from and what he was all about. And yet they were singing his legendary hit. And I couldn’t help thinking that without any meaningful link to his life and music, the audience that had congregated in this lackluster Montreal suburb was somehow violating Freddie’s feelings, his art. How many of them actually ever heard the Queen: A group that once performed in front of 230,000 fans in Sao Paulo; the fathers of stadium rock, the mother-ship of flamboyant rock.

Did any of them know that Freddie was Indian and a man of color? Were they listening to him now because he could write complicated Western symphonic pop rock? Were they aware that Freddie Mercury was a genius?

Switch. Change mood angle. Extract from the official Queen website. The life of Farookh Frederick Bulsara began on the East African island of Zanzibar on September 5, 1946. Twenty five years later in London, under the name Freddie Mercury, he was fronting the now legendary rock group Queen. The son of Bomi and Jer Bulsara, Freddie spent most of his childhood in India where he attended St. Peter's boarding school, near Bombay. It was there the headmaster of the school realized Freddie possessed exceptional musical talent and suggested he take piano lessons. At St. Peter's Freddie formed his first band, the Hectics. No one could foresee where his love of music would take him. To escape political unrest, the Bulsara family moved to Middlesex in 1964. In 1966, he enrolled in Ealing College of Art to study graphic illustration, and shortly thereafter hooked up with a blues band called Wreckage. A fellow student, Tim Staffell, introduced Freddie to Roger Taylor and Brian May, founding members of a band called Smile. After graduating in Graphic Arts and Design, he joined a band called Ibex, taking over lead vocals from their guitarist. Smile metamorphosed into Queen when Freddie joined Roger and Brian to start a new band with himself as the lead vocalist. Along with bassist John Deacon, the band would stay together for the next 20 years. The rest is rock history.

EMI Records promptly signed the band and in 1973 their debut album, Queen, was released and hailed as one of the most exciting developments in rock music. The immortal, operatically styled single, Bohemian Rhapsody, was released in 1975 and topped the UK charts for 9 weeks. A song that EMI didn’t want to release due to its length and unusual style, but which Freddie insisted had hit potential, became a classic. By this time Freddie's unique talents were known to all: an exceptional voice that was served by signature clarity and a remarkable vocal range, and a stage presence that gave Queen its colorful, unpredictable and flamboyant personality.

Switch back. Mood swipe. What could this South Shore audience know as the choir screamed "Bismillah! Mama Mia" into their remote-controlled mikes? Did they know Farookh Bulsara wrote: Get Down, Make Love, Jesus, Killer Queen, Love of my Life and other great songs? Would they dare to sing his other hits, or would they only appropriate Bohemian Rhapsody because that’s all they could relate to?

Freddie Mercury died from AIDS in 1991. It is now the year 2000 and I suddenly feel very sad for Freddie Mercury. I was never a big fan of Queen. But I couldn’t help feeling that his life and music had somehow been co-opted, that his soul had been stolen by this tacky, diversity-deprived mob in the suburbs of Montreal.

There are (self) interest groups that would like to turn Montreal (including its suburbs) into one big mega-city, like Toronto. Their game is to mask years of fiscal mismanagement by incorporating the surpluses of the suburbs while paying lip service to ‘cosmopolitanism and diversity:’ it’s called talking the talk. And then there are others who are opposed to the mega-merger because they don’t want to be associated with Montreal's diversity.

We slunk out at the intermission, stole through the deserted parking lot into the car, and in stunned silence tore across the Champlain bridge until we arrived at the corner of Duluth and St. Laurent. We went straight to Nantha’s Kitchen where we proceeded to gulp down several glasses of wonderfully wicked wine and Mee Goren Noodles and Pad Thai Curry, and only then did we begin discussing -- the night we called it day. The DJ was spinning an old Talvin Singh triphop cut: O Meri Jaan, Ankhon Se Door Na Jao. Don’t go too far from my eyes, my love.

THE END

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