Where. To. Start.

This compulsion has been driving me for years with building intensity. Maybe all the way back to ABBA and Alice Cooper I didn’t have much to work with. I’m just glad “Dancing Queen” didn’t stick and that I didn’t wind up with “Party Monster” based on my catastrophic debauchery. No, instead I stumbled through Kool & the Gang, O N J and E L O. I swear it was completely innocent and naive. There’s nothing pure and virtuous about how my family nurtured me in Queen and the Doobie Brothers. Well, I don’t hold my mom accountable for the Carpenters and Johnny Mathis.

Seriously looking back, I must have been raised by a coven of witches and warlocks if I was singing along to all of “A Night at the Opera” before I was eight. As if it were a perfectly normal thing to do we’d dress up in black gowns and praise Beelzebub. Ah, the unholy splendor we would share listening to Freddy singing “Seaside Rendezvous” backwards. The damage is done and I can only conclude that I have since been desensitized to many outrageous attacks on decency, such as 80s hair bands.

All satanism aside, Queen are the sum of my memories from my early development. I already knew they were very talented and that their music was different. Being young I was not jaded to the typically shallow and conceited bands. “39” and “Good Company” were so bright and genuine to me that even today I have strength to endure Hannah Montana. There was a lot of very happy and positive music at home and I felt a special bond with my aunt and uncle chanting “Bismillah! NO!” with them. Looking back I realize Queen were not THE most significant development of the 70s, but I can’t imagine what would fill the void if I had been raised on the Bay City Rollers. Don’t we have special Social Security benefits for that now?