Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

by Des Barres, Pamela

For they will understand

  That the lord loves perfection

  Now we’ll have a perfect band.”

  So as we go through life: now we know

  That perfection is our goal:

  And we strive for this.

  So when we are called,

  We’ll feel free to go.

  We head back to Bernice Circle so I can finally see Eddie’s legendary Gretsch and his .45 Buntline. I can hardly wait.

  As I clumsily handle the cherished .45, trying to pick up the original owner’s vibe, I swear I can feel Eddie laughing at me. Does Gloria ever sense the nearness of her baby brother? “I feel him pretty near all the time. I do,” she states with conviction. “Mother used to tell me that she would dream about him, that he was in the front room. It may sound silly, but for a long time you could walk in his room and it was just like he was right there with you. It was really something.” Ed comes into the room with the aging guitar case, opens it to reveal that vibrant orange Gretsch, and I realize my heart is beating fast. I pick the instrument up and it’s light as a feather. I want to hold it like Eddie did, to touch the strings. I put the original hand-tooled “Eddie Cochran” leather strap over my head and pretend I can play. For a brief moment in time I really do feel the presence of Eddie Cochran. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and look up to see Ed and Gloria smiling at me.

  Eddie Cochran took his Bible with him everywhere he went, says his sister Gloria, and written in Eddie’s handwriting on the inside cover, after the phrase “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son … ,” were the words “And Eddie Cochran.”

  Eddie’s gravestone—a tribute from brother Bob. (COURTESY OF GLORIA JULSON)

  FREDDIE MERCURY

  I’ve Always Admired a Man Who Wears Tights

  Freddie Mercury—Queen’s highly eccentric, outlandish diva-dervish front man—was the first major rock star to die of AIDS. After fifteen years of voluptuous, luxurious hedonism, Freddie startled those near and dear by becoming a virtual recluse, rarely leaving his divinely decadent six-million-dollar Kensington mansion, preferring the company of his beloved cats to carousing in London’s finest darkened dens of iniquity.

  For several years the buzzing rumors invaded Freddie’s very private mystique, but he didn’t announce his dire affliction until twenty-four hours before his death on November 24, 1991. “Following the enormous conjecture in the press,” his final statement read, “I wish to confirm that I have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date in order to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth, and I hope that everyone will join me and my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease.”

  The son of devout followers of the Zoroastrian religion, young Farokh Bulsara grew up on the exotic, idyllic, friendly islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, which lie in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa. He attended boarding school in Bombay, where he studied piano and was exposed to the classics and opera, which would later become the oddly eclectic inspiration for Queen’s ornate, bombastic compositions. But when the family relocated to London in 1959, Farokh (Freddie in English) was teased by the British kids for his dusky skin, protruding front teeth, and clipped colonial accent. The only subject he showed any interest in was art, and at nineteen joined the throng of hip, swinging London teens heading to Ealing Art College, where Who maestro Pete Townshend had recently gotten his Mod band together.

  Obsessed with Jimi Hendrix, skinny, velvet-clad Freddie painted copious pictures of his hero, his favorite showing the guitar god as an eighteenth-century fashionable dandy. A classmate recalls that Freddie was prone to the giggles. “When that happened, he would put his hand right over his mouth to cover up those huge teeth of his.” A female student remembers Freddie’s shyness. “I can’t remember him being particularly popular with girls. Freddie only stood out because he was one of only two boys in our class. He was terribly quiet and unassuming.”

  Shyness aside, moody, mercurial Freddie gave himself the last name “Mercury” after the mythological messenger of the gods, and sang for two different bands before joining Smile with former dentistry student Roger Taylor and physics student Brian May. Although Freddie and Brian May had lived one hundred yards from each other for eleven years, the two didn’t meet until the group got together! After going through six bassists, the band finally settled on John Deacon as their fourth member in 1971. Freddie then bravely christened the band “Queen.” Years later he told Rolling Stone, “It was a very strong name, very universal and very immediate; it had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it.”

  Shopping for outrageous androgynous garb, Freddie met petite blonde Mary Austin at the super-trendy London boutique Biba, and they lived together for the next seven years. Mary encouraged Freddie’s dramatic flair by teaching him how to tease his hair and apply makeup. She painted his fingernails black, helping to create his tarty early Queen image. Even after Freddie came to terms with his gayness and their romantic relationship was long over, Mary and Freddie remained amazingly close, and when they stopped living together, Freddie bought her a beautiful flat a few minutes from his new home. Their unusual relationship raised eyebrows through the years, but as Freddie lay dying, Mary kept a constant bedside vigil, and it was she who broke the news of Freddie’s death to his distraught parents.

  In 1974 Queen’s third release on EMI, Sheer Heart Attack, included the first of many melodic monster smashes, “Killer Queen,” followed by the groundbreaking album A Night at the Opera. (The permission notice from Groucho Marx read: “I am very pleased that you have named one of your albums after my film and that you are being successful. I would be very happy for you to call your next one after my latest film, The Greatest Hits of the Rolling Stones.” The album’s first single, a seven-minute operatic innovation entitled “Bohemian Rhapsody,” topped the U.K. charts for nine weeks—the longest run since Paul Anka crooned “Diana” back in 1957. The band spent many weeks in the studio with producer Roy Thomas Baker, during which time the song escalated into a grandiose operetta with more than 180 voices while still retaining a ripping rock feel. Despite the critics’ disparaging remarks about pretentious overproduction, “Rhapsody” brought Freddie and Queen to the forefront of the music industry. When the band missed a spot on an important British rock show, “Top of the Pops,” they made a film of themselves singing the song instead, starting a powerful new trend in the music industry—promotional videos.

  Delighting pop audiences with their ingenious musical hat tricks, Queen followed with another album titled after a Marx Brothers film, A Day at the Races, a multilayered, hit-filled extravaganza. Then the band’s next album, News of the World, went platinum in America due to two bravura tracks, “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You,” which became instant anthems in spite of the burgeoning anti-everything punk movement. When Sex Pistol Sid Vicious came across Freddie at Wessex Recording Studios, spewing vitriol and venom (“So you’re this Freddie Platinum bloke that’s supposed to be bringing ballet to the masses”), Freddie had an unruffled response: “Ah, Mr. Ferocious, we’re trying our best, dear.”

  While the Pistols punished their audiences, Queen gave their fans royal pomp and pageantry and held lavish, bacchanalian bashes. Decked out in satin catsuits slit to the waist to reveal a froth of chest hair, fur coats, ballet pumps, and skimpy short shorts, Freddie Mercury epitomized the unstoppable rock-and-roll showman. With twinkling eyes, he once told a journalist with glee, “I like a nice frock.” He was a constant eye-catching vision.

  The release party for Queen’s fourth album, Jazz, was held in New Orleans and featured voluptuous strippers who smoked cigarettes with their vaginas, a dozen black-faced minstrels, dwarfs, snake charmers, and several bosomy blondes who stunned party revelers by peeling off t
heir flimsy costumes to reveal that they were, in fact, well-endowed men. And for the concert launch of Jazz, Queen employed fifty naked girls to cruise Wimbledon Stadium on bicycles.

  Freddie’s campy madcap birthday parties lasted for days and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, featuring fireworks, flamenco dancers, ladies-of-the-night on the house, pills, powders, and vats of the finest alcohol. He once flew eighty friends first class to a Manhattan penthouse suite, where they consumed fifty thousand dollars’ worth of champagne and took copious amounts of drugs, heralding the birth of their most generous rock-star friend. Their host, Freddie Mercury, loved to party and was always on the lookout for Mr. Right (or Mr. Right Now!).

  Certainly Freddie’s nearest and dearest knew he was gay—a fact he never divulged to the outside world, though speculation was always rampant. A man who didn’t like to be alone, Freddie had hundreds of flings and many affairs. On tour he reveled in his stardom, heading directly from headlining stadiums to the town’s gay area, which brought innumerable opportunities for wham-bang sexual encounters. He enjoyed straightforward, uncomplicated, and sometimes rough sex—and lots of it—but often complained of loneliness, especially at night. He enjoyed the idea of a true-blue relationship, but was unable to remain committed for very long. “I’ll go to bed with anything,” he told a friend, “and my bed is so huge it can comfortably sleep six. I prefer my sex without any involvement. There are times when I just lived for sex.” He found New York especially titillating. “When I am there I just slut myself,” he said. “It is Sin City with a capital S.”

  And the man loved to shop. “I love to spend, spend, spend,” he admitted. “After all, that’s what money is there for.” Freddie could spend more in mere moments than many people made in a lifetime. Cartier jewelers in London would stay open after hours so the pop star could shop for gems and gold in peace. He collected Lalique glass and works by Victorian masters and by Russian painter Marc Chagall, but his all-time favorites were Japanese woodcuts. On one short trip to Japan he dropped $375,000 on art and antiques. Freddie’s exquisite twenty-eight-room mansion took almost five years to complete and was a masterwork of taste and extravagance. His ornate bedroom included a balcony with Romanesque columns surrounding his gargantuan bed. Above the bed, which had to be hoisted up to the top floor by a crane, was an immense domed roof hiding hundreds of colored lights designed to change the bedroom’s atmosphere to match Freddie’s moods. “I’m fortunate enough to be rich,” he confessed. “Sometimes I believe the only bit of happiness I can create is with my money.” In the year of his death Freddie created happiness for ten of his friends, spending over a million and a half dollars on homes for them.

  Freddie Mercury dressed like a naughty housewife for Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” video. (SL/LONDON FEATURES INTERNATIONAL)

  In the early eighties, when Freddie exchanged his long locks and androgynous frocks for the macho-man mustachioed leather look, some of Queen’s fans turned on him: Razor blades were hurled onto the stage in protest. But Freddie was attracted to the rough, beefcake kind of man he emulated. When he noticed somebody staring at the bulge in his skintight trousers, he would say, “That’s all my own work. There’s not a Coke bottle stuffed down there or anything.” The backlash was inflamed in 1984 when Freddie dressed as a big-breasted woman for the video “I Want to Break Free.” Still he disputed press reports that he was homosexual. Some of his friends believe Freddie didn’t want to hurt his deeply religious parents; others feel that, as a brilliant businessman, he didn’t want to chance losing his fans with the revelation.

  Queen’s image was further tarnished when they played Sun City in South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott against the racist regime. Though the band stated that they were antiapartheid, the damage had been done in the United States. Still, Queen was massive in other parts of the world, breaking attendance records all over South America and Asia. And in that summer of 1985, when the band took the stage at the Live Aid concert, two billion people were awestruck. “The concert may have come out of a terrible human tragedy,” Freddie said that day, “but we wanted to make it a joyous occasion.” The newspaper headlines reflected the crowd’s reaction: QUEEN ARE KING! The show’s organizer, Bob Geldof, concurred: “Queen were absolutely the best band of the day, whatever your personal preference.”

  But sometime in 1985 Freddie must have found out he had AIDS. He stopped carousing and became more guarded than ever, spending a lot of time at home with close confidants. Queen’s final concert was at Knebworth Park in 1986, though Freddie continued to write and record until six weeks before his death. He even collaborated with Spanish opera diva Montserrat Caballe, which resulted in another hit album, Barcelona, in 1988.

  The AIDS rumors started after Freddie had a blood test at a Harley Street clinic, which he vehemently denied. “Does it look as if I’m dying?” He told reporters that his nights of crazy partying had come to an end because he was forty years old, finally growing up, and “no longer a spring chicken.” In spite of his pale and haggard appearance, his Queen colleagues also kept up the facade. The band members weren’t even told of Freddie’s illness until a few months before his death. After he collected an award with Queen in 1990, standing back meekly as Brian May made the acceptance speech, Freddie Mercury sightings became rare indeed.

  Nine months before his death, a pale and ravaged Freddie turned up at Wembley TV studios to work on a video for the band’s newest single, “I’m Going Slightly Mad.” The crew were told that the singer was having problems with his knee and would have to “take it easy.” A bed was installed in his dressing room, guarded by two security men. Freddie disguised his facial sores with thick white stage makeup and donned a black fright wig, plumping up his emaciated body by wearing clothing under his black suit. He wasn’t fooling anybody.

  During his final months, Freddie was taken care of by his former girlfriend, Mary Austin. Though his doctors tried to comfort him, Freddie suffered from pneumonia, severe body aches, Kaposi’s sarcoma, and bouts of blindness. He used painkillers constantly but never complained of the pain. Many of his intimates came and went as the months went by, but it was only Dave Clark, former sixties idol and dear friend, who was by his bedside at the end. “He didn’t say anything. He just went to sleep and passed on. It was very peaceful. He was a rare person, as unique as a painting. I know he has gone to a much better place.”

  Mary Austin said that despite the agony he was going through, Freddie Mercury had no regrets.

  A few weeks earlier Freddie had made the decision to rerelease “Bohemian Rhapsody” and donate the proceeds to AIDS charities. Just six days after the song came out, it went to number one, ultimately making more than $1.5 million for AIDS. Mary Austin revealed that Freddie had secretly given away millions to AIDS charities in the months before his death. But that wasn’t enough for a lot of people.

  Many in the rock world accused Freddie of cowardice by making the decision to keep his affliction a secret. They felt that by not admitting the truth, the flamboyant singer made gayness and AIDS something to be ashamed of. When his will was published in May 1992 and there were no bequests to AIDS charities, the controversy continued. When Mary Austin received the bulk of Freddie’s fortune, she vowed to donate part of the money for AIDS research.

  “I think the fact that he was so beloved,” David Bowie said of Freddie, “straight or gay, will focus some people on the fact that AIDS knows no boundaries:” Bowie also said he always admired a man who wears tights.

  Six months after their singer succumbed to AIDS, the remaining members of Queen gathered a phalanx of stars to pay tribute to Freddie Mercury and raise money for AIDS research. Guns N’ Roses, David Bowie, George Michael, and Freddie’s close friend Elton John sang Queen songs to the gigantic teary-eyed crowd who wore red AIDS ribbons to show their support. Despite claims that seven and a half million dollars would be raised for AIDS charities, it was finally revealed that, due to the costs of staging the massive
show and providing hotels and limos for the stars and their entourages, the concert made only a modest profit.

  There is still no memorial for Freddie Mercury. His ashes haven’t been scattered because officials in Freddie’s borough of Kensington haven’t decided whether he will be allowed a memorial. Said council leader John Hanham, “We do not want a problem like the Paris authorities have with Jim Morrison’s grave. And it can’t be like Elvis Presley’s shrine in America. You have to admit that Memphis is rather different from Kensington High Street.”

  SAM COOKE

  A Change Is Gonna Come

  The divine Sam Cooke in his prime. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/ VENICE, CALIF.)

  My favorite living singer is Terence Trent D’Arby. My favorite singer of all time is Sam Cooke. He is also Terence’s favorite singer. A lot of people feel that way about Sam. Rod Stewart claims Sam inspired him so deeply that he spent two years listening only to his music. “Sam Cooke is somebody other singers have to measure themselves against,” said Keith Richards, “and most of them go back to pumping gas.” Legendary record producer Jerry Wexler called Sam “the best singer who ever lived. No contest. I mean nobody can touch Sam Cooke … . Everything about him was perfection. A perfect case.”

  Sam Cooke was among the first ten inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Elvis, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. Four years before his fatal plane crash, Otis Redding told a reporter that he wanted “to fill the silent void caused by Sam Cooke’s death.”

  Last year ABKCO released the music from Sam’s own SAR label—a collection of gospel, pop, and soul that includes Sam’s former gospel group the Soul Stirrers, Johnnie Taylor, and the Womack Brothers, along with a few previously unreleased tracks by Sam himself. “Somewhere There’s a Girl” is the most inspirational, magnificent, soul-expanding vocal performance I have ever heard in my entire life. The song puts me into a state of prayer and gratitude, reminding me just how transcendent a human voice can be—and how far it can take you. Over thirty years ago Sam Cooke was shot down under very seedy, shadowy circumstances, his glorious voice silenced by a bullet to the heart. How did the well-mannered preacher’s son, the Jesus-shouting soul stirrer, wind up in a sleazy three-dollar motel room on the dark side of town, with a shady lady of the night?