From God Save My Queen Daniel Nester

The Game

 

Play The Game

 

Look for sparseness, a non-natural sameness. Restraint exposes only the strongest. Freddie advises drag queens to do “only half” what they want to do onstage. Finally taking one’s own hindrance to heart.

 

The lost Andy Gibb backing track, legendarily uninteresting. Hounding melody in the classic style, following another’s lead. Perhaps the first true Munich session, he wears the tight pants of another.[1]

 

“The first appearance of a synthesizer (an Oberheim OBX) on a Queen album.”

 

Dragon Attack

 

We return to Medieval, the vile mustached dame, for allusions and the first backwards masking. I avoid and regard as “too hard” for a 10-year-old’s ears, mounted on an odd-shaped bicycle, intently scribbled in a journal.

 

Its live interspersing—lamentable. Anyway, running up and down four frets whoops ass, an entry into the Skinny Tie Pop Sweepstakes.[2] Snow Plow, one says. Chicago Hot Plate, says another.

 

The Teutonic tea-makers must have flipped out. Totally.

 

Another One Bites The Dust

 

Every man runs the same line, tries real hard to see how it would have all crashed down, which it most certainly does. Another defeated genre, another wide-eyed and wide-tied analyst.

 

But this man completely hates metronomic duties as he fills another’s coffers—at least that’s what I’m thinking right now, the speaker thinks. So they go skiing together, and everything will be OK.[3]

 

Another firearm-themed ditty, Michael Jackson’s disco business advice.[4]

 

Need Your Loving Tonight

 

This decadence of pari passu could have been a massive misnomer. In point of fact, we understand each other, people, we are actually talking to each other. There’s a Spirit there, between us, expanding.

 

One of the best middle eights in recorded history lands square in the crotch of two number ones. So in a sense, it’s the ultimate bridge, a Conway Twitty freakout, and could we please enjoy ourselves now?

 

More complicated than it sounds, sitting here explaining this to you. Tonight.

 

Crazy Little Thing Called Love[5]

 

Never performed as understated again. Simply couldn’t be done. It has to be fleshed out, it just does, as the nothing redness takes the helm—entry-level trivia—henceforth back to curly and fuzzy.

 

Hard to think of them being so young. Emeritus appearance on NBC,[6] Frogger T-shirt, corporate logo jacket—innocent then, before LA and marriage trouble, a best friend ending. Nothing planned or payola-complaining.

 

Backwards masking: “Satan, I love you, I love you, Satan.”

 

Rock It (Prime Jive)

 

Roger’s letter to Dave Marsh—or do I conflate two bad Rolling Stone notices?—either way, fuckwad, I write my own letter to you on a barf bag, on a first-class transatlantic flight. No more eavesdrops on soundchecks, fatso.

 

“You call us the “first fascist rock band.”  And you’re right, of course. But that’s the fucking beauty of it—rock is Catholicism, it gets people to raise their fists. Everything is chiseled and uniform here.

 

And unlike you, Dave Marsh, I am alive, I am on top of a Blue Mountain.

 

 

Don’t Try Suicide

 

Really the way I could have been, alone in a room. Gimme a clue from the checkerboard ticket scalper.[7] An understudy trundles out the swishy s-sounds in the studio, sounds sincere with a jets-and-sharks whistle.

 

Outsider art gospel chords and small handclaps manhandled by a bespectacled German producer, his countenance overwhelmed even by this throwaway. Everything is chiseled, every snap sizzles.

 

Only mention of “tits.” Diminutive, fretless bass?

 

Sail Away Sweet Sister

 

Is it an emotional mariachi who pops? Tonight? A sibling three-? The Pointer Sisters, matriarchs recognize their excellence of this, their list of harmonized moments, and begin here, exactly here.[8]

 

John sports chops, Birdman, keeps it down.

 

Coming Soon

 

The best Rod Stewart single of the early 1980s—or the biker-jacketed summer of ’79. Check out the new digs, have a vodka—I’ve a song I’d like to play for you. Canada never got to be that fun, anyway.

 

Making our way though New York, two chilling MacGuffins, two chords destined to intermingle. And I’m air-guitaring in the mirror, our spirals in fine voice—some places crumble, others remain, and here we are, black-and-white quartet.

 

“Out with the boys.”[9]

Save Me

 

I thought of Kim O. on the beach, and reflected on my life, my loss. And also the sequence, how we always end with ballads. Begin with the rocker, place mid-tempos in between. Take them on a trip.

 

Reading a hired hack write about the genesis of this single, its impending failure. A dove in the video, shitting on Freddie’s arms. Things were never better than this. Even those dark days of Munich make sense, light up my boring life.

 

Kim O., Kim O., How soon things would change. How I miss her still.[10]