Spiderbite

My parents (my Dad especially...I think I Mom just went along because she didn't want to anger him) would go through periods of this the entire time I was growing up.

Some stuff would be okay (say a James Bond movie called Octopussy) but a Def Leppard album would be satanic or sinful.

Early Beatles okay. Late Beatles bad.

It was hard to keep up with the attitude of the day at my house sometimes.

I think more of it had to do with what my Dad liked. He loved James Bond so it was okay. He hated modern day rock music so it was bad. Disney World bad. Disney animated movies okay.

It was certainly strange and I think my Dad would even admit today that he went off the deep end several times when I was growing up.

printerati

Alabama.

BobO'Link

While they have superb musicianship and good songwriting skills they are, IMHO, more a "Pop Rock" band, which *is* "Rock" in the truest sense of the word. When I say "Rock" I mean "Hard Rock" which, again IMHO, Queen is not.

Spiderbite

I would have considered them hard rock up until "Jazz." And even Jazz and the albums that followed have some "hard rockers." But they have such a variable sound from song to song that I can see why some people wouldn't consider them "hard rock." They almost defy classification if you as me.

hdnmickey

Given how much people were very recently praising Bowie for changing up his sound, it's humorous to see people railing on Queen for doing so. Especially since one of their better songs is actually with Bowie, and a prime example of them changing things up on almost every album.

Supermallet

I guess you haven't heard their first six albums then. Queen rocked as hard as anybody, but they also did more than hard rock. Did Kiss become not hard rockers when they released Dynasty? Were The Rolling Stones not hard rockers because they released "Angie"?

BobO'Link

Yes, I have. I own copies of them and enjoy most of it.
No, they really didn't, but they *are* a musically diverse group, which is why I own their output up to "The Game." If I were to place a more distinctive label on them it'd be more Art and/or Glam Rock than Hard Rock.
Kiss has *always* been "teeny bopper" rock. They were never taken seriously or played by any AOR or "Hard Rock" station I've ever listened to.
Not applicable. Almost *all* "hard" rock acts have released ballads or softer material, some of it quite good, but still not "hard rock" songs in spite of the groups material in general being hard rock. Classifying a band as hard rock is primarily based on song plays on AOR and/or Hard Rock stations. A venue which didn't play, at least around here, material from Queen *or* Kiss.

Damfino

After reading this thread, I guess Queen's appeal might have been slightly regional. I was still in LA at the time, so I do remember this show, I didn't go, but some friends of mine did.

To answer the OP, yes Queen was that big in the 70s. At least in California.

hdnmickey

Sorry your area is different, because both Queen and Kiss get played on the AOR/Hard Rock stations here. Always have, probably always will until the stations cease to exist. That includes most of the tracks on this Queen compilation disc and other album tracks from the both Queen and Kiss' first few albums.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Rocks

Hokeyboy

The day Brighton Rock is not hard rock is the day mankind flies to the moon in a vehicle powered by cabbage farts.

morriscroy

(Without going heavily into politics/religion).

In practice, I've found that various older extended family members who subscribed to similar attitudes/philosophies, were largely using it as a lazy shorthand to rationalize and justify their own personal opinions and tastes.

Whether they actually truly believed anything an outside "authority" actually said (whether it was Reagan, Falwell, Carter, Thatcher, their local pastor, etc ...), was a completely different matter.

Quite a few of them when I visited them on their deadbeds shortly before they passed away, eventually admitted most of the "moral majority" stuff was just an easy way to control us "out of control" kids when we were growing up. They knew it was largely BS all along.

Paff

Another thing to consider is the era. Rock did not switch from the Beatles-esque sounds of the 60s to the harder rock sounds of the 70s on January 1 1970. There's a transition phase that takes several years. So even if songs like You're My Best Friend are pretty mellow and poppy, and bands like Iggy and the Stooges, MC5, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, et al were experimenting with sounds that we associate with "heavy metal" nowadays, Queen was still a rocking band for their time. So yeah, Queen was always considered "rock".

And the poster who said that music fans of the time didn't know Freddie Mercury was gay, yes on that too. Back then, people couldn't imagine that anyone into rock could possibly be gay. Seems ludicrous now, but it was true. Even in the 90s, I was having an argument with a co-worker. There was a discussion back then of a radio station that was going to dedicate their airtime 100% to gay/lesbian artists. He said "they won't have a lot to pick from, and sure as hell won't be any hard rock on there". I asked him what he thought the gay kids in his high school were into, and he said, "oh, stuff like music, band, drama". You should have seen the look on his face when he put two and two together...

jgorow

I always thought queen rocked hard and that freddie mercury had an incredible stage presence, in adition to the great voice, when he took to the stage he always knew how to work an audience and "own" the stage, he was in his element, the true definition of "rock star". but, what really amazed my friends and i, growing up in the 70s was brian may's guitar sound, the sound he got out of his guitar, most people actually thought was coming from a synthesizer. if you look at the back covers of all of the queen albums before "the game", it said right on the album cover "no synths!!". they never used a synthesizer until the album "the game"

Supermallet

So why deny what your ears are hearing?

Okay, maybe they didn't rock as hard as The Stooges or King Diamond, but neither of those artists are hard rock either. It's telling that Metallica covered "Stone Cold Crazy" and Trent Reznor used to listen to Queen II on the NIN tour bus.

There's really nothing about Kiss that makes them more "teeny bopper" than most other hard rock acts. And songs like "Love Gun", "Black Diamond", and "Rock Bottom" (among many, many, many others) is evidence that they were in fact hard rockers.

I'm basing it on how the music sounds. I don't care what the radio in your area did or didn't play.

statcat

I see every person in this thread writing that Freddie was homosexual. He was bisexual. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure he didn't start seeing men until the later 70s? I know he left most of his money to Mary Austin who he considered the love of his life.

Why So Blu?

Yup. Hell, you can even watch their Winterland performance of 1975 and that show features songs form their first two albums and they're hard as fuck. Got To Choose and Parasite sound phenomenal.

EddieMoney

Anyone who says Queen is not hard rock is doing hard drugs.

wendersfan

Queen were never a cool band.

cungar

Changing things up does not always equal getting better.

hdnmickey

But "better" in that regard is always going to be different for each person. That goes for both Bowie and Queen (and KISS and very other band that does anything other than put out more of the same).

Supermallet

Oh, I also wanted to address this. AC/DC has never released a ballad or softer song, so that means they're the only hard rock band to ever had existed.

Or, more reasonably, a band can have more than one dimension to them and still be hard rock. Your delineations that Queen and Kiss aren't hard rock but other bands are despite doing songs that clearly aren't hard rock is both arbitrary and silly.

SatoshiNak

I never did get into Queen although they had a couple songs I thought were great, Bicycle and songs like Queen Killer just killed it for me - that and then I had an ex girlfriend that loved the band and would play those songs to death...I always thought May was a great guitarist and Mercury a great vocalist. As a kid in the 70s I remember after News of the World came out you'd go into U-Totem's and see posters of that album and Star Wars next to each other, I always thought that was odd but I guess the band had gotten pretty big during that time with We Will Rock You and We Are the champions getting so big.

Josh-da-man

rbrown498

I first heard "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the radio when it was first released. I was in junior high, and I had never heard anything like it. I bought the single (hey, this was in my pre-able-to-get-an-afterschool-job days when money was really scarce) and played it nonstop. In fact, I pretty much wore it out and ended up buying a second copy of the single. My best friend and I became what had to be the two biggest Queen fans in Mississippi. I was absolutely floored when a classmate casually mentioned that his uncle was the head of the worldwide Queen fan club in London. I finally got enough money to buy A Night at the Opera, and my best friend and I listened to it over and over, discussing the lyrics, picking out melodies (him on his guitar and me on the piano), and generally obsessing over all things Queen. We bought the issue of Creem magazine (remember THAT?) that had a cover article promising a track-by-track analysis of A Day at the Races. We raced to see who could buy all of their back catalog first (he won, as I never bought a copy of their first album on vinyl). After talking my dad into taking me to the record store for my birthday to get Sheer Heart Attack, he took one look at the album cover and asked why I was "listening to those queers." After explaining that all of them were either married or had girlfriends, I never had another thought that any of them could POSSIBLY be gay...until Freddie died. I took A Night at the Opera to school to listen to in band study hall, and it tended to appear on any turntable that I happened to be near.

So, yeah, they were popular in the Deep South, of all places, as Spiderbite has mentioned. Other bands that were popular with my peers and me at the time? Boston, Blue Oyster Cult, Alice Cooper, and Head East.

statcat

also Love Song