I recently found an article from The Telegraaf (a Dutch newspaper) about the 31-10-78 New Orleans concert and the Jazz album launch & press conference, written almost forty years ago by the late music journalist Jip Golsteijn (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jip_Golsteijn). It contains quite interesting details so I’ve decided to translate it for you. The comments between brackets are mine. Enjoy! :)
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Freddie Mercury: “Queen has nothing to say, but we say it so beautifully!”
By Jip Golsteijn
On the bed lie two balloons, a mask, a handful of confetti, and a note: “Queen invites you to a Halloween Party in the Ballroom Suite of the Fairmont Hotel. The party begins at eleven o’clock and will last until everybody has collapsed. If you want to come dressed up, we can recommend the following address…”
Halloween, a partly pagan, partly Christian celebration on the eve of All Hallows’ Day, is vaguely similar to our St. Martin’s Day. Children go from house to house to beg for candy, their parents become drunk elsewhere in the city, dressed up unrecognizable.
In a city like New Orleans, trained in celebrating carnival, something like that goes not unnoticed. Of the 10.000 persons who crowd the Auditorium, a quarter is dressed up as gorilla, voodoo-doctor, witch, nun, clown, or 18th century preacher, so your reporter – who has a certain fame in the Netherlands for his Wehkamp [a cheap mail order company] look – begins to feel like the only madman in an otherwise perfectly sane world. But the extravagance in the hall is amply surpassed by that on the stage when Queen has, after some delay, finally arrived there.
Perfected
The show has been considerably refined since I saw the group in the company of thousands of drunk American soldiers in Frankfurt less than a year ago. The stage which has been taken along is twice as large, so Brian May and Freddie Mercury don’t have to meet each other if they wish to.
The light used by Queen is more than adequate to magically transform the far side of the moon into a pleasant artificial village. A complicated system of stairs, equipped with a battery of floodlights that operates independently from the stage lighting, leads to Roger Taylor’s throne which is encased around by the percussion instruments.
The simplest part of a Queen concert, the traditional acoustic set, is in itself an impressive show of strength. For exactly two songs an extra stage sinks down, seven meters broad and twenty-five meters long. For the one small refrain that Taylor can’t handle with only the tambourin, a special drum kit is put together. And Freddie Mercury changes his costume yet one more time…
But the fact remains that it works. After two hours and three encores the 10.000 in the Auditorium are standing on the seats and if they don’t have switched on the audience lights by now they are still standing there.
* * * *
Queen themselves would have liked to see the Ballroom Suite converted into a velodrome where the guests could have raced around to their hearts content and the management of the Fairmont Hotel would have gladly agreed if the police had not forbidden it. Now, cycling only takes place on the two gigantic screens, on which footage is continuously shown of a bicycle race with fifty-five nude girls organized by Queen in the summer for a poster. Total costs of this event: 15.000 dollar. This because of putting together a potential leading group from a number of English top models and a system of watertight security measures to keep unwanted visitors out of the stadium.
No Risk
The Halloween Party is outsourced to an independent publicity agency that has taken no risk with regard to useful entertainment and general amusement. The food is piled so high that the Sahel may be a year out of trouble if it could be shipped out by the Tor[re]y Canyon [a large oil tanker], the stream of booze impresses more than the nearby Missisippi, and as soon as the dance floor and the stage are in danger of becoming somewhat less crowded they are occupied by an army of strippers.
Queen, marched inside the Ballroom Suite behind a jazz band, leave after a short while, likely “not amused” by a representative from the recording industry who welcomes the men warmly, but mixes up their surnames. For a small quarter of an hour, Freddie Mercury is standing at the back of the immense room, gloomily taking in the event. Brian May shows himself for a short time on the floor around half past four in the morning. By then, a curious diverging of opinions has taken place. The Americans were greatly amusing themselves, the Europeans are baffled by so much tastelessness and went disappointed (“It’s not their style!”) to their luxurious rooms, elsewhere in the hotel.
The day after the evening before. A lunch and press conference in a French restaurant in the Rue Royal[e]. The group arrives late, a wise decision, because they would no more appreciate, as one may fear, the roasted potato in cream and the Eggs Benedictine than the majority of the media people present. Around fifty persons are squeezed into a small side room. Lights of TV crews are increasing the temperature up to more than the subtropical values measured outside.
The “reception” is at first a frustrating affair. Spanish, Argentinian and Brazilian journalists ask, assisted by translators who barely speak English, questions in their mother tongue for which even a contributor of Muziek Express [a Dutch music magazine] in 1965 would be fired on the grounds of extreme incompetence. What is their favorite color? What type of girl they like the most (Mercury: “You are surely not talking to me?”). What influences have they underwent (Taylor: “The one of my mother was rather [stifling?] when I was around three years old”)? One of the Argentinians even asks the men casually if they can each tell the most interesting facts about themselves. At that moment, the group intervenes professionally. Brian May promises to send a biography to the South-Americans and invites the British, Scandinavian and Dutch representatives to come closer, because otherwise it’s “in danger of becoming very formal.” A master stroke, because with only a table full of drinks between us we are able to isolate the media from four different continents from the happening. In this way, we can write down quite a lot of information about the new Queen LP Jazz (hence New Orleans).
* * * *
Roger Taylor: “We have named the album Jazz because of different reasons, but to none of them special importance should be attached. We have recorded it partly in Montreux, which is traditionally rather associated with jazz due to the festival. Furthermore, “jazz” means “mishmash”, which seemed quite nice to us after all those pompous titles”.
Brian May: “We will probably never lose the reputation of exaggerating everything, how modestly we would choose our titles. Of course: in a time where everything has to be simpler and cheaper, Queen is becoming more complicated and expensive in everything. Again and again, we come up independently with things that make the whole more perfect or attract even more attention for ambitious projects, but this becomes an increasingly costlier affair. We are already near the maximum of what is financially possible.
Break Even
For example, we will be fortunate if we break even during this American tour. We have 48 people on the payroll, none of them could be missed and each one of them earns significantly more than the average educated American worker”.
Freddie Mercury: “Since we manage ourselves, we have become very conscious of these things. In those nine months, I have learned more than in all the previous years as a professional musician.
Just as I learned more from self-producing than closely watching somebody else for years. The reason that we worked again with Roy Thomas Baker is that we are able to realize top sellers ourselves. News o
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