Savior Of The Universe
Okay, so maybe that's the most hyperbolic, cliched way to start a conversation. But in a way, becoming a fan of music, as opposed to a casual listener, did sort of save me. It saved me from boredom. It saved me from being culturally isolated. (It did not save me from spending money, however, as my credit card bills would attest.)
Entering high school in August of 1980, music was still just an afterthought, something that I heard in passing. Sure, there were songs from my youth that I liked... a combination of what my Mom listened to, and things that cropped up on the radio when we were in the car. But because my parents weren't very pop-cultured, and I had no older sibling from whom to absorb influences, and I was the only kid my age in my neighborhood, my musical taste hadn't gelled in any real way. Musically, I was a blank slate.
Then I met Tom.
In my ninth grade Social Studies class, Kevin, my friend from middle school (who died of cancer a few years ago... time is short, my friends... don't take it for granted) introduced me to his friend Tom. Tom was a quiet, unassuming guy. But a few days spent interacting with him revealed a funny, smart dude who was almost my lost soulmate. Tom loved movies. He was artistic. And he was the first person I'd met in ages who also loved comic books like I did.
But Tom was a little more plugged in to pop-culture-at-large than I was. Specifically, he had a broader musical exposure than I did. And thanks to this musical maturity, he introduced me to the band that would change (or maybe save?) my life...
...QUEEN.
Dear Jebus, Queen blew my mind. The first time I went over to Tom's mom's apartment, he played for me his double-A single of "Fat Bottomed Girls" and "Bicycle Race". Then he went on to play tracks off of The Game and A Night At The Opera. I was hooked. I mean, slavishly and forever hooked. Over the next couple of months we dug into News Of The World and Queen II. Our every waking moment together, in and out of school, involved obsessing over Queen like a couple of teenyboppers.
So imagine how psyched we were when we discovered that Queen were providing the soundtrack for the upcoming Flash Gordon movie! I'd missed the debut of "Bohemian Rhapsody". I'd missed the success of The Game. I'd missed seeing Queen live in my area by a few scant weeks. (To this day, not seeing Freddie Mercury live is one of my biggest disappointments.) But here was my chance to experience another Queen milestone, an actual soundtrack to a big-budget science-fiction movie!
December finally arrived, and off we went to the theater. I honestly can't recall if we saw it the first weekend, but we definitely went during the first week. (And a few more times after that.) As cool as the visuals were, Tom and I concentrated more on the soundtrack. We bounced out of the theater reciting dialog and recalling our favorite bits.
And of course, we were geeking out over the music. Freddie and Brian were noticeable all over the soundtrack. Guitars chimed. Drums thundered. Synth lines soared. All the various songs and instrumentals were a perfect complement to the Technicolor imagery on the screen.
To me, this was a big deal: the first new music released by Queen since they became my favorite band. After years of casual fandom, I was now one of the devoted flock.
A few days later, while doing my homework, I was lucky enough to tape the title track, "Flash's Theme", off the local rock station. I listened to it over and over and over and over and over. The pulsing drumbeat, the crashes of lightning, the unmistakable wail of Brian May's Red Special guitar, the powerful vocals... WOW. And they folded in sound bites from the movie!
This anthemic theme song was like nothing I'd ever heard before. And it made me desperate to own the entire suite of music. So I harangued my poor mother, until she bundled us into the Chevy Impala and headed to K-Mart... just to buy Flash Gordon.
If I'd only had a ring like this, high school would've been so much more fun...
Excited beyond words, I yanked the album out of the rack and ran to the register. The total with tax came to something like $7.47. Despite not really having an allowance, I had cobbled together somewhere in the neighborhood of eight bucks, all in crumpled bills and loose coins. I thought I'd help the cashier by giving her "exact change". But I was so discombobulated by my geeky enthusiasm, instead of giving her seven in bills and forty-seven in change, I gave her all eight bucks. Which meant, after a few moments of her trying to figure out what this bowl-haircut-sporting dope was thinking, she had to hand back fifty-three cents. Which completely invalidated trying to help her not have to give me change. To this day, when I see the Flash Gordon album cover, I remember that embarrassing moment. (Ah, developmentally stunted youth. How I miss you.)
Once we got home, I commandeered our big Fisher console record player, and proceeded to spin Flash Gordon incessantly for weeks. Those weeks bled into months. I tortured my family with my new obsession. It didn't help matters that Tom gave me Queen's self-titled first album for Christmas, and a tape of his "Fat Bottomed Girls"/"Bicycle Race" single. So in my house it was all Queen, all the time, well into the spring.
Sometimes soundtrack albums don't work. As individual pieces of orchestral music, they can lack the power they create when they're paired with the visuals. But Flash Gordon is different. Being a mix of songs, instrumentals, and movie clips, it's more than just an album, it's an "audio movie". Since I was a kid in the olden days before "owning a movie" was an affordable thing, my only options for experiencing Flash Gordon at home were twofold: one, renting the tape from a video store (and the VCR, in a big armored case that could have sheltered the Tesseract); or, two, putting on some headphones and listening to the soundtrack in our rec room for the umpteenth time. Guess which option I chose on a regular basis? Even if you haven't seen the movie, you can get the meat of the story through a spin of the album.
And Flash Gordon stands apart from the Queen discography as one of their most stylistically diverse albums. There are pop songs ("Flash's Theme"), rock blowouts ("Battle Theme", "The Hero"), goofy synth pop jams ("Football Fight"), oddly affecting and haunting instrumentals ("The Kiss", "Escape From The Swamp"), and a Brian May arrangement of "The Wedding March" done on guitar. (I would have used it myself if I weren't afraid my lovely wife-to-be would have killed me.) The only other modern soundtrack I can compare it to is Prince's Parade, which was also an amazingly stylistically diverse album wedded to a critically maligned motion picture, Under The Cherry Moon.
Unfortunately, here in America, neither the film, nor the soundtrack, were big hits. But so what? So what if Flash Gordon didn't win Best Picture at the Oscars? So what if "Flash's Theme" didn't top the Billboard chart for 1980? Tom and I didn't care what the public thought. No matter what opinion people had regarding the quality of the film, we refused to accept any criticism of Flash Gordon that doesn't declare it the greatest soundtrack album ever recorded.
Me (on the left) and Tom on a freshman science class field trip in 1981. We were just kids!
August of 2020 marked forty years since I met Tom. And despite some ups and downs, we're still friends to this day. We still love Queen. We still flip out any time we see some new Flash Gordon artwork or merchandise. What can I say? We're fans!
However, as the years have passed (and oh so many years they've been), I've found myself listening to Flash Gordon the album less and less. I revisit the movie once or twice a year, but my temperament has changed such that when it comes to the soundtrack, I'd rather pop through to my favorite tracks, like "Battle Theme" and "The Hero" and that incredible theme song. But I rarely sit through the entire album in one go.
That being said, it's still a potent memory. One look at the cover, and I'm fourteen years old again, sitting in Tom's bedroom, listening to records, and copying the Frank Kelly Freas robot from the News Of The World cover. To some, Flash Gordon was just a mediocre collection of songs from a band that had crested their peak. But to me, it was a key that unlocked a door I walked through happily.
Maybe Flash Gordon didn't save your life. But it sure saved mine.
"Yeah"? More like HELL YEAH! Am I right?!?
(A different version of this article, edited by Brandon Marcus, was originally published on Trouble.City.)