How the first song Queen ever played became a classic rock anthem in 1974
A lot of the time, the way rock bands form is fairly serendipitous, as the minute they start playing together, it’s evident things are going to work out.
It took a while for the members of Led Zeppelin to finally find each other, but when they did, it was obvious they were going to be an exceptional band. Jimmy Page previously knew about John Paul Jones, and then found out about Robert Plant and John Bonham through word on the street. A few phone calls and conversations, and suddenly they’re in a basement room, covering The Yardbirds, and blowing their own minds with how good everyone sounded.
“We first played together in a small room on Gerrard Street, a basement room, which is now Chinatown,” recalled John Paul Jones, “There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door, and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other: ‘What shall we play?’ Me doing more sessions didn’t know anything at all.”
He continued, “There was an old Yardbirds tune […] Called ‘Train Kept a Rollin’… The whole room just exploded”.
That live sound was taken to crowds across the world, one of which had a young Freddie Mercury, not yet a member of Queen, but very much aware of the fact that he wanted to be a singer. When Mercury first saw Led Zeppelin, he was a fan of Smile (Queen before Queen was a thing), and had asked them to be their singer, but to no avail, and was instead playing in a band called Ibex.
When he saw Zeppelin, he was so blown away by how encapsulating their hard rock sound was that he went to Ibex and tried to convince them to change their name to Wreckage, and it was also during this period that he wrote the song ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, a track that would eventually feature on Queen’s third record.
Mercury joined Smile in 1970, and the first port of call was to convince them to change their name to Queen; his second port of call was to show them the song ‘Stone Cold Crazy’. “‘Stone Cold Crazy’ was one of Freddie’s frenetic ideas,” recalled Brian May when hearing the early stages of the track, “But the original was much slower”.
The band played their first gig at Truro City Hall and performed a banging rendition of ‘Stone Cold Crazy’. It wasn’t their best song, not by a long shot, but it encapsulated the flamboyant essence of Queen that listeners would soon fall in love with. Despite playing in front of such a small crowd, Freddie Mercury strutted around like he owned the place, and blurted these haphazard lyrics in a manner which onlookers were totally unfamiliar with. Roger Taylor from the band commented, “He sounded like a rather powerful bleating sheep”.
The track wouldn’t officially be released until their third album, and it eventually became a bit of a Queen classic. Sure, it might make no sense, but that hard riff and the hard-to-decipher lyrics paved the way for some of Queen’s other fantabulous hits that they would continue churning out in the ‘70s.
