You love clapping along with Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and “Another One Bites the Dust” at sporting events. Your favorite scene in “Wayne’s World” is when Mike Myers and Dana Carvey take a drive with “Bohemian Rhapsody” blasting from the car speakers.
You won’t want to miss The Music of Queen at the Grand Rapids Symphony’s 2016 D&W Fresh Market Picnic Pops, coming to Cannonsburg Ski Area on Thursday and Friday.
Jeans 'n Classics joins the Grand Rapids Symphony in a salute to Queen's biggest hits, from "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" to "We Are The Champions" at Cannonsburg Ski Area on July 21-22.
Pianist Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor blended progressive rock and heavy metal with glam rock and operatic camp released 18 No. 1 albums and sold more than 150 albums since the group was launched in 1970.
You may know their music, but you may not know everything about the band elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001
10 Facts You May Not Know about Queen:
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Freddie Mercury, who studied art and graphic design at Ealing Art College, designed the Queen emblem.
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Mercury also came up with the name “Queen” for the band, calling “a strong name, very universal and immediate” and “open to all sorts of interpretations.”
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All four members of Queen were well-educated, and at least two were geeks as well. Guitarist Brian May, who earned his Ph.D in astrophysics in 2007, built his own guitar. Bassist John Deacon was an electronics engineer who built some of the band’s equipment including its trademark Deacy Amplifiers.
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Queen not only recorded 18 chart-topping singles, every member of the band wrote at least one of the 18 singles.
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“Another One Bites the Dust” never was meant to be a single until Michael Jackson caught a performance in Los Angeles and convinced Queen to issue it as a single.
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Mercury owned as many as 10 cats, dedicating an album and a song – “Mr. Bad Guy” – to his feline friends.
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Mercury’s familiar mic stand stick – a microphone with the upper half of the stand but not the lower half – happened by accident. When his mic stand snapped in two during a performance early in Queen's career, Mercury carried on with the show and discovered he liked the unusual arrangement.
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Queen won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution in 1990. All four members of the band came to the stage to accept the award. It was Mercury's last appearance in front of an audience before his death in 1991 from AIDS-complicated pneumonia.
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Freddie Mercury's birth name was Farrokh Bulsara. He and his family were Parsi, originally from India, who practiced the Zoroastrian religion. He legally changed his name to Freddie Mercury around 1970 when Queen was formed.
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When asked what one of Queen's most famous songs, “Bohemian Rhapsody” meant, Mercury replied, "It bears no real meaning. It's all rhyming nonsense."