F&M Discarded Scenes - #3

Here’s another set of pages that I wrote and drew for Freddie & Me, but ultimately decided not to use. This is actually a fairly lengthy set – possibly the longest sequence to get cut, aside from those imagined conversations between Freddie Mercury and Brian May, which I’ve posted a couple of times before.

This material was supposed to be the beginning of the third main section of the book, “Hard Rock”, which was set in 2002, and centered on me meeting my future wife, Aliza, and a trip that we took together to Rome that summer. These pages are actually sort of a rough draft of sorts – a lot of the scenes and ideas that I toss around here, were re-drawn into the sequence that I used in the final book.

I am pretty sure I’ve said before that the 2002 and later material was actually the toughest for me to write, mainly because, just like with actual History, it’s sometimes hard to have any perspective on things that happened in the more recent past. Unlike the parts of the book that took place in my childhood or teenage years, it wasn’t immediately clear to me how to present myself or the people around me. Writing about my relationship with Aliza was especially tough – and I think these pages kind of reveal that. Instead of being a sustained narrative, like other parts of the book, this sequence is more like a cliffs-notes kind of bullet-point thing, where I’m basically just depicting random memories about our first few months of dating as they come to me.

Another concept which I attempted to introduce here, but didn't really go anywhere, was about autobiography in music. I established that Aliza was into hip-hop/R&B, and I wanted to talk a little about how a lot of that music is much more lyrically autobiographical than most Classic Rock. There aren't many Queen songs where Freddie talks about his actual specific life, but there are a ton of Kanye West ones where he does.