Join Eric as he delves into the enthralling journey of the iconic rock band Queen during their time with the Disney-owned record label, Hollywood Records. Freddie Mercury and Brian May helped shape a sound that led the band to Super Stardom. Explore how Disney CEO, Michael Eisner's wish to own a record label for Disney led to Queen's collaboration with the label and the first time release of some of their biggest hits on CD. Queen's partnership with Hollywood Records has Led to some synergistic opportunities. Eric Explores some that happend, and also woneders about what else could be done with the relationship. Uncover the unique dynamics between Queen's artistic vision and the Disney brand, and how this unlikely union created a captivating fusion of rock and pop culture.
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00:58 --> 20:06 Hey, this is Synergy Loves Company, where we explore how Disney connects to everything. I'm Eric and I want to thank you so much for listening and keeping me company. Disney has been making some cost cutting decisions lately. Things like massive employee layoffs across the company, taking some content off at Disney Plus to save money on residuals. And just recently, I heard some news that kind of made me a little sad. That Disney's Hollywood Records may soon be looking to offload the music catalog of the massive British rock legends Queen. So it seems like a great time that we could explore the relationship between Disney and the band Queen. If you take a good look at Hollywood Records's website, hollywood Records is Disney's pop rock record label. You'll notice that the artist list features some pop acts who've had minor hits, a lot of artists that I personally have never heard of and some Disney stars turn pop star and all the way at the bottom are international superstars Queen. It doesn't make sense. It's kind of incongruous why this massive band would be among this list of kind of Sea list artists is kind of fishy. So I wanted to go into kind of the history of how Disney and Queen got together. Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and Dan Deacon started Queen in London in 1970. And they had this interesting sound. Their signature theatrical hard rock that they made was led by Freddie Mercury's vocals and Brian May's distinctive guitar tone. It was clean sounding, but also distorted. It kind of sounds like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. The studio effects, though, and the overdubs that they use allowed Freddie Mercury to harmonize with himself and that gave him also this like chorus of his own voice and another kind of otherworldly sound. So those two things paired together were just kind of magic. It's a kind of magic that Queen puts that sound together. Because their music sounded so complex, they would often have a disclaimer on their earlier albums reading. No synthesizers were used in the recording of this album, which is kind of a testament to all the kind of studio trickery they would do and the amazing sounds they would get just out of the rock band instruments they used. Of course, later in the 80s, they did use synthesizers. I love synthesizers, so I got no problem with that. But then they couldn't put the disclaimer on the albums anymore. So there you go. The best example and possibly the greatest example of the convergence of all of Queen's best special powers without the use of synthesizers can be heard in their epic song Bohemian Rhapsody from 1975. This is also a song that was kind of integral in launching their career to the next level at the time. If you haven't heard Bohemian Rhapsody, you just got to go do it. Go listen to it now and then come back and listen to the rest of this. But don't forget to come back and listen to the rest of this. If you have heard Bohemian Rhapsody, you know what I'm talking about. It is epic. They cranked out some big hits throughout the some of my favorites were Don't Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, Bicycle Race, and Another One Bites the Dust. Just by me saying Another one bites the dust, you probably could hear that bass line in your head going right through it. I don't even need to make the sound with my voice because you could hear it already. And then they had two big rock songs that became sports anthems. We will rock you and we are the champions if anything, even if you're not a Queen fan, not too familiar with their music, you've probably heard these. They are staples at every sort of sporting event. We will rock you as so simple yet amazing and easy for anyone to join in with the stomp stomp clap thing going on. And it was awesome. Like where Queen could use it in the shows and let the audience participate. And it would just be the audience and Freddie Mercury before the rest of the band came in to finish the song. And then, We Are the Champions, of course, is that song that you'd play right at the end of the NBA finals, the Super Bowl, wherever you kind of feel like, yes, we won. We made it, we did it. So their songs have had such an impact on not just pop and rock music, but even on the sporting world. So this caught Disney's attention, of course, because Disney is going to enter the story of Queen in 1990. Michael Eisner and Frank Wells had taken over Disney in 1984. And they were all about kind of integrating Disney into the rest of Hollywood, into what was happening in the movie business. And they did that. They knew Hollywood really well. They knew live action movies really well. They both had worked for live action production studios and they were really great at it. So they immediately, at arriving at Disney, started to build up Ron Miller's Touchstone label into being the adult version of Disney. Not just the family movies anymore. This is stuff that mature moviegoers would want to see, too. And then they added another production company later on in the 80s, Hollywood pictures. So they had conquered, in a way, the movie industry for Disney in the 80s. But Michael Eisner did not want to stop there. He wanted to crack into the music industry. He wanted Disney to go there next. So Disney actually had been in the music industry, the record industry since the 1950s. There's Disneyland Records that came on in 1956. That was their first foray into the record business. And then Buena Vista records came out. That one was less Disney, but it came out in 1959, just after and they still had these two record labels out there. Both of them were mostly being used for soundtrack albums. Buena Vista released some Disney artists like Annette Funicello's albums and some Disney themed albums from popular artists like Louis Armstrong. But Disneyland Records kind of went a different direction and got into the Storybook Record Companion Game, where they would kind of have when a movie came out, they would do a version of a soundtrack and they would also do like the storybook read along record. So Eisner really didn't want to just do that anymore. He really wanted to get into the record industry, pop records, hit songs. He wanted to do that. You could kind of see his interest in the record industry. Starting in 1980. Eight's oliver and company. The movie was kind of a musical, but it featured music from musicians like Billy Joel, who starred as kind of a main character in the story, huey Lewis in the News, ruth Pointer of the Pointer Sisters, and Bette Midler, who has a long running relationship with Disney. I'm probably going to have to do a Bet Midler episode because there's so much there. Maybe it would be two episodes. Anyways. So the movie Oliver and Company starts picking at the idea of getting in with all these musicians. Oliver and Company comes out in November of 1988 and Hollywood Records is announced just the next year, in December of 1989. There's an Associated Press article from that December that quotes Michael Eisner talking about the upcoming launch of Hollywood Records. In the article, he explains that instead of trying to acquire a label, they would just go ahead and make their own, but it would be its own thing. Kind of like Touchstone is its own thing. He actually said, this record label will be no more a Disney label than a Touchstone picture is a Disney picture. Now, personally, I kind of think a Touchstone as a Disney picture, it's just how I categorize things. But I see what he means there. It's not Disney, it's something else. That's his idea. But the problem with that is to build a label from the ground up, you need the music. And to get the music, you need the musicians. In the music industry, it's very difficult to find and sign new bands. It's hard to predict pop, like, what do people actually want to hear? What's going to be the next big thing? What's the fresh new sound? It's much easier to go for something that's tried and true, something that's tested so queen. Queen had tons of hits and name recognition from decades at this point. They had a lot that they could offer Disney, but Disney also had a lot that they could offer Queen. Queen didn't have CD releases for their albums that had been released in the 70s from before the format existed. Their American distributor, EMI Capital, just never really got around to it. It was very highly requested from fans. Everyone wanted the CDs of those old Queen songs, but EMI Capital wasn't putting them out. They just weren't prioritizing that they would put out the new Queen Records on CD, but not the back catalog. Queen really wanted to get their back catalog on the new format that had come out in the 80s. CDs were starting to gain traction and they wanted to be in that game. So in 1990, Queen saw that switching their distributor to Disney and doing a deal with Disney would let them put out these CDs. So Queen does enter into a deal with Disney. Disney gets to four Hollywood Records, acquire all the back catalog for distribution of Queen's Records, and then signs them to a record deal for future releases. Queen is going to give Hollywood Records four albums going forward. This was one of the largest record deals in history at this time because it included so much with Queen's back catalog, a Queen's back catalog and the future going record deal sold to Disney for $10 million. Kind of a big deal in 1990. Money. Finally in 1991, just a year later, disney and Queen started to make good on a lot of these things. Queen released a brand new album which sold 500 copies, which wasn't really a big album for Queen, but it actually ended up being Hollywood Records's biggest album so far. So even though it wasn't a hit for Queen, it was a hit for Hollywood Records. Hollywood Records also made good on their part of it too. And they had released all of the previously unreleased albums on CD. So they both got what they wanted. And things were going great for Disney and Queen's relationship until they weren't. You see, Freddie Mercury had been diagnosed with AIDS in 1987. At that time, the AIDS epidemic was very stigmatized, so he decided to keep it a secret. But by November 22 of 1991, he made a public announcement and about 24 hours later, he passed away. On November 24, he passed away from bronchial pneumonia resulting from his compromised immune system. And the loss of Freddie Mercury had a large impact. A lot of artists felt for that. They looked up to Freddie Mercury big time and saw him as an inspiration. So later on, Queen will put on things like the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, which is super star studded. All these people that wanted to support Freddie and say how much they cared about his work and just him as a person because he left such an impact on just the people, but also the industry itself. For Disney, Freddie Mercury's loss was pretty scary. They had just spent $10 million on Queen's back catalog, and the band still owed them three records on a deal. So Freddie Mercury's passing put them a little bit in a flux, but it did start a new reinterest in the band Queen. Like I said about the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, so many of these artists going back and revisiting Queen's music brought the whole catalog to a new audience who maybe wasn't as familiar. But when you get someone like George Michael singing Somebody to Love, you get a whole new fan base going, OOH, what is this song? I want to hear more of this. So that kind of helped Queen's music kind of continue on. The back catalog started selling big time, and Queen later continued on with different iterations of the band. The band truly never went away. They had a time that they toured with Paul Rogers from Bad Company, who I thought was a terrible choice for Freddie Mercury's replacement. He doesn't even have a close enough range anyways. But then later on, Adam Lambert from American idol and solo career joined queen for queen. Plus Adam Lambert. And he is definitely, vocal range wise, a much better fit for the Queen collaboration. So Disney had Queen's catalog, and they continued to use Queen's music and license it out. They actually had my favorite big synergy moment was when the D Two Mighty Ducks album came out, the soundtrack album. It was kind of a big deal to me at the time, in the early 90s, when you had an album that had We Will Rock You on it, and We Are the Champions on it, as well as Whoop, there it is. I thought this like I kind of thought I I pulled a fast one on the music industry. I was like, really? I get all these songs on one album. This is the coolest thing ever. Which is totally hilarious, looking back at it. But anyways, I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Another thing that very big happened more recently is the movie Bohemian Rhapsody that kind of follows Freddie Mercury's life in the career of Queen and what impact they had on the music industry and their story. And that came out in 2018, just a year before Disney acquired Fox. Bohemian Rhapsody was a 20th Century Fox movie, so all that music at the time had to be licensed from Disney to make the movie. But then a year later, Disney bought that movie with the rest of 20th Century Fox's catalog. So it's kind of a weird thing where it was being licensed from Disney to make a movie about Queen. And then Disney bought the company that made the movie, and now they're kind of backwards synergy, I don't know, might break your brain. Who knows? Another synergistic moment that I really love is the Muppets cover of Bohemian Rhapsody. Like I said earlier, if you hadn't heard Bohemian Rhapsody and I told you to stop and go listen to it right now, the same reigns true. For if you haven't heard the Muppets version, go find that one right now. There's still also so many ways I would have liked to see Queen and Disney synergize even more. If you listen to my episode with Tammy Tucky from a couple of months ago. We talked about Disney pop versions of songs and one thing I did mention is that I would have loved to hear Queen cover a disney song, maybe not even in a pop version, but they had that theatrical style that I think would lend itself really well to those musical style songs in Disney animated films. I would also have loved to see Queen with Freddie Mercury, of course, write a whole soundtrack for a Disney movie, kind of like Elton John or Phil Collins did back in the would have loved to seen a Queen composed musical for Disney. That would have been great. Another thing I think that we could still make happen, this one we could still make happen. I would love to hear the seven seas of rye on Guardians of the Galaxy cosmic rewind. I think the energy of it would fit the ride so well. Go take a listen. Maybe put Headphones on, put on a Ride video. See if you can get the idea. Seven Seas of Rye with Guardians. Cosmic rewind. That one could happen. Probably not, but I'm going to say it can. And here's a long shot, but I still would also love to hear the Dapper dance on Main Street singing Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy by Queen I don't know. I think it would just be cool. All right, well, tell me what you would think. If there's any sort of Queen ways that Disney could integrate Queen music even more into their attractions, their movies, that they could do it, because the connection might not be around that much longer. Now, it's reported that Disney and Hollywood records are rumored to be looking at the idea of selling Queen's catalog, possibly to the Universal Music Group. And it's rumored that that might go for a billion dollars. Queen's catalog being sold for a billion dollars would be crazy because just 30 ish years ago, it sold for 10 million. So the return on that investment go Michael Eisner. That's all I have to say with that one. It would be sad to see Queen leave the Disney fold, but maybe Universal could do something more with it. I would love it if Universal was able to make something happen with the Flash Gordon movie and the Queen soundtrack that went for it. I love the Flash Gordon movie. That's one of my favorite non Disney movies. I'll just put it that way. It's so campy and weird and I love it, but that would just blow my mind. So if Queen's going to Universal do the Flash Gordon thing, and I think I'll be okay with it. We'll have to take a look at the news, though, and see what is going to happen with this deal, if Disney's going to hold on to Queen's catalog or if they're going to sell it off to someone like Universal Music Group. All right, if you like this episode, like talking about me talking about Queen, I know I end up talking about music quite a bit. I want to know from you, what other topics should I use to uncover the Disney connection to something else? Reach out to me on social media and let me know. You could find me on Twitter at Eric Hsnergy and on Instagram at synergylovescompany. Remember, you want to make sure you don't miss the next episode. So go to Synergylovescompany.com. And right there on the main page is a button for podcasters, itunes, Spotify, Google, Podcasts. It's all right there@synergylovescompany.com. And if you're enjoying Synergyloves company, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with a friend who loves Disney just as much as you do. Just tell them to visit Synergylovescompany.com, because sharing the show is the number one way that you can support the show, and your support means the world to me. Thanks for exploring Disney's connections with me. Until next time, keep discovering the magic in everything.