I gobbled up the 1991 Queen discs as they were issued. (Except for the two live albums which I bought much later.) Before they were released, my Queen CD collection was a strange mishmash of British EMI and US Capitol discs including some promos.
The Hollywood 20th Anniversary discs brought new promo pieces of their own including the cardboard cube pictured above and the Queen Rocks 4-drawer jewelbox up on the right. I was fortunate enough to score a mint cube still shrink-wrapped but later gifted it to the biggest Queen fan I have ever known (even though he was completely ignorant of their existence) and though I managed to obtain all four promo Queen Rocks discs individually, I was never able to find the jewelbox itself for less than $100, which included the discs. There were also a few promo CD singles issued with unavailable anywhere else edits or mixes but they, too, proved to cost prohibitive. The most coveted mix or edit for me is available on two of those discs - it is "We Will Rock You"/"We Are The Champions" as one track.
With all apologies to the other worthy discs mentioned in this issue of ICE, for me it was all about the Queen stuff. Marked release dates on the family calendar as they became available, budgeted money with wife's approval and hit the Wherehouse on my way home from work (I called ahead and they held them for me as I worked a mile away form the store) or on my way to work if I was closing that night which is how I missed getting A Kind Of Magic on day of release - I forgot to call ahead and they had sold out before I got there. They called me at work when they got more copies in a week or two later though. There were two other Queen discs I picked up in 1991: a promo only CD single that features President George Bush, Sr. proclaiming victory in the first Gulf War throughout the song and the disc below, which featured the Ruined by Rick Rubin with the help of the Red Hot Chili Peppers rhythm section mix of "We Will Rock You" that is featured as a bonus track on the News Of The World disc, as well as four other previously unavailable mixes including a James Brown-infused "We Are The Champions".
A later issue of ICE as well as the liner notes from the 1992 disc below foretold of a coming disc of Queen remixes that were different from the ones included as bonus tracks on the CDs. That CD never appeared...or did it?
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The infamous "ruined" remixes by Rick Rubin. When I see the Hollywood BASIC name, I think of the late Dave "Funken" Klein, the man responsible for putting together this Disney subsidiary. He jumped from Def Jam to head into the unknown, when no one ever thought Disney would have anything to do with hip-hop. The Queen remixes got a bit of attention but it was stuff by Raw Fusion and Organized Konfusion, along with Lifer's Group, that set the label apart from everyone else, perhaps a bit too far apart for anyone to knew what was going on. Hollywood BASIC was also the first label to give DJ Shadow a shot but no one had ever "ruined" a song and made that the selling point. You may have heard a remix of a rock song on a radio show or a tape someone traded but never released it on vinyl. What Rubin and Funkenklein did was let people know that if you know how to do it nicely, the sky is the limit, which would turn into an incredible and a decade of eclectic hip-hop that was very different form what went on in the decade before.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Queen remixes CD, they were on the verge of releasing it but depending on what version of the story you've heard, either Funkenklein's health was becoming a greater issue or they were afraid of some of the samples heard within some of the remixes. The issue was that by being a Queen-related project, more people would pay attention than something that was just an Organized Konfusion thing. That Discogs page shows a date as 1999 but Funkenklein died in 1995 and Disney had other issues by 1999 than to deal with a hip-hop label that didn't have their own Vanilla Ice.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, considering where hip-hop was in 1995 and the different genres and sub-genres at the same time, I honestly think Hollywood BASIC could have been on the same level as Mo' Wax or Fondle 'Em had Funkenklein lived for the remainder of the decade.