City: | San Francisco, CA, USA |
Venue: | Winterland Ballroom |
Date: | March 6, 1977 |
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This show was rescheduled from the night before, to make room for the San Diego show. These images from Queen's second (and last) gig at the Winterland were taken from an eBay auction selling prints of the photos, so I can't see why it would be a problem to post them here. I'd be happy to link to a website where visitors could buy prints of these great pictures, but after much searching I wasn't able to find one. Matt Granz (who also has a story from Oakland '82) had this to say about an incident (assumingly) on this day: "I had two separate bass players who at different times played in my band "The Windowpanes" who told me a tale of standing in line at the Winterland in S.F. for a Queen show in the mid to late 70's. They both told me the same details of Queen arriving in their limo and getting out and walking by them with Brian clutching his guitar for dear life as he passed by. These bass players didn't and still do not know each other but must have been spitting distance from one another that night. Strange but true!" By no means did Queen attract an exclusively homosexual audience, but San Francisco is well-known for its gay scene. In light of that, Thin Lizzy's Scott Gorham has a distinct memory of this show: "I'm rushing about the left-hand side of the stage, thinking I'll go and mess with the audience on the right. The spotlight is chasing me and I get over there and look up and there's like five hundred of the gayest guys I've ever seen, man! They were wearing sequinned hot pants, satin jump suits, huge floppy hats with giant nodding ostrich feathers and they're jumping off their seats, chucking feather boas in the air. When I arrived at their side they all started lunging over shouting, 'Yeah, shake it boy!' Geez man, I'm thinking, whoa there buddy. I'm not real ready for that kinda contact! And hey, I'm already making a beeline to the farthest left I can find!" Freddie revealed in a 1981 interview that he lost his voice during this gig. When asked if he ever leaves a stage feeling he's done a really bad gig, his reply was: "Yes, sometimes. We all scream and shout at each other and destroy the dressing room and release our energy. We set ourselves a very high standard and 99 per cent of the audience wouldn't agree with our assessment of a bad gig. In San Francisco I lost my voice and it was awful. My register was limited to virtually a monotone. I still gave it my all but I knew it was a bad performance. They had to reschedule the tour and take three or four shows off the tour [ed. two, actually - Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento and Selland Arena in Fresno on March 8 and 9 respectively; Thin Lizzy were promoted to top of the bill for both nights, and Sammy Hagar was the opening act]. I have nodules on my vocal chords and most tours are now scheduled around my voice." Brian recalled the last stretch of the tour in an interview with Capitol Radio a couple months later: "Freddie's voice gets a real beating on a tour like that, especially if you're doing five nights in a row, which sometimes we were. So towards the end he was having a lot of trouble and he was going to great length to keep it in trim, to the length of not talking on tour between gigs and taking all kinds of medications. We lost a couple gigs due to that, but all in all we did very well, I think." The last two set of pictures were taken by Chris Bradford and Beverly Coughlin respectively. |