Difficult Music

Rockcritics.com celebrates Circus magazine.

Blackout, the first band I was ever associated with, used to practise in Mike Schmidt's mock tudor/Germanic basement on Huxley Ave. Between run-throughs of Willingdon Black's "The Things You Do" and air banding to News of the World we'd read Circus, inhaling some rancid inspiration from the heady waft of rock & sleaze & teenage lust emanating from its pages. Although, as the rockcrit commentary says, Circus was a somewhat staid cousin to Creem magazine, it packed enough thrills and oddities to keep some kids in Burnaby entertained.

One of our favourite parts of Circus was "Into Your Head," the teen advice column tucked away in the back. It was sort of a Dear Abby for the earth shoes and Big Blue jeans set. Never mind what Gene Simmons or Ted Nugent had to say up front, the real freak scene was "Into Your Head." The best letter ever was from a young woman troubled by her obsession with Freddie Mercury. All other guys, she claimed, were shit compared to Freddie—the only way she could endure encounters with her boyfriend was to imagine it was Freddie making sweet love to her instead, probably on white satin sheets. Indeed, she was in urgent need of counselling.

Despite being 12 and not suspecting what Freddie's true preferences were (or would become), this poor girl's letter was still the most ludicrous thing we'd ever contemplated. I still wonder about her and whether she got over her debilitating Freddie fixation. Did she have flings with a string of "hot cops" in a quest to snare a surrogate Freddie, or did she snap back to reality with a sickening jolt once she heard Hot Space?