Speak: Geoff Tate Recounts The Power Of TV, And Public Opinion, In Mindcrime’s Breakthrough
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“Just watch the television/Yeah, you’ll see there’s something going on,” Geoff Tate sings in “Revolution Calling,” the summon to arms that disillusioned junkie Nikki heeds with dire consequences in Operation: Mindcrime. As the man who originally conceived the record’s storyline and convinced Queensrÿche to give the concept album a shot, Tate was fired up over the headlines in 1987 that were full of political corruption and armed conflict. The lyric above is also a backhanded swipe at the media itself, for as he sings in the character of Nikki, “I used to trust the media/To tell me the truth . . . I’m tired of all this bullshit/They keep selling me on TV.”
The insidiousness of TV is woven in the Mindcrime story, its presence fueling public opinion with the manipulations of Nikki’s nemesis, Dr. X. Sick of its blathering, Nikki blows out a TV screen with his gun when equally treacherous Father William appears preaching about salvation. But in America the medium is as inescapable as celebrity worship, its ability to persuade even more potent in the era of audience interactivity. Tate points out how the commercial breakthrough of Mindcrime is a great example of TV’s all-pervasive power.
“We finished the record, we put it and went on tour, and toured for almost a year on the thing, and it sold exactly what our last album sold. And it just hit that wall and didn’t go any higher,” he remembers. “And Q Prime [Management] was telling us, ‘OK, well, it’s time to make another record, you know. Good job. You guys are really consistent with your touring and good job making the album come in under budget and all that, but it’s time to make another one, so we’re gonna pull ya off the road here and regroup and start writin’ the next record.’ And we didn’t want to get off the road yet. We thought, ‘Come on, just give us another few months. There’s places we would like to play still.’ ”
About a week later, then-co-manager Cliff Bernstein called, saying he knew an MTV executive that loved the album and wanted the band to make a video to be played on the channel. Epic finale “Eyes Of A Stranger,” shot primarily in black and white and featuring the story’s characters intermixed with performance shots of Queensrÿche, was the result.
“As soon as that thing hit MTV, the week later, we sold 500,000 copies. It just went through the roof, and it really showed us how powerful that television medium is,” Tate says. “People, especially in this country, are just glued to the television, and they buy what’s sold to them. So here, you can work your butt off a number of different ways and play your songs and affect a very small amount of people with that, but when it’s packaged as a product and sold as a commercial, all of a sudden, everybody’s interested.
“You can’t really say, ‘Well, this song is better than this song, because it did this’; that doesn’t really compute. What it says is, ‘OK, well, this is the one that was picked as a commercial and this one was rammed down everybody’s throat, and it affected them.’ So couldn’t we do the same thing with another song on the album? Well, yeah, ya can,” he laughs. “You can just keep hittin’ ’em with commercial after commercial after commercial, which was really the game plan on [1990 follow-up record] ‘Empire.’ We made six videos for that album, and it sold, what, 4 [million] or 5 million records. It’s unbelievable, the power of that television. Unbelievable.”
Long before the watershed moment of “Stranger,” Tate gave the album a mini test drive with a much smaller audience. When Mindcrime was in its formative stages, he’d visited a club in Amsterdam one night and spied a woman dressed in a nun’s habit, clutching a teddy bear as she swayed to the music. The odd sight became inspiration, for the lady was immortalized as former hooker Sister Mary. Tate brought the album full circle, so to speak, by returning to the club to give Mindcrime its first public spin.
“I will always remember [former guitarist] Chris [DeGarmo] and I took the final mixes, the mastered mix, to a club in Amsterdam the next night after we mixed it, and we had ’em play it over the house system at like five in the morning,” Tate says. “I’ll always remember that—just sitting there in a haze of smoke and drinkin’ a bottle of wine and listening to that being played over this giant sound system, and thinking, ‘Wow. OK. It’s done,’ ” he laughs.
How many people heard Mindcrime on its virgin run? “There was hardly anybody in the club,” he says. But their reactions were a sign of things to come: “Pretty much everybody kind of stopped and listened to it, and some people were dancing to it, and other people were like sitting there just kind of spacing out listening to it ’cuz it was quite different than what had been playing previously on the speakers.”
Farther along in our conversation, Tate discusses how public opinion won over music critics who disliked Mindcrime - and, conversely, how Queensrÿche’s determination not to conform to popular taste has sustained the band.
Blistering.com: What do you think of when someone says Mindcrime is 20 years old?
Geoff Tate: Ah. I can’t believe that much time has gone by. [laughs] Really. It’s kind of like a snap of the fingers, you know? Really, 20 years is a long time.
Blistering.com: When you think back on when you first started working on the record, what are the memories that pop out to you?
Tate: Well, there was a lot of new stuff going on with the band at the time, ’cuz we were switching over management companies. I guess that’s probably the biggest thing, was finding a different team of people to work with. We just went through kind of a rough time with our former management, who we’d been with from inception, and that was kind of a big thing, ’cuz your management company is your real lifeline to selling what it is you do and handling all the day-to-day stuff . . .
The people that were managing us before were a husband/wife team, and they were very good for the position they were in at the time, but I think we kind of outgrew each other, so we got involved with Q Prime just right after the [1986] Rage For Order album, and they suggested that we just kind of follow our muse really and write the kind of record we wanted to write and don’t worry about trying to fit in with what was going on at the time, just kind of follow our own path, you know? Which I think was good, good advice at the time, ’cuz we were kind of going down that road of looking to Los Angeles for fashion sense and musical stylings and things like that.
And there was a lot of pressure, I remember at the time, to try to conform to what everybody else was doing, and we didn’t wanna do that, so that encouragement from the Q Prime people was the right thing, I think, and I think it gave us the confidence to just kind of do what it is we wanted to do.
Blistering.com: At that time, the industry gave bands time to develop before breaking commercially. Since you mention changing management, were you feeling the pressure of, “We’re a couple albums and an EP into this, and we’re not quite at that point”?
Tate: I don’t know if there was really such a conscious thing. It was more that we’d kind of been doing what it was that we wanted to do. We did our [1983] EP on our own, and then made the [1984] Warning album and then that took us to Rage For Order, which was a real musical leap for us and a good thing. And we wanted to continue down that sort of musical path of adventure, really, doing something we wanted to do, and we’d been talking of writing a complete concept album for a while. It’d been kind of on our planning board, and I don’t know if we would have continued doing that if we hadn’t had gone with Q Prime, because they were very much encouraging that. I don’t know how to put the answer, really. We weren’t so concerned with the business side of things, at the time. We were more involved with the creative side of things, more consumed with that.
