Is this the real life? : the untold story of Queen /

THERE is no such thing as a happy rock band. With the inexplicable exception of U2 - who have, to all appearances, somehow remained on good terms, from band practice in high school to sold-out stadiums in middle age - virtually every group of note either crashes and burns or struggles through hard times to reach a grudging business agreement that keeps them working. And who can blame them? Imagine meeting some fellow adolescents and deciding that your rudimentary instrumental work sounds decent together, only to find yourself traveling the world as part of a unit, forced to create more songs under more pressure while also sitting at the top of a multimillion-dollar corporation. It's a miracle that any members of big-time bands can stand the sight of one another after a while. "Enter Night" and "Is This the Real Life?," both written by veteran British music journalists, recount the stories of two of the world's biggest, loudest and most emotionally complicated rock 'n' roll bands. Consider Mick Wall's account of the impressions that the leaders of Metallica made when they first met: the drummer Lars Ulrich described the brooding guitarist James Hetfield as "the king of alienation . . . almost afraid of social contact," while Hetfield considered Ulrich "a rich, only child. Spoiled." A disgusted Hetfield was also put off by the Danish-born drummer's snacking habits: "We ate McDonald's, he ate herring." This might be considered nothing more than typical teenage preening, except that this dynamic went on to define Metallica for the next 30 years. Hetfield's pent-up anger and loner tendencies would clash with Ulrich's energy and ambition - resulting in some of the most powerful and definitive heavy metal ever made, but also tormenting the baffled bandmates until they were forced to leave the group. The members of Queen had a different, less overtly hostile approach to band dysfunction. A former manager once said of the group that "when we'd get into an airport, one would stop, one would go right, one would go left and one would go straight ahead." Judiciously keeping their distance meant that the Queen lineup, once solidified, stayed intact, though the foursome can be described in terms that sound almost cartoonish: flamboyant Freddie Mercury, brainy Brian May, rocking Roger Taylor and silent John Deacon. It's hard to imagine that two more different groups could come under the heavy metal/hard rock umbrella. Metallica was bora of working-class American rage (other than the Danish kid). After the band's breakthrough, Newsweek described them as "ugly, smelly and obnoxious." Queen was as prototypically English as its name indicates, made up of university students who were drawn to rock for its theatricality and drama; Mercury once described the band as "more Liza Minnelli than Led Zeppelin." Metallica is beer and shots in the parking lot (not for nothing were they nicknamed "Alcoholica"). Queen was Champagne and cocaine in European discos. Yet both formulas resonated loudly. Metallica has sold over 65 million albums in North America; its 1991 "Black Album" alone sold over 15 million. Queen's "Greatest Hits" is the biggest-selling album in British history (yes, more than any Beatles record), and one poll selected its bravura appearance at Live Aid in 1985 as the best performance of all time. Wall, who has written biographies of such hard rockers as Led Zeppelin and Axl Rose, has a long history with Metallica, as he goes to great lengths to remind the reader in "Enter Night." Each chapter opens with a brief, not particularly insightful vignette from one of the author's previous encounters with the band. More valuable is his deep archive of interviews, which give an actual sense of the story unfolding in real time. Wall's writing sometimes tries too hard to match the brute force of Metallica's playing (he describes one performance as sounding "like some mutant one-eyed alien monster . . . smothered in nuclear dust clouds and the blood of puny humans"). His critical take doesn't always follow the conventional wisdom; he is far more generous with the commonly dismissed "St. Anger" album than with the band's latest, "Death Magnetic," which many considered a return to form. His toughest struggle, though, is competing with the 2004 documentary "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" which, as he notes, sometimes flirts with Spinal Tap territory but offers a close-up look at tormented Hetfield, control freak Ulrich and laid-back guitarist Kirk Hammett that's hard for any biographer to top. Mark Blake, the author of a well-received Pink Floyd history, hasn't had the same kind of access to Queen that Wall had to his subjects. Much of "Is This the Real Life?" is based on more recent interviews with May and Taylor, when they attempted a quasi reunion with the Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers. Though the two are thoughtful and well spoken, their comments on the band several decades after the fact seem to come through a filter of respectful diplomacy. THE book is strongest when examining the early life of Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara to a middle-class Zoroastrian family in Zanzibar. Blake has turned up a number of his friends after he was sent to school in India, some of whom were not aware of the singer's identity transformation until long afterward. One of his contemporaries remembers Bulsara saying, "I am going to be mega! You have no idea how mega I am going to be!" before he had so much as stepped on a stage. There is one further similarity between these two legendary bands, and that is the extent to which a death defined their legacies. The way the two books handle these tragic moments reveals much about the authors' differing approaches, and about the bands themselves. "Enter Night" largely pivots on the 1986 death of Metallica's defining bass player, Cliff Burton, in a tour bus crash. Burton, Wall argues, was the band's freethinking musical conscience, and it was his guidance that differentiated Metallica from their thrash-metal peers. His death was followed by "a bold new pragmatism that ensured Metallica would not just survive, but continue to prosper," Wall writes, inevitably leading to a multiplatinum band that was "bloated by fame and success and full, suddenly, of the kind of hubris that had destroyed the original rock giants." For Queen, of course, Freddie Mercury's death from an AIDS-related illness in November 1991 forever altered their image. As hard as it is to believe now, given the band's photos and videos, Mercury was always coy about his sexuality to the public and press, carrying on multiple affairs with men while continuing to live off and on with Mary Austin, the woman who many believe was the one true love of his life. Dodging rumors of his sickness for months, he finally announced his condition the night before he died. Yet "Is This the Real Life?" offers minimal insight into the psychology of this incomparable rock supernova. "Mercury had always been an enigma, even to his bandmates," Blake concludes. Unsatisfying this comment may be, but it seems to be true. "We didn't actually know what was wrong for a very long time," Brian May says of his dying lead singer. "We never talked about it." Alan Light is the director of programming for the public television series "Live From the Artists Den."