Fred Mandel: Session and Touring Musician (Queen, Elton John, Alice Cooper)

Fred Mandel was another person that I stumbled upon during my months long deep dive into Freddie Mercury and Queen.

I learned about Fred when reading Queen Unseen: My Life With the Greatest Rock Band of the 20th Century by Peter “Ratty” Hince, a Queen roadie dedicated to Freddie Mercury. I’ve reached out to Mr. Hince for an interview but finding the time hasn’t happened yet.

Fred is a great guy and was an absolute pleasure to interview. When scheduling the interview he asked me if I had a preference of which of his mics he should use and whether be on video or not to ensure he had a good backdrop and high quality audio. If I’m being completely honest, I’m not very technical so I replied to him and said:

“The gear sounds good to me, I trust whichever mic you decide to use.”

On the day of the recording we had some technical difficulties with the first platform we were going to record on had to jump onto a zoom as a second option. The problem with Zoom is I’m on a free plan so we were capped to 40 minutes and had to leave the call and come back in for the second half of the interview.

Technical difficulties always fluster me and I can hear that fluster in my questions in the interview. Fred is great, we exchanged numbers after the interview and we’ll get him back on the show in a few months to tell some more stories — we barely touched on his time with Elton and didn’t even talk about how he played at Live Aid!

This interview taught me an important lesson for how to approach interviews in the future. The chronology is cool and an easy way to lay out an interview but we never end up having time for the whole story, and it feels very formulaic “okay, and then what happened next?” which is sort of what I did here. What I took away and wrote down when reflecting on this interview was instead of going in chronological order is to focus on lessons from my guest’s career and anchor the interview around those lessons and then let the guest use stories from their career as a way to reinforce those stories. Going from one story to the next is cool, but being able to have a deeper meaning tied to the story will make the interview more resonant. We’ll see how this goes in practice, it’s a theory I have now but one I formulated after interviewing Fred and will be my approach for my next chat with him.

One final fun fact, for the transcript, I linked out to every single reference and name Fred said throughout the interview. This more than tripled the time it took me to do the transcript and I don’t think I’ll be doing it for future episodes but if you’re looking for an education in rock and roll, just scroll through the transcript and click on the links, you’ll learn a ton!

Fred’s Album: ⁠Part Time Rebel⁠

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