FROM THE VAULT "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen: Everything You Didn't Know (50th Anniversary Edition!)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two scaremoshes of scarily granular detail. Yes,
I'm Alex Hagel.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
I'm Jordan Run Talk and I was hoping you were
gonna go with something with that.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
It should be Scaremoshi Scattamucci. Today, Jordan, we were talking
about one of the greatest classic rock songs of all time,
one of the all time. The DJ wants a smoke
break and or needs to poop long jams, an improbable
fusion of high wire operatic vocals and balls out guitar heroics.
That's right, We're talking about Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Hell yeah,

(00:50):
what does a world look like without Bohemian Rhapsody. It's
one of the most audacious musical fusions of the twentieth century.
It's something that on paper seems so profoundly bizarre that
it would never work. And yet, and yet, and yet,
it's a song that is lodged in our cultural firmament.
Somewhere on the level of the national anthem. It's great.

(01:11):
My favorite memory of this song is being on some
field trip in high school and for some reason, someone
just started singing the opening piano line, and one by one,
like two dozen kids on the bus just slowly started
to jing in and sang the entire song start to finish,
guitar soul who included, and just like, I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, it was great.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
You don't get that with a lot of other songs,
especially not ambitious, multi part quasi operatic epics. But it's
just like a bunch of nerds on a bus trip,
just you know, mouth jamming. We didn't have a boombox
or anything. It was just literally just people singing all
the piano and all backing vocals.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
That's like the tiny dancers scene on the bus and
almost famous.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
That's incredible. Before I had seen that movie.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Oh man, Well, I wish I had such a foundational
memory of this song, or I wish I remember hearing
it for the first time and really just kind of
experiencing how truly bizarre and fresh it was. For me.
Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen is like the actual Queen, just
one of those things that was always kind of there.

(02:21):
I wasn't until years later that I appreciated just how
outrageous it was blending this Gilbert and Sullivan esque operetta,
hard rock and baldry into this sprawling epic, which you know,
it's one of a kind. It's beautiful, it's haunting, it's
completely ridiculous, And my favorite part about it is that
it's so unashamedly itself, and I think that's its true legacy.

(02:42):
I mean, sure, the song has made an untold number
of kids headbang and play air guitar, but I think
any creative person can draw inspiration from Freddie Mercury's just
completely unapologetic single mindedness and confidence in his artistic vision.
He was just so different and yet so proud of
the things that made him different, and that made him
become a source of strength in a funny way to

(03:04):
so many others, kind of like a David Bowie figure.
My favorite Freddie origin story is from his time at
ealing Art College in the late sixties, long before he
was anything approaching famous. A classmate found them sitting in
a pub looking depressed, so he went over and asked
Freddie what was wrong, and Freddie sighed glumly, I'm not
going to be a pop star, and then a smile

(03:26):
spread across his face as he rose to his feet
and he threw his arms out in a heroic pose
that would become his on stage trademark. I'm going to
become a legend. How could you not love that? I'm
a poor art school student who had absolutely no breaks
at that point whatsoever. I just love that and that

(03:46):
confidence I think was brought to the four on Bohemian Rhapsody.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah. Well, from everything that went into the absolutely insane
multi track recording process, including Freddie Mercury's extra vocal chords
and teeth and Brian Mayy's homemade guitar and amp, to
the song's groundbreaking music video, to the records that it
continues to set a half century later, and world and

(04:10):
Wayne's and also Wayne's World. Will talk about Wayne's World
and animals.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Here's everything you don't ever interrupt me again, Here's everything
you didn't know about Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Wow, please open
this with that help.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
Hey, We're not going to recap the entire history of
Queen to get up to this point.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
We'll probably touch on it a little bit. There's a
biopic you guys may have heard of from a couple
of years ago that'll do that for you if you want.
I've heard it's really well edited. Oh yeah, shots Fired.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
We'll just start with nineteen seventy four's Sheer heart Attack,
really the band's first taste of international success. It reached
number two in the UK went gold in the US,
thanks largely to the single killer Queen, which reached number
two on the British charts and became the band's first
US hit, reaching number twelve on the Billboard Hot one hundred.
But despite this, Queen was broke. They essentially assigned a

(05:18):
contract with Trident Studios that made tried end the middlemen
between Queen and what they produced. So they would produce
records at and phenomenally four Trident, and then Trident would
take the finished product to a record label and be like,
this is our product that we are trying to sell you.

(05:40):
And so because of this, they made no money from it.
They were making sixty pounds weekly like they were living
in dismal apartments. I think the stories that John Deacon
tried to get money for a down payment for his
house and was denied and so in December nineteen seventy
four they began negotiating their way out of the deal
with Trident, and after nine months they directly with EMI

(06:01):
in the UK and Elektra in the US. And though
there were a number of financial pitfalls associated with this transition,
not just court cost, but they also had a US
tour fall through around this time, their new manager, John Reid,
who was also Elton John's manager at the time, advised
them to let him worry about all that and focus

(06:21):
on their new record, which they arrived at the name
of at some point a Night at the Opera aimed
for the Marx Brothers film.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
And the opening track on this album, Death on two
Legs Parentheses, dedicated to was Freddie Mercury's vengeful Spike Field
distract aimed at their former manager, and his lyrics were
so coarse that they left the rest of the band
totally shocked at first when they heard it. You suck
my blood like a leach. You break the law and
you breach screw my brain till it hurts. You've taken

(06:53):
all my money and you want more. Misguided old mule,
with your pig headed rules, with your arrow minded cronies,
who are fools of the first division. Death on two Legs,
You're tearing me apart to Death on two Legs. You
never had a heart of your own. Incredible subtle. Yeah,

(07:15):
not to recap the whole song, but my favorite line
is feel good? Are you satisfied? Do you feel like suicide?
I think you should. You do not mess with Freddie Mercury. No.
This was so brutal that the manager in question, Norman Sheffield,
ended up suing Queen and their label for defamation over
Death on Two Legs, which resulted in an out of

(07:36):
court settlement, and he later titled his memoir Life on
Two Legs Set.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
The Record Straight. That's good bit of score settling well. Consequently,
the only song on the night of the opera that
they tracked at Trident Studios would be God Save the Queen,
which is I think the shortest song on the album.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
It must be the last one, the one that comes
after Bohemian Rhapsody. Yeah, God Save the Queen is like
what would end all concerts in the UK. They played
the national anthem before everybody went home, so I think
that was like a little bit of Sergeant Peppery, you know,
making the album a concert kind of deal.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
They had recorded that the previous October. Before embarking on
the tour for Sheer Heart Attack, the band spent a
month during the summer of nineteen seventy five rehearsing in
a barn at what would then become Ridge Farm Studios
in Surrey, which was a studio established by Frank Andrews,
who was a lighting technician who had toured with Queen
Bad Company, Rolling Stones, Doobie Brothers and Abba.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
You know who kicked Bohemian Rhapsody off the top of
the charts in the UK in nineteen seventy eight.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
It was Mama Mia Mia, which is funny because it's
in the lyrics. A number of legendary bands passed through
Ridge Farm, Roxy Music, Bad Company, Hawkwind, Pearl Jam, Ozzy Osbourne.
All of them spent time there. Andrews were called bringing
metal detectors out for the property looking for Ozzy Osbourne's

(08:53):
rolex after Sharon Osbourne pitched it off their balcony in
the middle of an argument. One night at Ridge Farm,
when we weren't working, we would swim, play bad tennis,
bad snooker and be beaten at table tennis by Freddie
Queen drummer and vocalist Roger Taylor told The Telegraph in
twenty eleven. I think he'd been the champion at his
boarding school and I never ever saw him lose a game.

(09:15):
That summer was more like a youth club rather than
wild parties. In the evenings, we would go down to
the pub, come back to the barn and play more music.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
You know. It was also like supernaturally good at ping pong.
Prince Prince ye. Yeah, oh man, imagine that. I know,
that's exactly what I was gonna say. I mean, wait,
now I keep going. I'm gonna google and see if
there was ever an epic face off.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
No, my favorite one is Prince playing Michael Jackson and
making him cry because he was like hitting Prince with
really complicated like spin serves and stuff, and Michael Jackson
left in two ears.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Oh yeah. It was like when he was working on
Under the Cherry Moon. They were like in the same
studio or something.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
There is a cute anecdote involving Freddy in Prince Freddie
Mercury's former PA Peter Freestone said if Freddy stayed in
during the evenings, he would usually veg out and watch television.
He had one video of Prince which he forced many
people to watch, sometimes over and over again. These video
sessions generally occurred at two or three in the morning
after Freddy and his entourage returned from an evening on

(10:15):
the town. The Prince tape was immediately put on, and
Freddy had sole control of the remote, and his guests
were subjected to Freddie's enthusiasm for said artist again and
again and again. I wonder what tape it was, Purple
rain O, Well, maybe under Cherry Moon.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Definitely not on the Cherry Moon.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Well, just because you mentioned Michael Jackson, I have a
great Michael Jackson Freddie story that I'd like to share. Peez. So,
Freddie loved Michael Jackson back from his earliest Jackson five days.
He just was totally in awe of Michael. He thought
I Want You Back was an incredible song, and he
used to like torture his more hard rock loving roommates

(10:57):
by playing early Bubblegum Jackson five tracks over and over
and over again at high volumes, which I love. And
sometime in the early eighties, Freddie and Michael got together
in the studio to work on some tracks together, but
it fell apart. And there are two reasons why. The
Freddie centric version is that some of what should we say,

(11:22):
Michael's eccentricities got on his nerves a little bit. Jim Beach,
who was Queen's manager at the time, said, I suddenly
got a call from Freddy saying, can you get over
here because you got to come and get me out
of the studio. Jim Beach said, what's the problem. Freddy said,
I'm recording with a lama. Michael's bringing his pet lama
into the studio every day, and I'm really not used

(11:42):
to recording with a lama. I've had enough. I like
to get out. Michael, for his part, he had some
issues with Freddy's quirks too. According to the story sold
to the Son by Freddie's former personal assistant, these sessions
broke down when Michael Jackson caught Freddie snorting cocaine through
one hundred dollars bill, which didn't fly with Michael.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Which would you be more offended by? Probably the lama?
I think, yeah, I'm gonna go with a lot. I
can deal with cocaine, I can't deal with a big,
spitting mammal.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
Brian Wilson wanted to bring a horse into the studio
for pet sounds.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
I mean when they were doing Chinese Democracy, Bucket had
made them build a chicken coop in the studio.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Right.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
It was at Ridge Farm that Freddie Mercury would play
a six year old Tiffany Murray his early sketch for
Bohemian Rhapsody. Murray, a novelist, would later recount this incident
in her twenty ten memoir Diamond Star Halo. Do you
like it? He asked, It's fantastic, I said, It's a
bit long, he replied. According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith,

(12:44):
who is a keyboard player in the pre queen band Smile,
Mercury started first developing Bohemian Rhapsody in the late nineteen
sixties when he was a young Faruk Bolsara. The earliest
kernel of the song was known simply as the Cowboy Song,
which is my favorite thin list song, and began with
the line Mama just killed a man. Freddie Mercury used

(13:06):
a piano as the headboard of his bed at his
flat in Kensington, and because he was double jointed, he
would he would wake up out of dreams and play
the piano backwards to work out of ideas from bed.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
There are so many easier ways to do that, and
yet that was the way that was chosen.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
He told him an interviewer in Sydney in nineteen eighty
five that Bohemian Rhapsody was quote basically three songs that
I wanted to put out, and I just put the
three together.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
This was in the era when Freddy was enrolled at
the prestigious Healing Art College in London alongside future Rolling
Stone Ronnie Wood and Freddie would draw on his art
college training for many instances when it came to Queens
stage shows, costumes, and even their famous royal crest logo,
which he designed himself. It incorporated the zodiac signs of

(13:55):
all four members, two lions for the leos, John Deacon
and Roger Taylor, a crab to represent Brian May's cancer sign,
and Mercury represented himself with two fairies, which he claimed
were merely symbols of Virgo. And all of this was
dwarfed by a massive phoenix, a symbol of hope and renewal,
which borrowed from the crest of his childhood alma mater,

(14:18):
Saint Peter's School, and at the center of it all
is an elegant queue with a crown at the center. Naturally,
And during Freddy's attendance at ealing Art College, a young
David Bowie came to play for students, and a fascinated
Freddie followed him around and offered to carry his gear,
and Bowie soon put him to work pushing tables together
to make a makeshift stage. And later, when Freddie was

(14:40):
working at a vintage clothing stall in Kensington Market, he
sold Bowie a pair of boots, and he was also
standing front row when Bowie's debuted as Ziggy Stardous character
at a pub in January nineteen seventy two. I just
love these stories, like pre famous musicians hanging out and
being friends, and I just think it's so cool. London
wasn't that big of a place. Yeah, true, but Freddie

(15:01):
Sam was several local bands around the time that he
first started writing Bohemian Rhapsody, but he had his eye
on playing with the aforementioned Smile, who were a trio
which included guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, later
of Queen, and with trademark enthusiasm, Freddie offered a long
list of unsolicited suggestions to the group, and he would
stand in front during their shows and shout if I

(15:22):
was your singer, I'd show you how it was ton
narrator voice. He would.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
That's moderately rude, uh, but he did. That's true. Roy
Thomas Baker, who while at Decca and Trident Studios, worked
on the first three Queen records, recalled Mercury playing Bohemian
Rhapsody to him for the first time in nineteen seventy
five to the magazine Sound on Sound. In an extensive
interview he gave about the production of the song in

(15:51):
October nineteen ninety five. He said, we were going out
to dinner one night and I met Freddy at his
apartment in Kensington. He sat down at his piano and said,
I'd like to play you a song that I'm working
on at the moment. So he played the first part
and said this is the chord sequence, followed by the
interim part, and although he didn't have all the lyrics
together yet, I could tell it was going to be
a ballady number. He played a bit further through the

(16:12):
song and then stopped suddenly, saying this is where the
opera section comes in, we both just burst afing. I
had worked with an opera company at Decca, where I
learned a lot about vocals and the way vocals are stressed,
so I was probably one of the few people in
the whole world who knew exactly what he was talking about.
Though the band rehearshed the tune at Ridge Farm. Bohemian
Rhapsody was actually tracked in rock Field Studios, just outside

(16:34):
the village of the same name in Monmouthshire, Wales. It
was actually relatively new at the time. It had originally
been a livestock farm and the converted stone farm structures
were built in nineteen sixty eight and nineteen seventy three
as one of the first residential style studios.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
It can have smelled good.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
I just think it's hilarious that the band that came
in after Queen was motorhead like talk about diametric opposites.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Once again, that can have smelled good. And later on,
speaking of and again later on, Oasis recorded What's the
Story Morning Glory there and this was the scene of
the famous cricket bat incident, which is one of my
favorite stories in all of Oasis lore. For those of
you who don't know Liam Gallagher came to the studio
one night drunk with a bunch of new friends from

(17:21):
the pub in tow Brother Nol had been hard at
work for hours, and he was already pissed that his
brother had blew him off before, and he didn't appreciate
these unexpected guests. Liam later admitted, can you do a
Liam Gallagher voice?

Speaker 2 (17:34):
No?

Speaker 1 (17:35):
No, I probably shouldn't have brought him back, but I
thought we were a rock and roll band. You know.
A fight broke out with Liam attacking Noel with one
of his own guitars, which that's not done. You do
not attack a man with one of his own guitars.
That's just that's against the Geneva convention. Noel responded by
hitting Liam over the head with what was at hand,

(17:56):
which was a cricket bat, which I can only imagine
he must have had in the studio because of that
scene in Spirinal Tap when the manager is like, sometimes
it's good to have a good solid piece of woodies disposal.
This cricket bat was handed over to a British music
journalist named Palo Hewitt, who treated the thing like a
holy relic until he sold it at auction. I was
unable to find out how much it went for Queen, meanwhile,

(18:19):
were much better behaved twenty years before Oasis. They were
hard at work, as Brian May would later say, making
the album that would save us.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
With each member of the band a talented songwriter in
their own right, Queen's process typically involved the individuals bringing
their own ideas to the group and then working on
them again, either by themselves or in smaller pairs. Brian
May told Melody Maker in nineteen seventy five that you
lose a bit of the group feeling with this dynamic.
I can point to things on this album that suffered
from not having us all there at one time, because

(18:50):
there's too much responsibility on one. With all that said,
Mercury arrived at Rockfield's studio one with Bohemian Rhapsody written
down in notebooks that his father Boy used for his
accounting work.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
Roger Taylor also said that it was sketched out on
the back page of a telephone book, which I love,
just lots of little scraps basically, and the working title
for Bohemian Rhapsody for a time at least was simply
Fred's Thing, which I also love.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
It wasn't standard musical notation. Brian May told Mark Blake,
author of Is this the real life, the untold story
of Queen? But a's and b's and c's and blocks
like buses zooming all over bits of paper. He seemed
to have the whole thing worked out in his head.
We were all a bit mystified about how he was
going to link these pieces. Indeed, the song moves through
the keys of B flat, E flat A and F major.

(19:41):
That's crazy. That's too many keys for one song, Freddy
Fred's thing. Hey. According to Baker, the basic backing tracking
was recorded at Rockfield, with Mercury conducting and playing a C.
Bechstein concert grand piano, the same one seen in the
promotional video and that he would play in live appearances

(20:03):
in the UK.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Just a quick word about the piano used on Bohemian Rhapsody.
There's a persistent rumor online and inn like you know,
listicles about this song that the piano used to record
Bohemian Rhapsody is the same one that the Beatles used
to record, Hey, Jude. They're referring to a Bechstein consercized
grand piano at Trident Studios in London, where the Queen
recorded their first three albums, but I'm fairly sure it

(20:26):
wasn't the same one used on Bohemian Rhapsody. Unfortunately, however,
this piano was used on the seven Seas of Ryan
Early Queen's Song and possibly Killer Queen, as well as
Elton John's Your Song, Tiny Dancer and Levon Harry Nilssen's
cover of Bad Fingers Without You, Carly Simons You're So Vain,

(20:47):
Lou Reed's Transformer album, best heard on the track perfect
Day t Rex is Get It On. Not to mention
David Bowie classics like Life on Mars and Changes, plus
tracks on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, super Tramps, Chrime, Century,
Early Genesis and so much more all one piano that
is incredible. What became of this historic instrument, you may ask, Well,

(21:11):
the piano was being moved and I'll just I winced
just even reading this. The cradle supporting it broke as
it was being moved, and this priceless instrument tumbled onto
the floor and had to be rebuilt, permanently altering it sound.
It was later sold at auction in May twenty eleven,
but the details of the price and the purchaser have
never been made public. It's rumored to have been sold

(21:33):
between three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand pounds somewhere out there.
It's a piece of rock and roll history. And you
know what I have to say about that, You just
gotta punch in them. You just got to punch in
the air. Yeah. I love Freddy's playing, though Brian May
would observe that he plays like a drummer, just with
such power, but also an unwavering sense of timing.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
And just like totally rigid hands too. You watch it
play and it's just like it's like he's playing with
ten drumsticks instead of fingers.

Speaker 1 (22:05):
Yeah, that's an incredible way to put it. Yeah, no
click track, I mean, and for much of the quiet
intro parts, he doesn't even have a drummer to help
keep him in time. It's insane.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
Initially, producer Roy Thomas Baker left a thirty second slot
of tape open for the opera section as they were
calling it. He told Sound on Sound the end rock
section was recorded as a separate song, the way we
would normally record a loud rock number of that period.
The thing that made it difficult was that even the
end had lots of vocals on it ooh yeah, ooh
yeah part. So we had to record the basic backing

(22:38):
track of drums, bass, guitar and piano, then do the
background vocals without having the lead vocal on first. This
wasn't the regular way of doing things because the lead
vocal would normally dictate the phrasing of the background vocals.
But we wouldn't have had enough tracks left for the
rich backing vocals if we hadn't have gone down this route.
All due respect to Brian May, who we will get to. Yes,

(22:59):
the crazy part of Bohemian Rhapsody is obviously the vocals.
The typical Queen vocal sound that you hear is even
though Freddie Mercury has a you know, I was, I
was reading these different people saying whether or not he
had a three or four octave range, and I did
find a video that successfully found evidence that he hit

(23:19):
notes spanning four octaves at one point or another, whether
or not he consistently had that. But it's funny because
most often the highest notes that you hear on Queen
recordings are actually the drummer Roger Taylor. The highest note
in Bohemian rhapsody for Me. That's Roger Taylor could give
us a taste for me a B flat high b flat.

(23:45):
But the typical blend is they would have Brian May
at the bottom because he had the lowest voice, Freddie
in the middle, and Roger Taylor on top, and they
arrived at this voice in combination because of their tambour
of each other's voices. Like basically, Roger tayl voice was
thinner and more piercing, so they would give him all
the notes that kind of had to go on what
you would have like a soprano sing. But they were

(24:08):
arranging their the harmonies in more what we call block voicings,
which are closer to like barbershop or gospel style vocals,
where the intervals of the harmonies are closer together than
what you would see in a choral spread, where there's
like in traditional four part choral voice leading. There's all
kinds of rules that you have to obey when you're

(24:29):
writing chorls dating back to like the Bach era, about
how much movement and how much space you have to
have between all the four voices. Block voicings are much
closer and smaller together. It's like the tight kind of
a cappella harmony blend, but more so than the voicings.
What we think of when we think of the Queen
vocal harmony sound is overdubs, like a sload of overdubs.

(24:56):
All three singers would sing every note of each chord
into a mic at the same time, which meaning even
a simple triad a three note chord vocal harmony would
be sung by nine voices. Then they would re record
that up to four times again, with the total arrangement

(25:17):
being spread across the either the center of the stereo
image or to the left or right channels, meaning that
in the finished product, what you would have a three
part vocal arrangement would feature up to thirty six voices
of the members of Queen spread across basically the entire
stereo image. And that's the wall of sound, that's the

(25:40):
defining Queen vocal sound.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
And Brian May has talked about this other vocal trick
that Queen used a lot during this period, and he
called it the bell's effect, where you'd have someone hold
a note, and then you would have somebody else come
in singing a different note, and then somebody else coming
in singing a third note, and then possibly somebody else
or an overdub come in and sing a fourth note,
and so you have this cascade of harmonies building a chord.

(26:03):
It's almost like the Three Stooges Hello, Hello, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Rhapsody.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
It's the oh.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Like that as those stack up. That's that's one of
the one of the places in the song that you
can hear him talk that he points to.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
And that's an approach that the composer Manta Vani did
a lot in the thirties, and it's just one of
the many weird non rock influences that went into this track.
I also read that the band, at some point during
the vocal sessions, we're saying into metal tubes to get
a like a honky effect on the vocals, like a
weird echo.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
I'm waiting for you to say, not that kind of honky.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Some of these man that that documentary where you watch
him solo, some of these vocal takes is insane, like
they they some of these falsettos that they're doing and
like high notes that they are hitting did do not
sound human. It is true, really a phenomenon of mixing
that this thing came together, Baker told sound on sound.

(27:06):
The opera bit was getting longer, and so we kept
splicing huge lengths of tape onto the reel. Every time
Freddy came up with another galileo, I would add another
piece of tape to the reel, which was beginning to
look like a zebra whizzing by. This went on over
a three or four day period while we decided the
length of the section. That section alone took about three
weeks to record, which in nineteen seventy five was the

(27:29):
average time spent on a whole album.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
And they've reportedly would be working on this between ten
and twelve hours a day, which is like Cubricians in
its punishing schedule. I think I read the final stats
for the opera section alone was about seventy hours, and
I've read two figures it was either completed between five
studios or six studios. There's an article on Queen's actual

(27:55):
website that says six, but the figure I've most often
seen is five. Either way, that's a ridiculous amount of
studios and this would contribute to making A Night at
the Opera the most expensive album ever made up to
that point.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
And the other thing, too, is that this is nineteen
seventy five. The band is recording on a twenty four
track mixing desk, which is the most channels that you were.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Cutting, cutting edge at the most cutting edge you can imagine, Yeah,
and all of those overdubs piled up very quickly. The
way that you worked around this is a process called bouncing,
in which individual parts are recorded and then themselves.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Re recorded into groupings. Right, so you have three harmonies
that are then recorded and bounced to a separate track
where they're all together, so that they no longer take
up three tracks, they take up one track. Baker explains this.
He says, we formed three part harmonies by recording one
harmony at a time and bouncing. So we did three
tracks of the first part and bounce into one track,

(28:52):
three of the second, and three of the third. We
would then double bounce to one section so that particular
phrase would have a three part harmony just on one track.
We would do this to each background vocal part across
the song and ended up with fourth generation dupes on
just one of the parts. By the time we mixed
two of the other parts together, the first part was

(29:12):
up to eight generations of overdubs. That's not good for tape,
and that has given rise to one of the most
commonly recited bits of queen lore, which is that, as
a result of all of is overdombing something like one
hundred and eighty vocal parts, that the tape that they
were using for this was actually worn translucent by the

(29:33):
time that they they got done with it. Do we
talk about how how does that? Does that make sense
to people? Should to do a quick thing about how like.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
A tape is oxidized. Yeah, I do a thing on it. Yeah,
you can explain it byter than many.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
Do a thing. So in analog recording, what you're doing
is taking the current that is coming from the microphone
and store it in the form of magnetic particles that
are embedded into the surface of a tape, and then
you run that tape over a magnet. That's how analog
tape based recording works. But you degrade the oxide on

(30:11):
the tape the more and more that you use it,
and that's why you know, you have to bounce this
stuff to new and fresher tape. It's why remasters from
the original tape are such a big deal, because they
have to go back and very carefully look at these
things because even though two inch tape is a very
high fidelity format, it is intrinsically an unstable one, and

(30:33):
so in there in this biography, the Mark Blake biography,
Brian May said the original tape had actually worn thin.
People think it's this legendary story, but you could hold
the tape up to the light and see through it.
Every time the tape went through the heads of the
playback machine, more of the oxide was worn off. So
they quickly would bounce this to its own fresh tape.

(30:55):
But yes, they literally wore away the oxide on their
tape record. We have vocals to this.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
A moment, and now to a little section of the
show I like to call Boteethian Rhapsody.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
There's an odd bit.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Of Freddie Mercury trivia that is explored in the aforementioned biopic,
namely that he was born with four additional incisors and
as equips in the film, this means more space in
my mouth means more range. Despite having the resources later
in life to do so, Mercury left his anterior overjet

(31:46):
or Class three malecution as it's medically known.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Or as pronounced overbite as it's not medically known.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
He left that unfixed, even though he frequently obscured his
mouth and photos with his hand and later his signature mustache.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
That really makes me sad. Yeah, Whenever he was talking
to people at close range, he would kind of wave
his hand in front of his mouth, and his schoolmates
nicknamed him Bucky as a kid rude.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
This was because he actually believed that his voice came
down to his extra teeth and having them fixed would
affect it. That's not really true, but some interesting facts
about extra teeth. According to the Genetic Literacy Project, the
overall prevalence of extra teeth is point zero nine percent
to three point four percent, and one small study found
a prevalence of point zero seven to two percent in Iran.

(32:39):
Fredie Mercury was born in Zanzibar, but his parents are
of Parsi descent. They immigrated from Iran, and he was rare.
Even among this rare subset of people, only one percent
of people with extra teeth have more than two Wow,
that is crazy. You said that so deadpan. I don't
actually think think you believe it?

Speaker 1 (32:58):
No, I mean I was trying to crunch the numbers
in my head of what that means for the overall
global population of extra teeth. It yeah, well four extra teeth. Well,
Ronnie Mallet came to believe that there was something vaguely
supernatural about these extra teeth. Also, he was fitted with
a set of prosthetic teeth for the Bohemian Rhapsody movie,
which he'd wear during his off hours to practice speaking

(33:19):
and singing. And this was apparently before the film was
even green lid. That's dedication, he told Entertainment Weekly. When
you put in those teeth, there's a very visceral change
to your performance. When I took them out, by the
end of the film, I felt quite naked.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
While Mercury may have been trying to reclaim this part
of anatomy that he was teased over as crucial to
his musical success, it turns out that what makes his
voice so unique is lower down in the body. Get
your mind out of the damn gutter.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
It's his throat, his actual throat, Get your mind out
of the gutter.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Specifically, what are called false vocal chords. They are a
pair of mucous membranes that we all have fronts of
the pod.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
Mucous membranes. We all have them.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
They protrude out as folds just above your regular vocal chords,
but they're not usually used in the way that most
people pronounce sound speech and in turn singing, and that's
why they're called false vocal chords. But some people do
use them, in particular in indigenous cultures where overtone singing

(34:33):
where you are producing both a fundamental pitch and either
a sub pitch or an overtone of that fundamental at
the same time. Tuvon throat singing is one such example.
They do it in certain Inuit tribes of it as well.
They are using those false vocal chords.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
Can that be taught? Is that something that can be
taught or is that something that's Yeah, some people learn how.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
There's white people who do it, of course, but I
don't know how worked out how Freddie arrived at it.
It's interesting though, because there was a twenty sixteen study
by a group of Austrian, Czech and Swedish researchers published
in Logo Pedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology, Friend of the Pod.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Now. The authors they analyzed recordings of Freddy and they
brought in a professional singer name was Daniel zangerborch Oh,
he's great. I got all this early stuff.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
To do his best Freddie imitation, and they filmed, like
with an endoscope or whatever those things are. They filmed
his throat at four thousand frames a second to get
to watch the way that his vocal cords were vibrating.
And what they discovered by comparing this footage to the
recordings is that at certain parts of his performance Freddie's vocals,

(35:52):
whether or not he was doing this on purpose or
it was just something that he wound up doing, he
was utilizing those false vocal chords along with his regular
vocal chords, and this creates this effect of hearing almost
two pitches at once. It's not quite like you're not
hearing someone harmonize with themselves. Essentially, what you're hearing is

(36:14):
the regular tone, like the what they call the fundamental
and then the way all sound works is that there's
a fundamental frequency, and then based on mathematical relationships of
that frequency expressed in hurts, there are overtones and undertones,
and with throat singing when you're using those different folds
and everything, and even like I think you can hear

(36:35):
actually like David Lee Roth do it in the like
some of those that like Van Halen stuff, the like
whistle tones where he's like ha like that, those are
technically like that's like kind of the same thing.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
So yeah, you can hear Freddy Mercury doing that. It's
just part of the magic of Freddy Mercury.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
I've also seen as said that in you know, one
of these many pieces trying to explain in Freddy's voice
that he was technically a baritone that could sing in
a tenor range. I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff. Does
that actually have an impact on why his singing is
so unique or is that just another way of saying
he has a crazy multi octave range. It's still more
of the latter.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
I mean, there's plenty of baritone people with a speaking
voice who like I have a pretty crazy falsetto range,
but I'm a My chest voice and speaking voice is
more of a baritone. And then there is like a
voice part called barrett tenor, like Josh Grobin is a barretenor.
We were singing to Kate Bush along in the car
and I was doing all the weathering heights stuff, and
Lowe was like, how are you doing that?

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Can we hear? I don't know the winding winy.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
More, that's the first part of weathering heights.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
Wow, Heath Cliff, HiT's me. You can't you come home
and so cool? Let me to you.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
It's like, that's what's my highest.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
Can you do tiptoe through the tulips? Give me some
tiny taol through the tulips? We me. I used to
be able to do a pretty decent Brian Wilson falsetto.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
I just did Frankie Valley. He was my other one.

Speaker 1 (38:19):
Ooh mean struck in again. Oh that's Lou Christie. Oh
Lou Christie. Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
Not I confuse all my annoying Italian guys from the
sixties who sang in girls voices.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Wow, that is I am very impressed.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
I never actually learned how to like utilize it, like
I don't never obviously never sang like that in our
band or anything. It's just something I do in the car.
I use two dogs, uh when sometimes when.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
They start howling on how long with them? I always
loved in U. There's like really creepy early like sparse
Elvis stuff where he's.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
Doing like blue Moon and he's doing.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
Oh yeah, I'm.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Just like trying to sound like a theremon, you know,
so true.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Anyway, while we're talking about the vocals, we might as
well talk about the lyrics, namely, what the hell is
this song about?

Speaker 1 (39:18):
What do all of these names mean?

Speaker 2 (39:20):
Well, for starters, Scaramouche is a clown character from the
Italian theater tradition of Comedia de la Arte. What do
you know about Comedia de la Arte, Jordan.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
I think that's the mask based it is, Yeah, yeah,
where everybody is like a different well go ahead, sorry
to mean to cut you off. Oh yeah, man, I
think that's the famous like you know, the drama mask
the punch and Judy comes out of it punchy. I
didn't know that, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's it's basically
just like it's really punny and over and it's supposed
to be.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
I mean, it's comedia. It's a comedy. But they yeah,
they wear masks, and there's and and basically there's different
archetypes that pop up over and over and Scaremoosh is
a combination of two of these other characters of the Zani,
the servant character who's typically the like kind of Iago
the devious, scheming douchebag, and then the capitano who is

(40:14):
the kind of machismo swag like henchman muscle character. And
that and Scaremoosh is a clown character, but he combines
attributes from both of those other twos.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
Yeah, the scaremoug character is famous for worming his way
out of tough, sticky situations, often to the detriment of others.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
The fandango is a couple's dance originating in Spain in
the eighteenth century that starts slowly and gradually increases in tempo,
though at least one person annotating this song on genius
dot Com suggests that in the context of Bohemian rhapsodies
other death obsessed lyrics, Freddie could be referencing an English

(40:56):
slang term, the hemp fandango, which was a term from
hanging Times, I guess, which referred to the death froze
of a hanged man as his legs would jerk at the.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
End of the rope was made of hemp.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Wow, the old fandangoo.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
Wow, that's really grim. Yeah, you're gonna pitch.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
You're gonna pitch this next guy pitch it?

Speaker 1 (41:27):
Yeah, I mean, well, folks. If you want to learn
more about grim phrases in English music, look up The
True Meeting of Spandau Ballet. That's all I'll say. Uh.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Galileo Galilei, of course, was an Italian astronomer and physicist,
best known for being forced into recanting aspects of his
theory of heliocentrism, the correct theory that the earth in
fact revolves around the sun by the Catholic Church from
his trial and the Catholic in front of the pod
Catholic Church. No, they're on the enemy's list. It's the

(42:00):
Catholic Church. Jeffrey Katzenberg and.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
Uh, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Short Liz's the Holy Trinity.
We're mostly here to make friends, just not those guys. Uh.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
From Galileo's trial in sixteen thirty three until his death
in sixteen forty two, he lived under house arrest. Kind
of like pandemic lockdown. Huh, anybody, topical humor doesn't always
hit uh. Figaro is probably an allusion to Mozart's classic
opera The Marriage of Figaro Mercury. Unsurprisingly lifelong opera lover,

(42:38):
he released Barcelona, an album of duets with the operatic
soprano Montserrat Cabale in nineteen eighty eight.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
You heard that red song rules. The song Barcelona is incredible.
He was written as the theme for the for the
Olympic Olympics. Yeah, oh, it's so good.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Bismilla, meanwhile, is a common Arabic term meaning in the
name of God, hence why it precedes the frase let
him go. I e in the name of God, let
him go, the line answered by the devil's response, we
will not let you go. Freddie Mercury was born to
parents Bomi and Jerebo Sara, in the Tanzanian archipelago of Zanzibar.

(43:15):
His parents, as I mentioned earlier, were of Parsi descent,
followers of the Zoroastrian religion, whose ancestors came from Persia.
Freddie spoke very little about this side of his upbringing
during his life, but his funeral was conducted by Zoroastrian priests.
And while we're on the topic of antiquity religion, biez
Olbab is one of the seven Princes of Hell in

(43:37):
Christian demonology, a name derived from the Hebrew phrase baal Zebov,
meaning lord of the flies sucks to your asthmar.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
I didn't all know that that was a biblical reference.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
No, well, not sucks to your asthmar. That's in the
pets in Job. It's the Book of Job, and God
said to Job sucks to your asthmar. Oh boy, is
that one of our most niche references.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
Yeah, it's up there.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
Okay, we'll see how this one market tests. It's an
alternate name for Satan, beezelbub. It's one of the few
names of a few parts of the song that Mercury
is actually on the record about. I found a film
on camera interview where he says someone wrote a letter
about him being into demonology, and he said, well, just
because I used that doesn't mean I study demonology. I

(44:29):
just love the word beezelbub, which is a very funny
sounding word. It must be true.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Yeah, And I'm also guessing he probably wanted to clear
that up for the sake of his parents, who he
really seemed to go out of his way to protect
both from the unsavory aspects of his fame and also,
must be said, certain aspects of his personal life. Here's
a weird side note about Beezelbub. In two thousand and four,
when Queen released the Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, where

(44:55):
Western music was and I imagine still is strictly censored
and sexuality was and I believe still is illegal. They
included a leaflet in Persian with translations and also explanations
concerning some of the lyrics on the tape, and the
explanation for Bohemian Rhapsody states that the song is about
a young man who has accidentally killed someone and like Faust,

(45:18):
sold his soul to the devil, and on the night
before his execution, he calls for God, saying bismilla, as
you said in the name of God in Arabic, and
with the help of angels, he regains his soul from Chaitan,
which is the devil in Arabic. So that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Neither of us were major in theology or linguistics.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
By the way, the broadcasting or journalists or any of this.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
There's been a ton of speculation as to what Mercury
meant with all of those names. One biographer, Leslie and Jones,
postulated that the four figures mentioned by name, Scaramouche, Galileo,
figured Out, and Bazelbub are stand ins for the band themselves,
with Mercury being Scaramouche May with his interest in astrophysics,
Galileo Taylor, and Deacon being Figureo and Basil bub respectively.

(46:14):
I don't know if that's representative of either of those
two men. But John Deacon is just a lovely man.
I can't imagine he was actually supposed to be a
stand in for Satan.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
I actually interviewed Leslie Ann Jones, the author you cited
a moment ago, a few years back, and she told
me she interviewed Freddie in nineteen eighty six and she
asked him point blank what Bohemian Rhapsody was about, and
his only response was that it was quote about relationships,
and that was actually more than most interviewers got from him.
He once said, I'll say, no, more than what any

(46:45):
decent poet would tell you if you dared ask him
to analyze his work. If you see it, dear, then
it's there. And some have suggested that the song takes
some lyrical inspiration from the Albert Camu novel The Stranger,
in which a young man confesses to an impulse of
murder and then has an epiphany before he's executed. So
that could have been a possible inspiration for the.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
Lyrics the other nakedly depressing aspects of this song. Sometimes
I wish I'd never been born at all. Nothing really
matters have been speculated to be about Mercury's battle with
his sexuality, but he famously never commented on any deeper
meaning to the song. Kenny Everett, the DJ who first
played the song on air, claimed to Blender that Freddy
told me Bohemian Rhapsody was just random rhyming nonsense.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
Yeah, Freddie always went out of his way to dismiss
his lyrics, I'm guessing in an attempt to disuade fans
from looking any closer. Brian May remembers that Freddy would
always say, all my lyrics are fish and chip paper
Darling gone tomorrow, because you know, all the chippies would
wrap their fish and chips in yesterday's newspapers, So that's
what that means.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
His Queen bandmates have alternated between playing koy and playing
dumb when pressed for the meaning of the song, and
a BBC three documentary about the making of Bohemian Rhapsody,
drummer vocalist Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of
the song is fairly self explanatory with just a bit
of nonsense in the middle. Brian May casually countered Everett
to blender. He said Freddie was a very complex person,

(48:15):
flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities
and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood.
He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put
a lot of himself into that song. Brian May then
added to The New York Times in two thousand and five,
I have a perfectly clear idea of what was in
Freddie's mind, but it was an unwritten law among us
in those days that the real core of a song

(48:35):
lyric was a private matter for the composer, whoever that
might be. So I still respect that. Roy Thomas Baker
then joked, if I tell you, I would have to
kill you.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
The sexuality stuff is really interesting, and that tends to
be the prevalent theory as to what the song's about.
And I interviewed a few people close to Freddy for
my People magazine profile on him a few years ago,
and they all basically echoed that sentiment. His longtime romantic
partner Jim Hutton, who's together with Freddie when he died
in nineteen ninety one, has gone on records saying that

(49:06):
Bohemian Rhapsody was quote his coming out song, and speculated
that he'd kept his sexuality under raps for the sake
of his family, whose religion doesn't recognize homosexuality. In fact,
I don't think his family had any idea about his
long term relationship with Jim Hutton until after he died.
Leslie and Jones, the journalist, told me Freddie was very
respectful of his parents, and he did see them, but

(49:29):
they weren't aware of his private life until after he died.
I'm sure they would have found a way of dealing
with it, but they were from a different generation and
the expectations were different. They weren't uncompassionate people, they were
very loving parents, but they were from a different time,
from a different country, and from a different religion. And
speaking to the BBC in two thousand and four, Freddie's
mother said that although Bohemian Rhapsity filled her with pride,

(49:51):
she said it hurts me now to hear it, not
out of any kind of shame, but out of regret
that she didn't truly know her son. Queen's career Freddie
was in a romantic relationship with a model named Mary
Austen beginning in nineteen sixty nine, and the pair shared
an apartment and were even engaged to be married, but
Mary noticed something wasn't right between them throughout their seven

(50:13):
years together. She said in the two thousand documentary Freddie
Mercury The Untold Story. I knew this man wasn't at
one with himself over something. And then eventually, when Freddie
confessed his sexuality to Mary, she later said, I felt
like a huge burden had been lifted. Once that had
been discussed. He was like the person I'd known in
the early years, and though the romance was over in

(50:36):
the traditional sense, they would remain close for the rest
of Freddie's life. Freddie himself said in nineteen eighty five,
all my lovers asked me why they couldn't replace Mary,
But it's simply impossible. The only friend that got is married,
and I don't want anyone else to me. It was
a marriage. We believe in each other. That's enough for me.
And so many close to Freddie and many of his

(50:57):
fans believed that his feelings of guilt about out not
being able to you know, truly be with Mary. Austin
this way, coupled with his relief for embracing his own sexuality,
is what inspired Bohemian Rhapsody. The opening line, Mama just
killed a man seems to be addressing Mary or you know,
mother Mary. The line has a mournful quality, as if

(51:19):
he's saying goodbye to a part of himself. And again,
this is a man who's caught between cultures, you know, Zanzibar,
where he grew up with the somewhat strict Ziastan religion
versus the very sensual, swinging sixties London. And he's also
a man who's presiding over several separate sexual identities. There's
the verse later on in the song with the line

(51:39):
send shivers down my spine, bodies aching all the time,
which struck many who studied the lyrics as very sexual
in nature. And Freddy's good friend, the lyricist Tim Rice,
who wrote the lyrics to a Veda and the Songs
from The Lion King and many other great songs, has
agreed with this assessment. He said, it's fairly obvious to
me the Bohemian rhaps that he was Freddie's coming out song,

(52:02):
and he offered some lyrical analysis to support this theory.
Mama just killed the man, put a gun against his head,
pulled my trigger. Now he's dead, meaning he's killed the
old Freddie, the straight person he was trying to be,
and now he's trying to live as the new Freddie.
I see a little silhouette of a man that's Freddie's
still being haunted by what he's done and what he is.

(52:22):
And in the Mark Blake biography Queen, is this the
real life? This true story of Queen Freddie's personal assistant,
a guy named Peter Freestone, said, if you look at
the way Bohemian Rhapsody's written, it's in three parts to
describe Freddie's life. The first part living with Mary, second
part is coming to terms with his desire for men,
and the final part is actual sleeping with men. And

(52:44):
there's a story I was told by the video director
Rudy Dolezol, who directed several of Queen's music videos, including
These Are the Days of Our Lives, which is the
last one that Freddy would appear in shortly before his death.
And the story just always stuck with me or may
not be relevant to the meaning of Bohemian Rhapsody. Rudy
said that Freddie told him, for each step that you

(53:05):
go up the ladder of success, you have to leave
something behind that you love. You will lose friends, you
will even lose family, but that's the price you have
to pay. So maybe I'm projecting, but that could be
closer to the truth of what Bohemian Rhapsody actually meant
to Freddie than any of the other kind of flippant
explanations he would give in interviews. I'd like to give

(53:27):
the final word on the subject to Freddie himself, who said,
I think people should just listen to Bohemian Rhapsody, think
about it, and then make up their own minds as
to what it says to them.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
And now we come to Sweet, Sweet, the Purest, Goodest Boy,
Brian May, astrophysicist, Friend to the Badgers. I said, Jordan's
so many pictures of Brian May with Badgers.

Speaker 1 (53:54):
While we were researching, I used to write, I used
to take great delight in writing about Brian May's Save
the bad his campaign.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
Vegan loves you Know Believes is Yeah, that makes sense.
The man who's laser like guitar meis that's a portmanteau
of guitar army, guitar armies, but also his guitar minies,
his guitar. This bit's not going anywhere.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
The other most recognizable part of Queen Where to begin
with Brian may Well, A good place to start is
his legendary red Special guitar, which he made himself with
his dad, Harold, who was an electrical engineer who'd worked
on the Concord's landing system. When Brian was just sixteen,
Brian had taught himself how to play the banjo lay,

(54:38):
which is, as it sounds, a hybrid of the banjo
and ukulele, and then began lusting after the more standard Gibson,
Les Paul or Fender Stratocaster electric guitar after seeing Jeff
Beck play live and manipulate amplifier feedback with his strat.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
This is my favorite anecdote in this episode, and one
of my favorite anecdotes in rock history. I love the
story about Brian may made is great.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Oh it's just the most like DIY, cool, badass thing ever. Yeah,
he told The Guardian. Brian may told The Guardian in
twenty fourteen, dad could make anything. He converted our spare
bedroom into a workshop where he made all our household appliances,
including our TV. May's family was poor growing up, and
so when young Brian started clamoring for an electric guitar,
Harold decided he would just build one with his son.

(55:23):
May said it took two years and was all done
with hand tools, using any materials we could lay our
hands on. The neck of the red Special was constructed
from wood from a hundred year old Ish fireplace mantle
that a family friend had consigned to the trash. There
are wormholes in it that May filled in with match
sticks favor, and the position inlays on the fingerboard are

(55:48):
hand shape from mother of pearl buttons, presumably from his mother.
This is my favorite part. Well, parts of the body
are made from an oak dining table. This is my favorite.
The tremolo arm, which of the guitar, is made from
motorcycle valve springs and a bicycle saddle bag holder with

(56:09):
the plastic tip of a knitting needle to complete the assembly.
Brian May's relationship with his dad was complex. Harold was
a musician himself who abandoned his dream when Brian came along,
and so he was displeased when Brian then abandoned his
astrophysics studies to focus on Queen. The pair didn't speak

(56:29):
for nearly two years, and their rapprochement finally came when
Queen played Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy seven. Brian
Made told the Guardian, I put my parents on the
concord which dad had worked on but could never afford
to fly on, and told him to see what he thought.
I put them up in a hotel, told them to
order room service, and after the show, Dad shook my

(56:51):
hand and said, Okay, Son, I get it now. That
was a pivotal moment for me. I'd so desperately wanted
his approval.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
I love that story.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
He put his dad on the plane that he helped build.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
That's to watch him play the guitar that he helped
him build. Oh so good, that's some Steven Spielberg. Dad,
Come on, yes it is, Come on, yes it is. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
May would take weeks to craft solos and overdubbed parts
for Queen songs on the Red Special. A huge part
of their sound is the fact that his guitar parts
are multiple tracks of distorted single note lines that are
arranged into chords, which creates different structures of overtones rather
than simply playing all of those notes in a regular chord.

(57:38):
May also played tremendously light strings. He originally used banjo strings,
which were the lightest ones that he could find, before
he could find a set of electric guitar strings that
were light and tiny enough. Your average set of guitar
strings is like a ten gauge, and Brian May plays eight.

Speaker 1 (57:53):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
I think some guitar person will probably get angry about that.
He also uses a sixpence coin instead of a plastic pick.
He told Guitar World it's hard enough to give you
all that contact, and it's also soft enough not to
break your steel strings because it's made of nickel silver,
and it has this lovely serrated edge, and if you

(58:15):
turn it at an angle to the strings, you get
a lovely kind of splatter.

Speaker 1 (58:21):
That is nuts to me. I just love the fact
that they stopped minting sixpence coins when England adopted a
decimal currency in nineteen seventy one. So I have this
great image of doctor Brian May, PhD. Trawing eBay every
few months to get a new batch of sixpence coins
from old collectors and I, as a little boy, used
to collect pre decimal British currency, so I have a

(58:43):
real deep kinship with him over this.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
Well, I hate to break that image for you, but
it's his guitar, text job, his guitar. His longtime guitar
tech Pete Maladrone told Premier Guitar in their rig Rundown
series in twenty fourteen about May's guitars. He says, they're
not that expensive. Of the sixpence, they're cheaper than guitar picks.
Actually they're at face value now, he said, five or

(59:08):
six seven pence per. I buy them in bags of
one hundred. It's not difficult to get a hold of them.
That's another great interview.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
Actually because he shows, uh, he shows the guitar, and
he talks about having to clean up the guitar after
show to get rid of all the metal shavings that
come off the pick the pens and collect near the
magnetic pickups of the guitar. I'd like to collect those,
he talks about.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
He talks about so interesting, how how light Brian's touch
actually is because he's playing on these super light strings
with a metal object, and he's like, if anybody else
picks up this guitar and goes to play on it.
They're just immediately going to start snapping strings. But that
high end, and the other part of the sound is
that everyone talks about is Brian uses a Vox AC thirty,

(59:51):
a small combo amp. The dominant the dominant image of
British classic rock at the time is the you know,
the Marshall stack, the enormous all of Marshals behind led
Zeppelin and behind AC DC and blah blah blah. But
Brian uses a small Vox AC thirty, a combo amp
that it's not even a combo means it doesn't have
a separate amplifier and speaker cabinet's all built into one structure.

(01:00:14):
The AC thirty is also the Beatles model, Is that correct, Jordan?

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
Famously, voxes are a more trebly, mid range, bitey, jangly
voiced amp than a That's why I have one.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
The Beatles think then, like your fenders or your or
your Marshals, And so the combination of extremely light guitar
strings and a metal pick and a very medi trebly
amp gives that biting a laser, his guitar parts sound
like lasers, and he uses something called a treble booster,

(01:00:49):
the range Master treble booster. It's another part of his
distinct guitar tone. Anyway, when Roy Thomas Baker got with
Queen to start making their debut album, he told Sound
on Sound Brian was already onto something different in terms
of trying to orchestrate his guitars in a different way
to how most people would approach it. I had quite
a bit of an orchestral background through working on classical

(01:01:10):
music at Decca, and that helped with structuring the phrasing
of the guitar parts. We never thought of Brian's guitar
as a raunchy instrument like most guitarists do. It was
an orchestral instrument. Brian's great strength was in phrasing apart
and then double tracking or harmonizing very quickly and accurately.
Queen's early albums all featured the phrase nobody played synthesizer

(01:01:31):
in their liner notes, and Baker told Sound on Sound
that was less a protest against the dominance of sins
and music at the time, and more to clue people
in that all of these other worldly sounds that they
were hearing were just Brian. He said there was no
stipulation that we wouldn't have any synths, but the statement
no since was printed on the album sleeves. Because of
people's lack of intellect in the ears department, which is

(01:01:52):
a very British turn of phrase, many people couldn't hear
the difference between a multi tracked guitar and a synthesizer.
We would spend four days is multi layering a guitar solo,
and then some imbecile from the record company would come
in and say, I like that synth.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
There's the track on that at the Opera Good Company
where he has a whole horn section. It sounds like
a horn section. For years I assumed it was that's
all guitar lines, just weaving in and out for one.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
And it's really incredible because he's trying to get it
to sound like a Dixie Lane jazz band, and you
hear him playing stuff that sounds like It doesn't just
sound like, oh, I'll play like a bunch of guitars.
It sounds like the clarinet parts. The Snowsberry's tastes like Stusburry.
The clarinet parts sound like what a clarinetist would play.

(01:02:40):
He does a trembone glissando at one part with the trembar.
It's really it's mind boggling the stuff that he was
able to pull out, and on Bohemian Rhapsody in particular,

(01:03:05):
May used an amp that was actually built by Queen's basis,
John Deacon. John Deacon is the if we're assigning identities,
he's the quiet one or the cat ah the spaceman
because he was the only person who didn't sing, and

(01:03:26):
he pretty much disappeared from all public life after Queen died.
Brian May says the only time they hear from him
is about money, which fair. But he's a great bassist.
As I mentioned earlier, he wrote You're My Best Friend
and another one bites the dust, I want to Break Free,
co wrote under Pressure. And he was also a trained
electrical engineer, so one of the trademark Queen guitar sounds

(01:03:48):
comes from an amp that he built, called the Deakey
or what they called it because his name is Deacon.
You can hear that on the back half of Bohemian Rhapsody,
the harmonized solos, as well as Killer Queen and the
aforementioned Good Company Bohemian rhapsody.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
I assume it's the like trumpet floorish is at the end,
like the triumphant like processional. Yeah, and that kind of stuff. Again.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
In that video that we've been talking about, you can
hear him pull apart the different guitar sounds and he's like,
that's the d key, like blah blah blah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
Just incredible stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
John Deacon built that out of stuff he found in
the trash while walking through London, specifically the amplifier section
of a transistor radio called the Conquest Supersonic PR eighty
that was built in South Africa and Zimbabwe in the
nineteen sixties. Deacon hook that up two speakers, one of
which was a six and a half inch eLAC twin cone,

(01:04:43):
built the whole thing into a cabinet and powered it
with a nine volt battery. It has no tone or
volume controls and it never broke down, so they didn't
know like they had. It just worked for them because
he handbuilt the thing, they never knew what was in it,
and eventually someone started to be like, oh, we should
like make a commercial copy of this, so they took
it apart and then found out what was actually what

(01:05:07):
I had actually gone into this thing, which for decades
had been just part of the Queen's studio studio gear. Yeah,
so red special Vox AC thirty, the Deky and a
Dallas Rangemaster treble booster, some really thin guitar strings and
a sixpence and you're and you will still not be,

(01:05:28):
just gonna say, and also a near genius intellect and
incredible fingers. For Bohemian Rhapsody's lyrical solo, Brian May told
Total Guitar in twenty twenty one. Freddy said he wanted
a solo in there, and I said, I would like
to effectively sing a verse on the guitar. I basically
sang it. I regard the guitar in that situation as

(01:05:49):
a voice. I could hear this melody, and I had
no idea where it came from. The melody isn't anywhere
else in the song, but it's on a familiar chord sequence,
so it dovetails in quite nicely. I didn't do many takes.
It was one of those occasions where you do a
few takes and then you go back and listen to
the first one, and the first one is almost exactly
what you want. You just need to trim it a
little bit and polish it up.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
Yeah. Brian May talked at length about how he didn't
want his solo to just be a restatement of the verse,
but he wanted it to be its own distinctive musical phrase.
In one of several Bohemian rhaps City documentaries out there,
he said that to play the verse melody in this
case would be quote lamb, which I enjoy very much,

(01:06:31):
just find it hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
He would have been problem that man would have been
great if like he'd been doing this documentary with like
a badger cradle in his arms, like working the faders
with this cute little animal. As for the headbanging riff
of the part of the song, May said, that was
Freddy's idea, Freddy Burker, who played guitar, and so he said, Uh,
Freddy had that riff in his head, and I just

(01:06:55):
played what he wanted there. I think he just sang
it to me, and then we went for it live
in the studio. As you meditate on that, we'll be
right back with more too much information after these messages,

(01:07:17):
once all of these elements had been recorded and all
of the tapes spliced together by hand and mixed at
five or six studios, four of them in London alone.
The band started premiering it to people. Queen at this
time had a habit of hiding their tapes while the
sessions were in progress to shield them from the eyes
of the label, meaning very few people heard the song
until it was finished. Baker told Sound on Sound we'd

(01:07:40):
attempt some rough mixes ourselves for other songs, just to
see if edits would work. But rough mixes had a
habit of getting into the record company's hands prematurely, so
if we ever did any we would hide them or
disguise them. Once a triedent. Billy Kobom, who's a jazz
drummer who's around this time. I think he would have
been in Mahavishna Orchestra with John mccauklin. Billy Coben was

(01:08:01):
working next door and we hit our tapes in that
control room. Labeling them is silly, Bobham. If it had
been labeled Queen, we knew that E and I would
have had a copy the next day.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
I didn't know any of this. That's really fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 (01:08:14):
Mark Blake's biography recalls that Mata Hoople lead singer Ian Hunter,
who had just quit that band and was about to
get the members of Queen to play on his next
solo record, drop by the studio to check in on
what the band was doing and was treated to Bohemian Rhapsody.
He told Blake, they unleashed it on us in four
huge speakers. I couldn't make head nor tail of all
that pomp and circumstance. It was like being run over

(01:08:36):
by a truck. Fred said, what did you think? I
didn't have the faintest idea.

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):
What is it? Does Mata hoop will have like pictures
on somebody. First they were going to break up, and
then they got David Bowie to like give them all
the young dudes and sing on it and produce it.
And then Ian Hunter bounced and was somehow going to
get Queen to play with him. I mean, like, Mata
hoopole are fine, but that's a serious star wattage for like,

(01:09:04):
never mind, I'm not going to go any further in
case I'm Mata Hoopl's fervent fan base come for me.

Speaker 2 (01:09:10):
Well, I mean, you know, it is really funny. Todd
Rundren played on his one of his tours Mick Mick
Jones from The Clash is on uh is on his
first album in the eighties. I don't know, man, maybe
maybe Ian Hunter has like, uh, he's got like voodoo
powers or something. He just uh yeah. His nineteen seventy
nine album featured John Kale and several members of the

(01:09:32):
East Street Band.

Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
Okay, oh yeah, I forgot that. So you do recognize
that that's super weird.

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):
No, it's yeah, it's wild. I all American alien boy.
This nineteen seventy six record. It has David Sanborn, who
is like a famous jazz saxophonist, and Jocko Pastorius, who
revolutionized the electric bass in the twentieth century, is playing
on that for some reason. Yeah, man, what is he
Hunter have on baby? He's just really persuasive. He's got

(01:10:03):
great drugs. I did not know that Ian Hunter wrote
Cleveland Rocks.

Speaker 1 (01:10:09):
Oh yeah, the theme song to the True Carriage Show.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
That is wild. Ian Hunter was given the key to
the city by Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kassinich in nineteen seventy nine.
This concludes your Ian Hunter sidebar.

Speaker 1 (01:10:26):
He must have made so much money from that damn song.
Ah uh.

Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
When Queen's manager John Reid played Bohemian Rhapsody to his
other client at the time, Elton John. The singer's response was,
are you fing mad?

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
Elton's response is really funny to me. I think it's
important to note that Elton was also in a romantic
relationship with John Reid at the time, and Elton wrote
about the moment that he first heard Bohemian Rhapsody in
his memoir The hilariously titled Me. He said, quote, we
listened to the song and I shook my head incredulous.

(01:11:01):
You're not actually going to release that, are you. We
asked what the problem was with the song, Elton replied,
for one thing, it's about three hours long. For another,
it's the campiest thing I've ever heard in my life,
which is hilarious coming from him. And the title's absolutely
ridiculous as well, he said, which is rich coming from
the man who just released an album called Captain Fantastic

(01:11:22):
and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Although, wait, does that album
title kind of rule in might kind of rule all right?
Which it's my favorite from that era. But the title,
it's a ridiculous title.

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
I mean, yeah, Captain Fantastic would have sufficed.

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
Yeah. However, I do love Elton and Freddie's friendship so much.
Elton told this really sweet, really devastating story of getting
a delivery at his house for Christmas nineteen ninety one,
which was just a few weeks after Freddie Mercury's death,
and it was a painting by the British Impressionist artist
Henry Scott Tuck, who Elton had just started collecting, and

(01:11:57):
the canvas was covered in an elaborate pillow cave, and
it came with a note from Freddie reading using their
drag names. It said, Dear Sharon, I thought you'd like this,
Love Molina, Happy Christmas. And Elton has reduced to tears
because he knew that his friend had picked out this
Christmas gift knowing there was a pretty decent chance that
he wouldn't be alive to give it to him. And

(01:12:19):
Nelton said that he still has the painting on its
easel in his bedroom, as well as the pillowcase that
it came in next to his bed. And I'm pretty
sure that Freddie's death was the reason that he became
really active and fundraising for a's research. A touching display
of friendship between two two outrageous legends.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
Despite the pressure that the band had faced to produce
a radio friendly hit to lift themselves out of the
financial hole they were in after the tried ent deal
and a canceled US tour. Mercury was adamant that Bohemian
Rhapsody'd be the band's next single. Tell me one other
group that has done an operatic single, he said, I
can't think of anybody. Producer Roy Thomas Baker went to
bat for the band, pointing out that Richard Harris had

(01:13:01):
had a hit with MacArthur Park in nineteen sixty eight,
a song that goes on for an interminable seven and
a half minutes.

Speaker 1 (01:13:08):
I'm guessing Hey Jude, which is also around that same length,
was less of the shock because it was the Beatles,
and yeah, they could do whatever they want.

Speaker 2 (01:13:16):
But Emi said the BBC wouldn't play anything past three
and a half minutes. Paul Watts, who was the general
manager of the label's international division, is quoted in the
Mark Blake book. I was expecting something very special, so
when they played me Bohemian Rhapsody, my reaction was, what
is this? Are you mad? Watts and Eric Hall, who
was a fan of the band at EMI, both pushed

(01:13:38):
for radio edit, but Queen refused. Later on, it was
said that bassist John Deacon was the lone member who
would have been okay with releasing the song in a
radio edit format.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
I read that they actually made one for the French market,
which was something like three minutes and eighteen seconds long,
and it's really rare. I've been trying to find a
version of it online. I can't say for certain that
the one that's on YouTube is the right, because according
to descriptions from Brian May, at least this radio edited
version started off right at the piano intro with no

(01:14:09):
you a cappella beginning, and it cut out the operetta
part entirely. It was basically just the ballad part of
the song. That's not the case for the version that
I found on YouTube. So I don't know if you
were a loved one as the three minute version, but
he Bean raps forty five please get in touch and
Higel will vemma you five bucks.

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):
The story of how the song eventually hit the airwaves
is a little muddy. The aforementioned EMI dude, Eric Hall,
said that he himself smuggled at copy to Kenny Everett,
who is an extremely famous DJ on London's Capitol Radio,
while Roy Thomas Baker said that he brought Everett over
to get his opinion on the song, and Everett loved
it and asked for copy. The band acquiesced under the

(01:14:52):
condition that he not played the song, as it was
a test pressing or rough copy or whatever, and whatever
the actual case was, what ended up happening was that
Everett played few snippets of the song, all while telling
his listeners that he couldn't play the whole thing, and
then proceeded to do just that fourteen times over the
course of one weekend.

Speaker 1 (01:15:10):
Yeah, Kenny Everett loved Bohemian rhapsoy so much. He said
it shouldn't be number one, it should be a new
position above that. It should be a half just pretty
good I record hit half. Yeah. Some of the folks
I talked to for my Freddie Mercury profile who knew
Freddy and Kenny Everett, who were both close friends, basically

(01:15:30):
said that it was a case of handing this tape
of Bohemian Rhapsody over to Kenny Everett and saying, oh no,
it would be a shame if someone were to, you know,
play this on your super popular radio show and use
it to drum up buzz for a song that our
labels giving us a hard time about releasing. Whatever you do,
don't play it, you know. Wink And then Kenny said,

(01:15:51):
oh no, I never do that, wink and.

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
Watch me when I say it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:56):
Yes, yes, winking was involved. Whatever the case, Kenny Everett,
who was kind of a renegade with this python esque
sense of humor that ended up getting him fired from
the BBC a few years before. As you said, he
teased listeners by playing snippets of the song before then
playing it in its entirety fourteen times that weekend. And

(01:16:16):
it was one of those cliche situations where all the
phone lines at the radio station lit up and I
an interviewed with the Sound on sound producer Roy Thomas
Baker said it was a strange situation when radio on
both sides of the Atlantic were breaking a record that
the record company said would never get airplay.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
Yeah. This was because Paul Drew, who ran the RKO
general stations in the US, was actually in London and
he heard Bohemian Rhapsy being played on Effett Show and
managed to get a copy of the tape to play stateside,
which ended up forcing the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra.
So what happened after this weekend was that fans hit

(01:16:54):
the shops Monday to try and buy this single, and
all the record shops then rang up Emi and said
we need this song released as a single, and the
result is that Bohemian Rhapsody was released as Queen's fifth
single in the UK on Halloween nineteen seventy five.

Speaker 1 (01:17:09):
I mean this is when we cut to the cigar
chopping executive. Get me that song, Get me Queen. I
gotta hit a Bohemian Rhapsody.

Speaker 2 (01:17:18):
Scarrowmouge. I think I think I had that guy killed.

Speaker 1 (01:17:25):
He's buried with Hoffa. The B side for Bohemian Rhapsody,
hilariously is Roger Taylor's I'm in Love with My Car,
which is the song Roger, It's your cousin, It's your cousin,
Marvin Taylor.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
You know that new sound about having sex with your
car you're looking for, Well, listen to this.

Speaker 1 (01:17:51):
He plays like the sound of a strip club next
to a next to a highway light. Bulb goes on
over Roger Taey's head. No, that song actually whips. It's
a great vocal performance. It's great, but it is very silly.
The lyrics are very sexual. Should I read some of it? Yeah,
there's no getting around that. Yeah, it's about wanting to

(01:18:12):
have sex with your car.

Speaker 2 (01:18:13):
But it's not about Roger Taylor. Supposedly he wrote it
inspired by one of the band's rodies, a guy named
Jonathan Harris, whose Triumph TR four was evidently the love
of his life. The lyrics are as follows the machine
of a dream, such a clean machine with the pistons
of pumpin and the hub caps all gleam. When I'm

(01:18:35):
holding your wheel, all I hear is your gear with
my hand on your grease gun. Oh it's like a
disease son. Anyway, this isn't.

Speaker 1 (01:18:48):
The appropriate response. But a TR four is not like
it's like a Mazda Miata like. It's not like a
Rolls Royce or a Jaguar like some really like rare
expensive car.

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
Roy Thomas Baker told Sound on Sound Queen were great
to work with, although like most bands, there was an
element of internal bickering. I always told them there was
too embarrassing for them to have an argument in front
of everyone in the studio, so I would always make
a room available for them to go in and argue
in private. I think most of their arguments were about
who had the B side that royalty thing, which is
if you have the B side to a successful single,

(01:19:21):
you get half the royalties, meaning Roger Taylor's song about
wanting to his car got half the royalties from being
the B side to one of the greatest songs of
all time. Baker continued, I remember Roger moping because he
really wanted his song I'm in Love with My Car
on the B side of Bohemian Rhapsody. He locked himself
in the tape closet at SARM Studios and said he

(01:19:44):
wouldn't come out until they agreed to put it on.
If you should happen, however, to find one of the
two hundred copies of the Bohemian Rhapsody I'm in Love
with My Car single that were pressed on blue vinyl,
you are extremely in luck. There is one of them
currently on sale on this cogs for over five thousand dollars,
and that's.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
A bargain because in some of the documentaries from like
two thousand and three, two thousand and four I was
watching about Bohemian Rhapsody, that's how much it was going
for then twenty years ago, so I bet you the
list price is probably even higher.

Speaker 2 (01:20:16):
A Night at the Opera, which as we mentioned, ended
up becoming the most expensive British album ever made at
the time, came out just under a month later on
November twenty first, nineteen seventy five. Because of the band's
dithering over the final mix, it wasn't reviewed in most
UK music magazines because they just didn't make these available.
There was no final mix of it until the very
last minute, so there were no press copies available. But regardless,

(01:20:38):
it topped the UK album chart for four non consecutive
weeks and peaked at number four on the Billboard Top
LPs and Tape chart, becoming the band's first platinum certified
album in the US.

Speaker 1 (01:20:49):
But it wasn't without its detractors. A critic for the
UK outlet Melody Maker, came for Bohemian Rhapsody upon its release,
writing that it sounded like quote a ballum amateur opera
society performing the Pirates of Penzance. Presumably this reviewer was.

Speaker 2 (01:21:05):
Shot Bohemian rhaps They topped the UK singles charts for
nine weeks plus another five weeks following Freddie Mercury's death
in nineteen ninety one. It remains the UK's third best
selling single of all time. Topped the charts in countries
including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the Netherlands, sold over
six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song

(01:21:27):
peaked at number nine in nineteen seventy six, but reached
a new peak of number two after appearing in the
nineteen ninety two film Wayne's World. More on That in a.

Speaker 1 (01:21:36):
Bit, Critic Anthony to Curtis described Bohemian Rhapsody uncharitably but
not inaccurately, as the quick essential example of the kind
of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America fair.

Speaker 2 (01:21:50):
In two thousand and four, this song was inducted into
the Grammy Hall of Fame. While following the release of
the twenty eighteen Queen biopic that shares the name, it
became the most streamed song from the twentieth century period,
breaking the previous record held by Nirvana for Smells Like
Teen Spirit. In twenty twenty one, it was certified Diamond

(01:22:11):
in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal
to ten million units eh. Fellow prog rock icon Greg Lake,
whose song I Believe In Father Christmas was kept from
the number one in the UK by Bohemian Rhapsody, acknowledged
that he was beaten by one of the greatest records
ever made, describing Bohemian Rhapsody as a once in a

(01:22:32):
lifetime recording.

Speaker 1 (01:22:34):
I can't believe you just loved Greg Lake and with
Queen Go go listen to take a pebble on your
own time.

Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
What's your beef with the Lake?

Speaker 1 (01:22:50):
No peace socks? Come on? Oh, I have a soft
spot for a lot of prog rock. Actually, I'd probably
like Kingdom Success, But yeah, I like you whatever. The
Welcome Back by Friends of the show that never owns
that one rules, Yeah, I like yet I like some
Yes too man carnivil Carnival. Yeah, I even like the
one with the armadillo tank Tarcas. I went to a

(01:23:13):
big ELP face brain salad surgery, come on, oh yeah,
brain solas wrong with you? Don't hate on ELP putts.
You wish you could play keyboards. It's jealousy, that's what
it is. You wish you had a collection of Nazi
daggers to stab into a series of b three organs
like yeah, um, no lesson authority here, this will warm

(01:23:38):
you to the cockles of your frozen elp hating heart.
No lesson authority on mid century maximalist pop music than
the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson, when asked about the song
in Sounds magazine in nineteen seventy six, described Bohemian Rhapsody
as quote the most competitive thing that's come along in ages,
and a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer

(01:24:01):
of artistic music. I love that. I love that Brian
Wilson comments at a Bohemian Rhapsody because I really think
there's a line between you know, the unorthodox form and
meticulous studio construction of good vibrations to Bohemian Rhapsody. There's
also been a lot of comparison between Bohemian Rhapsody and
another Wayne's World staple, Stairway to Heaven. Music writers Pete

(01:24:24):
Brown and HP Newquist observed that both songs had a slow,
introspective beginning and a gradual climb to a raging metal
jam and back again, although the notable distinction is while
led Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted
for the like grandeur of the operetta as part of
its hard rock.

Speaker 2 (01:24:42):
At the nineteenth Annual Grammy Awards in February nineteen seventy seven,
Bohemian Rhapsody received two Grammy nominations for Best Pop Vocal
Performance by a Duo Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement
for Voices. Though it lost. Queen has been nominated for
four Grammys, lost out every time, although in two thousand
and four the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall
of Fame. Hell the Bell, he mean to absolutely lose

(01:25:02):
for Best Vocal Arrangement too.

Speaker 1 (01:25:04):
Ooh should we check this? Yeah? Like seriously, one hundred
and eighty tracks. The tape was clear. You animals, You insects,
The tape was clear.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):
The laces were out. The lace Venture reference for you
just because Span High Low Culture. Best Pop Vocal Performance
by a Duo Group or Chorus Ooh if You Leave
Me Now by Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:25:35):
Oh, and what was the other one?

Speaker 2 (01:25:40):
Best Arrangement for Voices, Best Arrangement for Voices?

Speaker 1 (01:25:44):
Oh oh no, it's the worst possible one.

Speaker 2 (01:25:50):
Guess I'll give you a hint. It was featured in Anchorman,
I Don't Know, Starland vocal band for Afternoon Delight.

Speaker 1 (01:26:05):
Ah ah, screaming into a pillow.

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
Oh my god, that's horrifying.

Speaker 1 (01:26:15):
Yeah, that's bad. That was stellar call from the Grammys.

Speaker 2 (01:26:20):
Bohemian Rhapsody also won an Ivor Novello Award in nineteen
seventy six and British Single of the Year the nineteen
seventy seven brit Awards and October of nineteen seventy seven.
Only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry
named Bohemian Rhapsody as the best British single of the
last twenty five years, and twenty five years after that,
it was named by Guinness the Guinness Book of World

(01:26:40):
Records as the top British single of all time. In
a two thousand and one poll of more than fifty
thousand readers of The Observer and viewers of British TV's
Channel four for the one hundred best number one singles
of all time, Bohemian Rhapsody came in second to John
Lennon's Imagine Bohemian Rapsody's Better. In two thousand and two,
it came in tenth in a BBC World Service poll

(01:27:01):
to find the world's favorite song has been in the
top five of the Dutch annual all time Top one
hundred singles since nineteen seventy seven, reaching number one on
eight occasions, more than any other artist. The Dutch love
Queen Who Knew That.

Speaker 1 (01:27:16):
The Dutch.

Speaker 2 (01:27:18):
In a twenty twelve reader's poll conducted by Rolling Stone,
Bohemian Rahpsy was voted the best vocal performance in rock history.
Also that year, the song topped an ITV poll in
the UK to find the nation's favorite number one over
sixty years of music, beating out Billy Jean, Someone Like
You Don't Look Back in Anger and Hey Jude, which
rounded out the top five. The band's groundbreaking music video

(01:27:41):
for the single so passed one billion views on YouTube
in July twenty nineteen, one billion views, making it the
oldest music video to reach one billion views on the
platform and the first pre nineteen ninety song to reach
that figure. And lastly, my favorite honorifics of all time.
In two thousand and two, Bohemian Rhapsody was selected by
the US Library of Congress for preservation in the National

(01:28:02):
Recording Registry as being culturally, historically or esthetically significant.

Speaker 1 (01:28:08):
I'm so glad you have that? What else do I
have at this point, they've taken everything else from me. Well,
speaking of that video, it's a crucial component of Bohemian
Rhapsoy's success, and honestly it was more or less done
just to get out of doing lame promotional appearances they
didn't feel like doing. Queen were poised to head out

(01:28:29):
on tours soon after the release of Bohemian Rhapsody in
the fall of nineteen seventy five, which made it tough
to do the traditional televisual promotional run and on the store.
I just love this anecdote. Roger Taylor's drum kit was
outfitted with a sixty inch symphonic Tam Tam gong which
had been cleaned, packed and set up on each date.
It's just so we could strike that one final note

(01:28:50):
in Bohemian Rhapsody touring in the seventies.

Speaker 2 (01:28:54):
Speak of Emerson Lake and Palmer, I think they set
like a gross weight record when they were touring in
the seventies, the sheer tonnage of crap that they were
taking with them on tour. I mean, B three's aren't
like I found what it was. Emerson Lake and Palmer
in nineteen seventy seven took twenty five tons of equipment
on tour.

Speaker 1 (01:29:14):
I would is it like itemized? I would love to
see what the hell that I make? Gus a bunch
of organs like synths, gongs, yeah, drums, samps, stamps. Wow?
Is that a record?

Speaker 2 (01:29:28):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
I don't know that the I choose to believe it. Yeah. Wow. So,
in addition to gearing up to head out on the
road performing what he Mean raps the on TV shows
was further complicated by the fact that the song was
extremely hard to perform live. Brian May would later say
that they felt self conscious miming to the operatic part,
which is really their only option. You couldn't reproduce that

(01:29:50):
on stage, at least at that time. In nineteen seventy five,
that music TV show du Joor was Top of the Pops,
which was I'm trying to think of with the American
eqivalent would be like bigger than American Bandstand, bigger than
Soul Train, bigger than TRL, some combination of the three.
But appearing on top of the Pops was kind of
a drag for Queen. Speaking to the Observer in December

(01:30:12):
two thousand and four, Roger Taylor explained we had everything
we possibly could to avoid appearing on Top of the Pops.
One it was the most boring day known to man,
and two it's all about not actually playing. It's all
pretending to sing or pretending to play. So we came
up with the video concept to avoid playing on Top
of the Pops, a fact that I'm sure the producers

(01:30:33):
of that show are thrilled to hear. Queen also hired
director Bruce Gowers to shoot their music video, and he
got the job basically by virtue of the fact that
he was one of the few people in Britain at
the time who had experienced shooting music videos or pop
promos as they were called back then. He was a
camera operator and a few of the Beatles promotional clips
from a decade earlier, including one for Paperback Writer in

(01:30:55):
nineteen sixty six, and he would later move to Hollywood
and direct the MTV Movie Awards, the Primetime Emmy Awards,
the People's Choice Awards, and the first ten seasons of
American Idol. So this guy's had a big career anyway.
Gowers met the band at Elstree Studios just outside of
London to shoot the Bohemian Rhapsody clip in November nineteen
seventy five, and they completed it in just three hours

(01:31:17):
for a poultry thirty five hundred pounds or about five
thousand dollars. And there are two main images from the
video that everyone remembers. The first is the band recreating
their iconic diamond pose from the cover of their Queen
two album, which was taken by photographer Mick Rock and
that image was borrowed from the silver screen cinema star
Marlena Dietrich from her nineteen thirty two movie Shanghai Express,

(01:31:39):
which is just one of the many non rock star
influences on Freddie Mercury always thought it was interesting. He
also worshiped e Liza Minelli, specifically the use of her course, yeah,
specifically the use of her hands when he wasn't playing
an instrument on stage, those sort of Bob Fosse ish
movements that he had her do in the movie Cabaret,
and Freddie later said, I as adoralize them. Anelle. She's

(01:32:01):
a total wow the way she delivers her songs, the
sheer energy and Robney Mallick later told The New York
Times that as he was preparing for his role, as
Freddy in the film Bohemian Rhapsody. He found it more
helpful at times to watch Liza in cabaret than watching
Freddy's concerts. The other famous visual in the Bohemian Rhapsody
video is the stream of Freddy's faces that stretch off

(01:32:23):
into infinity during the Magnifico and let Me Go parts.
This sort of visual echo, and this was achieved live,
not in post production, by pointing the camera at a monitor,
thus triggering what's called visual feedback, which is basically akin
to audio feedback. And the effects for this video, even
though they look really cool, were really low budget. For example,

(01:32:44):
the honeycomb effect that was of the band in their
diamond post was achieved by holding a prism up to
the front of the camera lens, so very quick, very easy.
Everything about this clip was sort of a rush job.
It was edited in just five hours because Top of
the Pops wanted to air the video the same week
it was shot, so it premiered on November twentieth, nineteen

(01:33:04):
seventy five, and resulted in a whole new wave of
interest for Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody. And It's funny the
band actually laughed when they first saw the clip because
they just thought it was so kitchy, but turned out
to be their master stroke. More than an artistic triumph,
it allowed for repeated airings on top of the pops,
which contributed to the song's success. Normally, when bands came

(01:33:25):
on to mime their new single, they could only really
play at once, but making these promo videos meant you
could play it again and again, and this jump started
a trend among British artists at the time for making
videos of their songs to air in place of TV appearances.
Saved them from having to slep around all these different
studios and again you got a lot of repeat performances
out of it, and hence why when MTV launched a

(01:33:47):
few years later in nineteen eighty one, the majority of
the videos that came in these early days were from
British artists because that was simply all that was available
all the time. The other enduring image of bohemian raps
these stems, of course, from Wayne World. The nineteen ninety
two film based on Mike Myer's breakout SNL character, opens
with Wayne Dana Carvey's character Garth and their friends headbanging

(01:34:09):
in the car to the song, and it's hard to imagine,
but this scene was very nearly completed using a different song.
Laurd Michaels, the Saturn Night Live producer and the producer
of Wayne's World, was pushing hard for a guns N'
Roses track in order to keep the movie contemporary. And
this is because it's hard to remember now, but by
the dawn of the nineties, Queen We're not seen as

(01:34:30):
very cool in the United States. They hadn't even bothered
a tour here during their last international tours, and the
reason that's most commonly cited for Queen's popularity taking a
nosedive was their video for I Want to Break Free,
which featured the band in drag, and that so it
seems ridiculous to say now, sort of damage to their

(01:34:50):
reputation in the United States. It was tough for hard
rock fans at the time to be seen openly embracing
a band who dressed in drag. So by nineteen ninety two,
Queen weren't big in America and so they were a
tough sell for the producers of Wayne's World. Mike Myers
told Vanity Fair in twenty fourteen, Lauren kept putting under
my office store of the Billboard Hot one hundred, and
it was all guns n' roses, guns n' roses, guns n' roses.

(01:35:13):
I said, I love guns n' roses, but I don't
have a joke for guns n' roses. Mike Myers and
Lauren Michaels, they seem to have this really weird relationship
in the late eighties. Soon after Myers was hired on
Saturday Night Live, Lauren tried to get him to remake
The Graduate Dustin Hoffman and Ben's Weird. Yeah, I know.
Myers responded by saying, kind of rightly, it didn't need

(01:35:35):
to be remade. He said, it's a perfect film and
a little man should not stand in a great man's shoes.
And Lauren said, I just offered you a freaking movie,
and Meyers said, well, I want to make Wayne's World,
to which Lauren said really, which Myers said, decoded as
Lauren speak for you sing idiot. Myers then went on

(01:35:58):
to decode other Lauren. When Lauren says right, a lah
Doctor Evil who based Doctor Evil on it means he
doesn't want to hear about it anymore. Meanwhile, when Michael
says cool, it means get the out of my office.
So things started off on kind of a weird foot
for Wayne's World and the Bohemian Rhapsody scene in general,

(01:36:21):
and reportedly when producers tried to pressure Mike Myers into
using Welcome to the Jungle for that scene, he threatened
to leave the production entirely. I guess Mike was kind
of a pill on the set. The headbanging scene took
ten hours to shoot, and by the end everybody evolved
with the scene. We're complaining of headaches and begging for aspirin.

(01:36:41):
And you'll notice if you watch the scene, Dana Carvey
didn't learn the lyrics ahead of time, so you can
see that he's often just like randomly moving his mouth
when singing a lot. It's pretty funny. Yeah. Director Penelophie
Safara said that Mike was a nightmare to work with, though,
and that she quote hated that bastard for years. She
told the famous story I'm arriving on set one day
to discover that the snack table only had butter and

(01:37:04):
not margarine for his Bagel Myers, who suffers from low
blood sugar, became enraged, flipped the table over and stormed
off the set and did not come out of his
trailer for hours, reportedly for legal reasons. Penelophe sa Faris
added to Entertainment Weekly. Myers was emotionally needy and got
more difficult as the shoot went along. You should have

(01:37:25):
heard him bitching when I was trying to do that
Bohemian Rhapsody scene. Oh, I can't move my neck like that.
Why do we have to do this so many times?
No one's gonna laugh at that. But thankfully Sepharis and
Mike Myers have reconciled. Two thousand and eight, she revealed
that after seeing him at Austin Powers International Man of Mystery,
she was so impressed that she thought, I forgive you, Mike.
You can be moody, you can be a jerk, You

(01:37:47):
could be things that others of us can't be, because
you are profoundly talented, and I forgive you. But thanks
to his inclusion in Wayne's World, Bohemian Rapsy shot up
the charts in the United States, reaching number two, being
kept from the top spot by Jump by Chriss Cross,
and years later, Mike Myers would pay tribute to his
role in the song's success by taking a role in
the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody as the EMI executive who

(01:38:10):
refuses to release Bohemian Rhapsody because it's too long and
kids need a song that they can quote bang their
heads too in a car, which is clever.

Speaker 2 (01:38:20):
That phrase would be an anachronism.

Speaker 1 (01:38:22):
Yes, you're right. Quiet Riot had not released Bang Your
Head or Metal Health, I should say, until nineteen eighty three. Uh.
Still pretty funny, though, is it?

Speaker 2 (01:38:36):
Jordan's Is that the price we pay for historical accuracy
in our biopics? In our Oscar winning biopics?

Speaker 1 (01:38:45):
Did that win Best Picture? Ronnie One?

Speaker 2 (01:38:48):
Oh my god, Bohemian Rhapsody?

Speaker 1 (01:38:51):
Oscars? Did it win Best Picture?

Speaker 2 (01:38:52):
Jesus Christ?

Speaker 1 (01:38:54):
Did it? Yes? God, wow, wow, Jesus Okay. Mike Myers's
character says to Queen but even Rhapsod, he goes on
forever it's six bloody minutes, to which Freddy has the
medium funny comeback line, I pity your wife if you

(01:39:14):
think six minutes is forever. Ooh yeah, that's good. That's
pretty good. Yeah. The head banging scene in Wayne's World
sounds unpleasant for all concerns, but there was a silver
lining for Myers other than, you know, making a ridiculous
amount of money. He belatedly learned that Brian May had
taken a rough cut of the scene to Freddie Mercury
just before his death in November nineteen ninety one, and

(01:39:36):
according to Brian May, Freddy quote loved it. He just
laughed and laughed. He was very weak, but he smiled
and laughed. How wonderful is that? And Mike Myers reportedly
had no idea about this until he was at a
screeting from Bohemian Rhapsody in twenty eighteen, and Brian turned
to him and said, you know, Freddy saw Wayne's world
and he loved it. According to Myers, he cried on

(01:39:58):
the spot. I had no idea, he said. I didn't
know that he'd seen it until then. And so remember
our sweet sentimental ending for our Austin Powers episode, when
our dear Mike Myers got a priceless moment with his
hero George Harrison that went over so well that we've
decided to end this episode on another one of those
sweet Mike Myers almost meeting his hero of moments. Friend

(01:40:21):
of the pod, Michael Myers tears, happy tears, happy tears. Wow,
that's everything on Bohemian Rhapsody that took us less time
than I thought I would two hours on one song.
This episode is about as long as Bohemian Rhapsody, and.

Speaker 2 (01:40:37):
It'll be better edited. Where's our Oscar Academy. Let's not
get weighed down in bitterness. I would like to go
out on this episode with a quote that Roy Thomas
Baker gave to The New York Times about the song
Bohemian Rhapsody, but that I think could also be a
lovely eulogy for its mastermind, mister Freddie Mercury. The thing

(01:41:01):
that makes the song most ageless is the fact that
it didn't confine to any given genre of music. It
doesn't compete with anything. It's in a world of its own.
What a world, folks. Thank you for listening. This has
been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtagg.

(01:41:21):
Nothing really matters, okaks you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:41:24):
Hey. Too much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The
show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The
show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:41:40):
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:41:45):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

Speaker 2 (01:42:01):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}FROM THE VAULT "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen: Everything You Didn't Know (50th Anniversary Edition!)