Roy Thomas Baker knew he was in trouble. He knew he was going to have an interesting scenario on his hands when he walked into the recording studio and Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury began playing him part of a piece of music he was putting together, something Mercury had been working on since the 1960s.
"He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, 'And this is where the opera section comes in!' Then we went out to eat dinner," said Baker, Queen's producer.
Baker wasn't sure what direction Mercury was heading in, but he knew he would get an explanation that would blow his mind and change the fortunes of the band.
Mercury had ideas for his concoction – lots of ideas. He was going to make sure that everything that was pouring out of his mind was going to be put into this one record. No one knew it was going to be the equivalent of the Beatles' "Hey Jude, the classic Jimmy Webb composition "McArthur Park" or the Led Zeppelin standard "Stairway To Heaven," but by the end, "Bohemian Rhapsody" made the band Queen a household name.
The hours it took to put the song down were grueling. The dubs and overdubs and even more overdubs on top of the overdubs were practically punishing the finished work. And when it was done, it clocked in at a lengthy 5 minutes and 55 seconds, not exactly the time element radio station disc jockeys had in mind in playing a tune.
But Mercury was stubborn – it was sink or swim for the song because he never ever accepted anyone taking a razor blade to the finished product and slashing it down to three minutes or less.
Said Brian May, Queen's guitarist, of the recording: "That was a great moment, but the biggest thrill for us was actually creating the music in the first place. I remember Freddie coming in with loads of bits of paper form his dad's work, like Post-it notes, and pounding on the piano. He played the piano like most people the drums. And this song he had was full of gaps where he explained that something operatic would happen here and so on. He'd work out the harmonies in his head."
And so the song began with the band members singing, "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality."
Shortly after that, Mercury, playing the piano, begins to sing: "Mama ... just killed a man. Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead." Some surmise that this was Mercury's way of telling his family that he was coming out as a gay man, but no one really picked up on that clue for over a decade.
Recording for the song, which would be placed on the "Queen II" album, started on August 24, 1975, at Rockfield Studio 1 in Monmouth, Wales. The song itself was rehearsed for three weeks, so the band was ready to finally put the track down. But things got so complex with the recording of it, that, by the end, it took two weeks to record and to be done in four different recording studios. The only thing that was holding all the parts of the song together was a "drum click" that was making it easy to insert parts of the song into the final product.
At one point, Mercury, May and drummer Roger Taylor were singing their parts of the song continuously for 10 to 12 hours a day. And the song was placed into six parts: The intro with all four members singing with the piano in the background, the ballad where it is just Mercury singing, accompanying his own piano play, followed by May's memorable guitar solo, followed by the "opera" part that Mercury dug deep into his own religion growing up, Zoroastrianism, picking out words like "Bismillah," "Scaramouch," and "Beelzebub," which, of course, is in reference to the Devil. Once the opera hits its crescendo with all 180 dubs – that's right, 180 musical and vocal overdubs – was finished, the song goes back into a traditional rock format where May's guitar work is appreciated and Mercury's lead vocals are soaring. The song's outro finishes with Mercury lamenting, "Nothing really matters, anyone can see. Nothing really matters. Nothing really matters ... to me," ending it all with "Anyway the wind blows," followed by Taylor hitting a tam-tam (gong) to put the song to rest.
Amazingly, Baker didn't wind up in a mental hospital by the end of putting each piece of the musical puzzle together to get this magical masterpiece.
But even with Baker finishing up and the band eager to make it the first single release from "Queen II," just about everyone warned Mercury and his mates that there was no way in Beelzebub's world that "Bohemian Rhapsody" would see the light of day as a release. Even the hottest singer in the world at the time, who, too, was releasing long-winded pieces as singles, Elton John, told Queen's manager, John Reid, of the musical piece, "Are you mad? You'll never get that on the radio."
Again, though, Mercury was persistent and wanted to reward Baker for the work he did in putting this song with all those dubs and overdubs together.
So the band did the unthinkable – they went over the heads of their company's executives and of their manager and took the track to London disc jockey Kenny Everett of Capitol Radio. Everett listened to the song and Baker told him, "This isn't for release," for which Everett looked at Baker, winked at him, and said, "Yeah, I know."
At first, Everett "teased" his audience of the new Queen release by playing snippets of the song. They were intrigued to say the least. Then finally, he gave it up totally and played the full 5-minute, 55-second song. And he did it 14 times in both days of a weekend!
By that Monday morning, fans stormed record shops throughout England looking for the song to buy, only to find out that EMI Records hadn't released it, much to the fans' dismay. Meanwhile, Paul Drew, the head of RKO Radio in the United States, had heard Everett's show and heard him playing the song. He managed to get a copy of it and began to play it on his show. In the United States, Queen's record label company, Elektra Records, began to give in to pressure and have more stations play the song.
Ultimately, word got back to EMI Records that radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic were getting powerful and positive vibes from this record and finally gave in, releasing the unedited version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." In England, it was released in early November 1975. It hit the British chart at No. 47 on November 8, 1975 and pole-vaulted 30 notches to debut in the Top 40 at No. 17 the next week. After a modest eight-notch climb to No. 9 the next week, "Bohemian Rhapsody" vaulted another eight notches to land at No. 1 on November 29, 1975, where it would spend an overwhelming nine weeks at the top, tied for the longest-running No. 1 song of the 1970s with Wings' "Mull Of Kintyre" in 1977-78 and John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John's Grease movie duet, "You're The One That I Want" in 1978.
Though some critics took pot shots at the song, calling it "superficially impressive pastiche of operatic styles" and "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing," others like Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson found it to be an artistic triumph and Greg Lake, whose seasonal gem "I Believe In Father Christmas" was kept from hitting No. 1 in December 1975 by Queen's opus, said he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made" and called it a "once-in-a-lifetime recording."
The song was enjoying its sixth week at No. 1 in the UK on January 3, 1976, when it made the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, debuting at No. 81. Unlike in England, though, the song didn't take off with meteoric force. It took chunks out of the chart, though, moving from 81-71-59-49-43 and finally debuting in the Top 40 at No. 38 on February 7, 1976. Then it began the slow riser up the countdown, going from No. 38 to 33 to 31 to 29 to 25 to 22 to 19 to 17 to 15 and then to No. 12.
Slow and steady, the song never stopped at any particular point climbing the chart. Then on the week of April 17, 1976, "Bohemian Rhapsody" jumped up another two notches to No. 10, giving Queen its first Top 10 hit in the United States, a major success. The next week, it would move to No. 9, but that's where the song would die out after 18 weeks of climbing by May 1, 1976.
It also didn't hurt that the song's success was provided by a memorable music video of the band performing the song, including the crazy operatic part. Bruce Gowers, who got the job to do the music video because he had helped to shoot promotional stuff of the Beatles doing some music videos for songs they did in the 1960s, most notably "Paperback Writer." There was also another reason why a music video was shot for the song featuring the members of the band – the highly successful BBC show Top of the Pops had the famous Pan dancers dancing to the tune and it didn't look right. And May admitted years later that the band didn't want to go on the show to "mimic" the famous opera scene, so sending the show the music video helped immensely.
Everything about "Bohemian Rhapsody" was right – the recording, the overdubs, the music video, the reception on both sides of the Atlantic, even the title of the song. "Bohemian" stood for the individual work of the "newer, fresher" Bohemian artist and "Rhapsody" represented all that was right in the art rock world. Unintentionally, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was paying homage to the art rock acts who helped pave the way for an "art rock epic" like "Bohemian Rhapsody," acts like 10cc, Genesis, Yes and David Bowie.
By 2002, "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song that was never to see the light of the day thanks to the word of the band's record executives, was voted by Guinness Book of World Records as the third-most favorite song in the UK behind John Lennon's "Imagine" and "Hey Jude."
But the record had a sad footnote to it: On November 24, 1991, Mercury passed away due to complications from the HIV virus. He was only 45 years old. As a tribute to Mercury, Parlophone Records, now owners of the song, re-released "Bohemian Rhapsody" and on December 21, 1991, "Bohemian Rhapsody" did the unthinkable – it debuted at No. 1 in the UK as a double, A-sided track along with the Mercury-penned "These Are The Days Of Our Lives." The songs would spent five more weeks at the top and to this day, "Bohemian Rhapsody" remains the only chart-topper in UK chart history to be a No. 1 hit in two separate chart runs in the same version.
While the song was ruling England and the UK all over again, in the United States, the movie Wayne's World, based on the Saturday Night Live skit created by Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey), was released. And in the opening scene, there's Wayne telling those riding along with him in Garth's car, "I think we'll go with a little Bohemian Rhapsody, gentlemen," for which Garth says, "Good call." The song is played and the guys get into it.The hit from 1976 got a second chance to thrive in the U.S. thanks to the movie. And, wow, did it thrive – this time around, the song peaked at No. 2 in the spring of 1992, much to the band's shock and joy, learning that the music video for "Bohemian Rhapsody" from Wayne's World earned them an MTV Award for "Best Video From A Film." An emotional May accepted the honor with Taylor, saying to the audience at the show that night, "Freddie would've been tickled."
In 1977, barely a year after the song hit No. 9 on the U.S. chart, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody," only a 2-year-old song then, as the best British single in the period between 1952-77. And in an ITV poll in 2012, on the 60th anniversary of the British music pop chart, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was named The Nation's Favourite Number One of all time, ahead of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean," Adele's "Someone Like You," Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger," and "Hey Jude."
Amazing that over 40 years later, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is still a favorite of pop and rock radio. It probably will be long after we're gone. And to think that EMI Records wasn't going to ever release the song because it was too bloody long!
Whatever Mercury was thinking in his head was a masterpiece that would be lauded for years to come. And producer Roy Thomas Baker thought about running the other way when Mercury mentioned something about an "operatic" part.
Good thing he stayed.
No comments:
Post a Comment