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

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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, 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. 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.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it was great.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: That's incredible. Before I had seen that movie.

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Speaker 1: 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. 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. 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 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 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 confidence I think was brought to the four on Bohemian Rhapsody.

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Speaker 2: 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 Wayne's and also Wayne's World. Will talk about Wayne's World and animals.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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 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, 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 court settlement, and he later titled his memoir Life on Two Legs Set.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 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. 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: Yep.

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Speaker 1: 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 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.

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Speaker 2: Definitely not on the Cherry Moon.

00:10:36
Speaker 1: 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 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, 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: 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 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, 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 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 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 was your singer, I'd show you how it was ton narrator voice. He would.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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.

00:16:49
Speaker 1: It can have smelled good.

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

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Speaker 1: 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 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?

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Speaker 2: No?

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Speaker 1: 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, 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, 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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. 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 in the UK.

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Speaker 1: 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 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, 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, 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:22:05
Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 defining Queen vocal sound.

00:25:42
Speaker 1: 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. It's almost like the Three Stooges Hello, Hello, Yeah.

00:26:08
Speaker 2: Rhapsody.

00:26:09
Speaker 1: It's the oh.

00:26:12
Speaker 2: 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.

00:26:19
Speaker 1: 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.

00:26:40
Speaker 2: I'm waiting for you to say, not that kind of honky.

00:26:43
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah.

00:26:46
Speaker 2: 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. 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 average time spent on a whole album.

00:27:32
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:28:08
Speaker 2: 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.

00:28:15
Speaker 1: 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.

00:28:30
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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.

00:29:41
Speaker 1: A tape is oxidized. Yeah, I do a thing on it. Yeah, you can explain it byter than many.

00:29:46
Speaker 2: 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 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 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. But yes, they literally wore away the oxide on their tape record. We have vocals to this.

00:31:03
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just.

00:31:07
Speaker 2: A moment, and now to a little section of the show I like to call Boteethian Rhapsody.

00:31:25
Speaker 1: There's an odd bit.

00:31:26
Speaker 2: 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 or Class three malecution as it's medically known.

00:31:50
Speaker 1: Or as pronounced overbite as it's not medically known.

00:31:53
Speaker 2: He left that unfixed, even though he frequently obscured his mouth and photos with his hand and later his signature mustache.

00:32:00
Speaker 1: 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.

00:32:13
Speaker 2: 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. 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?

00:32:58
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:33:35
Speaker 2: 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.

00:33:52
Speaker 1: It's his throat, his actual throat, Get your mind out of the gutter.

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

00:34:09
Speaker 1: Mucous membranes. We all have them.

00:34:12
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:34:49
Speaker 1: Can that be taught? Is that something that can be taught or is that something that's Yeah, some people learn how.

00:34:55
Speaker 2: 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.

00:35:15
Speaker 1: 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.

00:35:30
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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.

00:36:49
Speaker 1: Anyway.

00:36:50
Speaker 2: So yeah, you can hear Freddy Mercury doing that. It's just part of the magic of Freddy Mercury.

00:36:55
Speaker 1: 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.

00:37:16
Speaker 2: 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?

00:37:38
Speaker 1: Can we hear? I don't know the winding winy.

00:37:42
Speaker 2: More, that's the first part of weathering heights.

00:37:46
Speaker 1: Wow, Heath Cliff, HiT's me. You can't you come home and so cool? Let me to you.

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

00:38:05
Speaker 1: 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.

00:38:16
Speaker 2: I just did Frankie Valley. He was my other one.

00:38:19
Speaker 1: Ooh mean struck in again. Oh that's Lou Christie. Oh Lou Christie. Yeah, you're right.

00:38:28
Speaker 2: Not I confuse all my annoying Italian guys from the sixties who sang in girls voices.

00:38:37
Speaker 1: Wow, that is I am very impressed.

00:38:39
Speaker 2: 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.

00:38:51
Speaker 1: 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.

00:38:58
Speaker 2: Doing like blue Moon and he's doing.

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

00:39:04
Speaker 2: Just like trying to sound like a theremon, you know, so true.

00:39:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:39:09
Speaker 2: Anyway, while we're talking about the vocals, we might as well talk about the lyrics, namely, what the hell is this song about?

00:39:18
Speaker 1: What do all of these names mean?

00:39:20
Speaker 2: 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.

00:39:32
Speaker 1: 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.

00:39:51
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:40:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, the scaremoug character is famous for worming his way out of tough, sticky situations, often to the detriment of others.

00:40:35
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:41:11
Speaker 1: End of the rope was made of hemp.

00:41:13
Speaker 2: Wow, the old fandangoo.

00:41:18
Speaker 1: Wow, that's really grim. Yeah, you're gonna pitch.

00:41:24
Speaker 2: You're gonna pitch this next guy pitch it?

00:41:27
Speaker 1: 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.

00:41:39
Speaker 2: 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 Catholic Church. Jeffrey Katzenberg and.

00:42:03
Speaker 1: Uh, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Short Liz's the Holy Trinity. We're mostly here to make friends, just not those guys. Uh.

00:42:14
Speaker 2: 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, he released Barcelona, an album of duets with the operatic soprano Montserrat Cabale in nineteen eighty eight.

00:42:45
Speaker 1: 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.

00:42:53
Speaker 2: 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. 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 Christian demonology, a name derived from the Hebrew phrase baal Zebov, meaning lord of the flies sucks to your asthmar.

00:43:48
Speaker 1: I didn't all know that that was a biblical reference.

00:43:52
Speaker 2: 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.

00:44:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's up there.

00:44:08
Speaker 2: 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 just love the word beezelbub, which is a very funny sounding word. It must be true.

00:44:35
Speaker 1: 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 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, 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.

00:45:35
Speaker 2: Neither of us were major in theology or linguistics.

00:45:40
Speaker 1: By the way, the broadcasting or journalists or any of this.

00:45:49
Speaker 2: 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. 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.

00:46:24
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:47:06
Speaker 2: 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.

00:47:30
Speaker 1: 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.

00:47:52
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

00:48:46
Speaker 1: 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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.

00:53:37
Speaker 2: 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.

00:53:54
Speaker 1: 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.

00:54:00
Speaker 2: 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.

00:54:17
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:54:18
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

00:54:52
Speaker 1: 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.

00:55:00
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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 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 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 hand and said, Okay, Son, I get it now. That was a pivotal moment for me. I'd so desperately wanted his approval.

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

00:57:02
Speaker 2: He put his dad on the plane that he helped build.

00:57:04
Speaker 1: 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.

00:57:16
Speaker 2: 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. 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.

00:57:53
Speaker 1: Oh wow.

00:57:55
Speaker 2: 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 turn it at an angle to the strings, you get a lovely kind of splatter.

00:58:21
Speaker 1: 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 real deep kinship with him over this.

00:58:45
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:59:15
Speaker 1: 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.

00:59:31
Speaker 2: 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, 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. The AC thirty is also the Beatles model, Is that correct, Jordan?

01:00:17
Speaker 1: Yeah?

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

01:00:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:00:28
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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 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.

01:02:06
Speaker 1: 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.

01:02:18
Speaker 2: 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. 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, 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 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 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.

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

01:04:12
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:04:21
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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, 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 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.

01:06:10
Speaker 1: 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, just find it hilarious.

01:06:32
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 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 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.

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

01:08:14
Speaker 2: 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 by a truck. Fred said, what did you think? I didn't have the faintest idea.

01:08:42
Speaker 1: 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, never mind, I'm not going to go any further in case I'm Mata Hoopl's fervent fan base come for me.

01:09:10
Speaker 2: 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 East Street Band.

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

01:09:42
Speaker 2: 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 great drugs. I did not know that Ian Hunter wrote Cleveland Rocks.

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

01:10:13
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:10:30
Speaker 2: 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?

01:10:41
Speaker 1: 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. 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 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.

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

01:11:35
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

01:12:38
Speaker 2: 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 had a hit with MacArthur Park in nineteen sixty eight, a song that goes on for an interminable seven and a half minutes.

01:13:08
Speaker 1: 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.

01:13:16
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:13:48
Speaker 1: 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 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.

01:14:31
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:15:10
Speaker 1: 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 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, oh no, I never do that, wink and.

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

01:15:56
Speaker 1: 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 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.

01:16:33
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:17:09
Speaker 1: 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.

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

01:17:25
Speaker 1: 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.

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

01:17:51
Speaker 1: 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 have sex with your car.

01:18:13
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:18:48
Speaker 1: 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.

01:19:00
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

01:20:03
Speaker 1: 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.

01:20:16
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

01:20:49
Speaker 1: 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.

01:21:05
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:21:36
Speaker 1: 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.

01:21:50
Speaker 2: 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 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 lifetime recording.

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

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

01:22:50
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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.

01:24:42
Speaker 2: 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 for Best Vocal Arrangement too.

01:25:04
Speaker 1: 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.

01:25:19
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

01:26:20
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

01:27:16
Speaker 1: The Dutch.

01:27:18
Speaker 2: 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 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 Recording Registry as being culturally, historically or esthetically significant.

01:28:08
Speaker 1: 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 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 in Bohemian Rhapsody touring in the seventies.

01:28:54
Speaker 2: 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.

01:29:14
Speaker 1: 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?

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

01:29:29
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

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

01:38:22
Speaker 1: 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?

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

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

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

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

01:38:52
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ?

01:38:54
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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.

01:40:37
Speaker 2: 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 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. Nothing really matters, okaks you next time.

01:41:24
Speaker 1: 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.

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

01:41:45
Speaker 1: 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.

01:42:01
Speaker 2: Jack Latinosan Fat Tax, Fatimum, and