Queen at 47, Part V

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (November 1975)

“Let’s say, finally, that enchantment can really happen.”

- Daniel Nester

In August of 1975, Queen – with the help of Elton John’s manager John Reid – finally parted ways with Norman Sheffield and Trident Studios. No longer encumbered by a contract that held them prisoners under the thumb of their greedy managers, the band were free to stop worrying about living hand-to-mouth (by Freddie’s standards, anyway) and focus instead on Sheer Heart Attack’s follow-up.

As a result, Queen entered that marvelous mental state where the best of us are sometimes fortunate enough to find ourselves for a few fleeting moments, where a truly proper perspective is at long last deployed, oftentimes unwittingly: life’s petty trivialities fade into the ether and we realize life is a gift, and the universe’s vast infiniteness is to be embraced, not feared.

This is precisely where Queen resided in August of 1975. Of their break with Norman Sheffield, Brian May told Sounds’ John Ingham, “All the emotions came out in a big flood.”

For Freddie Mercury – he who sang Jesus’ praises on Queen’s first album, he who delighted in watching a fairy feller crack a nut at night’s noon-time on Queen II – the vitriol that had only been touched on in Flick of the Wrist from Sheer Heart Attack exploded almost uncontained during this big flood, and found expression in one of Freddie’s greatest songs, one of Queen’s greatest songs, and one of the most startling album-openers of all time: Death on Two Legs.

John Reid successfully negotiated Queen’s split with Trident, but not without some collateral damage. The band had to pay their former managers £100,000 plus one percent of royalties on the next six Queen albums. However, once Norman Sheffield caught wind of Death on Two Legs (with its none-too-subtle subtitle, “Dedicated to…”), he very nearly blew a gasket. Without putting up a fight, the band quietly shelled out a second advance against publishing to calm him down.

Norman Sheffield could be forgiven for feeling a smidge hurt when he heard Opera’s opening track. Death on Two Legs verily seethes with venom and contempt, propelled ruthlessly forward by some of the most incendiary guitar playing of May’s career. Starting rather beautifully in a minor key, Freddie’s gorgeous descending piano arpeggio is quickly overtaken by May’s guitars – three of ‘em, in fact: the heavy chords interrupting Freddie, the high notes that quickly feel like an ice pick in your brain, and the feedback starting at 0:30. At 0:38, right when this awful cacophony, this noise, is about to drive you to drink, everything STOPS, and Death On Two Legs’ main motif begins.

It’s stunning at first, hearing Freddie at the peak of his powers, one of the great rock’n’roll voices, strong and resonant, nailing all of the notes in the ambitious melodies he dreamt up in the months after recording Sheer Heart Attack. And he’s PISSED: this is not the same Freddie Mercury who poignantly pointed out that love can break your heart so suddenly on Queen II. Right out of the gate, the man is practically snarling his contempt for his unnamed antagonist, calling him a blood-sucking leach, a thief, an old mule (misguided, at that), and berating his narrow-minded cronies who are fools of the first division. Then the big Queen chorale voices come in, like something out of Aeschylus, truly (KILL JOY, BAD GUY – BIG TALKING SMALL FRY) and Freddie comes in again, jeering at this “old barrow-boy” to kiss his ass goodbye. Then the chorale suggests that suicide is a viable option for Freddie’s tormentor.

And here we’ve only just arrived at the song’s mid-way point. Channeling Freddie’s bile, 

Brian May plays a frantic, heavy lead over a lurching, start-stop G-flat (the chorale’s key), before stepping into an almost pleasant lead in D-major, which is quickly ended by Roger Taylor’s machine gun fire snare drum. If anything, Freddie’s even more pissed now - check out the indignation in Freddie’s voice when he sings “Talk like a big business tycoon – you’re just a hot-air balloon – so no one gives you a DAMN.” “Dog with disease,” Freddie continues, “you’re the king of the sleaze” before asking, “was that fin on your back part of the deal?” In case this isn’t unsubtle enough, Fred helps out, hissing “shark” in between Taylor pounding his toms.

And still there’s more, with the chorale castigating our beleaguered antagonist as a “sewer rat decaying in a cess pool of pride.” “Should be made unemployed,” Freddie sneers, “make yourself null and void,” evoking the Velvet Underground’s Heroin.

This may very well have been Queen’s best song up until this point, a truly blistering poison-pen letter casting the niceties of their first three albums into sharp relief. Here was proof, in fact, that they were one of the better bands to come along in years. The problem was, the band themselves seemed, not infrequently, keen to sabotage this fact. And I’m not talking about record sales. Because art cannot be quantified.

Once more, for the ignorant among us: art cannot be quantified. Baseball has a Hall of Fame. This makes perfect sense. If you play seven years with a career batting average of .215 and a fielding average of .880, you will not be elected into the Hall because you stink. You are mediocre. Awful, even. But if you play for 20 years, with a career batting average of .341 and a fielding average of .986, then you are probably on your way to the Hall. The numbers bear out your worthiness.

Although few seem to understand this, art is different. Van Gogh was virtually unknown in his time, but is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of all time. The Velvet Underground sold barely any records in their time, and are now acknowledged as one of the most influential bands of all time. (They were inducted into the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” in 1996 by Patti Smith, of all people, proving once again that the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” should be burned to the ground, and everyone who ever accepted their “induction,” and everyone who ever aided and abetted this process – like Smith – should have their kneecaps broken. It’s strange to think that The Sex Pistols, happy to tour whenever they need money, preying on everyone’s base desires for nostalgia, are the one and only band who ever refused to accept induction because they correctly perceive that the place is a sham, calling it a “piss stain.” Others have refused to show up out of animosity towards ex-bandmates, but only the Sex Pistols refused on artistic principle.)

So you cannot judge how good or lousy a band is by record sales. Queen went on to sell millions upon millions of records, amassing more money than God. Unquestionably they were talented enough – and shrewd enough – to understand the craft of writing catchy songs that would sell. But to those of us who actually care about music as an art form, there’s a larger discussion beyond just shifting units. Remember: Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson took Say Say Say all the way to #1 in the U.S., a song that still dredges up a certain strain of PTSD when I hear a snippet of it in an elevator. This wasn’t art, it was cynical commercialism. But Queen was art. Right?

It was no secret by 1975 that Queen was a band of giant egos, Freddie foremost among them, who held in very high regard approximately two things: money and fame. Their intrinsic talent, though, betrayed a band not of egomaniacs intent on ruling the world, but instead four enormously talented but deeply insecure kids who felt they had something to prove to the world. This strain of self-aggrandizement is a very young-man attitude, and it simultaneously worked very well for the band, driving them to always outdo themselves, and worked very badly for the band, because they took their critics way, way too seriously. (And, in turn, their critics delighted in taking them down a few pegs.) Queen themselves may never have understood this irony. Their confusion about it may have served to simply amplify their worst suspicions, perpetuating their paranoid worldview, inspiring them darkly to close ranks and keep hammering away at the very things that pissed off their critics, just to spite them.

Freddie Mercury was not stupid. He knew that what Queen was up to, especially with A Night at the Opera, went beyond cynical commercialism. And if he hadn’t been profoundly insecure, he would have said this in interviews. But harsh reviews of Queen II and even Sheer Heart Attack put him – and the rest of the band – permanently on the defensive. Hijacked by their insecurities, they yearned for artistic respect, and the press were only too eager to jump all over a band that took themselves so seriously. Disastrously, they took the attitude that they’d simply pre-empt their critics by pretending that somehow, it was the press – not they – who were getting worked up over nothing:

“I like to write songs for fun,” Freddie told Melody Maker in 1981, “for modern consumption. People can discard them like a used tissue afterwards. You listen to it, like it, discard it, then on to the next. Disposable pop, yes.”

Which was just the kind of desperate bullshit everyone who hated Queen wanted to hear the band cop to. And Freddie knew it. Conversely, this kind of talk only served to baffle fans who were arguing it really was art. We thought our heroes, the guys actually writing and playing the music, had our backs. Then here comes Freddie Mercury, the cat who wrote Killer Queen and Death On Two Legs – the big cheese himself – pulling the rug out from underneath us, stamping his endorsement on what the pedantic straights in the academia conjectured all along, since 1955; that this rock ’n’ roll stuff really is just silliness, and you’re better off growing out of it now, and going to college, getting a degree, marrying, a job, a mortgage, and pumping out two units. Fun times.

Death On Two Legs was not disposable pop, and neither was the rest of A Night at the Opera. But this was the narrative Freddie needed to insulate himself from the critics whom he allowed to take up way too much of his mental energy.

Unquestionably, Opera is a flawed masterpiece. The chorus to May’s Sweet Lady is dead on arrival, wasting some choice 70’s rock riffage on the verses. It’s charming to learn that the jazz band playing in Good Company, May’s bittersweet Dixieland jazz band-cum-ballad recounting a man’s journey from happy young man to married man to divorced, broken old man, is recreated entirely by May on his legendary Red Special. It’s amusing, aye, but still doesn’t add up to much more than a touch of amusing filler. Having Freddie’s Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon follow the unbridled malevolence of Death On Two Legs gives you a chance to catch your breath, what with it’s giddy music-hall silliness and all, but it’s somehow galling that Freddie never acknowledged its enormous debt to The Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon. The astute Queen fan will note that the band changes key for May’s guitar solo whimsy, a technique first deployed a year earlier on Stone Cold Crazy. It’s as though the band was frequently overtaken by restlessness, and moving the key up a step or two was the only way to arrest the fear that things were getting dull and needed to be stirred up a bit.

It’s easy to write off Freddie’s Seaside Rendezvous as mock-music hall nonsense, but damned if it isn’t impressive how he and Roger Taylor use their voices to almost precisely imitate a clarinet, kazoo, and brass. The backing vocals soar, and Freddie is wholly in his element here, making you wonder if joining a rock band was his first mistake all along. Placing it at the end of side one was a masterstroke. A lovely bit of filler relegated to the middle of the line-up, right where it’s supposed to live as a fetching little surprise, like finding a forgotten gift hidden under the tree after everyone’s done opening their presents on Christmas morning. (Editor’s note: popular music used to be released on LPs, or “vinyl,” which had two “sides.”)

Beyond those songs – all of which are well worth your time, it should be noted – the four members of Queen move from strength to strength, song to song, fleshing out and fulfilling the template established on Sheer Heart Attack: complex arrangements, beautiful melodies, transcendent harmonies, and songs with lots and lots of parts.

As the band’s last paean to Dungeons and Dragons prog rock nonsense, May’s The Prophet’s Song should be the worst song on the whole album. The ridiculous a cappella-opera nonsense commencing at 3:24 and running for a really, really long time all the way through 5:51 sounds suspiciously like little more than a jealous retort to Freddie’s Bohemian Rhapsody genius. And yet the rest of the song’s euphoric tunefulness inspires true wonderment, begging the question: why didn’t the guitarist write serious lyrics for this song? Have you listened to this thing recently? There are five strikingly gorgeous moments (at 0:45, 1:20, 1:39, 1:52, and 2:39) in a song that’s already intrinsically striking. Lyrics aside, this is Brian May firing on all cylinders. When the forgettable operatic middle finally ends, he lays down a fierce lead from 6:20 to 6:32, and everything culminates in a sort of vocal orgasm at 7:20. From there until 8:21 a somber guitar outro bleeds seamlessly into Freddie’s Love of My Life.

Queen wrote a whole, whole lot about love – falling in love, being destroyed by love, etc., so much so that it got very old in short order. But Love of my Life is Queen pre-cliché, a genuinely pretty Freddie song about loss and old age, its touching lyrics outdone by an astonishing arrangement that is just restrained enough, and a first-rate level of musicianship, exemplified by Freddie’s sublime deployment of rubato phrasing, first at 2:32, then again at 2:42. Here’s how locked in these guys were at this point: Brian May learned how to tune and play a fucking harp just for this one song. Freddie’s arrangement called for it, and there was no way the song would be a best-we-could-do proposition; the sounds swirling around inside the singer’s head had to be realized exactly as he heard them, and what was in his head this time around called for a harp.

Brian May, incidentally, has a Ph.D. in astrophysics. That’s why his time travel song – 39 – is infinitely more interesting than Interstellar, even though it was written nearly 20 years before the advent of CGI. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was an advisor for the film, which is nearly three hours long and is completely cancelled out by a ghastly stereotypically happy Hollywood ending. Brian May, on the other hand, needed no advisor for 39, needed less than four minutes to tell a story about leaving the planet and coming back to find everyone much older, and came up with something far more tuneful and enjoyable than Christopher Nolan ever could have hoped for. A tad on the dark side, 39 was reworked live into a festive singalong during the set’s acoustic portion.

In the midst of Freddie and Brian dominating Opera’s setlist, drummer Roger Taylor and bassist John Deacon asserted themselves as indispensible to the Queen cause, chipping in with two of the great Queen songs, I’m in Love with My Car and You’re My Best Friend, respectively.

Taylor claimed that Brian May thought his new song was a joke when he demoed it. The demo never surfaced on any Queen reissues, but what wound up on Opera is as tuneful as anything the band recorded in their entire career. Sprinkled throughout the unsubtle lyrics are plenty of ridiculous double entendres (“hand’s on your grease gun,” “I’m holding your wheel,” and so forth), made palpable by some tasty Brian May leads, and heaps of beautiful backing vocals.

While a little more reticent than Taylor to dip his toe in the songwriting pool, Deacon’s You’re My Best Friend – only the second song he wrote for the band – wound up a top-20 hit in the U.S., and became a staple of middle school and high school dances for years. Deacon wrote the song for his wife Veronica Tetzlaff, whom he would much later cheat on in plain sight with stripper Emma Shelley. But the loving marriage endured (or, at any rate, Tetzlaff grudgingly stuck it out with her husband through his midlife crisis), and the song itself is enduringly sweet, marvelously dated only by the Wurlitzer Electric Piano that Deacon himself plays. Brian May’s thoughtful lead towards song’s end proves that the guitarist was well aware that it takes more than playing a million notes a second to prove your genius on guitar. Instead of going the Satriani route, he holds back, trading in tons of notes for a minimalist, but totally melodic lead that suits the song, and Mercury’s attentive vocal, perfectly.

And lastly there’s Bohemian Rhapsody (“Bo Rhap” to die hards), Freddie’s six-minute magnum opus that spent nine weeks at #1 in the British charts during the 1976/1976-holiday season. Finding anything more to say about Queen’s signature song is an amusing exercise in futility, but it has been entertaining watching how the song went from a curiosity that critics gleefully savaged upon its release (“…Mostly pretty empty, all flash and calculation” – Time magazine; a “brazen hodgepodge” – Rolling Stone; “It has no immediate selling point whatsover” - Record Mirror) to one of the more revered songs in rock history. As happens not infrequently, the pedantic, narrow-minded, pretentious castigations of the music critics were roundly ignored by the millions of people who heard Bo Rhap and Freddie's undeniable genius, sending it to #1 in the UK for a record nine weeks, and to #9 in the US (upon being re-released in the early 90s, it once again went to #1 in the UK, and #2 in the US). Think of it as the Harry Truman of the rock world. Everyone from Kurt Cobain to Lady Ga Ga has talked about the impact Freddie had on his or her lives, proving once again that rock criticism should never, ever be taken seriously. How anyone writing for any music rag in 1975 could not be forever rocked by this song remains truly mystifying. Beautiful, rocking, sad, majestic, bombastic – these six minutes are everything we ever loved about Freddie in one song.

A Night at the Opera was an expensive gamble for the band that paid big dividends, going to number one in the UK and giving Queen their first top ten album in the U.S. Awash in worldwide fame, the band toured from late 1975 into the spring/summer of 1976, and dug in for the fall, wondering how they could possibly top themselves.