Queen at 49, Part VII

 News of the World (October 1977)

Here's some boring, forensic information about Queen's sixth album: it's entitled News of the World. It was recorded in 1977, between July and September, and released in October of that same year. It was the second album in a row the band produced by themselves in conjunction with engineer Mike Stone and was mostly recorded at Wessex Sound Studios in London, but also in West London's Basing Street Studios. The cover was painted by famed Sci Fi artist Frank Kelly Freas and is based on the cover he painted for the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. There are eleven songs on the album, with all four band members writing at least two each.

Now here's all you need to know about News of the World: it is Queen's greatest album. It was better than everything that came before it, and they'd never record anything this good again. A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races are outstanding, containing some of their finest songs. Any other band releasing records that good could never record another note and retire happily, knowing they'd left their mark on popular culture.

But News of the World contain's Queen's two greatest anthems, their heaviest song, and a finalist for Greatest Queen Song of All Time, among other gems. The album's misfires - and there are three of them - do not alter the fact that six songs here easily qualify as top-tier Queen songs, some of the best work the band ever did, and among the best the 70s had to offer.

Music magazine writers never miss an opportunity to remind everyone that News of the World must always be viewed through the lens of the rise of Punk Rock. It was, of course, Queen for whom the Sex Pistols substituted on December 1, 1976, when they cursed on live television, precipitating a cultural uproar. And, as been written about innumerable times, the Sex Pistols were also at Wessex Studios in 1977, recording Never Mind the Bollocks as Queen recorded NOTW. Whether or not Queen had already decided to record something more basic on their own or felt pressured by Punk's encroachment depends on which member of the band you talk to, and what year. Roger Taylor, in 1978: "Our music has got much simpler recently, really, despite what people may think. In terms of studio use and recording techniques 'We Are the Champions' is the most simple track in the charts at the moment." Brian May, in 2017: "We'd already made a decision that... [after] A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, we wanted to go back to basics for News of the World." Roger Taylor, around 2010: "We couldn't reinvent ourselves as a punk band, but we wanted it a little bit more simple... To be more of the times, I guess we made a more straightforward record."

Not frequently mentioned in discussions about NOTW is that two albums after dropping Roy Thomas Baker as their producer, the band proved as capable in the control room as they were playing their instruments (with an invaluable assist from Mike Stone). As well as being their best album, NOTW is Queen's best sounding album. The rhythm section in particular never sounded as glorious as it does on NOTW. Roger Taylor's kick and snare are beautifully full and earthy. John Deacon's bass tone has the perfect amount of bite. Having set aside millions of vocal and guitar overdubs for the moment, Queen sounded like a straight-up rock band.

Sleeping on the Sidewalk is one of the most forgettable songs in the band's catalog. Queen were never a blues band, and why Brian May thought attempting another blues number was a grand idea, four years after having ripped off Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee with See What a Fool I've Been, is a mystery. The Latin American vibe conjured up by John Deacon's Who Needs You should be a lot more memorable than it is. Even a nifty acoustic guitar lead (presumabley played by May, although Deacon plays acoustic guitar on the track) doesn't save the song from its undistinguished-ness. Freddie's My Melancholy Blues amusingly evokes a smoky lounge and can even be kind of cathartic if you're drinking alone at home late at night. The singer liked his album-closer enough to record it during one of the band's BBC sessions (dig Brian May's solo on the BBC take!) and keep it in the set during the band's 1977 tour. It sounds much better live.

All Dead, All Dead is a bit overwrought, and ventures perilously deep into old-time, epically-overdubbed Queen circa Queen II at the 1:55 mark, but is more than redeemed by some great lyrics in the final verse and chorus, and some beautiful Beatles-esque harmonies throughout. Written at least partially about Brian May's recently deceased cat, it is one of the biggest downers the band ever recorded.

A pretty ballad that featured in three straight Queen tours, Deacon's Spread Your Wings  benefits enormously from the fact that the bassist happened to play in the same band as Brian May and Freddie Mercury. Freddie's vocals give the verses with much-needed verve, and May, as he did on You're My Best Friend, spices things up with simple but tastefully tuneful leads. During a BBC session recorded the day NOTW was released, the band taped an even better version of the song, with Taylor doubling the tempo in the outro. It's exhilarating stuff.  Why in hell didn't they do this on the album version?

Freddie's Get Down, Make Love is ridiculous and indispensable. It's been called funk-metal and the freak-out middle section has been called psychedelic, but what astonishes - aside from Mercury's hilarious, intentionally over-the-top lyrics - is the musicianship. With all sorts of space in which to stretch out during the staccato stop-start verses (a rarity in the Queen catalog), Freddie's bandmates rise to the occasion, each adding key flavoring and tension to a song that should be way more popular than it is. Taylor's fills, alternating between snare and roto-toms, snap your head like a whip, sometimes slow and heavy, sometimes fast and cracking, always keeping you suitably off kilter (16 of them - 0:11, 0:19, 0:25, 0:32, 0:46, 0:59, 1:23, 1:30, 1:37, 1:43, 1:50, 2:03, 2:10, 3:18, 3:24, and a superb fill at 1:56). Brian May's feedback sets the mood early from 0:03 to 0:11, and some perfectly placed power chords beef up the song at 0:50, 0:55, 1:52, 1:55, 2:11, 2:14, and 3.26. He also adds precision menace at 0:12, 0:26, 0:29, 0:36, 0:46, 1:24, 1:43, 1:46, 2:04, and 3:20.

But all of this would be academic without John Deacon's inspired work. You can trace the "funk-metal" label directly to the colossal fills he delivers at 0:31, 0:41, 0:48, 1:25, 1:39, 1:49, and 3:23.

Finally, there's Freddie, in total command of this magnificent aberration, sleazy vocals to the fore ("I suck your mind - you blow my head," etc.), mirrored by some impeccable piano playing (1:40). If you ever doubted the band's genius, listen to what happens at the end of the third and final verse. Instead of clipping it off and heading into the chorus with a drum fill, as happens the previous two times, May Plays over Taylor's fill, dropping to A flat (the song is in the unorthodox key of E flat), falling almost grudgingly a step down to G flat, and then up a half-step to G for the chorus. A flat, G flat, and G, all in a row. The effect is heavy and even momentarily disorienting (did these guys just change keys? No, wait...). It doesn't get much better than this, kids.

Taylor's Fight from the Inside - the 1st of two tracks that are essentially Roger Taylor solo songs on NOTW, both of which address teen angst and disaffection - continues in the funk-metal vein, another bass-heavy, borderline sinister song. The bass and guitar are about as nasty as you'll find in Queen's recorded output (guitarist Slash cites it as a fave), and Taylor's lyrics may fairly be described as political, what with his writing off the unnamed teenage protagonist as a "money-spinner tool." The only thing the drummer did wrong in an otherwise perfect song is a misstep in the chorus. It starts going from E flat to F twice, then switching to B flat to F. He should've switched back to E flat/F one more time when he sings "you can't win with your hands tied," for maximum effect. The entire Ranting Russell staff strongly recommends that he re-record the song with this change.

Queen take their genius another order higher with Taylor's other composition on NOTW, Sheer Heart Attack. This is one of those rare moments when all the best pieces of the universe fall miraculously into place for one fleeting instance and you're reminded that life really is a gift. Begun in 1974 but not finished and recorded until 1977, it is the most punk rock song ever recorded by a non-punk rock band and is right up there with the best songs recorded by The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash. It is a pile-driving tour-de-force. It erupts in your face with a squeal from Brian May's Red Special, assaulting your skull relentlessly over its entire three minutes and 28 seconds. Taylor accentuates the assault with explosive crashes at 1:29, 1:37, 1:45, 2:08, and 2:20, the last leading into May's "solo," twenty seconds of excruciating, high-pitched NOISE (don't believe me? Listen to it all the way through on high volume. It hurts). played over a single, pounding bar chord that is mercifully squelched by Taylor's propulsive drumming, taking us back to a final, crazed chorus that ends in an instant, falling off a cliff. No outro, no fade. Just over. For the essence of teen angst, look no further than Freddie singing "I feel so inarticulate" at the end of each chorus.

"As years have passed," Chuck Eddy wrote in 2009, "News of the World has come to be best known as The Album With 'We Will Rock You' And 'We Are The Champions' On It." This is an unfair appraisal, given all the other great songs on this record, but the We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You double A-side single remains a worldwide phenomenon 43 years after it stormed the charts, with both songs played in every soccer, football, basketball, and baseball stadium in every nook and cranny of planet earth on a daily basis. Critics - especially contemporaneous critics - delighted in pedantically heaping scorn on the songs, begging the question: do music critics actually like music? We Are the Champions is one of the most deliriously tuneful things I've ever heard. It's the ultimate pop song - you can sing along to it the first time you hear it. The choruses are epic. I lose myself in every note Brian May plays on this track. Yes, the lyrics are arrogant and pretentious. (Like there's not a lot of that in rock'n'roll music.) It's Freddie Mercury, for Pete's sake. Why get worked up about the small things?

And true genius is May's work at the end of We Will Rock You. Listen closely: when the guitar feedback comes in at 1:21, it's in E. But when he hits that gargantuan first chord at the end of the final chorus, it's a C. But when the solo proper begins at 1:35, it's in A. Dr. May fools you twice. Bloody brilliant.

But not quite as brilliant as It's Late, the final Six-Minutes-Plus, Lots-Of-Parts tune of Queen's career. Built around three "scenes" in a love life fraught with peril, It's Late's lyrics are familiar territory for Queen fans. The music, however, is as electrifying as anything recorded within a radius of 20 years. With John Deacon and Roger Taylor locked in as tight as any rhythm section could ever hope to be, the song builds ruthlessly, sporting two sections where Taylor doubles the tempo, driving the song into a fever pitch, and Brian May schools every other guitarist on the planet from beginning to end. This was the guitarist's only significant foray into the hammer-ons favored by Metal guitarists, but he eschews the million-miles-an-hour solos championed by the likes of Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen, instead playing very deliberately, bending almost every note into position, ratcheting up the tension by making a lot of it sound almost out of tune. After two key changes Taylor doubles the tempo, and some out of left-field chord changes and a titanic drum fill take us back to one last verse and chorus. Moving back to the song's original tempo after the frenetic guitar leads is almost gleefully sadistic on the band's part (see additional kick drum beat at 4:41), but right when the song appears to be over at 5:50, another furious Taylor fill starts an explosive outro, culminating in a crazed one-chord bludgeoning that ends the song.

Two years after owning the #1 spot for nine weeks with one of the most complex, overdubbed songs ever recorded, Queen stripped down their sound and recorded their best album. NOTW was a worldwide hit, and broke them in America, the dream of every British rock band. There was no need to issue statements slagging off all the smug, self-important music critics that relentlessly castigated them in print, no need to ask them point blank, whaddya think now, creep? The last laugh was always theirs: Queen simply couldn't help putting out hit records and being wildly popular. All that was left to do was top the charts with an album that was even more offensive to the critics who hated them.

It's Time to Reconsider... the Gor films

Editor’s note: In this edition of “It’s Time to Reconsider…,” longtime Ranting Russell contributor Nolk Landen reassesses the two movies made from John Norman’s Gor novels, 1987’s “Gor,” and 1989’s “Outlaw of Gor” (aka “Gor II”).

*****

Hello Renee –

I got your email assigning me to write about Gor and Outlaw of Gor for the blog’s “It’s Time to Reconsider…” column. I had to cancel a job interview in Lamesa today so I could meet your deadline for the piece. Thanks.

I think I mentioned offhand one night recently, after I’d had five or six margaritas, that none of Urbano Barberini’s dialog in the Gor movies could possibly have been dubbed because his voice was so unbelievably grating, and now somehow I’m an expert, tasked with reappraising the movie and its sequel? Great. I saw the first movie once, upon its release in 1987 when I lived in Dubuque. The boxcar hobo behind me offered up his flask when the lights dimmed and then threw up on himself during the scene where Oliver Reed says, “it will give you the chance of experiencing the delight of giving pain.” My date that night was not impressed. She never talked to me again. The next day my car threw a rod and I was out $1,000. Not that the movie was responsible, it just brings back terrible memories, you know?

At any rate, there’s no “reconsidering” here. You can’t “reconsider” that which warranted no consideration in the first place. There’s a reason Gor has no fans. There’s a reason too that fans of the original novel by John Norman were unhappy with this low budget calamity. In fact, now that I think about it, there’s a reason Gor and its sequel haven’t been released on DVD, much less Blu-ray. No one would buy them. There is no fan base. There is no one dying to play the commentary track and listen to anyone associated with these movies discuss their memories of making it.

Adding insult to injury, this is Rebecca Ferratti post-breast implants. As you’ll recall, Rebecca Ferratti was born in Helena, MT on November 27, 1964, and is of French, Hispanic, and German descent. She was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in June, 1986, and her turn-ons are positive people, busy days, fresh air, nature, and strong-minded men like her dad. If you can get past the ghastly 80s hairdo she had back then, Rebecca was quite an attractive young woman. But then came breast implants, her role as Talena in the Gor movies, and Mötley Crüe videos, and she was forever dead to me.

So there’s nothing to “reconsider.” In fact, if you want a scene that singlehandedly sums up the Gor cinematic experience, look no further than the opening minutes of Gor, when Tarl Cabot (played by Italian hunk Urbano Barberini) is driving through the rain at night, forlorn that his ladylove isn’t joining him for a weekend in the woods. He crashes into a tree, and the explosion (why would there be a small explosion in the first place?) seems to occur a little to the right of his car, almost on the other side of the tree, away from the car itself. Pathetic.

The rest of the movie is like a waking nightmare. Talena’s father, the King, has been kidnapped by the malevolent priest-king Sarn, played here by a how-the-fuck-did-they-get-him-to-appear-in-this-piece-of-garbage? Oliver Reed. Cabot joins forces with Ferratti and her cohorts, and they set out to rescue him. Along the way, their adventures in Gor are few and agonizingly far between. That whole bit where Cabot and co. sit down for some entertainment in the bar-in-a-cave goes on for over ten goddamn minutes. The music is total shit and it’s painful watching Paul Smith slumming here as the vicious Surbus, his role as Bluto in Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980) notwithstanding. So what exactly do you want me to “reconsider?” The Ranting Russell staff loves bar scenes. We discuss them frequently. Have you noticed Gor never comes up?

There’s that scene towards the end of the picture where Cabot is about to brand Talena with a hot iron and instead turns on Oliver Reed and shoves the iron into his gut, triggering the big fight scene, and Reed bellows “SEIZE HIM!” a few times and then finally thrusts both arms into the air and screams “AAAARRRHHHH!!!!!” I mean, that’s one of those things you’re watching that you can’t believe you’re watching. Barberini and Ferratti are totally surrounded by two-dozen men with big, cardboard swords but somehow no one is up to the challenge of stopping them. What is this, fucking amateur hour? Reed does nothing. He stands almost inert, screaming hysterically. It looks like if he moves too quickly his hemorrhoids will explode.

This should be game set and match. After more than an hour of this, you’re thinking, lovely, the climactic battle scene is finally over, so maybe the credits will roll now, and I can go smoke some heroin, but no: endless scenes of escaping through the underground caves, and they’re caught again, so sadistic Oliver Reed – sans any wound to his belly, where Urbano Barberini just shoved a molten-hot poker a few minutes before – can throw them all into a pit of fire. This farcical scene warrants the only complement I can think of for this movie: its requisite throwing-the-good-guys-into-a-pit-of-death-in-a-low-budget-swords-and-sorcery scene is much better than a similar scene in Joe D’Amato’s Ator II: The Blade Master. D’Amato gave us sparse sets and pit of lethargic snakes. Gor director Fritz Kiersch (whom I grudgingly love for Tuff Turf) gives us FIRE in a pleasant, outdoor setting. Kind of gives it a hint of gritty realism.

Outlaw of Gor is currently only available as an episode of Mystery Science Theater, which is very, very appropriate. A standalone release of this movie would be an enormous waste of the studio’s – and the public’s – time. C’mon, this thing was filmed concurrently with Gor, and yet producer/vice-king Harry Alan Towers had the temerity to sack Kiersch, replacing him with John “Bud” Cardos, (Kingdom of the Spiders, The Day Time Ended), for the sequel, thereby throwing a wrench in the works (“The two leads,” Cardos told Daniel Griffith, “they kinda got married to the first director… We had a little differences there for quite a while”). Who’s to say it wouldn’t have been a better picture had Kiersch stayed on?

Pay close attention to Urbano Barberini at the beginning of the movie when he and Russel Savadier first arrive on Gor. Barberini seems oddly out of sorts for someone who made the role of Tarl Cabot his own a few weeks earlier when the first movie filmed. Chalk it up to the directorial switch?

Much ink has been spilled over Savadier’s bizarre behavior during this scene, but it bears repeating: he says “Cabot” 27 times within 2 minutes and 3 seconds. Transcript:

“Cabot. Cabot. Cabot – Cabot, are you ok? Cabot, speak to me. Cabot. Cabot, are you alright? Cabot, what the hell’s going on? Where the hell’s the car? Cabot?” After Cabot explains they’re on the planet Gor: “Listen Cabot, what are you talking about? Where the hell are we? What’s going on here, Cabot? Cabot, will you explain this to me? … Cabot, listen. Listen to me. Cabot, what’s going on here. What happened last night? Did I do something? What’s going on here, Cabot? Cabot, listen, would you speak to me? I wanna go home right now, alright Cabot? What – where are you going? No no, wait there Cabot. Tell me what the hell’s going on here… Cabot… Cabot, would you wait up? … Cabot, wait – hold on. Cabot, can we take a break? Cabot, I – it, it’s getting hot. Have you noticed? It’s getting warm. Cabot. Cabot. Cabot, can – can we just hold it a minute?"

Elsewhere, an extra playing one of the queen’s guards is clearly asleep in one scene, a car rides through the background in another scene, the cast walks around a 7-foot tall statue of an erect penis at one point, and you can see an extra hiding behind the queen’s outdoor throne near the end. Two arch-villain über-clichés are deployed, one by Jack Palance (“That old fool, the elder – he would dare to meddle in my affairs?”), and one by Donna Denton, as the Queen Lara (“Guards! Seize him!”). Remember that Oliver Reed already screamed “Seize him!” in the first Gor movie. But hey, kudos to Ms. Denton for delivering the most memorable line of either movie with considerable gusto: “Get out of here, you – disgusting – WORM.”

Also, both movies boast the worst fight scenes of all time. Truly. We've moved beyond amateur here – I’ve seen better and more realistic choreography on an elementary school playground.

Carl Panzram once wrote, “the only thanks you or your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it…”

This sums up my feelings towards everyone involved with the Gor films perfectly.

Queen at 49, Part VI

A DAY AT THE RACES (December 1976)

One could reasonably argue that the apex of Queen’s toxic relationship with the music press was the period between September 11, 1976 and June 18, 1977.

September of '76 saw the New Musical Express’ Phil McNeill unleash a truly impressive array of insults in an article reviewing Queen’s performance that summer at the Edinburgh Festival, contemptuously taking them to task for everything from Brighton Rock (“meaningless exercise”) to Death On Two Legs (“self-righteous... unflinching immaturity...”) to Flick of the Wrist (“a treasure trove of superficialities”) to A Night at the Opera as a whole (“heavy-handed idiocy”) to even the medley the band did every night (a “garish, posturing event”). Odd that he accused the band of self-righteousness, when his article is self-righteousness writ large. Irony on a base level, as the late Bill Hicks would say.

June of '77 saw NME’s Tony Stewart being a total creep to Freddie under the belligerent headline, “Is This Man a Prat?” After conceding he didn’t request the interview to play nice (“the confrontation undoubtedly started with some mutual hostility”), Stewart seemingly enjoys being rude and insufferable to the singer for as long as Freddie will take it. He taunts. He baits. He criticizes Queen for not abiding by the “great musical change” perpetrated by the “New Wave” bands that don’t treat concerts as “the ceremonial idolisation of Star by Fans.” (Here Freddie only adds to the perception that Queen are a bunch of pretentious egos: “[Fans] want to see you rush off in limousines. They get a buzz.”) Freddie angrily calls Stewart “narrowminded” and “arrogant.” Stewart calls Queen’s new album, A Day at the Races, “bland and unsubstantial, musically and lyrically... artistically on the decline.”

And so it went. In this day and age of Post-Wayne’s World, Bohemian-Rhapsody-Starring-Rami-Malek-as-the-Beloved-Genius-Freddie-Mercury Age of Queen Adulation, it's easy to forget how frequently the music press, both in the UK and the USA, heaped scorn on the band – indeed, relished doing so – prior to Freddie’s death. Both of the above articles followed a template getting depressingly familiar to Queen fans by then: music magazines going well out of their way to find the writer on staff who most despised the band, and assigning that person to interview the band or review the new record.

Into this animosity came A Day at the Races, an album destined to be the bastard stepchild of the Queen catalog, hitting stores one year after A Night at the Opera. How does a band one-up their masterpiece?

Even Queen fans are divided on answering that question. BBC Radio DJ Paul Gambaccini was one of those who was skeptical: “I had been happy that You’re My Best Friend followed Bohemian Rhapsody because it was so different. It was going from this amazing segmented masterpiece to a heartfelt pop song. Keep the variety going. That was always the secret of The Beatles, and Elton (Bleah. – Ed). Every single is different.

“Somebody to Love (A Day at the Races’ first single) comes out, and it is very obviously Son of Bohemian Rhapsody. And although, if Bohemian Rhapsody had never appeared, Somebody to Love would’ve seemed like a breakthrough – it wasn’t a breakthrough. And you always worry for a group because they’ve got to somehow keep the momentum going.”

We here at Ranting Russell wholeheartedly concur with Mr. Gambaccini: Queen’s Somebody to Love is remarkably unremarkable – wildly overrated, in fact – and we’ve never understood why the band kept it in their live set for so many years. James McNair once called it “a yearning, masterfully arranged vocal extravaganza” and “a bona fide classic.” If, by “masterful” and “classic” he meant “cloying,” “overwrought,” and “boring,” then we back him 100%.

But the album’s lead single being one of Freddie’s weaker efforts is just one reason A Day at the Races, for many years, had the peculiar honor of being The Long-Lost Queen Album After They Got Huge, despite its going to #1 in the UK and #5 in the U.S. at the time of its release. Another reason was the arrival of Live Killers in June of 1979, the first official Queen live product. For Queen fans who came of age in the late 70s/early 80s, Live Killers was a seismic event. An exhilarating document of a (nearly) complete Queen concert, it acted as a greatest hits album two-and-a-half years before the arrival of the actual Greatest Hits album. It quickly became our go-to record for ages. All the hits and great songs, electrified with that special energy that comes only from a live performance, replete with adoring fans and Freddie leading the charge.

And out of 22 songs, only 1 track from A Day at the Races.

Tie Your Mother Down appears as the second song on side four. Think about that: fans listening to Live Killers from beginning to end were reminded that A Day at the Races ever even existed only deep into the set, just before the encore. Otherwise, the two-record set draws heavily from A Night at the Opera (7 songs) and News of the World (6 songs). The album they were touring at the time of Live Killers’ release, Jazz, is represented by four songs (and a brief snippet of a fifth), Sheer Heart Attack by three songs, and Queen by one song.

This had the curious effect of rendering A Day at the Races, years later, as an intriguing unofficial Rarities album, a kind of unintentional collection of deep cuts. May’s Long Away is one of the Great Queen Songs You’ve Never Heard, with all the gorgeous melodies, harmonies, and chord progressions that seemed to flow so readily from the guitarist’s fertile mind and ridiculously long fingers during the band’s golden, pre-synthesizer era. It’s also one of the few genuinely despairing songs in the band’s oeuvre, with poignant lyrics that still connect to this day (“Does anyone care anyway? For all the prayers in heaven, so much of life’s this way” to the denouement “I’m leaving here, I’m long away…”). Deacon’s You and I doesn’t have You’re My Best Friend’s instantly-catchy hook, but its bright tunefulness grows on you mercilessly over repeated listens, lurching feverishly from time change to time change.

It’s impossible not getting swept along by Freddie’s Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy, this album’s music hall/vaudeville submission (see “Bring Back that Leroy Brown” and “Seaside Rendezvous”). It’s not meant to be anything other than a giddy song about romancing and sex, but Freddie was the master of endlessly catchy, giddy songs about romancing and sex, and there's no way not to love this song. Taylor’s drumming is impeccable.

As regards Roger Taylor, his one contribution here, Drowse, is yet another ever-annoying nostalgic take on childhood – his childhood, to be sure – and the endless boredom, the “easier lays,” he must endure before becoming a rock god. Although lyrically redundant in light of Sheer Heart Attack’s Tenement Funster, it’s one more song from Races that doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it until it grows on you and you just fucking love it. At first you want it to rock harder than it does, but then it occurs to you that its borderline excruciatingly slow tempo (in 6/8, same as I’m In Love with My Car) is symbiotic with the lyrics, and once you make this connection, Taylor’s genius becomes clear, and the lyrics go from irritating to damned funny, and even moving. The genius of everything else in the mix then falls naturally into place: May’s minimalist slide guitar, and Taylor’s perfectly-placed cymbal crash at 0:08, jarringly capturing all of childhood’s boredom and uncertainty (That is, if you weren’t born in Syria or Democratic Republic of the Congo – Ed.).

Alas, May’s White Man is a not-so-deep-cut, the guitarist’s honest, if misguided, attempt to weigh in on the horrors of Native American genocide. It would be five-and-a-half years before May would go political again, with better results the second time around on 1982’s Hot Space. White Man sounded much better live.

Somebody to Love struck Paul Gambaccini as Son of Bohemian Rhapsody, but really it's The Millionaire Waltz, Freddie’s 5-minute epic (lyrically almost indistinguishable from Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy) that more closely follow's Bo Rap's blueprint. At least six different parts play almost one after the other, with no formal verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle-eight structure. Although not as instantly tuneful as Bo Rap, Millionaire has that solid It-Grows-On-You quality, prevalent throughout the entire album, that consumes you after repeated listenings. Deacon’s lead bass playing makes me laugh out of pure joy every time I listen to it, and the whole staff recommends you crank your volume up to eleven when the Loud Part starts at 2:20. It rocks. Hard.

You Take My Breath Away is one of the most remarkable songs Freddie ever wrote. With no obvious, ready-for-airplay chord progressions, and the most beautiful lyric he ever wrote for any of his multitudinous love songs (“Every time you make a move you destroy my mind”), Breath’s stark arrangement sets it apart from the rest of the album’s mildly bombastic vibe. It was even more mind-bendingly gorgeous live, as you can hear on the Hyde Park version (an extra on the 2011 Races remaster), and the Earls Court version, where Freddie stays solidly on point after some loud, accidental feedback at 1:59 (although we’d like to believe it was Roger Taylor intentionally messing with the frontman).

Album opener Tie Your Mother Down is seriously rocking, raucous fun, containing a sprinkle of everything we love Queen for: soaring harmonies, a Brian May lead that starts as an Ace Frehley-esque 70s rock solo and ends with some over-the-top slide, and Freddie, front and center, at the height of his vocal prowess. Freddie’s voice never sounded so strong and assured as it does on this album, and never would again. He's at his glorious peak here in 1976. Tie Your Mother Down, You Take My Breath Away, and The Millionaire Waltz constitute the most powerful work Mercury – one of the great rock ‘n’ roll vocalists – ever committed to tape.

Having received a hero’s welcome in Japan for their spring 1975 tour, Brian May returned the favor by writing two verses in Japanese for Races’ album closer, Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together). May’s dark side once again counterbalances Mercury’s music hall numbers in a song about death and separation, a theme he returned to on the band’s next album. It would seem, listening to this, Tie Your Mother Down, and Long Away, that the guitarist was simply incapable of writing anything that wasn’t either catchy as hell or straight-up lovely. Another marvelous Queen song, and a perfect way to wrap up an album that didn’t – and still hasn’t – gotten its due as one of the band’s finer efforts.

A Day at the Races began its ascent in the charts in December of 1976, two months after Stiff Records released The Damned’s New Rose. Punk Rock was the new rage, and Queen stood on shaky ground as their grandiosness and bombast were cast in sharp relief by Punk’s straightforward, barre chord assault. No doubt Tony Stewart was one of many who watched, knife in hand, waiting to see how the band would respond.