By Randal C. Hill
“I always wanted to do something operatic,” Queen’s charismatic leader Freddie Mercury once said. “I don’t really know anything about opera myself. Just certain pieces. I wanted to create what I thought Queen could do.” The result became the quartet’s signature song, “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Here Mercury is offering is a six-minute suite consisting of several sections—an introduction, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part, a reflective coda—and all structured like Led Zeppelin’s masterpiece “Stairway to Heaven.”
While “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a monumental production, many Queen fans ended up scratching their collective heads when it came to interpreting Mercury’s mystifying lyrics:
Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger, now he’s dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away
Mercury—born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) in 1946—had just broken up with his long-time love, Mary Austin, after revealing to her that he had fallen in love with a man.
In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” it seemed that Freddie was indeed addressing his mother. She embraced Zoroastrianism, which is intolerant of homosexuality, and her son’s lyrics showcased the angst he was suffering in coming out as gay.
He was figuratively slaying the straight Freddie that he’d always shown the world.
Related: Music Flashback: “Lola” by The Kinks
The band’s record label balked at “Rhapsody’s” long running time—nearly six minutes—but the Queen crew refused to cut any parts, claiming that the song wouldn’t make sense if that happened. Besides, they argued, the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” ran 1.5 minutes longer.
No problem, as it turned out. Once “Bohemian Rhapsody”—from Queen’s album “A Night at the Opera”—hit the English airwaves, fans there made the single a Number One winner for nine weeks.
In America, the Elektra Records 45 became the group’s first entry into Billboard’s Hot 100, climbing to the Number Nine spot in 1976, then reaching Number Two on the 1992 chart after it was featured in the popular teen-oriented film “Wayne’s World.”
Trivia note: On “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Freddie Mercury played the same recording-studio grand piano as did Paul McCartney on “Hey Jude.”
