A Night at the Opera
Queen
1975/1991: Hollywood HR-61065-2
I acquired this album strictly to have “Bohemian Rhapsody, and probably I’ve listened to the other tracks maybe once, aside from “You’re My Best Friend,” which really is a beaut. The rest left me nonplussed at best.
But “Bohemian Rhapsody’…THAT I remember as being the first track I ever heard on headphones that woke me up to what stereophonic sound could deliver. I apologize for the antiquated terminology there, but that’s what was involved: a shift from just “stereo” sound (left/right channels) to the capacity for the medium to exploit a much larger spectrum within that zone.
The occasion for that enlightenment was, as I recall, some high school in Yakima where our Walla Walla-based debate team was preparing for some event. Someone handed me a pair of headphones (which, I hasten to add, weren’t alien to me) and hit Play on their cassette player, and THAT started playing. I know I’d heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” play on the radio or elsewhere before, so I didn’t find it utterly new and bewildering, but what was new was the intense stereophonic craft inherent in it.
It started off coaxingly enough, with the multitracked vocals and whiffs of stereo, but then it unfurled into an overblown glam-rock ballad which didn’t interest me. Blah-blah-blah, drama, killed-a-man, mama, whatever.
And then the tiresome guitar solo stopped abruptly, and I sat upright and started paying attention.
I had never encountered anything like that stuff before (“Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?”), and it was simultanously fascinating, dazzling, totally over the top, and engaging. The pinnacle of my reaction, however, was probably the build of Mercury’s “never, never, never, never let me go,” followed by the cascading chord reprising the “magnifico” from just 20 seconds earlier. Sure, it sounds like nothing when I mention it in text form all these years later, but when you hear it in such a startling context (and at ample volume, which is important) it’s pretty amazing…especially back when it was so bizarre and new and intense, with no contemporary works one could compare it to.
Hell, whom am I kidding—it still has no peers. “Bohemian Rhapsody” deservedly is unique and incomparable. What it’s all about does seem to fade into irrelevance, by contrast, if the drama of the track washes over you.
Comments © 2015 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.