As a rock radio-obsessed teen, I must have spent hundreds of hours analyzing song lyrics. Back then, what we now call classic rock was new music, and my friends and I would pore over the album liner notes for everything from Aerosmith’s Dream On to Come Sail Away by Styx to Supertramp’s Even in the Quietest Moments. Those songs had more depth and meaning to us than the required reading that teachers assigned us in English lit.
In Steven Tyler’s autobiography, Does the Noise in my Head Bother You?, he blew our collective minds by printing the lyrics to Dream On and revealing a misheard lyric after all of these years. I, and everyone I know including Derek, thought the song went, “Sing women, sing for the years…” Nope. It’s, “Sing with me, sing for the years…”.
Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, released on October 31, 1975. Freddie Mercury’s biographer says the complicated classic included Freddie’s attempt to come out of the closet. Lyricist Tim Rice agrees that by singing, “Mama, I just killed a man. Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger now he’s dead”, Freddie was telling the world that he was killing the man he used to be. Rice says he’s talked to Queen’s Roger Taylor about it, and Taylor backs him up.
Freddie apparently hated playing keyboards on Bohemian Rhapsody in concert because he was afraid he’d mess it up. It was such an iconic song. Singing and playing simultaneously is difficult! And that’s why his later songs leaned more heavily on the guitar than the piano.
Freddie Mercury died of aids in November 1991. I vividly remember that after weeks of speculation and rumours, he confirmed he had AIDS just hours before he passed away. After all of these years, I still love the simplicity of the official video for Bohemian Rhapsody. And now, four decades later, it has some of the extra depth I searched for so hard when it came out.