A lavish production well ahead of its time, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' remains one of British rock's finest moments. Twenty years after its original release, MARK CUNNINGHAM learns how the mercurial muse was committed to tape from its producer, Roy Thomas Baker, and mix engineer, Gary Langan.
Few singles can boast the technical and commercial achievements of Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. Released on October 31, 1975, it was a production beyond comparison, residing at the top of the UK chart for nine weeks and honoured in 1977 by the BPI as 'The Best Single Of The Last 25 Years'. Later, propelled by the tragic death of its composer, Freddie Mercury, the single returned to Number One for a second time in 1991.
Metamorphosing from wistful ballad to an operatic pastiche with a fiery rock climax, all within six short minutes, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was greeted like manna from heaven in the dull musical wasteland between glam-rock and punk. Although 'Killer Queen', a year earlier, showed the band was a cut above the rest of the rock pack in terms of inventiveness, nothing could possibly prepare the listener for 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. With one broad sweep, it sealed Queen's future in the Premier Division of rock performers and studio experimentalists.
The Recording Sessions
Recording began at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth on August 24, 1975, after a 3-week rehearsal period in Herefordshire. During the making of the track, however, a further four studios -- SARM (East), Scorpion, Wessex and Roundhouse -- were used. At the time it was the most expensive single ever made and guitarist Brian May was to later refer to the track's parent album, A Night At The Opera, as "our Sgt Pepper".
Vital to Queen's palette of sound was producer Roy Thomas Baker who, while at Decca and Trident Studios, had gained vast experience in rock, opera, and classical music. Baker had already produced Queen's first three albums (Queen, Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack) by the time Mercury casually previewed a new song called 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. Little did the producer realise that every ounce of his acquired expertise would be called upon in moulding this epic.
'This is where the opera section comes in'
Baker recalls his first hearing of the song: "We were going out to dinner one night and I met Freddie at his apartment in Kensington. He sat down at his piano and said, 'I'd like to play you a song that I'm working on at the moment.' So he played the first part and said, 'This is the chord sequence', followed by the interim part, and although he didn't have all the lyrics together yet, I could tell it was going to be a ballady number. He played a bit further through the song and then stopped suddenly, saying, 'This is where the opera section comes in.' We both just burst out laughing. I had worked with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at Decca where I learned a lot about vocals and the way vocals are stressed, so I was probably one of the few people in the whole world who knew exactly what he was talking about.
"It was the first time that an opera section had been incorporated into a pop record, let alone a Number One. It was obviously very unusual and we originally planned to have just a couple of 'Galileos'. But things often have a habit of evolving differently once you're inside the studio, and it did get longer and bigger. The beginning section was pretty spot on and the end section was fairly similar, although we obviously embellished it with guitars and lots of overdubs. But the opera section ended up nothing like the original concept, because we kept changing it and adding things to it."
Baker and Queen recorded the basic backing track in three sections at Kingsley Ward's Rockfield Studios, later transferring to Scorpion Studios in North London and SARM for work on the guitar overdubs and extensive vocals. "The first half or ballad section was done with piano, drums and bass -- the normal routine. We never really started the opera section at that point. We just left a 30-second strip of tape on the reel for later use, not knowing that we would even overrun it. Then the end rock section was recorded as a separate song, in the way that we would normally record a loud rock number of that period. The thing that made it difficult was that even the end had lots of vocals on it (the 'Ooh yeah, ooh yeah' part), so we had to record the basic backing track of drums, bass, guitar and piano, then do the background vocals without having the lead vocal on first. That wasn't the regular way of doing things, because the lead vocal would normally dictate the phrasing of the background vocals. But we wouldn't have had enough tracks left for the rich backing vocals if we hadn't gone down this route.
"The opera bit was getting longer, and so we kept splicing huge lengths of tape on to the reel. Every time Freddie came up with another 'Galileo', I would add another piece of tape to the reel, which was beginning to look like a zebra crossing whizzing by! This went on over a three or four day period, while we decided on the length of the section. That section alone took about three weeks to record, which in 1975 was the average time spent on a whole album.
"We formed a 3-part harmony by recording one harmony at a time and bouncing. So we did three tracks of the first part and bounced it to one track, three of the second, and three of the third. We would then double bounce to one section, so that particular phrase would have a 3-part harmony just on one track. We would do this to each background vocal part across the song and ended up with fourth generation dupes on just one of the parts. By the time we mixed two of the other parts together, the first part was up to eight generations. This was before we wore out the master and began making 24-track to 24-track tape transfers. Once that had happened, the distortion factor on those vocals was very, very high."
Although a project of this magnitude would understandably cause anxiety among many in Baker's position, the technical restraints of the era did not alarm him. "If something had to be longer, we would just add extra tape. If we needed more tracks, we would track bounce to free some more room on the tape. The making of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was basically one continuous track bounce!"
Due to the complex nature of the recording, it is not surprising that the occasional vocal faux-pas was noted by Baker's keen ears. He was not militaristic, however. "There were a few harmonies that were a little dissident, such as two notes next to each other which weren't quite spot on in passing phrases. We left those there, because they weren't classed as mistakes. In classical music they are allowable, whereas in rock music they normally are not. But in passing phrases it seems to work OK. If there was anything we heard at the time which we thought we wouldn't get away with, we would just wipe it and re-record it. So everything you hear was planned, albeit disjointedly planned, the way it should be."
Positioning and Miking
How were the Queen band members positioned in relation to each other for the backing track?
"Roger Taylor sat behind his drum kit at the live end of the studio and John Deacon was against the wall, with his Marshall bass stack on the right-hand side as you looked out of the control room window. Brian was in a portable isolation booth and Freddie was at the piano, close to the window.
"We weren't into multiple snare miking back then, so there was just a single mic on the snare. We tended to use mostly condenser mics at that time and generally Neumann U67s or U87s on the toms and overhead. The transformation between U67s or U87s was going on at that point and studios usually had one or the other. An AKG D12 was used on the bass drum. They were the days before the D112, which seems to be the standard now. John's bass was DI'd. Studios tended to make up their own DI boxes then, because no manufacturers appeared to be making them. They weren't active DI boxes either; people would make them with a transformer sticking out of the end with wires going all over the place. There was always a slight sound loss when you plugged them into the amp, so we had to compensate for that. We also used an Electro-Voice 666 and sometimes a Neumann U67 condenser on John's cabinet to pick up a bit of air.
"I was standing at the back of the control room and you just knew that you were listening for the first time to a big page in history. Something inside me told me that this was a red letter day, and it really was."
"Freddie's piano was miked with two Neumann U67s and we also set up a Shure mic for his guide vocal. He didn't sing all the way through the backing track takes, just the first couple of words of each line as a reference for the band."
But, as ever, much experimentation was undertaken before Brian May's guitar sound was perfected. "We used to have a few different types of mics set up, from which we would choose or blend signals for any one given sound, and it's a technique that I still use today. Brian's Vox AC30 amps were backless, so we also set up some mics behind them and near the wall, to capture some ambience and the full spectrum of the guitar sound. There was always a lot of experimentation going on during our sessions. Brian generally used AC30s but John Deacon had also thrown together something like a Tandy Radio Shack speaker with a 3 Watt amplifier, and we tried that with a treble booster. We tried putting microphones down metal and concrete tubes to get more of a honky sound, and it all seemed to work. It certainly all stands up today when I hear it all again."
