Narrator: It's a song you've all heard at least once.
♪ Is this the real life? ♪
And it was probably not like anything you've heard before.
♪ Is this just fantasy? ♪
I'm of course talking about Queen's legendary single
"Bohemian Rhapsody," a song that, even 40 years later,
is one of the most influential and memorable songs
of our generation.
But have you ever wondered why this six-minute single
that no one ever thought would be a hit
became one of the most famous songs ever written?
♪ I'm just a poor boy ♪
♪ I need no sympathy ♪
♪ Because I'm easy come ♪
(record scratching)
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was a song long in the making,
but it officially kicked into gear in the summer of 1975,
when Freddie Mercury began writing it
as an operatic piece titled, "Real Life."
After the success of their last album "Sheer Heart Attack,"
Queen was given complete creative freedom
and control over their next piece.
And it's obvious that they took that creative freedom
and ran with it.
Fisch: "Bohemian Rhapsody" had a very rare effect on people,
which is that it was one of those songs where
the first time you heard it,
you hadn't heard anything like it.
Narrator: This is Irwin Fisch.
He's an Emmy-nominated composer
and professor at NYU Steinhardt.
Fisch: In my image is that it's the kind of song
that makes you pull over to the side of the road,
because you go, "What the devil is this?"
Very few songs have done that, and that did.
Narrator: And he's right.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was different for its time
and still is today.
Unlike most pop hits that lasted around three minutes,
it was a six-minute pop single that has an opera,
an opera, right in the middle of the song.
Fisch: It actually in some ways hasn't been influential,
because it was so fully realized
that it was a little bit of, "Where do we go from here?"
It managed to become a ubiquitous part of the culture
and something that never gets off the radio
and never stops in the karaoke bars and is used in movies,
and it's all over the place, because nobody has still done
anything that sounds like that.
Narrator: One of the reasons why "Bohemian Rhapsody"
sounds so different is in its structure.
The song is neither an a cappella,
a ballad,
an opera
or rock.
It's actually all of them in one song.
Fisch: It advanced a tradition of suites in pop music,
meaning not a continuous song,
not a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge structure,
which was the norm.
A put together group of different songs, in essence.
So if people refer to "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a song,
that's a bit of a misnomer.
It's actually three or four songs.
Narrator: "Bohemian Rhapsody" can actually be divided
into five different sections: an a cappella introduction.
♪ Is this the real life ♪
Ballad.
♪ Mama ♪
Opera.
♪ Thunderbolts and lightning ♪
♪ Very very frightening me ♪
Hard rock.
♪ So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye ♪
And finally a reflective coda.
♪ Nothing really matters ♪
It was also highly unusual for a popular single
to not include a chorus, while combining
different musical styles and lyrics.
It is by definition a mind-blowing genre bender.
Fisch: This innovation started around the mid-'60s.
It started basically with the Beach Boys and the Beatles.
Beach Boys with "Good Vibrations."
♪ I'm picking up good vibrations ♪
♪ She's giving me the excitations ♪
The Beatles with "A Day in the Life."
♪ A crowd of people stood and stared ♪
Epic songs that pieced together different ideas
into a cohesive whole.
Queen, in "Bohemian Rhapsody," took that idea
and pushed it way over the top.
Narrator: And to see just how over the top they went,
you need to look no farther than
this operatic section of the song.
The lyrics name characters from classical Italian theaters,
quotes from the Quran, and the demon Beelzebub.
And this section that sounds like it's been sung
by a roomful of choir was actually just three people:
Freddie Mercury, drummer Roger Taylor,
and guitarist Brian May.
It's not just the vocals; there's harmony everywhere,
even in the instruments that almost sound like echoes.
This technique was heavily inspired by a production method
called the "Wall of Sound," developed in 1960
by producer Phil Spector.
He put masses of musicians in one room,
three keyboard players playing the same part
but in various similar instruments,
like the harpsichord or an electric piano,
and recording them together to create a sound
the likes of which had never been heard before.
That was exactly what Queen wanted to accomplish.
Fisch: When people talk about what a great song
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is, they're talking equally,
or even more, about the production.
Narrator: To achieve the sound that they wanted,
Queen used a technique known as reduction mixing,
also called ping pong recording.
Most of the pop songs you listen to today
use a lot of audio tracks, each track reserved
for different instruments and vocals,
combining to make one song.
But back then, technology limited the amount
of audio tracks that could be used.
For example, Beatles' legendary "Sgt. Pepper's"
was recorded on an analog four-track record.
And to fit more than four tracks in a four-track record,
they would record all four tracks, then bounce
all their tracks into one, record, bounce again, and repeat.
The bounce tracks would combine all of the tracks into one,
meaning if you raise the sound of that particular track,
it would raise the volume of all
the individual tracks within.
Fisch: Part of the great challenge of that process
was that you had to make commitments to your mix,
to the blending of everything as you went along,
so you needed to have a lot of foresight
and a great image of where you were going.
By the time Queen made "Bohemian Rhapsody,"
we were up to 24-track tape.
By today's standards, that's still not many tracks.
They had so many vocals and they had
so many layers of guitars.
I've heard that they had about 180 individual tracks
that got put onto a 24-track, two-inch tape.
Narrator: But of course this method
of bouncing tracks came with its own challenges.
Once it's done, you can't go back
to just fix it, like we can do now.
Fisch: Two-inch, 24-track tape that they were working on,
it was a physical process.
It was a razor blade.
It was an edit block where the tape would sit there.
You would slice through the two-inch tape.
You would cut out what you wanted to cut out.
And you would splice it together
with a little piece of white tape.
Now it's very easy digitally.
You chop it on the screen.
If you made a mistake, you can fix it.
Everything now is non-destructive.
Everything they did then was destructive,
so it took a lot of commitment and a lot of knowledge
and a very, very intense, deep skillset
to be able to piece that stuff together
and have it sound smooth.
Narrator: Just how much tracking went into the song
becomes more evident when you remove the instruments
to just listen to the vocals.
♪ I'm just a poor boy ♪
♪ I need no sympathy ♪
♪ Because I'm easy come, easy go ♪
♪ Little high, little low ♪
Fisch: And before the Beatles and before the Beach Boys,
a song was a song.
It needed to be presentable on the piano.
If you sat down and played "Bohemian Rhapsody"
from start to finish on the piano, you probably would say,
"Wow, that's really wild and interesting."
But you probably wouldn't say that's going to be a hit
that's gonna endure for 40 years.
What made it that had a lot to do
with the sound they created.
Narrator: And of course, it's hard to talk about
"Bohemian Rhapsody" without talking about
the man behind the song, Freddie Mercury,
because this song was his baby, his brainchild.
Unlike most of Queen's songs that were written
collaboratively in the studio, this was a song that,
according to the guitarist Brian May,
was "all in Freddie's head" before it even began recording.
Fisch: Freddie Mercury talked about the song
in an interview as "experimentation in sound."
I think that could be taken to mean that the experiment
was to see if he could get what was in his head,
his sonic preconceptions, out there.
I don't think it was the kind of experimentation
where they went into the studio to just see
what would happen, because he was famously buttoned-up
and had the production and the notes
and the arrangements and sound of the thing in his head.
I think the experiment was really about seeing
if something unique could be realized in the studio.
An important reason that "Bohemian Rhapsody" resonates
and has resonated for over 40 years
is that it embodied something very intense,
which is Freddie Mercury's personality and life.
That record is an oral extension of Freddie Mercury's
self-consciousness without shame.
It's music in some ways the sensibilities
are out of the closet.
As a performer, there hadn't been
a Freddie Mercury before Freddie Mercury.
Narrator: And perhaps beyond all the notes,
lyrics and performances, what truly makes
"Bohemian Rhapsody" great is that it embodies
what every musical piece should be:
the talent and the drive to push boundaries
and create something that brings us together,
even 40 years later.
In a time where pop songs just all generally
sound the same, maybe that's why we still
can't stop listening to "Bohemian Rhapsody."
With just this one song, Freddie Mercury and Queen
became something that very few artists
managed to achieve: a legend.