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You may not know that the United States has a National Recording Registry — a list of more than 600 recordings that have been deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant by the Library of Congress. GBH’s The Culture Show is digging deep, one recording at a time, with our recurring segment SOUND FILES.
In this edition, Keith Lockhart with the acclaimed orchestra Boston Pops waxes operatic about his love of Queen’s 1975 masterpiece “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“Twenty-five years ago, there were all these things that everybody knew how to sing,” Lockhart said. “These days, our audience is fragmented enough — from the younger people to the older people — that there’s only one song I can think of that pretty much everybody in every audience we ever play for knows. And that is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’”
Back in the 1960s, before Queen had even formed, frontman Freddie Mercury had begun composing parts of what would eventually become his most defining work. Its initial title was “The Cowboy Song” due to the Old West feel evoked by the lyrics to its now-famous ballad section. But much like pop music, recording technology and Mercury himself, the song would evolve dramatically in the years between its conception and its completion.
By mid-1975, Queen were a band on the rise. Their third album, Sheer Heart Attack, had been a tentative step toward a new sound. But Mercury — along with his Queen bandmates Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon — had more dramatic things in mind. As work began on their next record, A Night at the Opera, they set about hammering “Bohemian Rhapsody” into shape.
Recording it would stretch the limits of studio technology.
The work went on for three weeks — sometimes for 12 hours a day, across five different studios. Some sections layer as many as 180 vocal tracks. The sound Queen achieved was unlike anything previously committed to tape. Queen earmarked the tune as the lead single for the album. Record executives were worried about everything from the song’s dramatic shifts in musical tone to its inscrutable lyrics to its length. However, the track became Queen’s first top-10 hit in the United States — and their first No. 1 hit in the United Kingdom.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” has had remarkable staying power. It reentered the cultural zeitgeist following Mercury’s death in 1991; had another run at the top of the charts in 1992 thanks to a now-iconic scene in the movie “Wayne’s World” and yet another one when the Oscar-winning Mercury biopic hit theaters in 2018.
In 2022, it was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. In its induction essay, musical artist Don Breithaupt describes it as something of a musical and technological miracle and said, simply, “it is now in a class by itself.”
On its initial release back in 1975, literally millions of people across the globe bought the record. One of those buyers was a gifted 15-year-old clarinetist in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. That, of course, was Keith Lockhart.
“The first rock album I bought — the first LP I bought — was Night at the Opera in the fall of 1975,” Lockhart said. “I’d heard ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in airplay on the radio, and I thought, ‘How did they do this?’”
