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Crazy Little Thing Called Love The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke
Fender Telecaster Electric Guitar
1: "At first we wondered what he was up to. The rest of us just wanted to get on and mix the thing, but it really helps lift that section" - Brian May (Sound On Sound Magazine, June 2002). |
Form
Freddie, cleverly and/or unconsciously, built up this masterpiece from some very well-defined recurring motifs and themes, which feature so original variants that make the listener ignore them. That's one of the main reasons why Bohemian Rhapsody is so complicated, and at the same time so catchy. Of course it's not merely a matter of form, everything's involved there: production, arrangements, performance, tempo... Mercury had manifested his interest in song structures from the beginning. Something like this requires craftsmanship, professionalism and patience, as well as advanced musical knowledge and of course, loads of imagination. The form of this particular rhapsody is so distinctive that whenever somebody uses the same (as in Valensia Clarkson's marvellous Phantom of the Opera) it's immediately deemed a rip-off by most critics.
This theme appears mostly in the ballad section, but one of its variants is the song opener too: it uses almost the same chords as the verse progression, only in different order and changing Cm by C7. Paul McCartney's Yesterday has a similar idea as middle-eight derives from the verse progression. Some comments on each variant: - 1st: Chain of fifths: v/V/V > V/V > V > I, resulting in a nice cadence. Axl Rose's November Rain uses a similar trick but with different chords: IV > vi > ii > I (note that "vi" is "v/ii" too). - 2nd: Done first during the intro ("I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy"), then during the rock section transposed to Eb ("oh baby can't do this to me baby..."). - 3rd: A very common progression, which I personally tend to label "the ABBA cliché" because it's used in several of their songs (Fernando, Winner Takes It All, Super Trouper). - 4th: There's a chromatic progression over the Cm chord, similar to what Fred applied in both March of the Black Queen and Death on Two Legs. - 5th: Almost identical to 3rd (functionally), but with a passing chord. Freddie very often did I > V > vi progressions with descending bass: Lily of the Valley, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, Somebody to Love, Life Is Real... - 6th: Very clever two-and-a-half-bar variant. The use of "iv" instead of "IV" in some parts was common for Freddie as well: Play the Game, How Can I Go On, Guide Me Home, Made in Heaven, There Must Be More to Life Than This, Barcelona, Killer Queen, Love of My Life, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, My Melancholy Blues, Innuendo... - 7th: This variant is used during the second part of the guitar solo, and ends on a chromatic line that works as modulation to A Major (and double-time). - 8th: Appears as the guitar fanfare ("oh yeah oh yeah") after Fred does the famous left-hand piano run. As an experiment, try singing "mamma ooooh" while listening to this part! The chord change from vi to III in the key of Eb will also appear in Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy.
These twelve different cadences (seven perfect, five interrupted) have been grouped as one recurring theme, although different interpretations could result in other nominal conclusions. Some comments: - 1st, 2nd, 4th & 11th last three-bars each. Another song by Freddie where he used this sort of phrasing was The Miracle (around thirteen years later), and a non-Queen example is John Lennon's I Am the Walrus. - 1st, 5th & 10th overlap with the recurring piano leitmotif. - 2nd progression has the 'biiidim' chromatic function that also appears in Leroy Brown, Barcelona and The Millionaire Waltz. - 3rd variant is a descending line, used to modulate from Eb to A. - 4th, 6th, 7th & 9th have the chromatic 'VII' function, which was used by Freddie in Killer Queen (also in the key of Eb), Death on Two Legs, Seaside Rendezvous, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, Don't Try Suicide, Life Is Real and How Can I Go On. - 4th, 6th & 8th include the chromatic 'bIII' chord, also present in Barcelona, Seaside Rendezvous, Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, Staying Power and Life Is Real. - The end of 4th overlaps another motif ("Galileo"). - 5th variant has the bVII > IV > V > I progression, that Freddie would use again on Was It All Worth It. Also, in Bohemian Rhapsody itself, the recurring piano motif shares the two first chords (Ab > Eb), but changes the others (Ebdim > Fm7) and is on a different key. - 6th progression has the following non-diatonic chords: 'bvi', 'bV' (Seven Seas of Rhye), 'VII' (Killer Queen...), 'bVII' (Sunday Afternoon, Waltz, Somebody to Love...), 'bIII' (Lover Boy, Life Is Real...), 'v' (Lover Boy, Love Me Like There's No Tomorrow, Liar, Black Queen, Leroy Brown, Rendezvous). - 7th & 9th have the same chords, but in different order: 1-4-7-3-5 vs. 5-1-7-3-4. Note they both have VII > iii (which could be read as V/iii > iii). - 8th progression can be interpreted as three IV > V incomplete cadences, first in Db, then E and finally Eb (which gets resolved at the beginning of the fanfare). - 10th ends on the strange Abmaj7/Bb, a five-note chord entirely diatonic. - 11th sets the modulation from Eb to F, pivoting on the Db>C change (bVII>VI in Eb, bVI>V in F). - 12th has 'idim' function (Black Queen, Flick of the Wrist, Barcelona...), and closes with a ii>I cadence, as opposed to My Fairy King which is left unresolved on 'ii'. Maybe Freddie was trying to tell us that King didn't satisfy him and this one did?
Usually starting off with an arpeggio over Eb, it then turns to a semi-chromatic progression with pedal point. Sometimes it's interrupted, but in the full form it has the following chords: Ab > Eb > Ebdim > Fm7, or functionally, IV > I > idim > ii. There's a passage in Love of My Life where this motif has a cameo (albeit not in complete form). It comes in three versions: - 1st: B > Bb > A > Bb (bII > I > VII > I) over "easy come easy go little high little low", "I'm just a poor boy nobody loves me" and "easy come easy go will you let me go". Second and third times it's done in double-tempo. - 2nd: IV > I > idim > I, done first in A ("I see a little...") then in Bb ("he's just a poor boy from a poor family"). - 3rd: IV > I > IV > I > idim > I > IV > I ("Scaramouch ... fandango"). One of Freddie's most recurring points is to leave a two-bar spacer in the tonic before starting off the first verse: My Fairy King, Killer Queen, Liar, The Miracle. In Bo Rhap this is done before each verse, at the beginning of the opera section and as harmonic base for the rock riff. The riff itself consists of two parts: the first is all done over the two-bar thing, the second starts off the same but is transposed to F for the second bar. The "Galileo" melody appears twice in the song: first as a duet between Roger and Freddie, featuring bitonality (Am and Dm, or A Aeolian and A Phrygian), then, in reduced version, as Freddie's rough "oh mamma mia mamma mia", then joined by the choir for "mamma mia let me go", all in straight Eb key ("go" forms a Bb chord though). Similarly, there are two (slightly different) vocal build-ups, both done by Mercury: first in "magnifico" (Bb6), then in "let me go" (Gb7/Db). There are several bounces interacting: - "Bismilah": Done by Freddie on octave-vocals (shades of Flick of the Wrist). - "No, we will not let you go": Done on a multi-tracked three-part harmony. Only the first time there's "no". - "Let me go": Three-part again. The first two times Roger (who's alone on top) holds the note longer, but not in the others. - "Never never never never let me go": Done by Freddie. According to Brian, he came up with that bit at the very end of the sessions, maybe even the day they were gonna finish editing it (1). The first variant is a Bb > Eb > Bb > Db progression lasting 3 1/2 bars. The second time it's Bb > Eb > Ab and lasts 3 bars. Lyrically, it covers the "so you think you can stone me ... leave me to die" portion. |
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