There's a time in life for Hoagy Carmichael. There's a time in life for Claude Debussy. There's a time in life for Jerry Lee Lewis. There's a time in life for Destiny's Child. All these things have their moment. ~Elvis Costello
“I always wanted our songs to pop and kick,” The Cars’ Ric Ocasek told me in 2005. And on the band’s fifth album, Heartbeat City, they did just that.
You might think of the pop in Pop Art terms: bold colours, sleek lines; bang-vroom choruses, the kick of a lyrical subversion that sneaks up on you, hinting at fragile mental states, with elliptical drug references and some kinky S&M.
Of that contrast in his songs, Ocasek said: “One kind of holds you down to earth, while the other takes you somewhere else.”
After running the album-tour track annually from 1978-81, The Cars were looking to go somewhere else. The title of their fourth album, Shake It Up, hinted at just what they needed to do.
The first major shake-up for Heartbeat City was bringing in producer Mutt Lange, best known for his high-gloss hit-making on AC/DC’s Back In Black and Def Leppard’s Pyromania. “I thought that the combination of the sound he gets and what we do would mingle pretty nicely,” Ocasek said in 1984. “Mutt’s never done a band like us; he’s done a lot of heavy metal. But I thought the two could mix.”
Harrison had a rare ability that’s cherished in studio players like Louie Shelton, Brent Mason, and Larry Carlton. He could craft an unforgettable two bar phrase that becomes the signature to the song. Elliot Easton of the Cars and Keith Richards of the Stones, had this as well.
The classic example is Harrison’s intro to “Something”. Six notes with a released bend, all on one string. Anyone can do it. Even your little sister can do it. But he thought of it. This is a gift.
The concept behind Devo was created during a single shocking event in 1970. From their earliest moments they had a point to make – but they also had a specific way of wanting to make it, and it wasn’t an easy journey. In 2015, Gerald V Casale looked back on the band’s career with Prog.
“God, those were exciting times,” says Gerald V Casale, vocalist, bassist, synth player and joint founder of Devo, über-geeks of the States’ late-70s new wave. “When you’re just so energised by what you’re doing and you’re the chief believer in your own vision.”
Casale is reminiscing about Miracle Witness Hour, a live album, previously unreleased, of his band performing in a biker bar in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1977. That was just before Devo’s “full bloom,” when they became America’s Public Anomaly No.1.
“It was a very strange place,” he says of the Eagle Street Saloon. “It was mouldy and decrepit. There’d be a towny bike-bar scene and then the music would start. Some locals would stick around and create tension and terror for the artsy punks there, and then we’d play to them – around 40 people. Then we’d just get out of there.
“I remember being really afraid. I had things said to me and figured the best thing to do was ignore them. Whenever I got accosted on the street by a crazy maniac, the best thing to do was walk away. I always felt threatened. We had to leave by the back door at a lot of places.”
In contrast to the White Album and Let It Be, Abbey Road – released in September 1969 – found The Beatles operating relatively cohesively; attempting to pull together, in step with one another if not exactly on the same page. “Abbey Road was really unfinished songs all stuck together,” bemoaned John Lennon. “None of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all.”
It was the final collection of songs The Beatles recorded together, and our track-by-track guide tells its story.
Come Together
Very much John Lennon’s song, Abbey Road’s opener started out as Let’s Get It Together, a campaign song for Timothy Leary, standing against Ronald Reagan for Governor of California.
Lennon kick-started his lyric with a phrase from Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me (‘Here come old flat-top’), but neglected to cut the line from the finished recording. Berry’s publishers initiated plagiarism proceedings but settled out of court in 1973 on condition Lennon record three of their songs (hence his 1975 album Rock ’N’ Roll).
With a thinly veiled Lennon as central protagonist, Come Together is a groove-based espousal of the counter-culture, rich in selfconfessed ‘gobbledygook’, which references Yoko Ono (then recovering from a car accident, in a hospital bed actually in Abbey Road Studios) and features the zeitgeist-defining line ‘you got to be free’.
Recorded across nine days in July, all four Beatles featured, with Lennon on double-tracked guitar solo, Paul McCartney on bass and piano, and Ringo shuffling beautifully on juju drums. Outwardly good-natured, there was tension in the air; “Shoot me” Lennon whispered over the opening bars. McCartney told journalist Ray Coleman: “On Come Together I’d have liked to have sung harmony with John, and I think he’d have liked me to, but I was too embarrassed to ask him.”
2) Why did the Doors have no musician dedicated to playing bass?
To the first question, the Doors were unique among the classic rock bands in that their lineup did not include a bass-only musician (e.g., electric bass guitarist). Playing live, keyboardist Ray Manzarek used his right hand to play organ, and his left hand to play bass lines on a Fender Rhodes Piano Bass – the lower left octaves of a standard eighty-eight note piano. While unique, this configuration is not without precedent.
The Doors were a rock version of the jazz organ trio – a band led by an organist who plays bass lines with their left hand on the low notes of their instrument (or with their foot via bass pedals). Covering bass as well as harmony and melody, the jazz organist needs only a drummer for percussion – their kick drum accenting keyboard bass notes. The third player can be a saxophone or other horn soloist to add color, or a guitarist who can support the organist with chords as well as play solos. This keyboard/guitar/drums trio is the Doors instrumental lineup.
While the jazz organist often played bass and melody/harmony on the same instrument, Manzarek used a separate piano bass for a few reasons. The piano bass provided more punch to the low end than his electric organ’s bass register could provide. But even had he principally played a full electric piano a separate bass instrument was needed. Electrified bass instruments need higher wattage amplification than other (treble) instruments for rock music. Manzarek used separate amplifiers as well as separate instruments to handle his organ and bass double-duty with the Doors.
It is the second question that gets to the heart of the Doors sound, and the reception to their music.
Before the Doors, Ray Manzarek played in a band called Rick and the Ravens, a typical Southern California surf/frat party group which included Ray’s brothers – Ray incidentally was the lead vocalist. After that group disbanded, Ray looked to form another group, which he built around the lyrics and vocal styling of Jim Morrison, whom he first met as a fellow film student at UCLA. The band recruited John Densmore as their drummer, and Robby Krieger as a guitarist. They developed their songs in this lineup with Manzarek initially providing bass and harmony on the same electric organ. In the meantime, they auditioned electric bass players.
What Manzarek and the Doors found is that their music and lyrics gave the band a different vibe than the typical LA rock bands. The mood was darker, more dramatic, and had a hypnotic, trance-like quality which eventually drew in their fan base. Key to that quality was the simple and repetitive bass which rooted the music, and allowed Ray’s right hand, as well as John and Robby, to play more freely.
The auditioning bassists would come in and play walking bass lines and improvisation that turned the Doors back into a rhythm and blues group reminiscent of Rick and the Ravens. For that reason, Manzarek and the Doors determined the best course of action was to stick with Ray’s left hand playing bass, but with a separate keyboard bass instrument and amplification.
For studio recordings, the Doors and their producers used session electric bass players. Their roles in the recording, particularly with the first few albums, were to simply double up, note for note, whatever Ray was playing with his left hand.
The Doors in performance in 1967. Ray Manzarek is playing his iconic keyboard stack (Fender Piano Bass on top of his electric organ), each keyboard running into a separate amplifier.
Freddie received a thorough and rigorous education from his boarding school in India. In the evenings he and a group of boys would even gather to learn more about the arts from one of the teachers. They listened to opera and plays and read and discussed literature. So I don’t believe that the song was just a bunch of rhyming nonsense as he once told an interviewer who pressed him about its meaning. Freddie came from a very strict religious family whose religion considered being a gay male equally as sinful as devil worship. It actually says this in the Zoroastrian scripture. He constantly worried about upsetting his family. Even when he was very ill his mother said he would always brush his illness aside and worry about them asking if the press was upsetting them.
Many who were close to Freddie believe what the lyrics seems to suggest—that the man who was murdered in the song was the straight man that Freddie was pretending to be up to that point in his life. He came out to his girlfriend of six years who he loved dearly not long after the release of this song thereby ending their relationship and began living as a gay man. Some even believe that the “mama” in the lyrics represents Mary who provided him with unconditional love and remained his closest friend for life. Or maybe it represents both the literal and figurative since his Mom must have been disappointed in his decision to begin living as a gay man rather than settling down with Mary although she continued to love and support him. Sadly, years after his death when asked about his homosexuality she teared up and her son-in-law interrupted the interviewer telling him not to go there. So it is clear what Freddie was up against.
For those who are not aware, Freddie liked to incorporate his love of the arts into his music and videos. For example, “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is a song he wrote entirely about a painting of the same name and the opening lyric from “It’s a Hard Life” is based on a line (Laugh, clown, at your broken love!) from the opera Pagliacci. The music video for “Made in Heaven” paid homage to Dante’s Inferno, the first section of his epic poem “Divine Comedy” and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” which is a ballet accompanied by orchestra.
So it doesn’t seem likely to me that the names used in “Bohemian Rhapsody” were chosen randomly.
Who is Scaramouche? “Scaramouche or Scaramouch (from Italian scaramuccia, literally “little skirmisher”) is a stock clown character of the 16th-century commedia dell’arte (comic theatrical arts of Italian literature)…..Usually attired in black Spanish dress and burlesquing a Don, he was often beaten by Harlequin for his boasting and cowardice.” Scaramouche – Wikipedia
“I see a little silhouetto of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango? Thunderbolt and lightning very, very frightening me. (Galileo) Galileo. (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Figaro Magnifico-o-o-o-o.”
In this context, I think “Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?” probably means Freddie is being compelled by society and his family to “dance to their tune” and play a role that makes him feel like both a clown and a coward. First of all, Scaramouch is referred to as a “silhouetto of a man”, not a real man but a sham or less than a man because he is not true to himself. (Why is he asked to dance the “fandango”. What else would he be asked to dance? The fandango is a Spanish dance and Scaramouche often wore black Spanish dress.)
So where does Galileo come in? “On April 12, 1633, chief inquisitor Father Vincenzo Maculani da Firenzuola, appointed by Pope Urban VIII, begins the inquisition of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church.”Galileo is accused of heresy
“Thunderbolt and lightening, very very frightening ME.” Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest because he dared to challenge the religious dogma that the earth was the center of the universe. “Galileoooo!” It’s as if the crowd in a play is warning Scaramouch what could happen to him if he doesn’t choose to play their game. As for Galileo, they never did “let him go”.
The rebellious and defiant part of the song soon begins and although Freddie ends it with “Nothing really matters to me” he began living as a gay man sometime after this song was released. “Nothing really matters to me” seems to speak of the despair of his situation. If he cannot be free then what is the point? He must therefore be at one with himself if he is to care at all. For him to create this thinly veiled masterpiece and then make such an earthshattering change in his life is hard to dismiss. Although he did not announce to the world that he was gay he took an enormous risk by living true to himself from that time forward. He might not have formally come out of the closet for the sake of his family and probably the sake of his band Queen but he kicked the door open and whistled loudly. He often wore T-shirts with the logos of gay bars on them in public and even said that he was “gay as a daffodil” but he used beards at Queen functions whether in London or Munich. He walked a very fine line that must have at times been extremely stressful but seemed also to relish dancing over it.
Now, what about this Figaro fellow? “Figaro, the Barber of Seville, is hairdresser to the stars in 18th century Seville. He’s an apothecary, a surgeon, a gossip and a fixer. He does everything for anyone with a purse including hoisting lottery tickets and enabling “assignations”. Poet or pimp, Figaro is the creation of French dramatist and bon vivant Pierre-Auguste Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799)….I doubt Monsieur Beaumarchais intended to begin a revolution when he created a character smarter than any of the nobility….In Mozart’s day it was unheard of for a servant (Figaro) to be smarter and better than the nobility (Almaviva) …Sensibly, Le nozze di Figaro and its prequel Le Barbier de Séville were banned in France by order of the hapless, and soon headless, Louis XVI. The young Queen Marie Antoinette, who had a fondness for expensive dress-up, saw no harm in portraying both Rosina and Suzanne at her own theater in Versailles. Was she the only person at court to miss the irony?” Who is This Guy Figaro, Anyway?
In these series of plays it did not end well for Figaro. But that he was portrayed as smarter than the royalty who oppressed their subjects and that the writers of the play dared to create a character who was a mockery of royalty in that day is what defines the character. It was royalty who had defined the culture and what was acceptable or not.
Was “Figaro” the answer to his dilemma? To outsmart everyone who made the rules he could not live under? Isn’t this in a sense what Freddie did? He lived his life the way he chose and yet was able to continue as front man for a rock band back in the day when it was not yet acceptable. Queen suffered a decline in popularity in America merely because of a cross dressing video that wasn’t even Freddie’s idea. But in the end he sang “The Great Pretender” with relish—and with cross dressing.
“Magnifico-o-o-o-o.” could be the adjective meaning superb or extraordinary for Scaramouche’s performance conforming and dancing as instructed as necessary and for Galileo and Figaro for being defiant in spite of the rules and never accepting that those in real or imagined positions of authority knew better. But “Magnifico” also is an Italian word for a person of high ranking used for Venetian noblemen. In that case the characters go from the humble Scaramouch clown to the revered but victimized Galileo to the clever and wiley Figaro and finally to nobility in the form of Magnifico.
Freddie seems to have written a coming out song that has become an anthem even for people who opposed homosexuality. He put his flamboyance on parade and yet even many fans didn’t understand this because it would have been too shocking to accept for many of them. He was subversive wedge against hatred for the gay community. And I believe he may have ended doing as much or more in his own way than others who championed the cause openly just by doing what he was born to do.
This is all speculation but after doing a little research I was surprised to find that what each of these characters is most known for seems to fit so well.
Every Moment Has A Song 