Nothing that Queen ever made was supposed to be by the book.
Even from their debut record, they already had their sound down to a finely-polished sheen, and when they first started taking chances on their later records, everything would completely make sense when it fell under their creative umbrella. But when Brian May looked back on the countless songs that got them to where they were, he knew that a few artists could make the kind of harmonies that could put all of them to shame.
Then again, any Queen song without the harmonies would be like listening to Eddie Van Halen play a ukulele on a record for an hour. No one comes to the band without expecting those massive layers of voices, and while Freddie Mercury could turn himself into a one-man choir pretty quickly, May was the one looking at the mechanics of harmony, whether that was building up the voices or seeing what he could get out of his guitar whenever he started layering in the studio.
It’s that ingenuity that led to him making something as strange as ‘Good Company’. Unless your name is Frank Zappa or you are completely insane, who the hell would have had the guts to make an entire jazz band come out of one guitar? Answer: Brian May. A lot of that may have been natural talent combined with years of listening to the greatest names in jazz, but there was also that inspiration that came from hearing what The Beatles could do with their music whenever they stepped up to play.
No one would have thought that four lads from Liverpool who didn’t know the first thing about theory could have gone in so many directions, but by the time they began working on Abbey Road, things had progressed by leaps and bounds. Sgt Peppers was the benchmark of the Summer of Love, but even if May ignored the true classics on the record like ‘Here Comes the Sun’ or ‘Come Together’, he was mesmerised with the kind of sounds on a song like ‘Because’.
The medley might seem more impressive on the record, but having this precede it was like listening to classical music for the first time for May, saying, “We were transfixed. I can feel the shivers going up my spine. We thought, ‘Oh, my God, that has to be the most daring piece of pure harmony we’ve ever heard.” And while there’s a touch of Queen-style harmonies that were born from that, what the Fab Four created was all their own on this one.
In all fairness, John Lennon did get the basis of the song from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata when coming up with the actual melody, but there were also pieces of the tune that seemed more in line with what the band’s signature harmony sound was, almost like the older cousin of what they had done on records like ‘This Boy’ back in their moptop days.
But that’s far from the most impressive song on that album, either. The medley is a whole different matter right after ‘Because’ is over, and while Lennon was quick to call it absolutely pointless when throwing songs together haphazardly, what they ended up doing was accidentally inventing progressive rock by cramming everything together into a massive symphonic suite.
The bones of what Queen would do on a track like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ can be found on this one tune, but May knew better than to try to match what the Fab Four did. Aiming for those goals is one thing, but anyone is fighting a losing battle if they claim they can rise to that level of musical brilliance.
