In May of 1976, my older sister Victoria was given a copy of A Night At The Opera, the fourth album by Queen, by her schoolmate Nancy Kinsella (I can’t believe I remember her name) on the occasion of what would have been Vick’s 12th or 13th birthday, if I recall correctly. This was invariably due to the inclusion of its sprawling hit single, at the time, the even-then-already-iconic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The LP went into swift, regular rotation on our family’s stereo, alongside my sister’s favorite album, at the time, that being the also recently released Mothership Connection by Parliament.
As summer arrived, both of these records started to play hugely informative roles for my nascent, music-hungry ears, and I completely adored both of them. While, as the sniveling nine-year-old I was, I’d predictably become otherwise inexorably besotted with KISS, both A Night At The Opera and Mothership Connection boasted dynamic sonic palettes that were -– with all due respect to my beloved KISS -– a thousand times richer and more diverse than anything I was ever going to get from my battered copies of Dressed to Kill and Destroyer, although one could argue that latter KISS record certainly tried.
I’ve already spoken about the impact of Mothership Connection, and being that today is hirsute Queen guitarist Brian May’s birthday, I thought I’d devote a little space to what is criminally the band’s most under-appreciated work, despite the fact that it’s equally ambitious to its more celebrated sonic sibling in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I’m talking about “The Prophet’s Song.”
There’s a pervasive, year-zero mentality that arrived during the advent of Punk Rock -- brewing to a foamy head that very same summer of 1976, although my ears wouldn’t really hear about it for another few months -- that Queen were one of THEM -- an overtly arty ensemble of avariciously excessive musos whose penchant for elitist, noodly proficiency was everything this angry new guard was seeking to destroy, but fuck all that. Queen were inarguably consummate musicians and certainly guilty of some extravagant silliness, but they still fucking ROCKED. I am reminded of the oft-repeated anecdote from some short years later when Queen and the Sex Pistols were both ensconced in the same recording studio (the `Pistols were recording Never Mind the Bollocks while, down the hall, Queen were working on what would become News of the World) and Sid Vicious and Freddie Mercury, legend has it, “exchanged words.” The story goes that Sid popped in and tried to cartoonishly deride Queen (which certainly sounds in character for Sid) and Freddie literally tussled the gangly “bass player” right out the door by his collar, blithely brushing him off as “Simon Ferocious.” The resultant Queen record, it should be noted, did feature the track “Sheer Heart Attack” (not to be confused with the title of their third LP), which arguably strove to emulate the adrenalized stealth and raw aggression of Punk, one-upping these younger upstarts at their own game. To this day, slip “Sheer Heart Attack” into a playlist between tracks by, say, The Exploited
and Discharge, and it doesn’t sound wildly out of place, if a touch more slickly produced.
But, once again, A Night at the Opera predated all that and arrived like a sumptuously grandiose wedding cake of unrepentantly sophisticated musicianship of the very variety the punks had an alleged grievance with. But, again, I didn’t know anything about that stuff, as yet. All I knew was that A Night at the Opera contained moments when the band made sounds that were positively explosive to my little mind, and never was this more the case than during the first track of the second side, that being, once again, “The Prophet’s Song.”
A sprawling and ominous tsunami of a track (the band’s longest, I’ve read), “The Prophet’s Song” was the brainchild of Brian May and, again, an equally complicated endeavor as “Bohemian Rhapsody,” boasting a comparably intricate middle-section based around a dizzying, tape-delayed a cappella performance by Freddie Mercury. Bookending that surreal vocal workout, though are some doomily ponderous guitars underpinning a cautionary tale about a coming tempest brought about by man’s forsaking of empathy for avarice. It’s as hoarily windswept an epic as can be imagined, highlighted by several instances of multitracked avalanches of guitar heroics and a fulsome sonic heft that rivals the weightiest moments of then-standard-bearers like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. “Another One Bites the Dust” it is not.
I can’t actually recall if my sister was as enamored of A Night at The Opera’s deep cuts as I was. I believe she was pleased with the big singles like “You’re My Best Friend” and the aforementioned “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Regardless, in short order, I basically absconded with Vick’s copy of the album (I still have that well-loved, original vinyl edition to this day) as she moved onto stuff that I wasn’t really that into like Brass Construction and Evelyn Champagne King, although, to be fair, “Peekin’” by Brass Construction is alternately pretty hilarious and unsettling, when heard through the prism of 2023.
To this day, “The Prophet’s Song” is still my very favorite song by Queen, encapsulating their myriad strengths in a single track. It was never released as a single and doesn’t appear on any of their more celebrated compilations, and if you dare to plug the song into your local saloon’s jukebox, you should probably expect to hear complaints once Freddie’s vocal acrobatics in that middle-section kick in. I felt vindicated, today, when I read in Vulture’s feature about “The Best and Most Spectacular of Queen, According to Brian May” that May himself considers “The Prophet’s Song” to be the song he wishes “wasn’t eclipsed by the hits.” It’s filled with as much power, drama, depth and rage as some of my favorite songs by Killing Joke (yeah, I said it) and is a colossal achievement.
But, weirdly, “The Prophet’s Song” also sounds like, well, my childhood. Like I said, for a while, A Night at The Opera was seemingly always playing in our home. Even when I hear the sinister intro plucks of the koto or the most histrionic passages of “The Prophet’s Song” (like when Mercury’s vexed voice rises above the maelstrom with lines like “The Earth Will Shake, In Two Will Break, Death All Around, Around, Around….”), I am instantly reminded of sunlit days at the summer house we owned in the late `70s out in Quogue, lolling around on our overgrown lawn, running around with the kids from across the street and the smell of the interior of our shitty Volvo, with floormats caked with sand from the beach. The little lane we lived on doesn’t look even slightly like it did in 1976, but I recently drove back down it, a few weeks ago, searching for that elusive “sense of place,” and as I did, “The Prophet’s Song” roared doomily out of the car stereo.
It's the best Queen song there ever was.
Crank it.
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