A Day At The Races

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If “Bohemian Rhapsody” defined <i>A Night at the Opera</i>, then “Somebody to Love” defined <i>A Day at the Races</i>. One song captured Queen’s excess and <i>Scaramouche</i>-sized ambition; the other captured the band’s ability to streamline that excess into something simple and direct. By the time <i>A Day at the Races</i> was released in 1976, the group was ready for a change: A recent five-month tour celebrating the successes of <i>Opera</i> had exhausted Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon. But it had emboldened them, too. In certain way, <i>Races</i> sounded like a return to familiar ground, but with a newfound confidence and a renewed sense of effortlessness: “White Man” and “Tie Your Mother Down” were heavy and nasty, “The Millionaire Waltz” let Mercury indulge in vaudeville and cabaret, and “Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together”) sounded nostalgic in an almost late-1960s kind of way. These guys knew what they were doing by now—so much so, they insisted on producing themselves this time around (May later reflected that the secret ingredient in <i>A Day at the Races</i> was freedom). As for the album’s hit lead-off single, “Somebody To Love”: Mercury had always loved the earthiness of soul and gospel music—qualities that might’ve seemed at odds with the extreme ornamentation of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but that also predicted the power and simplicity of stuff like “We Are the Champions” and “Another One Bites the Dust.” And while “Somebody to Love” would become one of the band’s biggest hit, it also played a crucial—if unintended—role in late-1970s hard-rock history. Not long after the song’s release as a single, the band was forced to pull out of an appearance on the television show <i>Today with Bill Grundy</i> so that Mercury could go to the dentist. In a pivot that captured the shifting cultural winds of the time, Grundy instead hosted the Sex Pistol, who’d just released “Anarchy in the U.K.” The Pistols got drunk, cursed, and in general gave one of the more entertaining television performances in pop history (though the show itself was soon canceled). .

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