Queen- A Night at the Opera @50- Brian May, Roger Taylor
Life’s big breaks don’t come with an engraved invitation, yet Queen’s big star-making effort A Night at the Opera actually did, right there on the album cover in November 1975. But it is a miracle that Queen ever got the chance. Already one album past their initial three-album deal with their record company, the London four-piece had only a couple of hits to show for their effort and expense in the UK, but only a single mid-chart success in the States with “Killer Queen” in 1974. Their first US tour supporting Mott the Hoople ended abruptly when Queen guitarist Brian May contracted hepatitis, only to then have emergency surgery for life-threatening ulcerated impacted intestines. The band was more than $100,000 in debt, while all earnings from record sales and concerts “mysteriously disappeared about the time our first manager sported a new swimming pool and Rolls-Royce”, as Queen drummer Roger Taylor told me here In the Studio.
It would be next to impossible to overstate the importance of Queen’s 1975 fourth effort, A Night at the Opera, both to the band’s career and to the album’s influence on rock thereafter. There has never been a day in the last fifty years when some American radio station has not played “Bohemian Rhapsody” from Queen’s fourth album A Night at the Opera. And who can forget the car radio scene immortalizing the ubiquitous response in Wayne’s World? But none of this universal acclaim can begin to explain just how close the London-based quartet came to being dropped from their record label and drowning in debt five decades ago.
Brian May, one of the finest guitarists in rock history (and one of the sweetest souls ever) is joined again In The Studio by Queen drummer Roger Taylor in my classic rock interview for this eclectic mix of hard rock (“Death on Two Legs”, “I’m in Love With My Car”), progressive rock (“The Prophet Song”), skiffle pub sci-fi singalong (” ’39”), mainstream pop (“You’re My Best Friend”), campy vaudeville (“Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon”), drop dead gorgeous love song (Freddie Mercury’s “Love of My Life”), and mock operetta (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) on Queen A Night at the Opera golden anniversary. -Redbeard 
