Your 'Bo Rhap' story ... elite QZers needed!

It's hard for me to associate Queen with Bohemian Rhapsody. I was born the year Freddie died and a year before the release of Wayne's World. So, as I'm told, I wasn't affected both by the craze which followed Freddie's death and the one for Bohemian Rhapsody and Queen in general as a result of "Wayne's World" success - our pop culture being very closely linked to America, it was just natural that Queen wasn't in the musical background by 2000 and 2001.

So it went basically and boringly like this: I began studying music very early and was brought up in a very stern, orthodox Jewish family. Rock/pop and even opera equalled "sin". And my mother and grandmother's behavior towards myself was quite intimidating, if you know what I mean...

But father was different. He was humiliated all the time by the family, but since he finacially supported it all and led his religious life in a much lighter and softer, but no less sincere way, he felt entitled to like whatever pleased him. And he was fascinated by the music from the 60's and 70's. Fascinated to a point that his collection of recordings was one of the most impressive I had ever seen - it was larger than any store that I knew of and it encompassed artists ranging from Dylan, Beatles and Linda Rondstadt to more recently, shortly before his death, Norah Jones and Christina Aguilera! Hehehe. 

There was always music in the background because of him, no matter what we were doing. What fascinated me the most as a kid were the album's COVERS! That exerted such an attraction...and my father wasn't very fond of CDs and would only buy them when there was no choice. So lot's of beautiful covers - in some weird way, if the cover art was beautiful, I was more likely to enjoy what was being played: I like Jethro Tull quite a lot, but I think it were the album's covers which impressed me first - they set the stage for the music. 

My father had two Queen albums: Sheer Heart Attack and News of The World. I remember very well a sunday when we were cleaning up the mess at home after the guests had left and News of The World started playing. Very loud because my father didn't want to listen to my mother ranting, this kind of thing. But I was having fun either way and by the time "We Are The Champions" reached my ears, oh my! I trembled and shivered all over. The song had everything I liked: beautiful piano lines, nice melody, strong choruses, beautiful sounding guitars and gorgeous vocals - all very grand, but without pomp or exaggeration: the song sounded both grand and intimate. 

From then on, I felt in love with the "robot album", as I called it back then. "It's Late" and "My Melancholy Blues" were songs I forced my father into listening to hundreds of times. 

I simply worn out both News of The World and Sheer Heart Attack so much I listened to both albums. Then whenever we went to the store, I asked my father to buy me albums from the "band of the robot", it was always something like this. We were at a used-record store and the LPs were by then quite cheap. My father bought all the guy had in the store, which was "A Night at the Opera", "The Works" and "A Day At The Races".

So my father guided me through the band's history and the albums: he knew a bit about it. He was not a fan, but knew the basics. He soon introduced me to Bohemian Rhapsody and said something like: "This is considered their masterpiece", and so on. It was the same day he "explained" Queen to me: Freddie had been dead for sometime - I cried! I didn't know! - and had died as a result of AIDs and was gay! and so on. It was a quite mature conversation for someone my age...but he felt he needed to because my mother was about to say something and he didn't want me to listen to her first. So he paved the way for me to deal with my mother's fury. 

I began to REALLY enjoy Bohemian Rhapsody, instead of listen to it in a melancholy way, when I proposed one of the local choirs I took part in to sing the song. It seemed fit. They liked the idea - there were always some pop numbers adapated to choir amidst the presentations - and we got to rehearse it and sing it. It was a whole different atmosphere: I was happy with my friends, singing a funny song - I laughed at the opera-section all the time I listened to it - from a band I loved. So then my love for the song started to grow. 

I felt in love with the song when I learned to play it on the piano. Then the song really conquered me. Because on the piano I could focus only on the melodic contour. I started to listen to the song in a different way: I was mesmerized by Freddie's vocals and by the sheer beauty of the song. I learned the lyrics and got thrilled. The "opera section" kept bothering me for some time, it was a perfect song for me, I cried listening to it sometimes as a kid when I fully realized the beauty of the song and the poignant lyrics, but it was as if the opera section didn't belong there. 

But it didn't take long for me to understand the dramatic side of that funny extravagant section and to admire the way it all had been made - it seemed like I was listening to thousands of voices telling different things and answering to each other...it was exquisite! So I got to like the FULL SONG, full stop. : -)))) 

The first time I saw Freddie on a video was a day my father called me to listen to "Live Aid" with him - he loved the concert and he boasted about having recorded it when it was broadcast, and so on...lol. This kind of thing. And he said I'd have a surprise. I liked the whole thing but when I saw Queen entering on stage and Freddie sitting at the piano before that huge crowd and adjusting the piano, I got crazy and started up from the sofa. He started to play and sing Bohemian Rhapsody and his beautiful voice couched in that exquisite melody seemed to embrace the whole room...even my father got quieter than usual...I was stonned. I couldn't utter a word and was in tears! Watching him singing the song live and before that crowd and conquering it all...it was absolutely moving. 

My Bohemian Rhaposy story isn't as fun or as revealing or interesting as most of those of you guys because of the circumstances, the times I grew up...but I think the bottom line is: I was prone to like the song sooner or later given its beauty and my fondness for the band. Today it's for sure one of my favorite Queen songs - probably my favorite Queen song after "We Are The Champions", when it all started - the "album with the robot", and so on. lol 

Best Regards! Great beautiful thread! I'm looking forward to reading more stories! 

Yara

For me, it was as 14 year old watching the midnight special on a Friday night.  The video came on and I had never seen or heard anything like that in my life.  I had bought some records in the past, but that night I became a full fledged music fan.  My friends will always remember me talking to them the next morning about what an unelievable song I had heard, "and then there is an opera part where he sings ""I see a little boy sitting in a tree""", for 34 years I have been reminded about how I "misheard" the lyrics.
I bought A Night At the Opera that weekend (still in early release hard cardboard instead of the later glossy cover) and was hooked forever.

Like many, I was a person who liked music but wasn't into it.  Then one night which I'll never forget, I heard a song on CKOC radio from Hamilton, Ontario which changed my 15 year old life forever.  I was so confused that I thought there were about 4 different songs on as I didn't get what was happening.  Then the DJ came on and said something about "Vienna Boys Choir", and I thought that's who it was.  Obviously he said that's who they sounded like, but I had no idea when I heard it was by Queen who or what they were.  All I know is I had never heard anything like it in my life, and as someone else posted, the world was different in 1975.  That song changed me in the ways I approached things and also, the passion and creativity made me believe that there were no boundaries apart from your own imagination.

I do not remember when I heard Bohemian Rhapsody for the first time, it was on the radio all day long. Most of my friends loathed it but there was a  small group who liked Queen - we were considered a bunch of pretentious idiots :-) The thing about BoRhap was that you had to play it really loud and that was not so easy with parents who did not appreciate any pop music in their house and many friends who thought Queen music was overblown rubbish. We used to cut cassette copies from our albums and play them in the car of a friend whenever we could - LOUD. I remember later I had even more problems with my preference for Mustapha :-) Up to this day I play Mustapha LOUD in my home when I need a smile on my face.

My story occurred in late 1975 or early 1976 (when I was 12 years old), after I had fallen in love with Bohemian Rhapsody, and a certain unlikely radio critic dissed "my" song. 

I was sitting with a portable radio in my lap, and flipping between radio stations listening to my favorite songs when I caught the beginning of Bo Rhap being played on an "old fogey" talk radio station (WGN in Chicago), and I was very surprised.  Well, before the opera section began, the song was faded out and the talk show host (Wally Phillips) came on the radio and indicated his disbelief that Bo Rhap was a hit single.  Obviously, I was pissed that Wally Phillips purposely played only a small portion of the song so that he could ridicule the musical tastes of young whippersnappers.

i don't remember when i first heard Bo Rhap as i was never a big fan of it. only the fact that it is a queen song and so "my band" was played on the radio meant something to me

but then came 12-JUL-1986 and I was at wembely stadion to see queen - the show, was off course, excellent but when Freddie started with Bo Rhap there was this sheer momentum of exciement with 72.000 people singing it line by line and me realising that this is like the unoffical british anthem. what a great experience!

but still Bo Rhap won't make my personal queen top 10

In 1992 actually I was a bit of a Supertramp / Michael Jackson fan. One day, while watching football on Eurosport, I saw an ad for the mail order only Box Of Tricks. The ad featured many snippets
of Queen songs, including the opera section of Bo Rhap.

I was just blown away, but I had no clue what the song's title was. I managed to buy the cassette single of TSMGO, which I knew of course (my first Queen exposure was Innuendo - the song - which I initially found both impressive and creepy), and which featured Keep Yourselk Alive as B-Track. I naively hoped that this song would be the one which I loved so much in the ad (Bo Rhap, then). It wasn't so, so I waited to have enough money to buy GHII (no luck) and then a while later while I was looking at the Queen K7 (CD's were too expansive for me at the time) at a department store, a guy came to me and said : buy this one, it's the best : it had the trademark Queen crest logo that I knew, but on a white background, and when looked at the tracklist I barely knew any song. Yet I thought the stranger must have known what he was talking about so I went for this cassette : A Night At The Opera. Bo Rhap was on it ; I had found it at last !

I was 11, and to this day it is one of my favourite songs, and it will be until the day I die.

I grew up in a church that frowned on contemporary music (pop and rock), radio and tv, so I didn't hear much music growing up.  But when I was 22 I went away for the Easter weekend with some extended family who had the radio on in their car on the way.  The traffic was really bad, so we were in the car for quite a while, and Bo Rhap and I Want to Break Free were both playing.  I went home after the weekend entranced by 'that song.'  Of course, when I got home I couldn't remember the name of the song, but described it to someone, who was able to tell me what it was.  So off I went to the library and borrowed Queen's Greatest Hits 1, 2 and 3, fell in love with them and have been listening to Queen ever since.

OK, thanks a lot... those who haven't written their stories and want to - please do so, but meanwhile I've got another question, mostly for people who know their way around the IT: how can I arrange that section?

I was thinking having a random story as a sidenote, with the option of reading them all. But how to sort them? By author, by era... any idea's appreciated.

I'd say by era, Seb.  As John said, the world was different when we heard it in 1975.  It changed my ideas about everything in life as I'd never heard anything like it before as I listened to top 40 AM radio before that.  So it can't have the same resonance in the "changed the world" sense as it did when it was released (the sounds of the time, the video, the bizarre length and sound for a 45 single) for younger fans, but maybe it changed their world.  I think it would be interesting to see the differing perspectives based on age.

Well, I'm not an elite QZoner by any means, and I've only really been a fan for about 11 years but here goes...

I first heard Bohemian Rhapsody in the living room of a small house in Belfast and I was but a wee girl of about 6.  It was 25th November 1991 and it was all over the TV for obvious reasons.  I remember feeling a strange pull to it but not understanding anything except wondering why the three 'jailers' (Roger, John and Brian) wouldn't let the nice dark-haired guy 'go', was it all because he killed a man?  Around this time, Bo Rhap was used as the soundtrack to an anti-violence advertisement condemning the recruitment of young men into paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, showing a teen killing someone and then getting shot by the in retaliation by men in balaclavas.  So both these videos meshed in my consciousness to where I thought Freddie was an IRA man who was sent to jail and/or hell.  Thus Bo Rhap had a huge impact on me psychologically and developmentally.  The mood the song conveyed to me, even as a child was one of fear, guilt, entrapment, defiance and ultimately submission and nihilism.  Pretty reasonable interpretation, eh?.

So being a child and all that, I never thought much more about it until late 1998 when my mother asked me to guess what song had been voted best single of the millenium, instinctively I knew.  Within about 6 months from then I had every album and all the videos or whatever I could get my hands on.

I became a fan of Queen's music first and heard Bohemian Rhapsody much later. I have said somewhere before that it is not easy to get your hands on Queen's music CDs in my part of the town. So any song that I wanted to hear, I would search for the CD at the local music shops, invariably wouldn't find it, and then I'd download it from the internet. Well, the situation is a lot better now, as a major music store have set up shop here and they stock all Queen albums. Infact they have arranged all the artists alphabetically and you can find most of the popular and some not very famous bands' music here. Probably it is common place everywhere else, but I found it truly incredible. So I'm the proud owner of the Singles collection Volume 1 : )

Coming back to Bo Rhap- I'd only heard a few of their songs ike WWRY, WATC, AKOM and other 80's hits at the time. But I really liked what I'd heard thus far so looked them up on the internet. Soon I found that the song Bohemian Rhapsody was not only one of their bighgest hits, but also one of a kind in Rock music history. Well, I had to hear it right away and so downloaded it from the internet. When I heard it the first time, I found it so pathetic that for the first time in my life I just coudn't suffer through the entire duration of the song. I was shocked and just could not imagine how this could have become such a big hit.

A few days later I was watching VH1 Classics and they aired the video and I was in for another shock- this sounded so very different and so very cool. I went back and checked the downloaded song and realised that it was actually some talent-less DJ's headbanger's mix of Bo-Rhap! Probably the long-lasting effect of this, but though I like the song and heard it many times afterwards, it won't make my top 10 either.

All through my early childhood in the 80's I was NEVER a music fan... could only tell you who Elvis was and the Beatles, but I couldn't tell you much of their music!!!

Strangely my slightly drunken dad in 1991 (I was 13) shouted me into the living room and TOLD me to watch the song playing on Top Of The Pops (Bo Rap). I wasn't really impressed until the "opera" section kicked in. All of a sudden I was hit by two facts... NEVER has my dad ever mentioned any love of music apart from the "crazy" cassette he always played in his Ford Capri non stop... GHs of Doctor Hook (who I grew to love years after... who couldn't?) AND when he said, "Freddie Mercury was the greatest singer who ever lived"... even though I had no idea who FM was!!!

I then couldn't get the mid section out of my head and luckily my Dad had the GH vinyl, so I popped it on and must have listened to the mid section for about 4 hours solid... only the mid section funnily enough.

I then started getting into Queen AND music in general in a big big way. From the GH vinyl, i learned that I "knew" some of the songs due to car listening on the radio from before probably... WATC, WWRY, FLASH.

I must have played that record for weeks solid learning each and every song in my own particular order, cos once I learned of a new one it was the only one I'd play for days... I was particluarly fond of Ooh Lava Boy (lol) which I heard on the radio couple weeks later after I got it and my dad said "that's on that album i gave you". Took me a while to find it, but it gave me my first chance to listen nearly entirely to the full vinyl till I heard it.

It must have been shortly after he died. Makes me sad thinking of it... that record had always been there in my dad's closert... if only he had told me of it in the early-mid 80s... I might have made it to a show...c'est la vie.

Nice topic.