In all the years Queen’s Brian May and Freddie Mercury wrote and performed together, creative friction was part of the process.
But May says they didn’t see eye to eye on one of his most famous and beloved guitar solos — and had he not held firm, it likely wouldn’t have made the final cut.
“Freddie envisioned it very much as a piano song, akin to Elton John, really,” May told Total Guitar of the track “Don’t Stop Me Now,” from 1978’s Jazz.
“[He heard] powerhouse piano, powerhouse vocal, and that’s it. I played lots of rhythm guitar on it, and Freddie still said, ‘No, no, no, no — it’s a piano song!’”
It’s the way we thought about things,” he says. “I said, ‘Okay, give me a verse, and let me see what I can do.’”
— Brian May
Mercury — whom May later honored with a touching tribute on his first signature guitar — eventually came around, conceding, “‘Well, it does need a solo. I need you to take over the vocal.’”
As May explains, that kind of push-and-pull was typical of their working dynamic.
“It’s the way we thought about things,” he says. “I said, ‘Okay, give me a verse, and let me see what I can do.’
“And again, being in the studio and hearing it evolve, I could sort of hear the solo in my head before I actually picked up the guitar to do it. As very often with me, it’s a kind of little diversion. It’s a countermelody.
“It’s not the actual tune of the verse. But it’s something which goes with it, a sort of counterpoint, and it’s something I could sing. And it was just a question of transferring it to a guitar.”
In hindsight, May feels vindicated — not by theory, but by audience response.
“It’s very simple,” he concludes. “I sometimes feel a bit apologetic about it. But I do notice that when it’s played in the dancehall, it gets a reaction from people in the solo and it steps up the energy quite a bit, even from a song that’s got high energy, so I’m happy with it the way it is.”
That instinctive, vocal-like phrasing is central to May’s sound, which is built on a highly individual rig: his homemade Red Special, a Treble Booster pushing a Vox AC30 — an amp he came to with a little help from Rory Gallagher — and his famously unconventional pick: an old British coin.
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