That special song

[Goodwatch]

It was the end of 1975, or was it early 1976, that my world was shook up by song that was played on the radio. I had never heard the likes of it before and never since. It starts with an a cappella slow ballad line: “Is this the real life, is this just fantasy?”. The song is unprecedentedly musical and complex. Some call it an over the top mockery of opera and ‘real’ music but to me it remains one of the best rock songs ever released.

In 1976, whilst in high school, the only thing a nerd like me could do to gain some acclaim at all was to do something like playing records at the annual school Disco and so I did. A mate and me brought a large collection of singles and LPs and he also brought an extra turntable as the school had only one.

The song was immensely popular because it contains something for all, including a hard rock intermezzo for would-be metal heads. We had to play it several times that evening although it is no dance track.

Wind forward to 1986. At that time I had a high quality set-up for playing records; Systemdek II, Mission 774 arm rewired with Siltech, Kiseki Blue cardridge, Krell PAM-1 pre-amp and a ‘l Audiophile 20 Watt Class A power-amp with 1,5 Farad capacitors. The capacitors could store so much energy that the amp kept on running and playing for almost one minute after switching off. Speakers were Etude 2-ways with an extra passive woofer.

Of course I played that song many a time on that set-up and I started to notice that it lacked clarity. The highs and middles sounded muffled. I blamed the record and bought another one. Same effect. Even a very expensive Japanese direct metal master cut sounded the same.

Whatever version I tried on whatever medium, the results were always the same and I began to suspect it had to do something with the recording itself.

Wind forward to 31 December 2008. Between Boxing Day and the last day of the year, a Dutch radio station plays the Top 2000 of All Times, a continuous stream of 2000 singles voted for by the listeners. On TV there’s a program during that days that delves into that. They play some tracks from the list, have guests that tell their special memories of their favourite songs, there’s a quiz, etc.

For many years that song is number one. And because of that I started to search for background info on the Net. And there I found the answer to that muffled sound: some parts were overdubbed 180 times to get the right effect!

The song I’m talking about is Bohemian Rhapsody of course