Brian May is not merely a kick-ass guitarist with his own unique pure tone (from crafting his own guitars). He's also a physicist and mathematician about to achieve his PhD. Apparently Mr. May stopped his doctoral thesis on the movement of space dust when his band Queen became a bit more successful than anticipated in the early '70s.
Queen was the shit, man. When I was nine years old my mom re-married and my new stepbrothers had the Queen LP A Night at the Opera. I listened to that stuff daily for a year, and used to get in fights with other neighborhood kids in Reisterstown who thought Kiss was better. Kiss sucked. In the Pantheon of rock gods Kiss wouldn't rate an altar niche, and any Kiss presence in the holy sanctuary would be based on costume and gimics more than their musical achievement. Queen, however, would merit their own tympanum. May's gorgeous slick guitar and Freddie Mercury's operatic voice moved me from tepid AM rock hits to more interesting material and I never looked back. I had all of Queen's LPs into my middle teens, but quickly moved on to other bands and kind of lost touch with them. I credit ambitious rock acts like Queen with my eventual interest in classical music.
The last few times I sang karaoke I did a little Freddie-channeling-Elvis number called "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." Awesome! And it has a clever little guitar solo by Dr. May to boot. Might be time to get a few of their LPs on CD and see how they hold up.
