Stone Cold Jam #2: Brighton Rock (Queen)

The Band: Queen

The Album: Sheer Heart Attack (1974)

This is what I know about Brian May:

1. Looks like Howard Stern
2. Actually holds a fucking honors degree in Physics. Fucking HONORS.
3. Built the guitar he plays, which may or may not be called Red Sonya, Clifford the Big Red Dog, The Red Army Chorus or something else with RED in it. But red is the important thing, the name definately has "red" in it. Red's Java Hut? Simply Red? The Big Red One?

The reason I say this is that I get the sense that May might have been stoned on at least a couple of the overdubbed guitar parts on this song, of which there are six billion (This song is overdubbed like Dolly Parton has lower back pain), and I don't know for a fact that Brian May was stoned. Last thing I want is Brian May tapping his vaste fortune to have me killed in some cruel and vile way.

But still, was he stoned?

The reason I asked is there is a certain obsessive quality to the army of guitar solos in this song. Like "Holy shit, I am some kind of goddamned high and it feels so goddamn good to appergio on this red guitar that I built with my highly trained scientific hands, that I will continue appergio-ing until I am done, at which point I will merely start all over again, after I take another bongload. I will then layer these appergios until it sounds like the fluttering of a butterfly the size of RODAN." And of course, his playing is great. Brian May does not play in The Replacements.

So, stoned, he appergios for weeks: bidda, bidda. He shows up at rehearsal: "Here, Roger, put some drum tracks under this." Roger plays some crazy fills. Freddy sings some crap in falsetto and a STONE COLD JAM IS BORN.

Fan/consumer annoyance point with the album "Sheer Heart Attack": the song "Sheer Heart Attack" is not actually on this album. It's on "News of the World". What the hell?