2000 Great Songs #1244: Keep Yourself Alive
Queen were one of the bands from my 70s childhood where I wasn't a huge fan, didn't have much interest in the LPs, but I was down with the singles--kinda like Kiss and Sweet and the Bay City Rollers . "Keep Yourself Alive," their 1973 debut single, pre-dated my AM radio adventures by a couple years. But when " Bohemian Rhapsody " tore up the charts in late 1975 just as I was discovering Top 40 radio--the first single I ever bought!--the local stations threw a few of their earlier hits back into circulation. " Killer Queen " quickly became my favorite, but "Keep Yourself Alive" definitely got my attention. Mercury's high-velocity overlapping verses, the helium harmonies, the unexpected key changes, that muted guitar sound--while "Rhapsody" was weird and epic and eye-opening for a 9-year-old kid first realizing rock music could go strange places, "Alive" was just a straight-ahead life-affirming rock & roll ant...
