Why Brian May still regrets the B-side to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’: “It was a real sticking point”
You know those small moments that keep you awake years later, like something embarrassing you said or an argument you know you should have won? For Brian May, the memory that still lingers is a very expensive regret.
When it comes to being in a band, things can stay fun for a while. When you’re playing local shows and just starting out, your bandmates are simply your friends and collaborators. But the moment any real success arrives, business inevitably enters the equation.
It hits a point when suddenly, collaborators become business partners and discussions of money, and especially money splitting, have to be taken seriously. Obviously, no band truly knows if they’re going to be big, and even fewer acts know which song might cause that boom to notoriety, but everyone better hope they’ve got their finances in order before it happens.
When it comes to royalties, conversations around how things will be divided can get tricky. In a lot of cases, a band make it fair and easy on themselves by simply splitting everything equally between members. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s situation was more unique as the Lennon-McCartney credit assigned to their work, regardless, meant they split their earnings whether or not they collaborated. But in the early days of Queen, in a move they thought would be the most honest, they decided to split it up based on who wrote what.
It seemed simple enough; if you wrote the track, you would get the songwriting royalties, but immediately, there were problems. First, there is the fact that no one person in a band ever really writes the whole song, and there is guaranteed to always be support from others, especially when it comes to the instrumental. Secondly, that method isn’t particularly compatible with a huge, timeless breakthrough single that’s going to make a lot of money, because some random B-side might wind up making a lot of money too.
That happened to Queen when ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was released to huge success. On the second side of the single, Roger Taylor managed to convince the band to put his own track, ‘I’m In Love With My Car’, but the second Brian May heard the song, he hated it.
“Brian was like, ‘Is this a joke?’” Taylor recalled of the first time his bandmate heard the track, still defending the song to Mojo as he said, “It’s a valid lyric, I think, but kind of tongue in cheek, too, obviously…cars and girls, what else is there?”
A strange, throwaway song about people loving their cars more than their wives, it’s simply in no way as good as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. But because of its position on the second side of the same single, and because of the band’s agreement on how they would split the winnings, Taylor ended up earning a lot of money for the song, the same amount as Mercury did for the hit.
“We were aware of the injustice of ‘I’m in Love With My Car’ making as much money as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’,” May told Mojo, adding, “It was a real sticking point for the band, and it’s good we got through it.” But while the band survived the arguments they had about it, leading them to change their process when it came to money, May has never really got over it. “He’s never forgiven me,” Taylor said decades on, “And I’ve never stopped laughing about it!”
