Tie Your Mother Down by Queen

Written by guitarist Brian May, this is a quintessential Queen rocker whose lyrics are a send-up of macho arena rock (“Take your little brother swimming with a brick - That’s all right!”) but whose music is definitely the real thing.

It made a rousing opener for their late-1976 album A Day at the Races, but “Tie Your Mother Down” is best remembered as a “live” song, and it opened more Queen concerts than any other tune.

The song was first played live a few months before its release at Queen’s concert at Hyde Park in summer 1976, which sealed their superstar status at home. As Freddie Mercury said at the time, “I was able to come to grips with the song in front of an audience before I had to cut the vocal. Being a very raucous track, it works well for me.”

After naming two consecutive albums (A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races) after Marx Brothers movies, the members of Queen got to meet Groucho Marx. He sang “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” for them.

The whole song is a swing rhythm; when thrown in with some very quick chord changes it makes for some fairly hard areas. Try to put your strum hand on autopilot and focus more on the frets and what fingers are depressed and which are lifted because it gets confusing as you are keeping up with a strong ever changing pattern set. On drums, be ready for a massive fill at the very end of the song.

Freddie is in heaven. John Deacon is retired. Brian May and Roger Taylor recently revived Queen with ex-Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers.