Freddie Mercury was a lot of things: gifted vocalist, iconic frontman, talented entertainer, and a surprisingly strong piano player to boot. Throughout his 20-year run fronting legendary English rock giants Queen, Mercury became one of the most acclaimed musicians of his generation. Able to synthesize the disparate genres of classical opera, rock and roll, synth-pop, R&B, and even punk rock. It seemed like there was nothing musical that Mercury couldn’t do.
But if you asked him, Mercury would claim that one of his biggest limitations was playing the guitar. Despite being quite a talented keyboard player, Mercury only had basic skills on the guitar. What he knew consisted of a few chords and rudimentary knowledge of things like sus chords. Mercury remained self-deprecating regarding his skills on the instrument, even though he composed one of Queen’s best-loved songs on the guitar.
‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ took me five or ten minutes,” Mercury recalled. “I did that on the guitar, which I can’t play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It’s a good discipline because I simply had to write within a small framework. I couldn’t work through too many chords and because of that restriction I wrote a good song, I think.”
‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was a knowing wink to some of Mercury’s earliest rock and roll heroes, most notably Elvis Presley. The insistent D to Dsus4 change that appears in the song’s intro and throughout the track is almost identical to the one used for Presley’s ‘Burning Love’, and it would stand to reason that Mercury practised his skills on the guitar by playing the bare-bones chords of Elvis songs.
After Mercury wrote the song, he immediately felt the need to record it. Producer Reinhold Mack was summoned to the studio, as were drummer Roger Taylor and John Deacon. Brian May wasn’t present, so Mercury recorded his first on-record guitar part. Mercury even tried an early version of the solo, but when May eventually arrived, he quickly wiped Mercury’s attempt in favour of his own rockabilly-flavoured solo.
The 1980s saw Mercury play piano on stage less and less as he began to fully embrace the role of frontman. Queen had already experimented with backing tracks in order to play the middle section of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ live, and from 1984 onward, keyboardist Spike Edney would join the band onstage to perform keyboard parts live. Even as he left keyboards behind, Mercury was always game to strap on a guitar and strum out the chords to ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ live.
