Feature Photo by Aldara Zarraoa/Redferns
As the lead guitarist of iconic rock band Queen, Brian May’s legacy speaks for itself. You’ve heard the triumphant solos in songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “We Are the Champions,” and “Hammer to Fall,” and you’ve basked in the glory of classic records like Sheer Heart Attack (19740, News of The World (1977), and The Game (1980).
And surely, you’ve seen all sorts of footage of May and his bandmates in Queen dominating stages worldwide. But over the years, May has found himself in several guest spots, too. Collabs with Eddie Van Halen for Star Fleet in 1983 and Feedback 86 with Steve Hackett in 2000 come to mind.
But most recently, May cozied up alongside not one but two guitar legends, Steve Cropper and Billy Gibbons, for a track called “Too Much Stress,” which comes off Cropper’s upcoming record, Friendlytown (2024). The story of how “Too Much Stress” happened via an email exchange between May and producer—and May’s longtime friend—Jon Tiven is as heartwarming as it is serendipitous.
Moreover, despite his gargantuan stature within the so-called “biz” and guitar circles, May’s reverence for Cropper and Gibbons is readily apparent. These are just a few reasons why May’s participation in Cropper’s latest made for a micro-watershed moment in the British icon’s history.
During a break from his various activism projects—which you can learn more about via Brian May’s social media account (@brianmayforreal), Queen’s legendary Red Special-brandishing six-string maestro dialed in with ClassicRockHistory.com to dig into working with Steve Cropper, and Billy Gibbons on Cropper’s upcoming album, Friendlytown.
You’re on Steve Cropper’s upcoming record, Friendlytown. How did that come to be?
Well, it started with the producer, Jon Tiven. Do you want to know about John?
Oh, yes. He’s important. Do tell.
I met Jon when he must have been 12 years old; I don’t know. He was a young bot, and he’d been out on tour with Led Zeppelin on behalf of Rolling Stone [Magazine], doing a feature on them. And along he came to speak to a very young Queen about going to America for the first time.
In fact, he spoke to me before I set foot in America. He said, “Don’t bring that guitar to America, it’s too dangerous.” But I did, many times. [laughs] So, I’d met Jon Tiven, and we became friends. He was a journalist at the time, but he was already a guitar player.
And from time to time, if we were passing through New York, where Jon was at the time, I would go over to his flat, and we’d play a bit of guitar together. He’d roll the tape, and a couple of little things came out of that, you know, various little informal tracks. So, we’d kept in touch over the years, but Jon became a very successful producer of blues records, you know, what they’d call “rhythm and blues” in the old days.
So, it was Jon who asked you to contribute to Cropper’s Friendlytown?
Yes, He’s a very interesting spirit, Jon is. He’s a very good producer and is good at getting spontaneity. He’s not a man who likes to structure things too much, cut things about, and do all this ProTools stuff—which everybody does these days. He wants to capture live energy, and live passion. So, Jon is a very good producer.
The song you’re on, “Too Much Stress,” is a lot of fun. It came about through email, right?
Well, Jon rings me up, no—he emailed me. He said, “I’m producing a Steve Cropper record, do you want to play on it?” Long story short, I said, “I’d love to, but I’m on tour and have so much going on. Apologies, but there’s too much stress. Maybe another time.”
And Jon pulled the title from that email…
So, another email came from Jon, and he said, “I got your email, and I’ve written a song about it. It’s called ‘Too Much Stress.’ Will you play on it?” [laughs] Well, I just had to say yes. There were my words, “Too much stress, my apologies.” We worked together on it, and it became what it became.
Was it just the fact that your words were in the title, or did you feel an actual connection to the song after reviewing what Jon brought to you?
The song has passion in it. It’s about stress—and that’s real in my case. But there’s also a huge sense of humor to it. So, all that stuff is in the guitar playing, I would say. Without having to play fast, or clever, I just played it the way I felt it, like, that’s the stress.
So, the stress is expressed through your note choices?
My favorite note from me on it is this one you might not even notice. I don’t know… but it goes in between the verse and the chorus or between the chorus and the middle eight… I can’t be sure, but it’s just the note which moves me—and it’s not clever. It just has this really kind of agonizing sound, which I love.
Of note, you shared space on this track with Steve Cropper and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. What was that like?
I love Billy’s stuff—and I love what Steve Cropper does. Steve has stayed so close to his roots; that’s the amazing thing. He’s still that guy playing solid… I don’t even know how to express it; there’s incredible integrity about the era that Steve helped to create.
It’s nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix, or Eric Clapton, it’s something which still has the same close attachment to the birth of the blues. But Billy is a little bit more evolved. He’s rock-blues to me. But again, it’s very pure. You never get into histrionics with ZZ Top.
And how would you compare your style with theirs?
My stuff has different colors to it. I have all that I’ve mentioned in me—and I love it—but I also have things like The Laughing Policemen and The Three Little Ducklings, which were in my ears when I grew up as a child. That very English heritage of music and stuff like that, all of that is in my vocabulary as well.
So, my guitar playing has blues in it, but it also has all sorts of other strange things, which come from different places. I think we’re all products of the way we grew up and what we heard when we grew up.
Something a lot of people don’t realize—probably because your styles and music are so different—is that Steve was a huge influence on you.
I think it starts with the bends, really. It’s hard to put yourself back to those days when the guitar was a very static instrument. It was a rhythm instrument, like an acoustic with a pickup in it and with very, very stiff strings on it. If you wanted to play single notes, you played only the notes of the scale.
But Steve Cropper, [Elvis Presley guitarist] James Burton, and a couple of others started doing this thing of putting slack on the strings so they could be bent to the side, and the pitch would go up. So, suddenly, instead of it being an instrument which had just a certain number of notes, like a piano, it had an infinite number of notes.
Are those some of Steve’s little things that creep into your admittedly very different style?
Steve’s playing has expression; it’s like a violin. It could talk like a human voice; that’s what got me. That’s what reached out to me. I just thought, “That’s what I want to do. I want to make the guitar speak like he does in ‘Green Onions.’” But that doesn’t happen for a while [in “Green Onions”]; it’s all about the keyboards, right?
And the rhythm and the vibe—which are brilliant—comes, and suddenly, you get this royal thing: he’s bending that string, that third string, and it was revolutionary. It still gives me shivers up the spine to think about hearing that for the first time. I just thought, “How’s he doing that? How does the guitar do that?” So, I was bitten. That’s the whole… that’s where it starts. For me, the guitar became a voice.
And as far as Billy goes, who you share a solo with, how far do you two go back?
In musical terms, a long way. I first heard Billy Gibbons playing when I was at Noddy Holder’s house, you know, Noddy Holder, who was the singer of Slade. We met the Slade guys while Queen was on tour; it was the very first tour Queen ever did in about 1970. So, I went around to Noddy’s house, and he said, “You gotta hear this stuff.”
He put ZZ Top on and said, “This is the coolest thing over there [in America].” I went, “Yeah… you’re right.” But I didn’t meet Billy until a way, way, way long time later. But I’ve always been in awe, and I’ve always loved ZZ Top because of that purity. And again, there’s a wonderful sense of humor going on there, and it’s just so cool. You can’t put a razor blade out anywhere because it’s just unbroken coolness.
Overall, how do you view the experience of working with Steve and Billy?
Well, the song “Too Much Stress” evolved in quite an interesting way. The song is a conversation, which reflects the email conversation between Jon and me, so it’s got two voices. So, it became a duet between me and the guy, which I really enjoyed. It became more and more of a conversation, and I just love the record. It makes me smile that I played guitar on it.
And what does the opportunity to work with a hero of yours, Steve Cropper, mean to you?
Well, what makes a great guitar player, to me, ultimately is: does the end product move you? If it’s coherent, if it all makes sense, and if it all works together, every piece of the song, the guitar, should work together. Ultimately, the guitar isn’t the voice of the song, except for short periods, but those periods are very important because they tie it all together. Steve has always been so good at that, so it was really great to be on this record.
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Brian May of Queen: The ClassicRockHistory.com Interview article published on Classic RockHistory.com© 2024
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