Freddie Mercury Dies: Rock's Greatest Voice Silenced

Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara in Stone Town, Zanzibar on September 5, 1946. His family was Parsi, of Gujarati Indian descent, practicing Zoroastrianism. He was sent to boarding school in India at eight and returned to Zanzibar at seventeen, just before the 1964 revolution forced his family to flee to Middlesex, England. He studied art and graphic design at Ealing Art College before music consumed everything else. He co-founded Queen in 1970 with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. John Deacon joined on bass in 1971. The band's sound was deliberately operatic: layered vocal harmonies, dense guitar orchestrations, and Mercury's four-octave vocal range, which could shift from tender balladry to raw power within a single phrase. Bohemian Rhapsody, released in 1975, took three weeks to record and used approximately 180 vocal overdubs. There is no chorus. The structure, ballad to operatic section to hard rock to reflective coda, followed no formula that existed in popular music. Their label, EMI, initially resisted releasing it as a single because it was nearly six minutes long. DJ Kenny Everett played it fourteen times on his radio show in two days. It went to number one in Britain for nine weeks. Mercury's stage presence was volcanic. His performance at Live Aid on July 13, 1985, at Wembley Stadium before 72,000 people and an estimated television audience of nearly two billion, is routinely cited as the greatest live rock performance ever. The call-and-response sequence with the audience, unrehearsed and improvised, demonstrated a connection between performer and crowd that no one else could replicate. His personal life was intensely private despite his theatrical public persona. He was in a relationship with Mary Austin through the 1970s and later with Jim Hutton. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 and told almost no one. He continued recording and performing as his health declined. He issued a public statement confirming his diagnosis on November 23, 1991, and died the following day, November 24, at his home in Kensington, London. He was 45.