Bohemian Rhapsody

Today would be Freddie Mercury's 80th birthday, and there's no better place to celebrate the legendary Queen front man than Montreux, Switzerland... where we arrived this morning.

Montreux is about a 90 minute train ride from Geneva, at the opposite end of Lake Geneva. It's a charming, small, waterfront city nestled in the lower part of the Swiss Alps. And for the last 20+ years, Freddie's fans flock here for the Freddie-Days birthday festival.

Queen recorded their album Jazz at the already famous Mountain Studios in 1978, and a year later the group bought the studio. Many of Queens top hits were recorded here, including Pressure, a spontaneous collaboration with David Bowie on what began as a strictly social visit, and Bicycle Race, inspired when the Tour de France passed through the city.

We spent the afternoon watching a wonderful Queen tribute show by the Swiss Accordion Orchestra, mingling in a large crowd of fans, visiting the Queen Studio Experience and museum at the original Mountain Studios, which is inside the Casino Barriere, walking along the lakefront, located the Freddie Mercury Hotel and of course taking pictures of the Freddie Mercury Statue right by the water.

After the orchestra performance, Freddie's sister, Kashmira Bulsara, made a special guest appearance for the singing of Happy Birthday, followed by a parade along the waterfront.

While there are too many amazing Queen songs to name them all, the most impactful for me are We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions, from the 1977 album News of the World, presented as two tracks that flow into each other without a break. In January 1978, I was in my first year at Duke, in the dorm closest to Cameron Indoor Stadium. To get to and from the basketball games, most students had to pass through an archway underneath part of my dorm. The dorm room directly over the archway had a small balcony facing the arena.

When the basketball team went on a winning streak, the guys in that room above the archway starting racing back after games to put their stereo speakers on the balcony and blast We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions as hordes of students passed back into the main campus. A spontaneous act turned into a campus-wide thing. Pretty soon, the pep band was playing We Will Rock You and students were stomping and clapping to it in the stands. At some point, the guys in that room felt pressure to leave games a couple minutes early to beat the crowd.

After starting January unranked, Duke won all nine remaining home games, then won the ACC tournament and advanced to the Final 4 before losing in the championship game to Kentucky. Whenever I hear those songs, including the finale in today's Swiss Accordion Orchestra show, I think back to the joy of my first experience rooting for Duke basketball. We all felt like champions!

Fun fact: after visiting CERN yesterday, today I learned that Queen guitarist Brian May holds a PhD in astrophysics. Dang!

By the numbers:

4 octaves – Freddie Mercury's vocal recording range

10 live albums released by Queen

15 studio albums officially released by Queen

45 years – Freddie Mercury's age at his death (from AIDS) in 1991

188 unique, officially recorded Queen songs

9,163 steps today

27,000 people, the estimated population of Montreux (or 86,000 for the wider urban area)

18,000,000 (British pounds), the cumulative amount donated by the Mercury Phoenix Trust to fight HIV/AIDS worldwide.

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