You know that feeling when a song's intro seems to trip up your ear, so that when the band comes in it sounds like the timing's out? There are a few rock classics that play with our rhythmic ears in this way. When I first heard Led Zeppelin's Rock And Roll I thought the drum intro featured several time signature changes, until I realised that it's just four bars of 4/4 with three eighth-notes before the downbeat (to hear it 'properly', start counting 4/4 on the fourth drum hit - the downbeat is the first accent).
Rock And Roll, correctly transcribed. Three eighth notes lead us to the accented downbeat of the first full bar.
The reason I think Rock And Roll fools us (well, fooled me), is that many people interpret the first sound they hear as the downbeat, and thereafter it's almost impossible to un-hear the song this way... so I was hearing a bar of 3/8 at the end of what I thought was four bars of 4/4 with various accents. And although the intro is so well-known that most drummers play (and transcribe) it correctly, some professional sheet music transcribers are still being fooled by John Bonham's beat displacing games, 45 years on.
Another intro that messed with my inner metronome for many years was The Eagles' Take It Easy. Same phenomenon - when I heard the first sound of the recording (in this case, a big G major electric guitar chord) I thought that was the first beat of bar 1. Here's another professional example where the transcriber's ear was tricked just like mine.
For years, this is how I heard the intro of 'Take It Easy'; when the drum fill brought in the band I could never figure out why they'd added a bar of 9/8.
Below is a transcription of what's actually happening in Take It Easy. The guitar comes in one eighth note before the downbeat, and if you can hear it this way and start counting exactly one eighth-note after the first sound you hear, Don Henley's snare drum fill is a simple three-note pickup and sounds perfectly in time.
Take It Easy intro - the electric guitar part starts one eighth-note early; the acoustic starts on the downbeat itself.
When you hear how the band played it live it's easy to feel the pulse, because of the vocal count-in combined with Henley's helpful off-beat hi-hat.
Here's my transcription of how I think we should be counting Bohemian Rhapsody's first two bars. I haven't found a professional/published transcription that interprets it this way.
Bohemian Rhapsody bars 1 and 2, transcribed from the vocal count-in. Is this the way Freddie heard it in his head?
Brian May, of course, must have spent many hours listening to the backing track in the studio, so presumably he hears it the same way Freddie counts it - that is, as transcribed above. But because no-one ever asked him (or Freddie) how the timing works, the transcribers just went with the simpler interpretation, and kicked into the long grass the issue of how to transcribe the apparent pause at the end of bar 1.
But that's the thing with music - you can never hear it through someone else's ears. We all have our own inner metronomes, and unless we play or sing with others, we rarely have a reason to reveal how they're ticking. Freddie's vocal was perfectly in time, all along. And I will never hear Bohemian Rhapsody in the same way ever again.
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