
The song was a live favourite throughout the 1970s, often being used a singalong in concert. The song is the 39th album track released by the band when counting each album track from the debut album onwards. The band thanked him, and performed " '39" a cappella. Since Queen had named their albums A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races after two of the Marx Brothers' most popular films, surviving brother Groucho Marx invited Queen to visit him at his Los Angeles home in March 1977 (five months before he died). In 2006, he resumed his studies and eventually completed his thesis, titled A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, and received his PhD in 2008. May had been working on his thesis in astrophysics, but eventually abandoned his studies to pursue his career with Queen. May had asked bassist John Deacon to play double bass as a joke but a couple of days later he found Deacon in the studio with the instrument, and he had already learned to play it. May sings lead vocal on the studio recording of the song, one of his few lead vocals on Queen recordings.
