### **The Cupboard Rebellion: How a Song About a Car Saved Roger Taylor and Nearly Broke Queen**
Every legendary album has its war story. For Queen’s *A Night at the Opera*, the most famous battle was over the six-minute operatic epic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But the strangest, most personal fight was over a three-minute ode to a used car—a fight that saw drummer Roger Taylor lock himself in a cupboard and, in doing so, accidentally secure his fortune.
The song was **“I’m in Love with My Car,”** a roaring, piston-pumping rock track written and sung by Taylor. Its lyrics were a literal, unironic tribute to his beloved Triumph TR4 (not an Alfa Romeo, as legend sometimes misremembers). To Taylor, it was a perfect, engine-revving piece of rock and roll. To Freddie Mercury and Brian May, it was, at best, a quirky B-side. At worst, it was a **glaring misfit** on an album they were painstakingly crafting as a masterpiece of range and sophistication.
The conflict came to a head during the final sequencing meetings. The band was debating which tracks made the final cut. Taylor, fearing his beloved song was about to be scrapped, enacted a now-legendary act of pure rock and roll stubbornness: he **locked himself in a cupboard** at the recording studio and refused to come out until “I’m in Love with My Car” was guaranteed a place on the album.
“It was a standoff,” Brian May later recalled. “Roger was utterly serious. He just disappeared into this tiny closet and said, essentially, ‘The car stays, or I stay in here.’ We had work to do. In the end, we relented.”
The compromise was historic. To appease Mercury, the song was placed in what seemed like a sacrificial position: as the **B-side to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”** It was seen as a defeat, a relegation to the flip-side of a song everyone knew would be the A-side masterpiece.
But then, “Bohemian Rhapsody” exploded. It spent nine weeks at No. 1 in the UK. And in the music business of the 1970s, the songwriter of the B-side on a mega-selling single earned the same **mechanical royalty rate** as the A-side. Every single copy of “Bohemian Rhapsody” sold was also a sale of “I’m in Love with My Car.”
Taylor’s stubborn, cupboard-based rebellion had turned his little car song into a **perpetual money machine.** The royalties from that B-side, fueled by one of the biggest-selling singles of all time, reportedly earned him a fortune that dwarfed the earnings from many of Queen’s own album tracks. It became one of the most lucrative B-sides in rock history.
Fifty years on, the story stands as a perfect testament to Roger Taylor’s character: stubborn, unpretentious, and unexpectedly shrewd. He didn’t just fight for a song; he fought for a principle, and in doing so, he won rock’s strangest lottery. The drummer locked in a cupboard to save a song about his car didn’t just get his way—he accidentally drove off into the sunset, forever rich, and forever remembered for the track that proves even in Queen’s world of opera and fantasy, sometimes the most powerful thing is a simple, roaring engine and the will to defend it.
