I can't find anything anywhere on this... but I came across a JJ Cale song called "Anyway The Wind Blows"
the actual lyric within the song is: "Easy come, easy go, anyway the wind blows"
The song was released in 1974 (album: Okie)...
Could Freddie have lifted the lines from this one? Has it been mentioned before? Or are these genuinely figures of speech that normally go hand in hand, perhaps used in the 60s/70s?
(from wikipedia)
"According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama... just killed a man.""
Of course, that doesn't say that those particular lyrics were part of it yet, but they could very well have been.
Probably very old sayings which is why it sounds peculiar.
But the question is whether they're commonly used together.
It's interesting that they followed each other on jj Cale's song but not on BR. Gives more weight to Freddie subconsciously picking it off JJ Cale.
Any other popular usages of both terms in the same context?
Since the two mean practically the same thing, I don't think it's that strange to see them together. You're applying a kind of faulty reasoning in two steps here:
1) "But the question is whether they're commonly used together." - a fair question in and of itself, but not one that will provide meaningful information as to whether BR draws on JJ Cale.
2) "they followed each other on jj Cale's song but not on BR" - a statement that renders the question in 1 moot, as they do not in fact occur together in BR. To make a reasoned comparison you would now have to look into the question of lyrics using two idiomatic phrases of similar meaning in different parts of the song.
It seems to me that you're reading waaay too much into this. You have no evidence, nor any reason to suppose, that Freddie was familiar with JJ Cale (who wasn't particularly famous at the time, although Freddie was likely familiar with Eric Clapton's covers of JJ Cale songs, which did do well in the charts), the album did not do much in the UK charts and no singles were released off it as far as I can find, and Freddie did not have any interest, implied or documented, in country/blues-rock. Where would Freddie plausibly have heard "Anyway The Wind Blows" by JJ Cale?
I think you've found a nice similarity, but there does not appear to be any evidence to suggest more than simple coincidence. If you think there's more to it, you will need to come up with evidence to make your case plausible (absolute proof is not reasonably possible here). That would mean you need to establish that it is likely that Freddie heard the song "Anyway The Wind Blows" prior to 1975.
it's not faulty reasoning... if it was faulty reasoning i'd be asking if JJ Cale died of AIDS because he listened to Bohemian Rhapsody after writing Anyway The Wind Blows. At least, that's what many people in this forum might think :-)
I'm using a possible coincidence of a song released IMMEDIATELY prior to Bohemian Rhapsody's release. JJ Cale is a very influential composer. It's not impossible. And I don't think we have a complete history of everything Freddie listened to. Nor do I think Freddie only heard pop radio. I'd like to think he was more open-minded and listened to stuff other than top 40 - especially in the 70s when he was most creative. I'm sure he would have been taking in anything he could draw on to come up with new shit. He wasn't a Mozart... he was a Beethoven.
Especially given the fact that JJ Cale's song was not a hit - it's more likely that Freddie picked up the lines from that song than a top 40 hit which would have immediately been more recognizable.
If the song we were talking about was Dancer (which clearly draws on the song The Stroke by Billy Squier) I'd be less interested.
Alas, my lack of evidence is exactly why I posted it as a question. If evidence does not exist, I believe it should remain an open question. Unless my question was whether JJ Cale died of AIDS because he listened to Bohemian Rhapsody after writing Anyway the Wind Blows. Because if that was the case, I'd lose that battle. I'd lose that battle 9 times out of 10.
I for one had never heard of JJ Cale before his project (album) with Eric Clapton though I am only thirty eight years old and not from England or what have you.
me neither - other than that he wrote Cocaine and After Midnight. but if you read up on him a lot of artists "say" they were influenced by him. Neil Young & Clapton of course to name a couple. Also, JJ Cale is from 'Murica. not English.
Which is why it's surprising in the first place and probably unlikely that FM really did lift the lines. Just odd that those lines appear in two songs within the same short time frame.