The Music Legacy Of The Bee Gees.
By
Nicholas Sheffo
The third
of our series about music acts not getting the credit they deserve these days
for various reasons brings us to one of the longest and most enduring family
acts in music history. Along with The
Jacksons, Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Osmonds (more popular over the
years than you might have realized), The Beach Boys, The Carpenters and other
great family acts over the years who may have fared better overseas than in the
U.S. (Tim & Neil Finn for example of Split Enz and Crowded House), The Bee
Gees remain the most successful family music act of all time.
Like The
Osmonds and The Jacksons, they had their youngest brothers become a breakout
solo artist (Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson were part of the original family act,
while Andy Gibb was never an official member of The Bee Gees) with each solo
artist having at least one smash hit among their solo efforts (Osmonds’ Go Away Little Girl remake was #1 for
three weeks, while Jackson’s Billie Jean
and Gibb’s Shadow Dancing spent 7
weeks at #1 each remaining their biggest solo hits ever and saddest of all, the
latter two left us long before they should have) establishing their
independence from their brothers.
Born in England,
The Brothers Gibb were a family music act as children long before anyone
expected a British Invasion, so they were in effect a few years ahead of it and
The Beatles. When 1964 arrived, they
were in Australia but ahead
of the curve, so when they returned to England in 1967, the adult-era hits
began. Their early hits were not trying
to sound like The Beatles or any other act from the various waves of that
invasion, so they stood out and became respected in the industry as well as
music favorites. Signed to Atco, they
logged over a dozen hits and sold well.
After a few years without hits, they signed with RSO Records and
immediately found an instant smash hit with Jive
Talkin’ and this time, they were ahead of the curve again that became the Disco Era which their hits would help to
define.
While
Andy logged solo hits quintessential of the era (Shadow Dancing, I Just Want
To Be Your Everything, Love Is
(Thicker Than Water), (Our Love)
Don’t Throw It All Away, An
Everlasting Love) that all could have worked for the group and are sometimes
confused with their hits, The Bee Gees moved from working with the amazing Arif
Mardin to a pair of producers who gave them their peak sound: Karl Richardson
& Albhy Galuten. With the group, the
sound of a grand classical pop sweep in their arrangements would redefine the
band and become their peak sound remaining with them and all their work
henceforth, extending to work with Andy Gibb, artists on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (the
biggest-selling double album of all time), the hit Emotion by Samantha Sang
(later remade by Destiny’s Child) and a series of albums produced by the same
team for some of the biggest singers in the business.
Starting
with Barbra Streisand’s massively successful Guilty, the team would follow up with Dionne Warwick’s Heartbreaker, Diana Ross’ Eaten Alive and Kenny Rogers’ Eyes That See In the Dark, all of which
produced big hits (including the various title songs, Woman In Love, Take The Short
Way Home, Chain Reaction, This Woman, Islands In The Stream, etc.) long after the Disco era was over and the
group remained highly respected within the industry.
Yet that
still amazingly leaves the actual Bee Gees own hits which span a much longer
period than merely the Disco Years. With
some of the most distinct and formidable harmonies in music history, here are
my choices for the ten songs that most endure and most define The Bee Gees
Legacy…
1)
How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? – This 1971 classic remains one
of their most loved, most enduring and most revered hits (also one of the most
remade) as this dead-on ballad (written by the trio who co-produced with Robert
Stigwood) is darkly beautiful and shows a unique side of pain and
relationships. The vocal performances are
like no other and fit right in with the singer/songwriter movement in tone and
feel. Robin and Barry share lead vocals.
2)
I Started A Joke – Barry Gibb was not always the
lead singer of the group as this underrated 1968 hit with Robin Gibb on lead
vocals proves, from the same team as Broken
Heart, Robin shows his range and empathy as much as any singer of the time
and it is well written to boot.
3)
Massachusetts – From the same team in 1967, the
band pulled off this hit that sounds like many of the records of the time, yet
does not sound as dated and in part, it is because it is not as rushed and the
vocals are more effective than many similar slow, sad ballads of the time.
4)
I Gotta Get A Message To You – If the above hits do not show
the band had a sincere edge of blues in their music, this great hit also shows
they were doing something with soul genre forms long before they worked with
Arif Mardin, featuring another great composition and vocal by the trio
co-produced with Stigwood that holds up incredibly well.
5)
Jive Talkin’ – This 1975 chart topper was not
only an instant comeback hot for the group, but partly foreran the Disco style,
introduced the beginnings of their falsetto style they would use in their Disco
hits and its influence extended to other genres (including Lindsey Buckingham’s
Second Hand News for his band
Fleetwood Mac) in what was a glossy, upscale pop record with a good backbeat
that opened up the next era of pop music.
Though the clever critic Nelson George would label this a record that
was part of the “white negro movement”, I felt that was unfair and misses the
idea of music as art that crosses borders.
That moniker could apply to other attempts by the group to do soul
records (Boogie Child is not as
successful for instance), but it oversimplifies what they accomplished with
this record.
6)
Fanny (Be Tender With My Love) – The peak of their falsetto hits
is this ultimate love song in that style that goes all the way with the style
(it was their mother’s favorite song) that is unusual in its multilayered
vocals, mix and approach, yet it works and shows of the Gibbs’ singing
capacities at their best that could never be faked in a studio. This was also produced by Arif Mardin and
written by the group.
7)
Nights On Broadway – More than any other record,
this Arif Mardin production is the one that actually captures the sense of
“street” (at least for the band) that made their later Disco hits credible, but
tends to be a richer record than most they cut later and mixes the falsetto and
standard vocal approach.
8)
Love So Right – This early co-production with
Karl Richardson & Albhy Galuten from 1976 set the tone for the their work
while retaining everything they gained with Arif Mardin in this exceptional
falsetto hit that shows great range within that boundary and also happens to be
a well written and arranged song.
9)
Love You Inside Out – Free of Saturday Night Fever, the band cut a mixed album in Spirits Having Flown, but two of its
biggest hits remain their best-ever records.
At this point, they were on top of the world and you can hear that in
the all-the-way boldness of this production to the vocals and the way the trio
just keeps pushing in the song to the end.
10) Tragedy
– Concluding with this hit, you’ll note I purposely skipped the obvious hits
from Saturday Night Fever and not
because they are good or bad records, but because the group was much more than
those hits that almost stereotyped them.
They push the high end of falsetto directly and all the way in a way few
vocal bands could hope to and both songs make a fitting coda to the end of that
peak era.
After
Disco ended, they had their solo projects, the star vocal albums noted above
and eventually more albums minus falsettos finding another sound to continue
their career on with including hits for Stayin’
Alive, a bizarre Sylvester Stallone-directed sequel to Saturday Night Fever that included the hits The Woman In You and Someone
Belonging To Someone (plus the infamous Frank Stallone hit Far From Over which got more radio
airplay than any of The Bee Gees cuts!) and other hits afterwards like One and You Win Again. They never
had the same success again, but also became the target of an anti-Disco
campaign that was actually (we now know; none of it having anything to do with
the misguided Sgt. Pepper’s feature
film either) a hate campaign against anything counterculture, Disco or about
political progress. Neo-Conservatives
(and other haters) knew it would be hard to go after gay men, soul acts or
African American artists and KC & The Sunshine Band were more easily
dismissed as well as being a U.S. act, but in The Bee Gees these Right-Wing
politicos found the perfect whipping boys and they became the first (and still
only act) in music history to be instantly removed from radio as if Disco (read
The Civil Rights Movement) never happened including “Bee Gees-Free Weekends” on
radio stations. It remains one of the
most embarrassing incidents in U.S.
radio history.
Now over
30 years later when music is so bad and the record industry is in flux, any
label would sign a band like them in a minute and is a remainder of better days
for music, radio and the arts. Maurice
Gibb passed away in 2003, but even he got to see them comeback and once again
get the respect they deserve. After all,
they were more than just a Disco act that had huge hits. They were one of the biggest music acts of
all time.
For more
on the band, start with this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9232/Ultimate+Bee+Gees+(Reprise+Records
- Nicholas Sheffo
