The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  Shaw now had a year to line up the necessary financial package but bankers remained nervous about the prospect. Polydor and their parent company, Philips/Siemens, however, were very interested in the idea of gaining management control of The Beatles for a bargain price, and promised the duo £500,000 when their option fell due. Now that RSO had the financial clout to back up their little agreement, Epstein publicly announced a merger of the two companies on January 13, 1967. Sadly, fate would intervene before the original 12 month period had elapsed.

  * * *

  On August 26, 1967, Brian Epstein’s personal assistant, Joanne Newfield, received an urgent phone call from his concerned household staff at his Belgravia home. Joanne drove at once to Chapel Street, phoned a doctor and, when repeated pounding on Brian’s locked bedroom door failed to get a response, the doctor and Epstein’s Spanish manservant Antonio broke down the door. Joanne went into the room to find Brian’s lifeless body lying on the bed. “Even though I knew he was dead, I pretended to the others that he wasn’t, ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘he’s just asleep, he’s fine.’ ”

  While it was widely supposed that Brian had committed suicide, the Coroner, Mr Gavin Thurston, ruled that it was an accidental death caused by “incautious self-overdoses” of Carbitol, a bromide-based drug which he used to help him sleep.

  With Brian Epstein’s death, the future of NEMS seemed uncertain. As he had left no will, his entire estate passed to his mother, Mrs. Queenie Epstein. Having lost both her elder son and her husband in a matter of months, Mrs. Epstein was in no state to deal with the business, so the responsibility fell to Brian’s younger brother, Clive.

  After two weeks of discussions between the interested parties, it was finally agreed that Clive would take over as Chairman of NEMS Enterprises. A new company, Nemperor Holdings, was formed to administer NEMS, with former bandleader Vic Lewis as its Managing Director, whilst Peter Brown took over from Epstein as The Beatles personal manager. In reality, of course, they managed themselves from this point on.

  In a statement released to the press, a NEMS company spokesman said, “Policies agreed between Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood are now not practically possible. In the circumstances it has been agreed on the most amicable basis that NEMS and the Robert Stigwood Organisation will go their separate ways. Towards the end of November Messrs Stigwood and David Shaw will resign from the board of NEMS.”

  They were rumoured to have left NEMS with a settlement of £500,000. “Having left NEMS, he was determined that he was going to have a Beatles of his own, and The Bee Gees were it,” Dick Ashby said. “In those days, Robert gave his total attention to their career. He was a manager in the finest sense of the word. He did everything: he was in the studio with them, travelling with them … The Bee Gees and Cream, those were his two loves, as it were.”

  Philips/Siemens still saw Stigwood as a worthwhile investment and, in February 1968, they handed over their original £500,000 stating, “We are interested in all forms of show business and are backing Mr Stigwood because we feel he has the necessary ability to deliver us business we never got before.” Robert would put their money, and that received from NEMS, to very good use.

  * * *

  Over and above the success he has enjoyed with the acts he managed, which included comedians Spike Milligan and Frankie Howerd, Robert Stigwood boasted other achievements that, even if viewed in isolation, would make him the envy of his peers.

  Firstly, in 1968, there was his first West End production Hair, a play which opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre, then ran for six years. He bought out Beryl Vertue and Associated London Scripts, and then the Gunnell Brothers agency, both of these take-overs bringing him writers and performers of the calibre of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, Johnny Speight, Georgie Fame, Alan Price and John Mayall. There were also film versions of Steptoe

  And Son and Up Pompeii.

  Then 1970 brought the shocking Oh! Calcutta! This was soon followed by the equally notorious Jesus Christ, Superstar which started life as an album, hit Broadway in 1971, and finally opened in 1972 at London’s Palace Theatre where it ran for eight years. The big screen version followed in 1973. A year later Stigwood produced the movie version of The Who’s Tommy, a film that nobody else would touch. Directed by the controversial Ken Russell, it would premiere on March 26, 1975 and star Oliver Reed, Ann-Margret and, in the title role, Who singer Roger Daltrey.

  Other equally well-publicised successes would follow, and Robert enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, unthinkable just a decade before.

  He shows no signs of slowing down yet either. In February, 2000, his Saturday Night Fever musical completed a successful run at The London Palladium. It only took 10 months for the production to recoup its estimated four million pounds costs, a figure in excess of 25 million pounds being anticipated when final accounts are drawn. A touring version of La Cage Aux Folles is being planned, together with another musical based on the work of the celebrated horror writer Anne Rice, best known for Interview With A Vampire which became a Tom Cruise film. His assets include real estate business in Australia, and a Louisiana oil and gas exploration company.

  Stigwood’s achievements are well known, but less so the man himself. Once he had their confidence, he seldom imposed his management on The Bee Gees, preferring to think of them in more sociable terms. “[They] are friends. I’m godfather to their children. We [didn’t] have formal business meetings. We [would] sit around socially and debate what they should and shouldn’t do. We worked on a committee basis, really.”

  Freddie Gershon, former worldwide President of RSO, once described him as “father, confessor, hand-holder, baby-sitter, and he has the bedside manner of the greatest medical practitioner in Middle America. He looks after his flock, his boys.”

  Julie Barrett saw Robert frequently when she worked for him in 1967 and says, “I found him quite a fair man. One of the girls who actually helped me at the time became pregnant, and being a single mum at that stage was just not on. He was very good and arranged for her to go into a ‘mother and baby’ home and he paid for all her expenses. I think he was quite caring, and though he’d come such a long way in his business dealings, he was quite down to earth in his attitude towards people.”

  “Down to earth” would certainly fit one tale his great friend Ahmet Ertegun likes to tell of him, and it reveals a side of Robert that all but his closest acquaintances never see. “Robert can be very cutting you know, just awful. There was a manager and concert promoter, Sid Bernstein, best known for The Beatles’ Shea Stadium shows in New York, who was manager of an Atlantic act, The Rascals, and he told me that he wanted to meet Robert. So I arrange that we go out to dinner, and Sid starts saying to Robert, ‘My boys love your boys – those Bee Gees sing like angels and so many songs, and Cream, the way Eric Clapton plays’, and on and on and on repeating, ‘my boys love your boys’. Then nature calls and he goes off to the toilets and Robert says to me, ‘I’m going to tell him that my boys hate his boys,’ and I said, ‘No, you’ll kill him.’ Robert says, ‘I’m going to tell him that my boys think his boys are a bunch of fucking Italian shoeshine boys!’ I begged him not to say that, and he didn’t, but he wouldn’t compliment Sid’s boys either.”

  Perhaps it is fitting that the last words should come from two of Robert’s boys themselves.

  “Believe it or not,” Barry began, “even though he probably doesn’t even realise it, [Robert] is still a great influence on our careers. Whatever the moves we make or whatever we do with our careers we always think to ourselves, how would Robert have handled this, how would he have had us do this? Would he have let us do this? It really has an effect on our decision-making.”

  “He was one of the old school of managers,” Robin continued, “that worked on gut reaction. You know, he had an instinct or something. And he went on feelings, and a lot of people today don’t go on feelings, they go on technical data and numbers, where in those days you see, a lot of people went on gut reaction. That
was the old school of thinking and it was always, to us, [that] the best way to go with anything is the feeling that you get in your gut. There’s a lot less of that [now] and I think that business is richer for them, those kind of people.”

  It was left for Barry to sum things upnicely. “Robert is irreplaceable,” he confirmed. “There is no question about that.”

  9

  BEE GEES 4TH?

  “THERE WERE A whole bunch of highlights that all happened in that six-month period in 1967,” Barry Gibb told Marc Baker in 1997. “Meeting The Beatles, being signed to NEMS, Brian Epstein’s label, thus being in The Beatles stable – that’s what everyone called it. It was incredibly inspiring to be among these people and to be suddenly in the game, in the competition.

  “But without a shadow of a doubt, the highlight was meeting Robert Stigwood. I think that apart from our father and mother, he is the man who made things happen for us – who opened doors for us. He is the man who gave us the opportunities – who made us believe in ourselves, much more so than even we had done, who changed our lives.

  “What glowed was the belief; whoever this man was he believed in us and that elevated us. It made us go to work, it made us think on a much higher level than we had before.”

  Robin echoed Barry’s sentiments when he said, “The whole industry is about flag flyers, champions who champion your cause and one voice that can actually move mountains for people. Robert Stigwood was a blessing, he was the man.”

  One of Stigwood’s early priorities was to smarten up his new protégés. “He gave us £300 and said, ‘Go and find some clothes because the clothes you are wearing are completely unacceptable,’ ” Barry recalled. “So he sent us to Carnaby Street, and we came back with clothes that were completely unacceptable because we didn’t know – we couldn’t have been greener.”

  In the early days of his stewardship Robert Stigwood introduced them to Richard Clayton Ashby, better known as Dick, whom the brothers would often refer to as “the fourth Bee Gee”. Dick Ashby would become their right-hand man, their tour manager and general liaison between them and Stigwood. He began his career in the music business as road manager to The Birds*, a rock group whose most celebrated member was Ronnie Wood, who later found fame with The Faces and The Rolling Stones.

  Robert Stigwood became involved with The Birds as their agent and also cut a couple of tracks for them on his Reaction label. When the group eventually disbanded, Dick found himself in something of a quandary.

  “I had got involved a little bit financially with the group, in as much as I’d lent them some money for equipment,” Dick recalled, “and obviously when the group folded there wasn’t any money to share around so I came to see Robert, cap in hand, with a van load of equipment trying to get some of my money back. He’d signed The Bee Gees virtually the week before, and that evening they were in Polydor putting down some demos. He took me round there and that was it. I became their road manager from 1967 … So as soon as they came back to England I virtually started work for them straightaway. They lived in Hendon for a while.

  “I got to know them on a very personal level, whereas if you’re just in an office and the group is signed up by the head of the company and they say, ‘Here’s The Bee Gees, here’s Dick Ashby, he’s going to be looking after you,’ it would take the amount of time I spent on the road with them to really get to know them, how they work and be able to keep the wheels turning in the best possible way.”

  With Dick looking after the day-to-day affairs of the fledgling group, Robert Stigwood and Brian Epstein travelled to America to choose an American label and negotiate terms for The Bee Gees.

  Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, recalled, “It was just prior to this trip that I first heard some of the tracks that Stigwood had produced with the group, and needless to say, I was extremely impressed. When they arrived in America, there was a bit of a tug of war between Epstein and Stigwood. Since Epstein had had several acts with Capital and Columbia, he was inclined to go with one of those labels as he knew the people who were working there; and Stigwood was leaning in favour of Atlantic as we were working hard at that time to break another new group that Robert had put together, called Cream.

  “Luckily for us, Robert’s will prevailed and we had the pleasure and honour of releasing the first of what was to be many hits by a group whose singing style and whose songs were of an originality and brilliance rarely heard on record. Our enthusiasm for the group, which must have made Stigwood and Epstein go along with us, was matched by that of our record buyers throughout the world.”

  Atlantic Records’ legendary engineer/producer Tom Dowd was already on the trail of The Bee Gees. In March 1967, he accompanied a Stax recording artists tour across the Continent and on to London. “At that time Atlantic’s contact at Polydor in London was a guy called Frank Finter, and he was anxious to meet all the guys … Otis, Sam & Dave, Booker T. and so on … He played me a tape [of The Bee Gees] and said, ‘You gotta hear these guys – they are gonna be big!’

  “He played me a few songs and I said, ‘Listen, I want them, but I don’t have the authority to sign anybody.’ He said there were other people interested, but he would try to hold off.

  “I immediately tried calling Jerry Wexler and couldn’t get a hold of him,” Tom continued, “and I tried calling Ahmet and nobody knew where he was, and I’m telling Frank Finter, ‘Hold them, hold them,’ ’cause I had zero authority. Meanwhile I finally get hold of Jerry and say, ‘I’ve heard this great band – we have to sign them,’ and he says, ‘Don’t talk to me about groups – I’ve got a great group that I’m gonna sign,’ and then I get hold of Ahmet and he says, ‘Don’t talk to me, don’t talk to me, I’m going to sign a group that’s going to be the biggest thing.’

  “What had happened was that earlier I did Disraeli Gears with Cream, and Robert became a big fan of Atlantic so he had gone to Ahmet with the deal. So we’re all on the trail of the same group and didn’t know it! I didn’t meet the guys until about six months later, but I heard that tape and I knew they were going to be big.”

  In spite of all the confusion, The Bee Gees were eventually signed to Atlantic Records for a staggering £80,000, the biggest deal ever made with a new group at that time.

  * * *

  Carlos Olms, born in Germany in 1930, joined Deutsche Grammophon DGG in 1952 from an electro-acoustic engineering company called Tele-funken. He started in the electro-acoustic laboratory before being trained in the art of recording itself. He went on to learn how to record classical music and was then sent to Hamburg to learn about the pop recording side of the business. Here he worked with Germany’s top producers and artists like Bert Kaempfert.

  In the early Sixties, he was sent to Venezuela to work in a recording studio for Polydor. When he returned to Germany, he was offered a job by Roland Rennie in London and he arrived there in January 1967. His remit was to create, and then run, a recording studio in an office floor at 19 Stratford Place – in the midst of the producers offices. It was very much built “on the cheap,” the recording electronics consisting of obsolete valve equipment shipped over to England by Polydor’s parent, DGG.

  In late February, after the studio’s completion, Carlos was called up to Roland’s office and introduced to a new act that had recently signed to Polydor. By early March, he was working with them.

  “They came in one evening,” he recalls, “and we started recording a backing track at about seven o’clock. But the whole concept was in the early stages. They had not even the words together for the song. But in the quietness of our old staircase – there was no one else in the building – in this atmosphere with the old goods lift and the folding zig-zag doors, sitting on the cold stone steps, there they composed and found the right words to the new song, which they called ‘The New York Mining Disaster 1941’.

  “When they started to put the vocals on the backing track, it sounded absolutely great. No matter that it was four o’clock in the morn
ing. Everybody had the feeling, this would be a hit. Roland Rennie loved it at first hearing in the morning, but if ever something is great, others come along with ideas to improve it, and so the original demo was rerecorded at IBC with strings and other sounds added. Still it was a great song.”

  One thing that astonished Carlos was the amount of technical recording knowledge the boys possessed. Firstly with Robert Iredale, and then with Ossie Byrne, the Gibbs had obviously been paying attention.

  As Carlos himself admits, he learned one thing in the session: “How to place the vocals into the backing track, to get the balance right in mono and stereo. You just listen in mono on one speaker! Everything falls into place.”

  Although he never worked with The Bee Gees again, Carlos did bump into the brothers on several occasions, and remembers these moments with great fondness. His connection with the group did not end there however, as he also worked with Lulu and Yvonne Elliman in years to come.

  Prior to 1967, The Bee Gees had always been just the three brothers with two guitars, but beginning in late February, in preparation for live dates, the group was expanded to include some old friends from Australia.

  Colin Petersen was born March 24, 1946 in Kingaroy, Queensland. A child actor in his native Australia, Colin entered show business at the age of seven and made his film début in the title role in the film Smiley in 1956. The circumstances that propelled him to stardom must rank amongst the most unusual of anyone in the entertainment business.

  “Thousands of guys were being tested for the part, and I went along to a theatre in Brisbane and lined up with the rest in my best suit, with a collar and tie and shoes and socks, clutching my scrapbooks. All the film people walked straight past me! Never gave me a second look. I went home and played with my cousin. I took my shoes off and got dirty, the way kids do.

  “But I was very curious to see who had got the part,” Colin continued, “so eventually I went back to the theatre. I was just going past a side door when the director came out for a cigarette and a breath of fresh air. I asked him what was going on, and he took me inside the theatre and offered me the part.”