by Hector Cook
The lead-off single ‘Wouldn’t I Be Someone’, like its predecessor ‘Saw A New Morning’, is a beautifully arranged pop song with considerable dynamic range, but like ‘Morning’, it did not reach its potential market. It appeared to be a great lead-off single, and very fairly represents the level of quality on the album itself. The B-side ‘Elisa’ is a slow piano ballad typical of several songs on the album, similar in mood to ‘My Life Has Been A Song’ but with a better lyric that avoids needless repeats. Germany got a different B-side, ‘King And Country’, another five-minute song shortened for the single to fade out quickly after the second verse. It may have been a little late for an anti-war lyric, and actually plays better in the short version than in the full-length LP version.
The album opened with both sides of the lead-off single, ‘Elisa’ and ‘Wouldn’t I Be Someone’, then into ‘A Lonely Violin’, another piano ballad featuring Barry solo. An acetate of the next two suggests they may have been planned for the next single. ‘Losers And Lovers’ has a mixed Barry and Robin vocal over a lively rhythm guitar and gypsy-ish backing. ‘Home Again Rivers’ is a country ballad with a Robin solo, repeating the same short melody many times over as he works through a long series of verses, resolving in the different final harmonised verse.
Side two opened with two songs run together, ‘Harry’s Gate’ and ‘Rocky LA’, the second sharing some of the same lyric. ‘Harry’s Gate’ is a bittersweet meditation on ageing and old times irretrievably gone, quite remarkable for writers only 27 and 24. It links into choppy electric guitar for ‘Rocky LA’ repeating the “back in 1958” lines in Robin’s rawest voice and adding “but it’s all gone!” Next was ‘Castles In The Air’, covered by Graham Bonnet within the year, which opens with a Barry vocal accompanied by a solitary piano and remains a memorable song. ‘Where Is Your Sister’ follows, a simple but effective song with a beautiful acoustic guitar opening supported by Barry’s finest soft vocal. The final track is ‘It Doesn’t Matter Much To Me’, which the group re-did the next year with a slightly faster and much bigger rhythm arrangement. It represents the first appearance of genuine falsetto screams — so beloved by their next producer — courtesy of Robin, who more than amply demonstrated his capabilities in that regard. Most of the album’s songs feature solo sections by both Barry and Robin, and the only Maurice solo is the verse in ‘Elisa’.
Four additional songs were submitted in January 1973, ‘King And Country’, ‘(Life) Am I Wasting My Time’, ‘Dear Mr. Kissinger’, and ‘Jesus In Heaven’. These were appended to the ends of the album master tape reels of sides A and B, but most likely they were not intended to appear on the album but rather were for B-sides.
Kick is a generally stronger album than Life, because it mostly avoids the worst excesses of overblown arrangements and repeated verses, as if they were now in command of this kind of material. The care taken with the recordings, and the genuine emotion in the vocals, belie any claims that this was an ineffectual piece of work. Unfortunately few have had the pleasure of hearing it as it was meant to be heard.
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On August 25, 1973, Billboard magazine reported that, “[The Bee Gees] have apparently reached a final decision to junk their last album master, a six month project which no longer satisfies them.”
“We could remix and get some of the cuts more to our liking,” Barry commented, “but if we feel the music doesn’t best represent what we are capable of today, it makes much more sense to go on to another project. The record companies aren’t happy at this decision of course. But they aren’t pushing us.”
Some believe that Atlantic rejected the album. “After all those years, to send an album to the office and have them say, ‘Sorry, lads, it’s not good enough,’ “ Dick Ashby said, his voice trailing off in disbelief. But asked in early 2000 about it, Ahmet Ertegun said, “I don’t recall that we rejected an album,” and Jerry Wexler and Jerry Greenberg, while both cautioning that Ahmet handled The Bee Gees, also do not recall any such incident. Mike Mayer, Atlantic’s counsel at the time, seconded Jerry Greenberg’s views that music came first and business second in those days. “Ahmet and Robert had formed a friendship years before and always discussed releases together. It was never a question of just submitting a tape and seeing what Atlantic would do.” While not recalling the album specifically, Ahmet suggested that he and Robert might have agreed that “we didn’t hear any hit songs in there,” which is close to what Barry said in 1973. Given the similarities in style of Life and Kick, and what had happened to Life In A Tin Can and its lead-off single, the chart failure of the excellent lead-off ‘Wouldn’t I Be Someone’ signalled the same fate.
The Bee Gees didn’t see it coming since they had completed Kick In The Head even before Life In A Tin Can was released. As Barry said, they might have tried tinkering with the Kick songs to salvage the sessions, but RSO was evidently willing to scrap the whole project and move on. Nonetheless The Bee Gees’ pride and their confidence had been badly damaged by so much hard work being wasted.
While David English, the former president of RSO Records and Barry’s close friend, says that the album could have been released outside the United States, America’s dominance of the world market would make it unwise to do so. “You make your money in America, and at that time there was a [record industry] cake [which showed] that 48 per cent of all record sales were in America. Second was Japan, then Germany and only nine per cent of all sales worldwide came from Britain. That is why … we wouldn’t release it [elsewhere]. If we’re going to make money, record sales in Britain wouldn’t be that important on a world scale.”
A Kick In The Head Is Worth Eight In The Pants would probably have been a fans’ favourite judging by the reaction of those who have heard the tracks by way of cassette tapes which have managed to make the rounds, or more recent bootlegged CDs. Much of the credit for the album’s overall appeal belongs to Jimmie Haskell whose arrangements proved him to be a worthy potential successor to Bill Shepherd. If The Bee Gees had been aiming at the cult group approach, it would have been an important release. But they had never been pitched at that kind of audience, and wanted Top 40. A change of direction followed.
‘Wouldn’t I Be Someone’ was released on June 22 to coincide with their first British tour in more than five years, but on the eve of the tour, it was announced that, “The Bee Gees have now cancelled the whole of their British concert tour, with the exception of their performance at the London Palladium on June 24. Also cancelled is their guest spot in the Royal Charity Gala at the Royal London Festival Hall (June 25) as the whole show is now scrapped.”
The official reason for the tour’s cancellation was that the group’s new drummer, Dennis Bryon had injured his shoulder, but there were some murmurs that perhaps the injury was not the real reason. “I admit some of the ticket sales for the early dates were not as good as they could have been,” Dick Ashby said, “and the group is perhaps not as popular in Britain as they once were, but they were quite willing to play to non-capacity audiences.”
For the concert at the London Palladium, their support act was Jimmy Stevens, the singer-songwriter whose Don’t Freak Me Out album (released under the title Paid My Dues in the United States) had been produced by Maurice. Stevens fell victim to one of The Bee Gees’ entourage’s little wind-ups, as Tom Kennedy recalled. “With Jimmy Stevens, we actually wired an alarm clock under his piano above the pick-up mike. When he was halfway through a love song, the alarm went off, but being the trooper that he was, he carried on,” he said.
The story of the prank became legendary, and would be passed on to subsequent generations of band members. Blue Weaver, who would not be involved with the group for another two years, well remembers being told about the incident, emphasising, “It was his most important song!”
Autumn found the group on the road again, with the start of another Far East tour at Kurashiki, Okayama-Ken on September 6. Nine days later, the last Japanese show of the tour took place in T
okyo at Shinjuku Koseinenkin Kaikan and was filmed for Japanese television’s Love Sounds Special, to be broadcast at the end of the month.
The two outdoor shows in Hong Kong were cancelled due to torrential rain and had to be rearranged for a week later. Two further concerts in Singapore were cancelled when authorities there denied The Bee Gees the 48-hour passes which the group had used the previous year to bypass the “long hair” restrictions vigorously enforced at that time.
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Looking back on Kick In The Head, the brothers tend to disparage it, dismissing it as a weak album. “It was some nice music but just totally mainstream pop,” Barry said. “They were downers, written about ourselves and things like that. One song on it was called ‘Harry’s Gate’, which was about a gate we used to swing on when we were kids. It was definitely a wrong direction.”
In August, another song was submitted for consideration as a single, but this apparently received the “thumbs down” sign too. Recorded at DeLane Lea studios, a tape box dated August 1 contains ‘You’re My Heaven’ with a handwritten note, “demo of possible single”.
With Kick In The Head out of the picture, The Bee Gees needed another studio album and a change in musical direction. “Most people have classed us as classical pop because we use an orchestra,” Maurice said. “The reason we use one is because the strings add the colour to a song we think is a beautiful melody. It fills it out so you go back and you hear it and you say, oh yeah, that’s lovely. It fills it all out. That’s why we go on tour with an orchestra to produce the same sound as we do on record.”
“We don’t use an orchestra just for the sake of using it,” Robin added. “We use it because it complements the music we’re writing. If we didn’t think so we wouldn’t use it. There have been plenty of songs where we thought an orchestra wasn’t warranted. We won’t use it on every song.”
“We don’t want to talk about it yet but we’re going to attempt a concept album that’s a major departure from our usual Bee Gees trademarks,” Maurice revealed. “And if that doesn’t work out, we’ll do something else.”
Robert Stigwood turned to Ahmet Ertegun for ideas on possible producers, and after discussing it with Jerry Wexler, Ahmet suggested their own house producer Arif Mardin, renowned for his work with Atlantic artists such as The Rascals, Aretha Franklin and Roberta Flack. Arif was well known as a fine arranger too, something The Bee Gees needed. Robert was happy with the idea. “I just felt that Arif Mardin was a terrific producer,” Stigwood said. “I knew him because of our Atlantic connection. I asked him if he would come in and start recording them, and he did …”
* * *
On the home front, Hugh and Barbara Gibb were on the move again, after their plans to open a nightclub in Ibiza fell victim to red tape and the political climate of the Franco government. They left behind the sunny island of Ibiza for the somewhat less temperate climes of the Isle of Man in the summer of 1973. They settled in Rose Villa, a large white house in a peaceful residential area of Douglas. For Andy and Beri, it was just one more upheaval, as they left behind the friends they had made to start again in a new place.
Andy’s budding musical career had sparked his brothers’ interest, and in 1973, The Bee Gees’ fan club reported that Andy had recorded a song written and produced by Maurice. The track, alternately referred to as ‘My Dad’s A Rebel’ or ‘My Father’s A Rebel’, was considered for release as Andy’s first single but was set aside.
Plans to publish Robin and Barry’s book, On The Other Hand, were also dropped around this time. “I’ve got streams of poetry at home,” Barry added, “but I don’t publish them. I just hold on to them because I think they’d be exploited if they were put out now. I’d rather have a book of poems published in about 10 years because I’d be older and my thoughts would be more mature. Right now it would be a part of The Bee Gees.”
Barry may have had “streams of poetry” on his mind, but Robin, on the other hand, expressed an interest in “water music,” but not the Handel variety. While there was little he enjoyed more than a lengthy soak in a hot bath, it caused him some frustration that he had of ten forgotten some of his best ideas by the time he had towelled himself dry. Never one to be concerned about appearing unconventional, he solved the problem by having a battery operated recorder and microphone installed in the bathroom of his Virginia Water home.
Barry and Lynda had settled into their new home in Ascot, still missing their dogs, who remained in quarantine after their Ibiza adventure. But on December 1, a new addition arrived. Barry was with Lynda when the five pound eight ounce boy was born and told reporters, “It was the experience of my life!”
Tom Kennedy recalled that, “The night his first son was born, Barry was up all night ringing people.”
“We were all ready with some girls names, but a boy has taken us by surprise,” Lynda added. One newspaper even claimed that the newborn Gibb went nameless for several weeks, but in the end, he was duly christened Stephen Thadeus Crompton Gibb.
23
A NOT SO GOLDEN GARTER
STEPHEN WAS BARELY a month old when he moved with his parents and maternal grandparents to a rented house on Glencrutchery Road in Douglas on the Isle of Man. It was a move inspired not so much by any longing to return to the land of Barry’s birth, but for more practical reasons: the prohibitive tax situation in the Britain of the early Seventies.
“We were all born on the Isle of Man which … helps us enormously if we live there, tax wise,” Barry explained. “The Labour government in England had raised the taxes to something like 83 per cent in the pound, which was terrifying to anybody who was actually making good money. The Isle of Man was our original home, so I think it was a bridge in a way to us moving to America because we’d done quite well up to this point. We’d had four really quiet years between ’70 and ’74. We couldn’t get arrested, I tell a lie, we could get arrested! But we were lucky, we didn’t get arrested! We weren’t selling records and the media were sort of saying, ‘Well, that’s enough of The Bee Gees.’ You know, you had them in the Sixties and you know what happens in this business at the end of every decade, it’s anyone who was big in that particular decade gets ejected unless they’ve got a few tricks up their sleeve.
“So it was the end of the Sixties, it was the end of people like us, and four years went by. We had some money put away from our success in the Sixties. This was our way of trying to save some money, and [although] we didn’t know it at the time, we were going to move into America. We were going to have another shot at the whole thing in a different country. But we went to the Isle of Man for about two years, and I stayed in that little semi-detached at the top of Bray Hill and then [the] little white house at the top of Princes Road, which I fell in love with.”
Maurice also had a new home, a five-acre estate in Sussex, following his separation from Lulu. “Of course I still think of Lulu and I still love her,” he confessed. “It took a long time to get over the shock, and when her TV series started I just couldn’t watch it. But I did catch one show and thought she looked like a million dollars and was singing really well.
“I feel I’m much more grown-up and independent now,” he continued. “I don’t think I’d have moved down here unless we’d separated, but it really is a fantastic place. Our home always used to seem to be full of pop people. And that doesn’t help when you just want a bit of peace and quiet. Living away from it all has taken away the pressure.”
With the new house in the country, he’d added a new hobby. “I’ve really got the horse-riding bug,” he revealed. The Bee Gees fan club dutifully reported that Maurice had bought a racehorse, called Royal Nash.
“It wasn’t actually a racehorse,” Tom Kennedy disclosed. “Some people in a pub sold him a horse, which they purported to be a racehorse. It was a nice looking horse — it had a goat for company,” he added.
For Maurice, the horse-riding bug would last only a few years before he reluctantly sold Royal Nash in October, 1976
.
February was an eventful month for Maurice. He and his business partner Chris Cooke formed a publishing company, Shetland Music, and signed a management deal with Soliloquy, a five-piece group that Maurice had discovered the previous year when The Bee Gees appeared in Kuala Lumpur.
These events were overshadowed by another little mishap. In one of the bizarre episodes which Maurice seemed to attract in those days, he was punched in the eye at the Montcalm Hotel in Great Cumberland Place, London, seemingly over his choice of entrée. “At this particular hotel they always make me corned beef hash — I just love it,” Maurice explained. “And it’s never caused me any trouble before — not even stomach-ache. This American, a bit bigger than me, took exception when I ordered the food. I think he thought I was trying to send him up because they use the word ‘hash’ in the States. The American said, ‘Fancy eating that garbage.’ I told him to belt up, and he belted me. I didn’t hit him back or take any other action. I think he’d had a few to drink.”
Even Monsieur Claude, the hotel manager, was drawn into the controversy, not to offer any enlightenment on the altercation which resulted in Maurice’s black eye but to clear up any misconception which might arise from mention that the Montcalm Hotel would serve such a plebeian dish as corned beef hash. Insisting that it did not appear on the hotel’s menu, he added, “It’s not something we are asked for very of ten. But we have provided the hash for Mr Gibb on almost every visit. He calls in advance and says what time he would like it, and I send out for tins of corned beef. It’s not what you would call a classical dish. We just like to please our clients.”
The next Bee Gees’ American tour began with a concert at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City on March 4, less than a week after recording sessions for their next LP were concluded. The group had changed their act from previous tours; rather than playing the whole show with orchestral backing, the first half was more akin to a conventional rock concert. This may also have been the only occasion when songs from an as-yet unreleased album were performed; the set was also memorable for the inclusion of ‘Butterfly’, a rarity from their Australian days. “We have a rule on this tour,” Maurice announced. “It must be fun. No hassles, no fights.”