by Hector Cook
The film, titled The Bull On The Barroom Floor, was described as a Western about three young Englishmen who emigrate to America in the early days and, according to Barry, “bring a bull with them and mate it. It’s very fast. It’s supposed to be a ‘chase film’ which hasn’t been done for a few years. Something along the lines of Mad Mad World.”
With a plot with the unlikely combination of Little House On The Prairie and It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, it was no surprise that this film, like Lord Kitchener’s Little Drummer Boys and Castle, never saw the light of day. “They were just ideas, once again, that never came to fruition,” Tom Kennedy said of the project.
Fortunately, The Bee Gees didn’t have to depend on their film career to earn a living. Their old fans were still there, and the new sound was bringing in more fans. Barry Gibb believes that the secret of their success is mainly down to one thing. “It’s the songs, basically, that sold us,” he said. “We have a large ‘listening’ audience — people who just like the things we’ve been writing and the music we’ve been performing. Whether somebody comes to ‘adore’ us because of the way we look or the way we dress — or anything like that — I don’t really know. Our fans, whether it be [in the US] or in Germany — where once they take a liking to you they really stay hooked — or in Japan — where they told us that the audiences would just clap politely, but where we always get standing ovations and really enthusiastic responses — I’d have to say the audiences are very similar. We’ve developed a ‘listening’ audience.”
* * *
Maurice’s divorce from Lulu became final on August 21, 1975, and they got together for the first time in two years to discuss the sale of their £88,000 Highgate home. There was some tension on both sides before the meeting, but as it turned out, it was completely unnecessary.
“When Lulu and I met to talk things over, I thought it would turn into a cat-and-dog fight, but it was lovely,” Maurice revealed. “I am glad that Lu and I can still be good friends. Our attitude now is that we have to go ahead and live our separate lives.”
Maurice still maintained that their marriage failed because he and Lulu had their separate careers going on under the same roof. “I found it was very difficult for two show business people to be married because we were always apart through work. And I suppose when Lulu and I were married we were so young we didn’t have the experience to make it work. She couldn’t join me on tours because of her work and then when I was off, she was working hard.
“With Yvonne I can feel much more relaxed and we’ve hardly been away from each other since we met. I’d miss her terribly if we were separated for even a few days.”
Maurice said that the couple had always planned to marry once his divorce from Lulu became final, but it would need to wait until after the end of The Bee Gees’ tour of Canada in early October. He revealed that the couple were planning a much different wedding from his first in church with thousands of fans outside. “This one is going to be in the registry office with just a few family and friends.”
“My mother wasn’t too happy when she heard I was going off to live with a pop singer,” Yvonne admitted. “But she changed her mind when she met Maurice.” Not only had her parents given their blessing to the match, but they had also moved in with the couple, living with them in Maurice’s Sussex home.
“We have been very happy for the past 18 months and hope to have children soon,” added Yvonne. In fact, she was already nearly three months pregnant when she and Maurice spoke to reporters.
“My personal life is a lot happier,” Maurice said, “and work is going well too — our single ‘Jive Talkin’ ’ is number one in the States and number five [in Britain].”
For Lulu’s part, she professed to be very happy that Maurice had found a girl whom he wanted to marry, adding, “I wish them both all the happiness.” She dismissed any suggestion that she may have been put off by her first experience of married life, saying, “I still want a man in my life — a normal man living in a normal house who I can have normal children by.”
For a time, anyway, she would find that man in hairdresser John Frieda, whom she married in 1976 and with whom she has her much-loved son, Jordan.
* * *
The release of ‘Nights On Broadway’ coincided with the first concert of The Bee Gees’ Canadian tour at the Memorial Arena in Victoria, British Columbia. The record gave them their second American Top 10 single from the Main Course album, perhaps in this case assisted by the editing on advance American promo copies. These omitted “the dreamy part” which Stigwood was so rightly fond of but which destroyed the song’s momentum as a snappy potential hit single. Regular copies of the single retained this bridge section and it was the last occasion, before the advent of 12-inch remixes, that any of their singles would be tampered with in such obvious fashion.
‘Nights On Broadway’ was yet another Top 20 hit in Germany although, this time, they pitched wide of the mark in the UK. However, less than two years later, Candi Staton would rectify this glitch when she charted with her own version.
The tour came to an end at the Forum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and The Bee Gees returned home. Barry and Lynda left behind their rented semi-detached house at the top of Bray Hill in Douglas on the Isle of Man and bought a larger house at the top of Princes Road called “Sherdley,” where they lived with Lynda’s parents, George and May Gray.
Maurice officially announced his engagement to Yvonne, and on October 17, the wedding took place at Haywards Heath registry office. Barry, on crutches and with his leg in plaster after a fall on his front steps, acted as best man for his younger brother. Maurice was kept waiting nearly 15 minutes before his bride-to-be arrived in a silver Rolls-Royce. Following the four-minute ceremony, the new Mr and Mrs Maurice Gibb and their guests returned to the couple’s home for a champagne reception.
The final two months of 1975 were spent promoting the Main Course album in Europe with press parties held in Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, Milan and Paris. The album earned them their first AMPEX Golden Reel award in the US with $1,000 going to the charity of their choice, The Children’s Health Council.
Meanwhile, convinced that it made good business sense to do so, Ahmet Ertegun had recommended the purchase of RSO to his board. Jerry Greenberg believes that Warner Communications were thinking about doing a deal, but declined because Stigwood’s price was too high. In any event, Polygram stepped in with a much bigger financial commitment, and Warner’s were left to rue their inability to conclude the deal. As Greenberg less than subtly put it, “Of course it was the biggest fucking mistake they made!”
Robert Stigwood thus changed the American distribution of RSO’s recordings from the Warner’s subsidiary Atlantic to the Dutch record company Polygram, of which Polydor was a part.
In January, 1976, as the group flew to the US to begin work on their next album, the third single from Main Course, ‘Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)’ was released. It was issued a month later in the US, where it entered the Top 20, eventually peaking at the number 12 spot. Once again, the group credited Arif Mardin’s production for a major part of the single’s success, but as they went into the studios this time, they could no longer count on Mardin’s guidance.
Arif Mardin was contracted to Atlantic, and since The Bee Gees were now effectively signed to Polydor under the new RSO arrangement, he would no longer be available to produce the group’s albums. The Dream Team partnership of Mardin and The Bee Gees had come to an abrupt end. A new challenge was suddenly thrust on The Bee Gees.
26
SHOULD YOU BE DANCING?
“EVERYBODY AT ATLANTIC was telling [Arif], ‘They won’t do anything without you.’ And Arif was saying, ‘Don’t worry. These guys will do it,’” Maurice remembered.
Despite Mardin’s faith in The Bee Gees’ ability, they weren’t immediately confident that they could produce their next album themselves. Barry recalled that they phoned Arif and asked, “Who do you think can continue
where you left off?’ He said, ‘Listen, I’ve worked with you guys. You can do it. You don’t need anybody else. Go away and do it, the same as you did for Main Course.’ I didn’t really believe that … We didn’t like it because we’d just had our first successful album in years, and we didn’t want to have to start looking for another guy that was compatible to us.”
The Bee Gees flew to California to begin work on the new album with veteran producer, Richard Perry, but it became apparent almost immediately that Perry’s personal style and The Bee Gees were not a happy mix.
“We were in the studio in LA for three days with Richard. His constant position of sitting in the studio was this,” Barry said, slouching in his chair and narrowing his eyes to sleepy slits to demonstrate. “And he had a phone on his console that he always talked on, so things were either constantly out of it or constantly disturbing. What he does, I’m told, is that he’s out of it most of the time, but when it comes time to cut the tracks and actually function, he gets it done. And then he goes back to being out of it again.”
The group played ‘You Should Be Dancing’ to Perry on three separate occasions, but even by the end of the third rendition he could not appreciate its hit potential.
Once again, they phoned Mardin to relate the experience. The situation seemed desperate; they didn’t feel that they could work that way. “Arif said, ‘You’ve got to do it yourself. You know what you want.’ So that’s what we did,” Barry said.
“A producer’s job is mostly just to be there and to encourage the artist’s creativity,” Blue Weaver explained. “I mean, what Arif did was to be there, to guide and to influence. It helped just to have his presence there … he didn’t tell you what to do. Sometimes, he would stop you and say, ‘Oh, you’ve gone a bit too far, you’ve lost it there. What you were doing half an hour ago was great,’ and you think, ‘Oh, what was I doing half an hour ago?’ and he would be able to tell you exactly.”
The group flew back to Miami and the familiar environment of Criteria Recording Studios, determined to use what they had learned from Arif to produce the album themselves. They continued to draw on their environment as he had encouraged them to do, to take inspiration from all types of music.
“You listen to all the radio stations — FM, AM, black, MOR — and you find out exactly what is happening … Then we go into the studio with four ideas only,” Barry explained. “It takes about two weeks, maybe three, to cut the four tracks — to cut them well, I mean, as far as finished items are concerned.”
He denied that this was a crass, commercial approach to music, insisting, “If you are a natural songwriter and your feeling is in it, it’s not a cold calculating thing at all. You listen not to steal, but to find out what little things are happening in songs and making hits.”
Karl Richardson, whose engineering work had helped Mardin make Main Course the success that it was, was enlisted as co-producer as well as engineer this time around. “We knew we would come back here to Miami and work with Karl, who’s a genius engineer and knows us from Main Course,” Barry said.
“We would actually get physically involved,” Blue added. “I mean, Karl was the engineer; he would get the vocal sounds, and we would give suggestions to him, but in those days, Karl was a brilliant engineer.” The new production team set forth to begin recording their new album.
It wasn’t easy at first. “We knew what we wanted, but we didn’t know how to get it technically,” Barry admitted. “But the problem was, we needed ears in the box. Someone to listen and give us help while we were recording …”
“We got two basic tracks down. I was having a lot of trouble just keeping my hands on the knobs and getting the sounds they wanted, and they were having a hard time communicating to the musicians what they really meant. So I saw the need for somebody else to be in the control room,” Karl Richardson agreed.
A phone call was made to Richardson’s best friend. Albhy Galuten had just finished recording a Bees Make Honey album and had no projects in the immediate offing, so he caught a plane to Miami.
An alumnus of Berkeley School of Music, Albhy was just what was needed. “He was musically trained, had a very wide musical knowledge, which was invaluable at that time,” Tom Kennedy explained. “When they started producing themselves again, Albhy was brought in with Karl as a co-producer.”
“As it turned out, some of Albhy’s ideas were really good for some of the songs we were working on,” Karl said. “So the relationship was struck up. They recognised the need for somebody else in the control room, somebody who could musically interpret what they were trying to say. It works well as a team because when they hear something, Albhy can say to the musicians, ‘Let’s try it like that.’ The musician’s paying a lot of attention to his instrument, what he’s trying to do, and he’s not thinking about the song, so to speak. Whereas the brothers are thinking about the song. They’re not playing the instruments, so they don’t know the technicalities of trying to get a particular sound out of an instrument. Myself, I’m involved in trying to capture it on tape. So Albhy is really the extra hand, he’s in ’cause he can interpret what’s going on.”
“Albhy was a musician,” Blue conceded, “but we didn’t need Albhy there to interpret their ideas — we’d already been working with them, we’d already done Main Course. I was responsible for actually pulling Albhy in because Karl said to me, ‘Oh, I need somebody there’ — because if you talk to him about music, he couldn’t relate to it. Albhy was Karl’s sidekick, and Karl said, ‘I’d like Albhy to be there so that when you ask me a question about music, you can ask Albhy,’ so he was Karl’s guide, if you like, for when none of us were in the studio. That was initially it, and maybe Albhy saw dollar signs and went to … a big lawyer and got a contract straight. He most probably couldn’t believe his luck because here was a guy whose luggage consisted of a cardboard box tied up with a little piece of string. In fact, when we went to Canada to mix the Children Of The World album, we arrived in Montreal in the middle of a snowstorm. They must have set the luggage down on trolleys on the runway because by the time the luggage came in on the carousel, Albhy’s cardboard box had disintegrated and his t-shirts and pants were just lying there. I can’t remember exactly how he gathered his belongings together but it was most probably a duty-free carrier bag that he stuffed them into.” To be fair to Albhy, he wasn’t one of Atlantic’s big wage-earners at that point. Jerry Wexler recalled paying him something in the region of $50 a week, as he put it, “to hang around”.
“Albhy and Karl also got themselves down as producers. Good luck to them for getting the business side of things sorted out first. They think they got their priorities right, whereas Dennis, Alan and I have only ourselves to blame. We were into the music first and were genuinely excited about what we were creating. Production credits were the farthest things from any of our minds and perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, there was a certain amount of naïveté on our part. Karl and Albhy were very clever in getting a co-production credit for Children of the World and future albums, and that is still a contentious point with me because some people put more into the production side than others … We could have done it without Albhy, it most probably wouldn’t have been a lot different.”
The album was given the working title Pacer. Somewhere along the line, as the recording progressed, the working title for the album was changed to Slipstream, but this was then used by Sutherland Brothers & Quiver. Next in line was Horizon which, in turn, became Response when it was decided that that might have been too close to their 1967 album Horizontal, but by the time it was completed, the LP took its name from its final track, Children Of The World.
“We do about two weeks work before we go into the studio,” Barry explained, “which is all preliminary ideas … which seem better written at the moment rather than three months before. Then, just before recording, you are really fresh, whatever you think of is right now.” The first song which emerged from the sessions with the new productio
n team was ‘You Should Be Dancing’.
“The bass riff on ‘You Should Be Dancing’ — that’s all Maurice — only he could have done that,” Blue observed. “He just goes out and sings stuff to the brass players … the string lines as well, Barry would sing the string parts and I’d sit and play those.”
The group had begun work on the track before Albhy came into the equation, but he suggested a looser feel, adding percussion. Stephen Stills was also in Miami recording at the time, and he was brought in, along with session player Joe Lala, to play percussion on the track. “Stephen was pretty loaded most of the time, but I had known Stephen from before, so I kind of made the introductions,” Albhy recalled. It was the beginning of a long friendship.
“I was always hanging around with Stephen,” Blue Weaver said. “Stephen was in one studio, we were in another. I’d go in and do things for him, he’d come in and play with us… ”
“Barry Gibb and I were just sitting around saying whatever happened to the good old days when we sang each other’s songs,” Stills recalled. “If you nicked something from someone, they’d nick something back later. Everybody got so protective and competitive which really destroyed a lot of great music. That destroyed the artistic end of the business that was essential to the great upheaval of music in the Sixties.”
Stills would go on to play bass on the demo for The Bee Gees’ ‘Rest Your Love On Me’ and even got involved with collaborating with the group on an unreleased song. “We wrote a song together one day,” he recalled. “We made an incredible track. Incredible! I’ve yet to finish the lyrics. They wanna use it in the movie of Grease.”