The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  “They take [young people] off the streets so there’s not juvenile delinquents growing up to be desperate criminals or whatever. The Police Athletic League are the people who grab these kids off the street and give them something to do.”

  Nevin Graham, the director of developments for the PAL told reporters, “The Bee Gees’ donation was the largest we received from one source the entire year. And The Bee Gees’ donation was the most pleasing we have ever received because it was done out of the goodness of their hearts.”

  The Muscular Dystrophy Foundation also benefited when the group received their second AMPEX Golden Reel award, this time for Children Of The World.

  The final concert of the tour at the Forum in Los Angeles on December 20 was recorded for their contractually obligatory live album, and the group returned to their homes to spend a quiet Christmas with their families, before returning to a hectic pace in the coming year.

  *Dancing at lunchtime.

  27

  SEX, DRUGS & DISCO!

  WHILE THE MOVE towards R&B had proved so successful with Main Course and Children Of The World, by 1977 The Bee Gees were all too aware of the jeopardy of becoming complacent. “It was a good change, but it’s by no means the last,” Barry said. “We have no intention of stopping in this one area. We’re going to try to embrace all kinds of areas as long as we exist as a band. It’s not something you can put into words. It’s just a feeling between the three of us, and how our writing is stepping up in scale.

  “The next album will be more progressive and have more variety. We want to get a little more intricate; we want to add a little more melody and place more importance on the lyrics. Last year we had a pop hit, an R&B hit and a country hit, which must prove that you shouldn’t dwell in one area. We just want to keep developing.”

  One of the proposed new developments for the group was to branch out into films, but for the moment there was the task of mixing their first live album and writing the songs for their next studio album.

  In April, 1977, The Bee Gees flew to Paris and began work at the Chateau D’Herouville in the north of France, the studio which Elton John immortalised when he recorded Honky Chateau there in 1972. According to all accounts, when they arrived at the studio, it was not exactly what they were expecting.

  “I recall that the Gibbs thought the Chateau was going to be some elaborate production like Versailles,” said Fredric Gershon, then President of the Stigwood Group. “Instead it was a cold, depressing place. They were more than a little cranky.”

  “When Elton did his album, the studio had just been built, and it was fabulous,” Maurice recalled. “By the time we went there, we felt like we were waiting for the Americans to come and liberate us. The place had gone downhill, and the studio itself had no atmosphere.”

  “One of the reasons they were put in D’Herouville was because there were few distractions,” related David English. “It was in the middle of nowhere. It’s very strange because the studio is haunted. There was an axe through the console of one of the rooms of the studio, and that studio had never been used again. There was also this cook who was crazy on Keith Richards, and he used to get up and do impersonations, jump up and down and sing.”

  “It was a pretty funky studio,” Albhy Galuten agreed. “[It] had a window that didn’t really close all the time ’cause you needed the air, and it was right by the piano, so it was very hard to keep the piano in tune, by an open window, as you can imagine.

  “We got it because it was cheap, and also because we’d originally gone there to record and mix the live album. Something about by recording it outside the United States and mixing it, they didn’t have to pay American taxes or some such thing.”

  Nonetheless, they soldiered on and began work on their next album. “We started recording our new album with a track called ‘If I Can’t Have You’,” Maurice said. “About a week after we got there and started warming up and getting used to the studio, Robert phoned us.”

  Barry recalled that Stigwood told them to press on with mixing the live album, putting the studio album on the back burner until it was finished. Only a few days had passed when their manager phoned them again. “Robert called me up and said, ’I’m doing this film called Tribal Rights Of A New Saturday Night from an article by Nik Cohn in the New York [magazine] …”

  * * *

  As in most undertakings in which many people are involved, there are contrasting recollections about how the project that would become Saturday Night Fever actually started. Ask a hundred participants, and you’ll get a hundred different answers, most equally convincing in their sincerity.

  According to Robert Stigwood, about six months before the story was published, Nik Cohn, a former London based music writer now living in New York, had come to him with an idea. He told Stigwood, whom he had known from his days in England, that he wanted to write a screenplay or at least the story for a film. Stigwood said, “Okay, if you have an idea, come and see me again, and we’ll talk about it.”

  Half a year passed by with no word from the aspiring screenwriter, when by chance a magazine cover caught Stigwood’s eye. He recalled, “I picked up New York magazine and saw this cover story and Nik’s name. So I immediately read it, and I thought, ‘This is a wonderful film subject.’ So I called Nik up and said, ‘You’re crazy! You come to me about writing a story for a picture. This is it!’ And I made a deal with his agent in 24 hours to acquire the rights.”

  “There’d been a hit record called ‘The Hustle’, Van McCoy’s record, that suggested there was a club culture … that wasn’t being written up,” Nik Cohn explained, “but I started to go to discotheques in Manhattan … I met this … black dancer, and he became my guide to the scene … With him we started going to gay clubs, watched the dancing there, and he said, ‘Well, there are these Italian kids over in Brooklyn, you ought to take a look at them.’

  “It was a very different kind of disco dancing than [in] the Sixties with everyone sort of waggling themselves around and waving their arms in the air. As soon as ‘The Hustle’ came in, I suppose it was a primitive version of line dancing … That’s what it was, everybody would line up and do pre-ordained steps. The leader would sort of call out the claps, and that was the earliest form of disco dancing.”

  Nik Cohn’s account of how the film came about included the story that his wife took a call for him, which she said was from a “Rabbi Stigfeldt”. He didn’t bother to return the call, thinking a local synagogue was seeking donations, but Robert Stigwood persisted. “He called until he got me on the line,” Cohn said. “We talked, he said he wanted to do the film. He called my agent to make the deal and she had his papers from his lawyer the same day.

  “The whole thing was completely baffling to me,” he added. “I mean, people didn’t make films out of articles or short stories, films were films, magazines were magazines, sometimes books were turned into films but never magazine stories. I didn’t feel that my article or story was a sacred document. It wasn’t the most important thing I’d written, certainly not to me …”

  According to Anthony Haden-Guest in his book The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco And The Culture Of The Night, Nik Cohn was fully aware of the film potential of his article and in fact had given a pre-publication copy of the story to Kevin McCormick, with whom he had been collaborating on another film project. McCormick read it and turned it over to Robert Stigwood.

  Stigwood read the story and phoned his lawyer and partner, RSO chief Freddie Gershon. Stigwood told him, “I see a hundred-million-dollar movie.”

  “There are no hundred-million-dollar movies,” Gershon retorted. “You are crazy.”

  At that time, Gershon said, disco was happening but had not yet become the worldwide sensation that it would later. “It was the very smart set and the gay set, which was sometimes the same set,” he continued. “It hadn’t spilled over. But Robert saw this was happening in Brazil. The year we went on the maiden voyage of the Concorde from Paris to Rio, Rio
was rough and very exotic, and the music never stopped. He saw it happening in England, France, Germany. It was going down the social strata. Five years earlier it would have been deemed effete for men to even be on a dance floor. Now men were becoming peacocks. It was Robert’s instinct that a Tony Manero existed in every community in the world.”

  Gershon got an option on Tribal Rites Of The New Saturday Night for $10,000, with Kevin McCormick assigned to produce, but before the deal had been finalised, seasoned producer Ray Stark expressed his interest in the story. Stigwood clinched the deal by offering Cohn the option of writing the first draft of the screenplay for a guaranteed $150,000 and agreeing to Cohn’s demand for a percentage cut of the soundtrack royalties. It was unprecedented for a writer to be given a share of the soundtrack royalties, but Stigwood was determined to make the film. Anyway, soundtrack albums were hardly big sellers.

  Stigwood and Gershon travelled to Los Angeles and hired a director, John Avildson, whose work on Rocky Stigwood admired. Avildson insisted on working with Serpico scriptwriter Norman Wexler. Stigwood acquiesced, and Wexler was hired, although no one bothered to inform Nik Cohn, busily working on his script.

  Not that Cohn minded. “I was just riding on its coattails, extremely pleased whatever happened, that was just fine. I could see that Norman Wexler was extremely skilled, and he’d made a commercial film,” he said graciously. “He got [the dialogue] right! He got it as right as I got it wrong.”

  “The person that did the most research was Norman Wexler,” Stigwood admitted, “and he really did hang out at all those clubs, the rhythm of the dialogue, he got it perfectly. I wouldn’t touch it, you know I wouldn’t water it down. Because he wrote Serpico, he knew it had to be gritty — you can’t gloss over the way those kids talk.”

  Gershon and Stigwood were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel during the negotiations. One evening as Gershon was sitting in the living room of their bungalow, he recalled, “I hear a screaming in the bedroom! ‘Quick! Quick!’”

  He dashed into the bedroom and found Stigwood watching Welcome Back, Kotter. Stigwood had found his Tony Manero.

  John Travolta had previously auditioned for Robert Stigwood when he was casting Jesus Christ, Superstar for its Broadway run. Stigwood liked what he saw but felt that Travolta was too young to fit in with the rest of the cast. “But I remembered his name,” Stigwood said, “and I was intrigued a few years later to see him pop up on Welcome Back, Kotter as Vinnie Barbarino. I could see the potential building for him, so I offered him a firm three-picture deal, pay or play guarantee of a million dollars. That came from left field.

  “[John] made a great crack at the press reception when his film deal was announced. He said, ‘I auditioned for him five years ago, and I just heard back!’ ”

  Although at that point John Travolta was best known for his role as the educationally challenged Barbarino, he had a wealth of experience in TV, stage and film work and had even recorded an album. Still, the contract with Stigwood was quite a coup for a young actor as yet untried as a leading man.

  “It was very unusual, but very typical of Robert’s belief in himself,” Freddie Gershon said. “It guaranteed that John Travolta would be paid for three pictures, even if the first one bombed. But Stigwood owned him, the way the old studios used to own an artist. Like a chattel.”

  Shooting for the film was scheduled for January 1977 at Paramount. Stigwood was dealing with the studio chief, Barry Diller. Diller’s reputation as a shrewd, tough businessman preceded him, but according to Freddie Gershon, “He also had the ability to step back and say, ‘I don’t agree with you but I will defer to you.’ Had he not done that, there would have been a debacle, because he was under a lot of pressure to make this a PG movie.”

  For a film targeting the youth market, making the film an R-rated picture seemed incomprehensible. The language used in the film was the main objection. “How are the kids going to get in? There were many fights,” Gershon explained. “I think Robert allowed a few ‘fucks’ and ‘sucks’ to be taken out as a concession.”

  “I was a bit worried about the language,” Stigwood conceded.

  The next problem to be solved was the music — there wasn’t any. Stigwood and Gershon had lost their concentration on the film and were occupied with negotiations to poach The Rolling Stones from Atlantic Records to sign with RSO. Proposals flew back and forth from their suite at the Plaza Athenee to the Stones at the Georges V Hotel and their long-time business manager, Prince Rupert Lowenstein at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Lowenstein was keeping Atlantic Records founder, Ahmet Ertegun, informed of each new offer, using Stigwood’s bids to try to raise their stakes with Atlantic.

  “Robert finally said they were getting very, very greedy. Very, very, very greedy!” Gershon recalled. Stigwood conceded he had had enough and dropped the idea of signing Mick Jagger and company for RSO. Stigwood was nothing if not gracious in defeat, and in typical fashion, he concluded the negotiations with a flourish.

  “Robert and Ahmet were very old friends,” Gershon said. “Robert had had it. He said, ‘I’ve gone the limit on this deal,’ and he sent Ahmet a bottle of Louis Roederer on his account.”

  Stigwood turned his attentions back to his film project and the task at hand of providing music. He made a simple phone call to a recording studio outside Paris. Enter The Bee Gees.

  As far as Saturday Night Fever is concerned, there is a discrepancy between what the Gibbs said then, what they say now, not to mention fluctuating opinions during the Eighties. To date, Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb have spent more than 20 years alternately defending and disparaging the film, its music and its impact on the group.

  Maurice’s memory of events is sometimes clouded by the alcoholism which gripped him at the time. “We wrote the entire musical score of Saturday Night Fever in a matter of hours,” he boasted in 1978. “We spent as much time at the premiere party as we did in composing the music!”

  Barry gives a more considered version of events. He says that the songs for Saturday Night Fever were born out of four or five weeks of horrible weather and being miles from civilisation. “All of those songs were for our own album,” he said in 1989. “They weren’t for Fever at all. Robert just happened to hear those four or five songs and said he wanted them for the movie, and ‘Please don’t make an album, this will be your new album.’ So we said okay. ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, ‘Stayin’ Alive’, ‘More Than A Woman’, ‘If I Can’t Have You’ — these things were all done in a chateau in France in really bad weather, with nothing else to do … Not even having television was actually very conducive to songwriting. It really worked well. There was no other form of entertainment, so you literally had to go to work. We couldn’t be lazy. The record for ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ was mixed about six times. ‘Stayin’ Alive’ was mixed about six times.”

  Ten years later, Barry claimed that when Robert Stigwood called about the film, he asked for suggestions for songs because The Bee Gees had never done any songs for a movie, and it might be a good experience. “So I said, ‘I’ll call you back, let me just think about it.’ So, about an hour later, I called him back and said, ‘There were three titles come to mind. One is ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and one is ‘Night Fever’, and I suggest you don’t call the film Tribal Rights Of A New Saturday Night. You’ve got to give it something people will remember, and something much shorter.’ I suggested ‘Night Fever’ as perhaps being the title of the film, and I remember Robert retorting … ‘No, that’s too pornographic, that’s too hot, we can’t use that.’ I said, ‘But those are the suggestions I have right off the bat.’ ”

  Maybe there was no TV to keep them amused, but there were other recreational pursuits. Two years further down the line, they would reveal to Rolling Stone magazine that their clear-cut image wasn’t completely deserved, and that for “Barry, Robin and Maurice” you could substitute “potty, pilly and pissy”.

  For Robin, “speed” was but a distant memory and he confessed
that “grass” made him confused, forgetful and paranoid. “If you can’t face reality and be happy with it,” he explained, “what’s the point of living?

  “But we’re not choirboys either,” he hinted.

  It appeared that success was not the only thing that had been going to their heads. Barry admitted to having tried cocaine, but clearly the chemical experience wasn’t pleasant for him either. “My nose was like a block of concrete for a week,” he told People magazine.

  Marijuana appeared to be an acceptable alternative but Hugh Gibb was confused by its appeal. “There’s nobody yet explained to me what pot does for them,” he said.

  His wife Barbara also entered the debate agreeing, “I’ve had a puff with Barry, and it doesn’t do a thing to me. I don’t say to people, ‘Don’t do it,’ but it wouldn’t do for me.”

  It was left to Hugh to put things in their proper perspective. “Barry doesn’t smoke it neat,” he clarified. “He pulls a cigarette to pieces and mixes it. Somebody said to me, it makes you more aware. I said I’m quite bloody well aware without it!”

  This unusual procedure came as something of a surprise to Aerosmith’s rhythm guitarist, Brad Whitford, who worked with them the following year. “Barry Gibb was rolling cigarettes out of a plastic bag full of tobacco, pot, and hash, which kept something light going all day.”

  For Maurice, drugs were less of an issue, as he stated rather pointedly, “I consider marijuana no worse than having a bloody drink,” before claiming that he hyperventilated on grass and, despite so much time spent in the company of individual Beatles, didn’t even know what LSD looked like.

  The youngest Bee Gee was facing an entirely different demon altogether and his mother was evidently very concerned about the long term effects of his alcohol problem, after being persuaded by New York reporter Cynthia Heimel to compare the respective effects of booze and coke. “[Cocaine’s] not as bad as whisky,” she felt provoked into saying, “because whisky makes you really ill.” Concerned about the potential of liver damage, and perhaps feeling cornered into justifying her remark, she added naively, “Your sinuses can always be repaired.”