The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  When the Rolling Stone discussion turned to their music, Barry insisted, “I didn’t know that anyone was going to call it disco but they did. It certainly wasn’t in our minds, and we certainly wouldn’t have called it disco, we thought it was R&B. We liked The Stylistics and The Delphonics and people who sang in falsetto. That was interesting to us because of our new found falsetto thing. So we weren’t thinking in terms of what you might call the music, and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ was born of those feelings and the lyric of ‘New York Times effect on man’. New York was, in fact, having that effect on the whole world at that point. Not so much California but the Studio 54 and the nightlife and the young people trying to find a future for themselves where without this nightlife, there might not be a future. I think the ‘Tony’ character in Saturday Night Fever depicted that.”

  “We weren’t looking at Fever as a career vehicle,” Maurice insisted. “We just got caught up in the Robert Stigwood syndrome. Anyone he managed, he also wanted involved in his film projects as opposed to keeping them separate, and I think we got blinded by that. He asked for three songs, we gave him three songs off what would have been our next studio album. We played him demo tracks of ‘If I Can’t Have You’, [‘Night Fever’] and ‘More Than A Woman’. He asked if we could write it more discoey. We’d also written a song called ‘Saturday Night’ but there were so many songs called ‘Saturday Night’, even one by The Bay City Rollers, so when we rewrote it for the movie, we called it ‘Stayin’ Alive’. Then we wrote ‘Night Fever’ and Stigwood changed the movie’s title from Saturday Night to Saturday Night Fever.”

  In 1989, Barry claimed, “We didn’t know what the film was about. We didn’t know there was a conflict of images which could perhaps hurt us later on. In those days you didn’t think too much about images. It sort of grew, blew out of proportion. We didn’t realise that’s what was … gonna happen.”

  In 1997, Robin gave a typically facetious reply as to how The Bee Gees came to write the music for Saturday Night Fever. “We had been down on our luck, and someone said, ‘Would you write some songs about a painter who goes out dancing in the evenings?’ so we did. If we’d known Travolta would make such a good job of it, we wouldn’t have knocked out any old rubbish and sung in those stupid voices!”

  Shifting gears into serious mode, Robin explained, “We’d had successful albums right up until Saturday Night Fever, and what was happening when Fever came about was, we were recording our new album in the north of France … And we’d written about and recorded about four or five songs for the new album when Stigwood rang from LA and said, ‘We’re putting together this little film, low budget, called Tribal Rites Of A Saturday Night. Would you have any songs on hand?’ and we said, ‘Look, we can’t, we haven’t any time to sit down and write for a film.’ We didn’t know what it was about …”

  “When Robert explained this plot about some Italian kids in Bay Ridge, I never thought it would come together,” Gershon recalled. “But as Robert played me the tapes of just the vocals and acoustic guitar, it was clear something very, very special was happening. They were all hits.”

  Robin said that the group offered the four songs already written for their next studio album to Stigwood, telling him if he liked the tracks, he could put them in the film. “We sent them to him, he reviewed them, he said he liked three or four, which was ‘Stayin’ Alive’, ‘Night Fever’, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ and one that we didn’t do ourselves, but Yvonne Elliman did, ‘If I Can’t Have You’. And that was used, so then we didn’t see any more about or hear any more about the film till they asked us about the title. They put Saturday on the front of one of our songs, Saturday Night Fever, atour suggestion and then that’s when the film came out. Of course, it was a low budget film without any hype. It was word of mouth that completely took the film off.”

  Somehow the group and their co-producers Albhy and Karl found the time to finish mixing the recording of the Los Angeles Forum concert, in between writing and recording the new material. The double album, Here At Last … Bee Gees … Live, was released in May, 1977, with the live single from the LP, ‘Edge Of The Universe’, following in July. It almost seems an afterthought, overshadowed by Fever.

  The soundtrack’s ballad, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, was “one song where Blue [Weaver] had a tremendous amount of input,” Albhy Galuten admitted. “There was a lot of things from his personality. That’s one where his contribution was quite significant, not in a songwriting sense, though when you play piano, it’s almost like writing the song … Blue had a lot of influence in the piano structure of that song.”

  “One morning, it was just myself and Barry in the studio,” Blue said. “He said, ‘Play the most beautiful chord you know,’ and I just played … what happened was, I’d throw chords at him and he’d say, ‘No, not that chord,’ and I’d keep moving around and he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s a nice one’ and we’d go from there. Then I’d play another thing — sometimes, I’d be following the melody line that he already had and sometimes I’d most probably lead him somewhere else by doing what I did … I think Robin came in at some point. Albhy also came in at one point and I was playing an inversion of a chord, and he said, ‘Oh no, I don’t think it should be that inversion, it should be this,’ and so we changed it to that, but by the time Albhy had come in, the song was sort of there.

  “We started work about 12 o’clock maybe one o’clock in the morning, and that demo was done at about three or four o’clock in the morning … Albhy played piano on the demo — I’d drunk too much or gone to bed or something … Then I woke up the next morning and listened to that … and then put some strings on it and that was it. Then we actually recorded it for real in Criteria. The chords and everything stayed the same — the only thing that changes from that demo is that when we got to Criteria, I worked out the electric piano part which became the basis of the song. It was the sound of the piano that makes the feel of that song.”

  Despite his unexplained absence, Albhy agreed that Blue’s spirit remained integral to the song. “Even though I did the demo because he wasn’t there, there were a lot of things from his personality [on the track].”

  “A lot of the textures you hear in the song were added on later,” Barry revealed. “We didn’t change any lyrics, mind you, but the way we recorded it was a little different than the way we wrote it in terms of construction. A little different for the better, I think … The title ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ we thought was perfect because of all the connotations involved in that sentence, and that was simply it.”

  “Every now and then a song comes along that has universal appeal,” Robin said. “Not every song has it but I think that one has, it’s either in the music itself or in the lyrics, but there is something about what someone says in a lyric that gives it automatic universal appeal every time you hear it. Personalities are examined in that tune, but female or male aren’t even mentioned in it. It has universal connotations and it clicks with everyone. It’s like a song you hear and never get tired of, and I think that ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ is one of those sort of songs that you can hear over and over again and not get tired of for the same reasons.”

  “It was something that was special to me at the time,” Blue said, “because I had been involved in the conception of the thing, and I was away from home, I think a lot of my emotions went into that song as well, even though lyrically I didn’t do anything.”

  There was some talk of Yvonne Elliman débuting ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, but Robert Stigwood soon quashed those ideas. “Robert said, ‘You’ve got to do this song yourself, you should not give it to anybody,’ “ recalled Barry.

  “I felt very strongly about that because when I heard The Bee Gees themselves, it was one of the most moving ballads I ever heard,” Stigwood added. Yvonne Elliman was given ‘If I Can’t Have You’ instead.

  At this time it was still very unusual to release a movie soundtrack song ahead of the movie but, as RSO intended, the song buil
t up interest in the coming film. The B-side was ‘Can’t Keep A Good Man Down’, a song from Here At Last… Live, so nothing else hinted at what was about to happen.

  * * *

  A tale so of ten told that it has passed into Bee Gees’ legend is that Robert Stigwood said, “Give me eight minutes — eight minutes, three moods. I want frenzy at the beginning. Then I want some passion. Then I want some w-i-i-i-ld frenzy!”

  In fact, after hearing the demo for ‘Stayin’ Alive’, Blue Weaver said, “Stigwood came in and said, ’Oh, they’re on the dance floor at this time and suddenly he sees her across the floor and it goes in slow motion and they walk towards each other… ’ So we wrote this whole section in ‘Stayin’ Alive’ where it goes down into slow section … but we threw it out in the end … There are obviously reasons why it never went on there in the first place.”

  “Robert has this thing about songs that break up in the middle with a slow piece,” Robin observed. “He did the same thing with ‘Nights On Broadway’.”

  “Robert wanted a scene that was eight minutes long,” Barry explained, “where John Travolta was dancing with his girl. It would have a nice dance tempo, a romantic interlude and all hell breaking loose at the end. I said, ‘Robert, that’s crazy. We want to put this song out as a single, and we don’t think the rhythm should break. It should go from beginning to end with the same rhythm and get stronger all the way. To get into a lilting ballad just doesn’t make sense.’ The film got changed.”

  Blue still has fond memories of the extended version of the track. “I want to mix the long version of ‘Stayin’ Alive’,” he said in 1999, “because I think it would do them a lot of good inasmuch as I think it would be very interesting to people to know that little story … they’re going to see each other across this dance floor, it’s going into slow motion — I think it’s a great version. And the end, as well, is different because it’s actually got synthesizer bass.”

  Next Stigwood asked them why they were singing ‘Stayin’ Alive’ rather than ‘Saturday Night’, according to Maurice. “We said because there are so many bloody records out called ‘Saturday Night’. It’s corny; it’s a terrible title.”

  Barry added, “We said, ‘Either it’s “Stayin’ Alive” or we’ll keep the song.’ “ Albhy Galuten recalled that after Stigwood had phoned the group, they agreed to get together some songs for him. “So of course, none of us had seen the film or even read the article, let alone the screenplay. ‘Stayin’ Alive’, when we first heard it, was just the three brothers singing with Barry on guitar. By the time they finished playing, I had the guitar lick that was used in the song figured out.

  “So we were working on writing the song, sitting out in the studio. So that we could practise the groove, we had some little drum machine, like an organ drum machine, awful sounding, and that would just run in a little loop, and [Barry] would strum the guitar and work on lyrics and the melody. I think the other brothers were there, the three of them sitting. This was kind of exciting.”

  “As writers you have to use a certain amount of imagination,” Robin explained. “Everybody thinks that sometimes writing is biographical and sometimes it is, but you would be exhausted if every song was about you, you know, if you actually experienced everything you write. The amazing thing about writing songs like ‘Stayin’ Alive’ is that we never actually saw the script. We never really knew what was going on, it just so happened that the songs worked, especially ‘Stayin’ Alive’ … It’s a very straightforward song about survival in the city that’s what it was and that’s really the statement.” Another of those amazing songs was also under construction.

  “ ‘Night Fever’ started off because Barry walked in one morning when I was trying to work out something,” Blue recalled. “I always wanted to do a disco version of ‘Theme From A Summer Place’ … by The Percy Faith Orchestra or something — it was a big hit in the Sixties. I was playing that, and Barry said, ‘What was that?’ and I said, “ ‘Theme From A Summer Place’,” and Barry said, ‘No, it wasn’t.’ It was new — Barry heard the idea — I was playing it on a string synthesizer — and sang the riff over it.”

  Albhy continued, “For ‘Night Fever’ the group had the hook-line and rhythm — they usually pat their legs to set up a song’s rhythm when they first sing it — and parts of the verses … They had the emotion, same as on the record. We put down drums and acoustic guitar first, so the feel was locked in. The piano part was put on before the bass, then the heavy guitar parts. We had the sound, but we needed something there to shake it so we used the thunder sound.”

  Echoing the beginnings of their first international hit ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’, the writing of ‘Night Fever’ was completed sitting on a staircase, utilising the natural echo. The only difference was that ‘Mining Disaster’ was written in Polydor’s London studios, and ‘Night Fever’ had the more atmospheric setting of a thirteenth century French chateau.

  That staircase had other claims to fame, according to Robin. “You know, years ago there were so many pornographic films made at the Chateau,” he revealed. “The staircase where we wrote ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, ‘Stayin’ Alive’, all those songs, was the same staircase where there’ve been six classic lesbian porno scenes filmed. I was watching a movie one day called Kinky Women Of Bourbon Street, and all of a sudden, there’s this chateau, and I said, ‘It’s the Chateau!’ These girls, these dodgy birds, are having a scene on the staircase that leads from the front door up to the studio. There were dildos hanging off the stairs and everything. I thought, ‘Gawd, we wrote “Night Fever” there!’ ”

  ‘Night Fever’ was the movie’s big dance number, and besides the drums, it is full of rhythms played on guitars and keyboards. ‘Night Fever’ uses two different verses and is so feverishly fast that it runs through verse-chorus pairs four times in only three minutes.

  After ‘Night Fever’ had been recorded, there was a serious illness in Dennis Bryon’s family so the drummer jetted back to Cardiff. Barry was anxious to complete the recording of ‘Stayin’ Alive’, but they had no drummer. Albhy said, “I think [Barry] was thinking about using that drum machine, which really sounded terrible, to put it down. So I had the idea … I said to Karl, why don’t we make a tape loop out of one bar of the drums from ‘Night Fever’ and set it to the right tempo and use that, and then we can replace it with Dennis when he comes back.

  “It’s one of those happy accidents. We picked a bar out of ‘Night Fever’ that sounded pretty good, and Karl took a seven-inch plastic reel and we used a two-track tape machine. We took this bar, recorded some drums from ‘Night Fever’ — Barry and I listened and picked out a bar with a particularly good feeling [then] recorded that bar of drums. Karl spliced it together into a long loop and then, on the two-track machine, had it going around through the capstan, and had a mike stand turned sideways, and the tape hung over that, and he had a seven-inch tape reel in the bottom hanging from the tape loop. It goes around through the tape recorder on one side, the other side goes over the thing and hangs, so that seven-inch tape reel was just enough balance so it stays in place while the motors turn it around. He made this drum loop that became ‘Stayin’ Alive’. We overdubbed to that, thinking we’d replace it with Dennis’s drums.”

  Galuten explained that when The Bee Gees are working on a song, very few lyrics are done in the early stages of composing. “Only the chorus and key words are locked in, and the rest is scat vocals, because they find nice holes rhythmically to put words in that way. So they end up putting different lyrics in different places, which is of ten very creative.”

  Galuten credits himself with the distinctive bass ‘Stayin’ Alive’ line in the finished record. “The result was it got recorded very quickly,” he said. “I showed the guitar parts to Alan [Kendall], and we punched them in. The bass line was mine as well, and I used to joke, for the songs on that album, if I had to name every note on every track, I could do it. By the time we had overdubbed t
he pieces, Dennis came back, but we could never change the drums. It happened to be a great feeling loop. We ended up using that same loop on ‘More Than A Woman’ … It was a great feeling bar.”

  As happens all too of ten when artists are in creative mode and ideas are flying around, disagreements over who actually did what are common. It therefore comes as no surprise to learn that Blue Weaver’s memories of this important event differ slightly. “First of all,” he said, “Maurice deserves a lot of the credit for the bass part because I believe Albhy picked up on a bass line that Maurice originally played. Also, I believe the guitar riff was possibly inspired by my trying to sound a bit like Stevie Wonder’s clavinet. I think Albhy thought (quite rightly) that we shouldn’t use the clavinet because it was too much like ‘Superstition’ and he came up with a similar riff inspired by one of his favourite Miami recordings.”

  The veteran record producer, Sir George Martin, said, “The great thing about ‘Stayin’ Alive’ is that it had a great guitar hook to start with which set up the theme, that pulsating beat. It’s no coincidence, by the way, that the disco beat of 120 beats per minute coincides with the heartbeat of your heart when you’re excited. This was a key thing which underlined the whole tune, and when the vocals came in, the vocals were so designed that they pushed that beat further. They anticipated in many cases, they came in before the bar line. All the time it was surging forwards to go with it which also accentuated that it leaned on the words. When you have that, combined with [The Bee Gees’] impeccable three part harmonies, it was electrifying. Their harmonies also have a kind of paradox because everybody knows they have quite high voices, but this was a very macho song but portrayed by almost feminine voices, but beautifully done.”