by Hector Cook
When Kim discovered she was pregnant, she hoped the news would help him to get his life back on track, and in the beginning, she said, “He was thrilled and excited about the baby. He had only one misgiving, that it had come at a bad point in his career— but he got over that and told everyone the news … We planned to have four kids, and everything was going to coast along just normally like everybody else.
“But as usual, dope and cocaine took priority over everything else. He blew most of our money — we had an income of $200 a week — on drugs.”
Kim had threatened many times before to leave him if he didn’t give up drugs, but her pregnancy made the decision final, and a record industry appearance helped her carry out her plans. “I just couldn’t carry on with the responsibility of having a child and looking after him as well. So one day when he was out of town, I left him.”
Distressed and ill, she fled to Pasadena, to the home of friends of her family, Judi and Bill Daniels. The Daniels and Reeder family had corresponded for years about their common interest in dogs, but Andy had discouraged Kim from seeing them when they first arrived in Los Angeles. Bill and Judi took her in and put her on a plane back to Australia, back to her parents in Rydalmere.
Kim was two months pregnant and suffering from a congenital disease of the kidneys. The Air New Zealand flight crew “were beautiful to me,” she said. “They didn’t know who I was, but they laid me down in the plane and couldn’t do enough forme. When I came back, I was pretty sick. I’d been worrying to death. I was eating like a horse, but the weight just kept dropping off me. I was really ill and deeply depressed.”
Andy phoned her the week after she left and promised to return to Australia for the birth. It was a promise that he would not keep.
The Australian press had a field day with the story that Andy refused to send any money for support — possibly in an effort to press Kim to return to him. Kim’s medical bills were heavy but had to be paid, so she went on the dole, collecting a $45 a week welfare cheque. “He refuses to maintain me, and I am just existing on the paltry Australian Social Security hand-out. He thinks that now he has had a hit and become a star, he can walk all over anyone. Every time I call, one of his protectors picks up the phone and tells me he is not available. I won’t be calling again — he knows where to get in touch with me.”
On July 29, with ‘I Just Want To Be Your Everything’ at number one in the American charts, Andy played the first of two concert appearances in Canada, as the support act for April Wine. With him were Tony Messina, still in tow as his personal assistant, The Bee Gees’ American tour manager, Alan LaMagna, and Andy’s new personal manager, Jim Dayley. Replacing the session musicians who recorded with him were a young band of musicians he’d met in California: Phoenix, Arizona natives, Richard Page and Steve George on keyboards and backing vocals, Peter Lyon [Leinheisen] on lead guitar, Jerry Manfredi on bass and Russ Battelene on drums.
Andy admitted that he suffered from stage fright. “For live appearances… there’s always those few minutes of nerves. Especially before a big show, I get really scared.”
Still, he preferred the immediate feedback that he got from being before a live audience. “I like touring,” he said. “Recording is nice when you see the end result … But the stage is nice — spontaneous.”
On August 3, he began a 23-date tour of the Unites States at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, supporting Gibb family friend, Neil Sedaka. “Some of [the venues] were big open-air arenas, and the audience reaction was incredible,” Andy said later. “It’s been a great thing to go by. I mean, going out to Neil Sedaka’s audience … and seeing twenty-one thousand people and seeing the banners across the audience with my name on. It was amazing.”
Drugs were all too present before and after the concerts, although he insisted, “Personally, I’m not a very typical rock’n’roll star you might come across elsewhere. We’re a very close-knit family, and we don’t even go out that of ten. We don’t really socialise; we just basically all sit at home with cups of tea and watch television. I suppose we must be like a slightly cool Osmond family. As we don’t mix too much with other people, I don’t have any fears about the pressures getting to me.
“You build up before the show so much, and you’re such a bag of nerves, you go on and you’re releasing this energy, getting the response from the audience, and it builds you up even higher, even though you become much more relaxed with the audience. It’s funny because it seems as quick as you start, you’re running up the stairs to your dressing room. Then you just sit there and think, ‘Well, that’s it.’ It’s all over again. It’s a strange feeling coming off, I find, and it takes me about three hours to totally unwind.”
There were also a growing number of teenage groupies. “I didn’t really expect anything like that — I just thought I was a songwriter, and I knew I loved performing before audiences,” Andy said. “But I didn’t think for a moment that I could be a strong attraction for girls. Going on tour and seeing it all, I still couldn’t believe it. It was just funny in some places — these young girls, 12 or 13, who were following me around!”
At times, the adulation of his young fans took a more serious tone. “They worry me sometimes,” he revealed. “They get so much emotion inside them. Crying. It’s emotional to see them from the stage. It’s hard to sing and watch them at the same time. To see kids at that age crying — that much broken up over a concert — it makes me feel pretty strange. They lose their mind and get hysterical — it’s really frightening sometimes.”
His single continued to dominate the airwaves. “It’s the hit song of the year,” Andy raved. “It just won’t stop selling.”
Questioned by a journalist whether Kim had accompanied him on the tour, he replied, “No, not this time. It gets to be a bit much, and she’s enjoying the sun in Miami. She’s near the rest of my family, so she doesn’t get too lonesome.”
The final show of the Sedaka tour was an appearance at the Nebraska State Fair in Lincoln, Nebraska on September 4. Before the show, Andy was on edge, asking if it would be safe for him to go out and see the attractions at the fair before his set. With the ever-present Tony Messina and members of his band along, Andy wandered unnoticed through the crowds, climbing aboard a helicopter on display at a Navy recruitment post with childlike glee.
After the show, Andy and his band members were full of plans for future recordings and personal appearances. Both Richard Page and Steve George were also budding songwriters, and there was talk of Andy recording one of their songs.
“I was so lucky to have a chance to go on tour with Neil Sedaka,” Andy enthused. “Neil had three generations of audiences: he had his original following and a new following, plus my following in the audience. I found that when I was going out there, all my following was out front for my show, and I was still getting response from the older people, who were … waiting for Neil to come on. It was very encouraging to have people, especially older people, respect my music and like it. That meant a lot to me.”
He was still very aware that his pedigree had made things much easier for him. “I feel very lucky,” he admitted. “I know that people try for years to break into even the lowest level of show business, and I just stepped into the top level. I never even had to audition. So it doesn’t bother me when people connect my break with my brothers, because I realise that, without them, I would not be where I am.”
He commented to The Bee Gees’ fan club, which had been reporting regularly on his progress since 1973, “I was amazed to find that so many people have been following my career for so long. I am really pleased and surprised that everyone seems to know so much about me. What can I say? It’s really fantastic and I really appreciate it.”
Andy and his band headlined at some club dates after the tour, where he continued to be amazed at the reaction of girls in the audience. Still, he was realistic about the advantages he’d had. “I don’t think I would ever have had my first hit if my bro
thers hadn’t been The Bee Gees, and if I hadn’t been with my manager, Robert Stigwood. I know they did it all,” he said modestly. “They gave me the push to go ahead. I think they’re responsible for everything that’s happened to me so far. Things just started jumping and wouldn’t stop, like a dream come true. I never thought it would happen to me.
“It was incredible to me that the single itself — my first single — didn’t show any signs of slowing down. I couldn’t believe it because I know how hard it is to have a hit record, especially when you stop to think that there are hundreds of records released every week. How could I expect my single to compete with all of them?”
But compete it did. For the first time in the history of Billboard’s record charts, a single reached the top of the chart and remained there for five weeks, then dropped to number four, before retaking the number one position and holding for a further five weeks. ‘I Just Want To Be Your Everything’ went on to become the most-played song of 1977.
“I think Barry, my brother, really pinpointed the reason [for its success],” Andy said. “He said it all works with the time of year. If you release a song in the summer that’s right for the summer, it’s a happy song, and ‘I Just Want To Be Your Everything’ was the perfect happy song. I mean, everybody sang along to it. It was a big hit with the industry before it was even released.”
Shortly before the release of his début album, Andy returned to Australia with his parents to open a three-day music festival at Vision Valley in Sydney. One of the first things he did was to contact drummer Trevor Norton. “He called me up to see what I was doing,” Trevor recalled. “He said he wanted me to get a band together ‘pronto’ to open a three day music festival with him at Vision Valley in Sydney.”
By this time, Trevor had moved on from Zenta and was playing with a much heavier outfit called Alcatraze, whose style was radically different from Andy’s pop approach. “I told him that I didn’t think they would be able to cut it,” he said, “so he told me to get some other players together to do this set for the concert.”
Trevor brought together Paddy Lelliott, the former Zenta bass man; Carlton Spencer on keyboards from the Stevie Wright Band and Garry Rowley from Nightshift on lead guitar. “Two days later, we were rehearsing with Andy,” he recalled. “We only had three days to learn the songs, which were ‘I Just Want To Be Your Everything’, ‘(Love Is) Thicker Than Water’, ‘Flowing Rivers’, ‘Words And Music’ and a couple of Bee Gees’ songs.
“It was great to play with him again, and I could see a great change in him — more professional than ever. He was obviously learning a lot over in America and his voice was sounding great. It all went over quite well and Andy was happy enough. The ABC television cameras were there to capture the whole set, and it was on the news that night.
“That was the last time I saw Andy,” Trevor added sadly. “We kept in touch by phone after that day. He was very excited about his first album and sent me a copy personally, but after about 12 months, he stopped communicating.”
The Flowing Rivers album, spurred on by the success of the its first single, ‘I Just Want To Be Your Everything’, entered the Billboard Top 40 on August 27 and remained there for the next 18 weeks, reaching number 19 at its highest position. It would remain on the Billboard Top 100 album chart for the next year — an impressive feat for a new artist. “I don’t think you can pin any one thing on the way my voice and songwriting have developed. A lot of people say my album, Flowing Rivers, sounds like The Bee Gees, but if I sang or wrote any differently than I do now, it wouldn’t be me at all,” he explained. “This is my voice and these are mostly my songs. I know the single has helped sell the album, but I want people to listen to the album for what I put into it.”
He later admitted that he wasn’t really as confident about the album as his words seemed to indicate. “I was worried about my own material really, really badly. I didn’t think I was a good songwriter at all. I was a bit doubtful about my own performance. Even today, I don’t like what I did on it. I did one song with Barry, ‘Thicker Than Water’, which I thought was good. And ‘Everything’ I thought would be a hit.”
Andy’s second single, written less than an hour after the first one, was ‘(Love Is) Thicker Than Water’. It was issued first in Britain in September, where ‘Flowing Rivers’ was the B-side, but in America where its release was delayed until November, its companion title was ‘Words And Music’. Although ‘Thicker’ was credited as a collaboration between the eldest and youngest Gibb brothers, Andy explained, “Even though it says on the credits ‘B. & A. Gibb’, it is really Barry’s song … It is very hard to write with Barry, but he said, ‘Help me think of a great title.’ That was a period where Barry was thinking of titles first and seeing how they would inspire him to write a song … We were thinking of good titles, and I said, ‘How about Thicker Than Water?’ I did not say ‘Love Is’, just ‘Thicker Than Water’. He said, ‘That’s great!’ and then he came up with ‘Love is higher than a mountain …’ and he just went on from there, but the title was totally my idea.”
It would seem a strange division of credits, but Albhy’s insight into Barry’s modus operandi might shed some light. “At some point, he would feel it was appropriate for you to be a writer, and then he would always split it in half. He didn’t do the 70 percent 30 percent thing. If people wrote the song, it was always split in half… It’s much easier if you just divide everything by the numbers. You don’t have to deal with the psychological implications of telling somebody this is how much their participation was worth. It’s a difficult thing even for people who are good at that, and that was not Barry’s strong suit. The issue for him was not ever about money; it was about success in music.”
During a four-day stint at the Roxy in Los Angeles, Robert Stigwood presented Andy with his first gold record for ‘I Just Want To Be Your Everything’. The presentation brought the show to a close, with thunderous applause and screams continuing long after he had left the stage.
As the year came to its end, so did Andy’s association with the band who had toured with him. The band, now called Pages, continued to work together with out Andy, playing mostly jazz fusion. A demo tape came to the attention of A&R man, Bobby Colomby, the former Blood, Sweat & Tears drummer, who signed them to Epic Records. Their eponymous début album contained original songs written by Richard Page, Steve George, Jerry Manfredi and Page’s cousin, John Lang. Guitarist Peter Leinheisen and drummer Russell Battelene left the group soon after the recording of the album.
Richard Page and Steve George had attracted the attention of several record companies for their background vocals on the tour, and were kept busy with session work for Toto, Kenny Loggins, REO Speedwagon, Donna Summer, Quincy Jones, The Village People, Barry Manilow, James Ingram and Twisted Sister. They would again work with Andy on his 1982 live dates, providing backing vocals.
Eventually, they formed a band with guitarist Steve Farris and drummer Pat Mastelotto, releasing their first album in 1983 under the name Mr. Mister, but it was their second album, 1985’s Welcome To The Real World, which would bring them fame. The album was RCA’s first number one in more than a decade, and all three singles released from the LP made the American Top 10, with ‘Broken Wings’ and ‘Kyrie’ both reaching the top spot.
* * *
After his concert dates, Andy returned to the Gibb family fold in Florida, moving onto a houseboat reportedly once owned by a Miami’s drug lord, who had been shot to death in the master bedroom. In the December issue of Superteen magazine, he said, “I live in Miami now … my wife and I live on a houseboat.
“I have two king-sized beds pushed together in my bedroom. The walls and floor are black carpet. The whole ceiling is mirrors and the headboard of the bed is mirrored also and meets the ceiling. The bathroom is designed for two people. There are two sinks and mirrors and you face each other as you’re washing. It’s really incredible.”
Back in Australia for six months by the tim
e the article was published, Kim said, “I think the houseboat sounds unpleasant and kinky. I categorically deny ever living on a houseboat of any kind with Andy. I can’t understand why he would say that I did …
“We discussed it and decided that our marriage and Andy’s career were two different identities. We agreed we would not speak publicly about each other. But that’s only one of a number of agreements Andy broke … I am very disappointed in [him] and his tactics of using me as a stepping-stone to gain publicity.”
Kim was rumoured to be expecting twins, living on welfare while he was living in the lap of luxury, and it did not take long before the news began to break in the United States.
Forced to admit to the breakdown in his marriage, he said, “My wife has said I’m a slave to fame but it’s just not true. She left me even before my first record was a hit. Her mother came and took her away from me. It’s all very sad — she’s a lovely girl. But she came from a working class family in Sydney, and she couldn’t cope with show business. If I had to go out in the afternoon and do an interview, she’d blow her top. We were together 98 percent of the time and I worshipped her. I would never look at anyone else. I used to think, ‘Oh God, it’s such a shame — we have so much more to come but she’s not going to be able to handle it.’
“Getting together again is something I am still hoping for, but with my career as hectic as it now is, it’s hard. There’s so much going on today with my career, with what I’m doing at the moment, plus the split — wow! We are still hoping and talking about getting back together. But Kim is back with her folks in Sydney, and I am here in New York.”
Rumours had begun to circulate about Andy’s alleged drug use, but he took pains to contradict them by admitting to smoking grass and, on one occasion, trying cocaine. “It was at a Hollywood party right after my first big record hit,” he said. “I was getting crazed being ‘Andy Gibb’ all the time. Luckily, it didn’t do any harm. I’ve cut myself off from that stuff. Everyone likes some kind of high, but I have enough trouble handling myself without it. I’ve become a health nut.”