The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  One musician Albhy didn’t mention was Gary Brown. ‘Grease’ was released with an instrumental version on the B-side, but the American single differed from the rest of the world as its instrumental version featured Gary providing an overdubbed sax solo. Exactly the same formula would be repeated a couple of years later on the American release of Robin and Marcy Levy’s ‘Help Me’.

  The year 1978 also witnessed a strange series of connecting releases. Franki Valli’s attempt at a follow-up was ‘Save Me, Save Me’ on Warner Brothers, and Rare Earth also recorded the same song for their Grand Slam LP for Prodigal. Shortly prior to that, they had issued ‘Warm Ride’ as single; Graham Bonnet’s version of the song also appearing as a single, this time on the Ringo Starr’s short-lived Ring O’ Records label. Both Rare Earth and Bonnet issued an extended remix of the song too. The best either performer could achieve in Europe or America was the number 39 that Rare Earth’s version reached in America. However, Graham Bonnett’s version was very successful in Australia and New Zealand where it reached number two and number six respectively.

  ‘Save Me, Save Me’ was proving to be a very popular cover indeed. Teri De Sario was next to try her hand at it, but gave it little chance by relegating it to the relative obscurity of a slot on her Pleasure Train album. The songstress fared well with the Barry Gibb composed title that did make it onto a single though, and again Albhy Galuten was involved.

  “This was someone who I had just heard in a club somewhere, and said to Barry, ‘She’s got a great voice, let’s do something and see what happens.’ It turned out not to be a big hit. I think it was a marketing and momentum thing. She did have a hit after that with somebody. If I’d been smarter then, I’d have signed for ongoing royalties on her future records! She was very sweet. Her husband was Bill Purse, the trumpet player.”

  The song that Barry came up with was called ‘Ain’t Nothing Gonna Keep Me From You’, but the Casablanca single fared better than Albhy gives it credit for, climbing to number 43 in the USA Hot 100.

  ‘Emotion’ is a song that will forever be associated with Samantha Sang, but this didn’t prevent Johnny Mathis & Deniece Williams from recording their own version, which they placed on the B-side of their big hit, ‘Too Much, Too Little, Too Late’.

  The year 1978 was also the year that Rita Coolidge provided A&M with a Top 30 hit in Britain, taking ‘Words’ to the number 25 spot. It was the year of the “cash-in” too, as Carol Douglas and Richard Ace took ‘Night Fever’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ respectively to the same position of number 66 in Britain.

  The activity continued unabated when the brothers even found time to provide backing vocals for ‘Little Miss Loving’ on Chicago’s Hot Streets album. The fourth brother Andy got in on the act too, singing with Stephen Stills on two songs on Stephen’s Thoroughfare Gap LP.

  A New Year, an old song. Dusty Springfield became the latest to record the much vaunted ‘Save Me, Save Me’ when it made a discreet appearance on her Living Without Your Love album.

  Visitors to Criteria studios in 1979 were The Osmonds, and Maurice shared the producer’s chair with Steve Klein for their Steppin’ Out album for Mercury, which also included ‘Rest Your Love On Me’, the recent B-side to The Bee Gees’ ‘Too Much Heaven’.

  The decade came to a close with some chart success from an unlikely source. The Bee Gees had left ‘You Stepped Into My Life’ as an album track on 1976’s Children of the World, but Melba Moore turned it into a reasonable hit in January 1979 when she took it to number 47 in the American charts. The same title reached number 90 in the USA when none other than Wayne Newton, almost fifteen years after recording ‘They’ll Never Know’, also released as a single.

  As a group, The Bee Gees had reached saturation point, and they would need to find new ways to get their songs heard.

  Barry explained the group’s thinking behind writing for others. “It’s great input for us, because it gives us another dimension to our songwriting. It tells us what else we can do. If we just use our own voices all the time, you can get locked into that syndrome of just our own voices as the instruments. Writing for other people tells you what else you can do, like stretching if you’re acting.”

  The words almost had a hollow ring to them, as their own acting careers had not stretched them by any manner of means.

  *A young offenders correction system used in Britain at that time.

  30

  BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF

  MR STIGWOOD

  IN NOVEMBER, 1976, plans had been announced for a new RSO film. In theory, it sounded like the perfect idea — take the music from The Beatles’ masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, add The Bee Gees and “Flavour of the Month” rock star, Peter Frampton, whose Frampton Comes Alive had topped the charts, and with The Bee Gees’ and Frampton’s respective managers, Robert Stigwood and Dee Anthony, at the helm, what could possibly go wrong?

  The project began with mutually patronising statements to the press from Messrs. Stigwood and Anthony. “I am happy and proud to be associated with Dee Anthony,” Stigwood announced. “His expertise and sensitivity will add greatly to the filmisation of this wonderful Lennon-McCartney musical. Peter Frampton’s presence brings the ultimate in true stardom to Sgt. Pepper. His portrayal of Billy Shears as his first music role will prove to be the first definite marriage of contemporary music and film. I couldn’t be more delighted.”

  Dee Anthony responded, “We are deeply privileged and honoured to be associated with Robert Stigwood and are looking forward to a rewarding experience. Both Peter and I have every confidence in Mr Stigwood’s artistic integrity, talent and ability to make this an important milestone in Peter Frampton’s career.”

  Barry Gibb told reporters that, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a great opportunity for us. It’s going to be a fantastic film. Chris Bearde, the creator of Laugh-In and The Gong Show, is going to direct and his fluid style should work well with The Bee Gees’ natural humour.

  “The Sgt. Pepper album was always very special to me … I first heard The Beatles’ album ten years ago in Robert Stigwood’s office the first day it came out. The next day there was a copy of the album on every music industry desk. No one could believe the album. It was a milestone in recording. It pushed everyone forward.”

  The original casting plans called for such diverse artists as Elton John, Olivia Newton-John, Donna Summer, Barry Manilow, Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Bob Hope to join The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. Most wisely bowed out.

  Paul Nicholas said, “I suppose by then Robert Stigwood had made so much money with Saturday Night Fever and Grease that he decided to do what was described as The Robert Stigwood Home Movie, which was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. ”

  Robert Stigwood had been contemplating making a film based on the Sgt. Pepper album for several years. “For a long time, I looked at those long lines of people at rock concerts and wondered why you couldn’t have the same kind of crowd for a film,” he explained. His theory was that if you made a film which appealed to the people who go to rock concerts, you would get the same people turning out in droves to go to the cinema. He had had some success with Jesus Christ, Superstar and Tommy, so why not Sgt. Pepper?

  He might have guessed there was trouble ahead — he reportedly turned down ten scripts before he enlisted the aid of the New York Times critic, Henry Edwards, to write the “ultimate fantasy,” an allegorical tale of good triumphing over evil in the music world. He had similar trouble choosing a director, finally settling on Michael Schultz, whose previous works included Car Wash, Which Way Is Up? And Cooley High.

  “It’s fun simply because it’s so berserk … The idea is to take people on a trip,” Schultz said, “even those die-hard people who say, ‘Oh, Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees, they’re not going to be The Beatles.’ Well, they’re not The Beatles. They’re goody-goody singers who have been entrusted with the magic music of Sgt. Pepper to bring joy to the world. And if you
accept that premise, you don’t have any trouble with the picture.”

  Robert Stigwood had always envisaged The Bee Gees as Sgt. Pepper’s band, but when the movie was being cast, “Peter Frampton was the hottest property,” Maurice explained. “He became the grandson of Sgt. Pepper.” The Bee Gees became The Henderson Brothers, taking their name from a line in ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite’.

  “It was a battle all the way for us,” Barry would say later. “Robert had verbally promised us the starring roles, and then this red-hot young man called Peter Frampton came along, and Robert wanted him to play Billy Shears. The film didn’t work for The Bee Gees. It worked for Peter — and I think you’d be blind not to see it — The Bee Gees had no place in the story. We just weren’t consequential to the story line, and we tried to point that out along the way. I just wish they’d given people a chance to act.”

  While The Bee Gees had met Peter Frampton in 1968 when he was a member of the Herd, and Maurice had been friendly with Peter in the early Seventies, they had lost touch after Frampton’s phenomenal rise to success. Maurice found himself thinking, “I only hope he’s the same cat I knew in England in 1972…” He needn’t have worried; Peter hadn’t changed. “It was great because the four of us got on like a house on fire. We had bad moments during the film, but not between the four of us,” he said. “By the time we finished the film, we had become the band.”

  The chemistry between Frampton and The Bee Gees as a band took some time though. “We were wary of each other,” Barry admitted. “[Peter] was a little worried about singing with us because we’d sung together all our lives, and he didn’t know how he fitted in. So a lot of our sessions were done separately.”

  The soundtrack album was recorded at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles under the auspices of George Martin, The Beatles’ legendary producer who had produced the original LP. When Stigwood first approached Martin with the idea for the project, Martin’s first inclination was to refuse. “I didn’t want to do the project at first,” he said, “but I was persuaded because Peter Frampton was riding so high back then, and I admired The Bee Gees very much. The premise was that it was a film score and not a record album.

  “I knew in my heart of hearts that The Beatles would not have approved,” Martin continued, “and, although I don’t need their permission to run my life, I still wondered if it was right to go over old ground. On the other hand, Robert assured me that if I took the job on I would have complete artistic control over the music, and would be able to dictate exactly what it should sound like.”

  Stigwood offered a powerful incentive to take on the task. The generous commission he proposed would be enough to make anyone stop and consider, and George Martin was no different. After much soul searching, it was his wife who made the decision for him in the end. “She said, ‘I understand the problems you’re going through,’“ Martin recalled. “ ‘You want to be sure that you’re doing the right thing artistically. But have you ever considered that if you don’t do it, someone else will, and you will hate what they’ve done? If you do it, you’ll be in a position to ensure that the music isn’t maltreated.’ That, and Robert’s promise of total freedom, which in the event was fully honoured, finally decided me.”

  Before the filming could begin, Martin had to prepare all the music tracks. “Since it was a musical film, all the musical sequences had to be mimed to existing recorded performances. It didn’t mean making finished tracks, but providing them with the nucleus, the rhythm and voices. With nearly two hours of music in the film, there was obviously a mountain of material to record before they could even start shooting,” he explained.

  When Martin began work on September 1, he had assembled a first class band of session musicians. On keyboards was Max Middleton, formerly of The Jeff Beck Group, as was the bass player, Wilbur Bascombe. Bernard Purdie, a fine drummer from New York and Robert Awhai, a guitarist who had done a great body of work with Middleton, completed the ensemble.

  For The Bee Gees, working with The Beatles’ producer seemed like a dream come true. “The greatest thing about making Sgt. Pepper was working with George Martin,” Maurice raved, “to recreate the songs he did with The Beatles … wow!”

  Martin seemed equally pleased to be working with The Bee Gees. “I first heard about The Bee Gees soon after I started recording The Beatles because they were kind of connected with Brian Epstein. They were kind of junior rivals. They were so professional, all three of them,” he said. “When they came into the studio, they would fool around and joke a lot, but once that red light was on, they were in there, and they were dead serious. Their harmony singing … they were very careful about precision of ensemble, and in fact, they wanted to do things over and overmuch more than I did. I would be inclined to say, ‘That’s human, that’s lovely.’ ‘Oh no. We’ve got to get it right.’ When they double tracked, they double tracked so accurately that you could hardly tell it was double tracked. They were very, very good.”

  Barry’s uncanny precision for staying perfectly in tune turned out to be a bit of a drawback for Martin. “I actually found myself telling him that by being so exactly in tune he was tending to spoil the nice parts of the double-tracking. He was so accurate, it almost sounded like a single track.”

  But Barry explained his approach to recording. “I don’t agree with the process where the artist goes into the studio, sings one vocal, and it feels right so everyone says, ‘Wow! That’s all right, that’s it.’ I say let’s have a vocal that feels right and is an impeccable vocal at the same time. Why not? You just do it till it’s right. You can accomplish that without doing it so of ten that it becomes bland.”

  Paul Nicholas was cast as Frampton’s brother, Dougie Shears. Not dissimilar in appearance to Peter, he had the benefit of previous theatrical experience — a dubious advantage in this case, as he noted, “Looking at the script, there’s no real focus. I think it must be very different for Frampton and The Bee Gees coming to this — I’ve done a lot of stage musicals and Tommy, and I still think it’s hard to react in this situation.

  “It should have been a hit … It had all the right elements in the sense that it had Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees and a very good English cast and a good director. Unfortunately, the problem with it was that it had a terrible script, and there was a very poor presentation of what really was a very heavy album.”

  Barry claimed that working on the film was great fun, and that he felt very comfortable in front of the camera. Robin echoed those sentiments, adding, “There’s no tension at all while you’re doing it. That’s because everything on a movie set happens so slowly there’s plenty of time to think about what you’re doing and relax.”

  As the Lonely Hearts Club Band, Peter Frampton was the lead guitarist, but The Bee Gees all took on different instrumental roles. On Barry’s recommendation Maurice, ordinarily a bass player, became the drummer because of his time-keeping ability. “Robin knew that he wouldn’t be good as a drummer ’cause he’d be very stiff, where I’m very loose,” Maurice added. “And I could follow a beat, ’cause being a bass player, you always follow the drums a lot.”

  Even so, Maurice said that he practised for nearly two months with a practise kit with session musician Bernie Purdy, who played the drums on the soundtrack album. “He’s a bloody good drummer, and it was very difficult,” he admitted. “When I first met him, I said, ‘You’re the hardest guy to mime to that I’ve evercome across.’ And he said, ‘I’m glad they picked you ’cause in that last filming, you didn’t miss one beat, and you hit every drum I hit when I recorded it.’ I was very knocked out from his compliments. He’s one of the best.”

  Barry took on Maurice’s usual instrument, and Robin became the rhythm guitarist almost by default.

  George Burns took the role of Heartland’s mayor, Mr Kite, the narrator and only speaking role in the film. Other stars involved in the film included Frankie Howerd as Mr Mustard, Aerosmith as The Future Villain Band, Alice Cooper as Father Sun, S
teve Martin as Dr Maxwell Edison, Billy Preston in one of the strangest pieces of casting as the reincarnation of Sgt. Pepper and Earth, Wind & Fire, as themselves. The female leads were played by relative unknowns; Sandy Farina as Billy Shears’s innocent girlfriend, Strawberry Fields, and Dianne Steinberg as the vampish Lucy.

  Aerosmith were actually the second choice for The Future Villain Band. Kiss turned down the roles out of concern that it might hurt their image. Lead guitarist Joe Perry of Aerosmith recalled that their agents phoned them to say, “ ‘They want you as the Future Villain Band. You get to kill Frampton and The Bee Gees.’ Sounded cool, so that spring we went to California and moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel …”

  Aerosmith’s first day was spent filming close-ups, and the second performing ‘Come Together’. On the third day, they filmed the famous fight scene with The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, which took place on a platform illuminated by glowing dollar signs. The script called for Peter Frampton to kill Aerosmith’s lead singer, Steven Tyler, but the group threatened to walk off the film.

  “We’re saying, ‘There’s no fucking way that Steven is gonna get directly offed by Frampton. No way. It’s gotta be an accident, the way it was in the original script we fucking agreed to,’“ Joe Perry recalled. Oddly enough, Tyler had no objection to being pushed to his death by the petite Sandy Farina, who in turn was killed by the surviving Future Villains.

  “We noticed it took The Bee Gees hours in makeup to get their hair right,” Perry added. “Then we heard these three guys were getting a million dollars to be in this movie, which we didn’t like, because we were getting considerably less. Joey Kramer [Aerosmith’s drummer] goes, ‘Let’s not beat them up in the fight scene. Just mess up their hair. That’ll really fuck ’em up!’ ”

  During the filming of Strawberry’s funeral, Peter Frampton had little need of crocodile tears as fate stepped in to give him a genuine cause for mourning. “I thought about the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash, which happened about the time we were filming that scene. All my road crew died on that crash,” he reflected.*