by Hector Cook
The tour began on June 28 in Fort Worth, Texas, at the Tarrant County Convention Center. The group arrived in their 55-seat Boeing 707 jet, leased at a cost of over a million dollars and custom-painted with a specially designed Spirits Having Flown tour logo. Inside, the plane was like a plush living room, with four video TV screens, 12-channel stereo system customised to the group’s musical tastes. Credit for this refurbishment belonged to Bill Hardy, who was also responsible for organising the flight crew. Four stewardesses in designer jeans and Hawaiian blouses served gourmet meals to the band and assorted family members, including their parents and grandmother Nora Pass, who had flown in from Australia to see her famous grandsons perform.
While the Gibbs and their fellow musicians were living it up in one of the five plush hotels and flying in comfort to and from gigs, The Bee Gees’ road crew had to make do with two customised buses with 32 bunk beds, catching up on their sleep as they rode their way to the next gig.
The Bee Gees were accompanied on the tour by a film crew capturing highlights of the concerts, for use in a 90-minute NBC-TV special hosted by David Frost.
The three Gibb brothers took their places front and centre stage, identically dressed in tight white satin trousers and dazzling white spangled jackets, opened to reveal hairy chests and medallions. Robin’s long wavy hair had changed from its natural brown to a bright red, allegedly dyed to match his Irish Setter, Penny. “He’s very doggy-minded,” explained their sister Lesley. The deafening shrieks from the audience threatened to drown out the opening strains of ‘Tragedy’. Al Coury, RSO Records President, who flew in for the first show, claimed, “I couldn’t take it. I had to break off two cigarette filters and stick them in my ears.”
Two nights later, at their concert at the Summit in Houston, a bearded John Travolta, in Texas filming Urban Cowboy on location, joined the group on stage to reprise some of his fancy footwork from Saturday Night Fever.
By the time that The Bee Gees had made their way to Los Angeles, some enterprising souls were getting as much as $700 for a pair of $15 concert tickets; and before the concert began, it was estimated that concessionaires were taking in nearly $3,000 each minute on Bee Gees’ programmes, t-shirts, jewellery and posters. “We have our own merchandising company,” Barry said, “and it’s done with taste, I hope. We’re doing things like nice t-shirts. We deal in jewellery but only real gold plate. If you’re an innovator, you’ve gotta be real careful not to get involved with all the spin-offs because they’re highly dangerous.”
Among the 60,000 fans at their concert at LA’s Dodger Stadium were some famous faces: Barbra Streisand, Olivia Newton-John, Karen Carpenter, KC and The Jacksons. Barbra Streisand was recognised as she and Jon Peters attempted to slip unnoticed into their seats. “The audience spotted me and started to applaud,” she recalled. “And it was like I was in shock. I couldn’t believe they would respond to me in that way. It was really thrilling.”
Streisand, in search of a new producer to bring flair and continuity to her next LP, was impressed. “I really love their music,” she said.
“We used to play to half-filled halls,” said Barry. “We always felt people were never really listening to us. Now we’re having the time of our lives.”
But Robin pointed out that, “For all intents and purposes, this tour is like being in prison.” The group were whisked into limousines after each concert and deposited 10 yards from their tour plane after each night’s concert.
Any thought of leading any sort of a normal life on the road was hastily dismissed as too much trouble. “To go out and buy a shirt would require two hours’ planning for logistics and security,” Robin claimed.
But Barry protested that it was much the same at home. “If I want to acquire something,” he said, “I call someone in the organisation who then goes out and gets it. You can go crazy like that, living in a controlled, concealed world. It’s like Presley.”
When the Gibbs and assorted band members wanted to see the film Alien on a rare evening off, Robert Stigwood had to make the theatre manager an offer he couldn’t refuse to cordon off the entire balcony for them.
Robin and Molly continued their long distance marriage with nightly telephone calls. “[Groupies] don’t worry me,” Molly said. “But it’s really sad that these people think by sleeping around with pop stars they are going to somehow become involved and maybe even find a husband. I know they haven’t got a hope in hell. I usually keep my distance from them, but there’s no way I’m going to grab Robin off if he happens to be talking to them. I’d know immediately [if Robin were to have an affair] — I’d be able to tell by his voice on the telephone. I can’t say how I’d react. I don’t know whether I’d forgive him or not.”
She insisted, “I trust Robin completely — so far no one has ever threatened our relationship. We’re always totally honest with each other. If he wants to go to a party or take a girl to the cinema, that’s fine by me, and I’m free to do what I want too. It’s something we’ve always agreed on — okay, you can be married and love each other, but you don’t own your partner.”
With so many concerts and being in a different city every night, there were sure to be a few mistakes. With his dry humour and willingness to laugh at himself, Blue Weaver described some of the little glitches that kept the tour interesting.
‘Tragedy’ was accompanied by dramatic explosions, which had to be carefully synchronised with the music, and Blue was the man with his finger on the button. “I used to set off the explosions,” he revealed, “and the first one would be in the lights above the top … of the stage, and all this sort of fairy dust would come down — it was quite spectacular. To create that — the actual explosions themselves wouldn’t make that much noise … So there was this one explosion, which was above the stage.”
After the first explosion, one of the group’s roadies would have to crawl underneath the stage and flick a relay switch, to reset for the following explosion at the side of the stage. “If you can imagine, there’s a relay switch under the stage … and I had this big button on the side of the keyboard that I used to hit to set off the explosions … because to make the explosions more effective, I used to hit the keyboard, and I had this sort of explosive sound … The first explosion went off, and the button must have stuck down so … when he’s crawling underneath the stage and flicked the switch, of course, the explosion went off right away, right at the wrong point. You can imagine, it threw everybody, but as true performers, we sort of carried on.”
Barry’s biggest crowd-pleaser would have to be ‘Words’, which was always accompanied by whoops and screams from the audience. “You know how Barry used to sort of milk the audience on [‘Words’],” Blue said. “The song would start off… I’d be doing a piano intro like that, and it could go on for several minutes. Barry would talk and every time he’d go to sing the first word, which is ‘Smile’, everybody — women would scream — the whole place would erupt so he would sort of stop, and then he would carry on and it would happen again … Well, I started off— the whole song is in G—so I had a mental block, and I was playing in F, and then I suddenly realised — and he did ‘Smile’ a couple of times and he didn’t quite get into the song — and I looked down and suddenly realised that I’m in F, and just as he was going to start the song, I changed so Barry actually went ‘S-m-i-i-i-l-e’,” Blue sang, his voice rising sharply mid-word. “I had to do it — it was either then or no time at all.”
“One other time, on ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ — the record was actually in E Flat, but some nights on stage, we would do it in E, depending on how Barry’s voice was … which sounds odd because it’s a higher key than E flat,” he said. “I think I had the habit of saying, ’How are we doing ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ tonight, and he’d say … ‘E flat’, or whatever … This one night, I just started to do it and I started it off in E … thinking that was the usual key, and there was this cacophony, and Barry had to say, ‘Okay, let’s start this again’ …
but that only happened one time.”
In August, the group took a well-earned three-week break from touring, resuming the second leg of the tour on August 26. The Bee Gees were presented with the Golden Ticket, an award presented to artists who draw audiences of more than 100,000, following sell-out concerts at Madison Square Garden.
At a party after the final New York concert, Barry was in a pensive mood. “Having families keeps us sane,” he said. “With all the ups and downs we’ve experienced, we have to have someone to sit at home with who’ll tell us, ‘Hey, you’re just a person. Knock it off.’ ”
On September 24, they were invited to the White House to be congratulated by President Carter for their work with UNICEF, along with the St. Louis Cardinals baseball player, Lou Brock, who was invited in recognition of his 3000th major league baseball hit.
Talking to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House, Barry said The Bee Gees had personally raised about $2.5 million for UNICEF so far. As for the President, “He didn’t tell us he was a Bee Gees fan. He said his family was,” he added.
It was a great honour for Barry, Robin and Maurice, but at least one member of their party remained unfazed by meeting the former peanut farmer from Georgia. “Hughie thought he was a twerp! I said, ‘He’s the President of the United States, Hughie!’ ‘He’s still a bloody twerp!’ He was never impressed by politicians,” Tom Kennedy chuckled.
Still riding high, Bee Gees’ Greatest, a two LP set in an embossed gatefold sleeve was released in October in the US and Britain, with their 20 Greatest Hits album released in mainland Europe. In the UK, RSO also released Short Cuts, a promotional only album for Bee Gees’ Greatest, which consisted of two separate six track medleys, one slow, the other fast.
The tour came to its conclusion on October 6 in their adopted hometown with a concert at the Miami Baseball Stadium. It would be The Bee Gees’ last concert in Miami for almost 13 years, until they took part in the Hurricane Andrew Relief Concert in 1992.
The strain of the tour had begun to tell on the group. “It looks like we can’t go on being The Bee Gees,” Barry confessed. “With this tour, all the hyperactivity began to take its toll. I found myself either on top of the world or totally depressed. A couple of times, I was at the point of bursting into tears. Being Bee Gees is like three people being one person. It’s impossible. We are each of us having an identity crisis. It could drive all of us crazy.”
“I can’t see us together singing ‘You Should Be Dancing’ at 40,” Maurice added, with all the arrogance of youth. “We’d probably have seizures from the strain.”
While Maurice still played the clown during the group’s medley of their earlier hits — checking his watch, wandering off and mimicking Robin’s cupped hand to his ear — as with many comedians, the jokes hid a darker side.
Recently, all three brothers have admitted that Maurice’s drinking was putting pressure on everyone during the tour. “There were instances where Maurice would actually have to feel his way along the wall to get to the stage,” Barry revealed, “and these were times when Robin and me would start to get apprehensive about what was going on. Because at that point, it was [Robin] and me that had to make sure that everything works right because Maurice doesn’t look like he’s going to make it happen, like he’s going to be able to play his part. So then it becomes tense, and you end up filling in for where Maurice isn’t doing it.”
“You’re not worrying so much about what the act’s going to be like when you’re going on,” Robin added, “you’re worried more about if Maurice is going to be able to come up with his part of the act. So you’re worried about him, more than you’re worried about whether it’s going to go down well.”
Until Maurice himself was ready to confront his alcoholism, worrying and trying to cover for him were all that they could do. “I would always escape, so something wasn’t right,” he said later. “My biggest defect of character, if you like, is unworthiness. I just didn’t feel worthy of what I was doing, or my contribution. It came from the boozing. This is what happens to your mind when you do this, you know with the disease of alcoholism. It’s totally, it’s very cunning, it sneaks up on you. You can’t love anybody else unless you love yourself, it’s impossible.” For the time being, he wasn’t ready to love himself.
But there were no signs of any discord when NBC aired The Bee Gees Special on November 15. The 90-minute programme covered the full spectrum of the group’s career, as they were shown working in the studio, performing live across the United States, and relaxing at home with their wives and children. It represented an idyllic family life that was becoming severely curtailed by the demands of their profession.
Robin had joined his brothers as a tax exile from Britain, so he and Molly and their children would meet up in Paris for short breaks as an alternative to the home in Long Island, New York, which they had bought earlier in the year. The couple were still insistent that Spencer and Melissa grow up in England, so Molly was back to being a pop widow for most of the year.
Maurice had teamed up with another celebrity friend, Neil Sedaka, to buy a Falcon 20 private jet. “Neither of us can quite afford it on our own,” Sedaka explained, “so it seemed a good idea to buy it between us. We’re going to use it ourselves and also rent it out a bit.”
It was rumoured that Barry had been offered the role of Ché Guevara in a film version of Evita; a rumour which he vigorously denied. With his production work with Andy and the forthcoming Barbra Streisand project, he was beginning to sound jaded. “I spend all of my time in the studio,” he confessed. “It will probably ruin my marriage. My house is never empty. There are always people passing through. Dick Ashby, our personal manager, lives in my house. All the business flows through there. I used to like being close to it. Now I want a retreat.”
32
ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM
BY THE MIDDLE OF 1979, as his elder brothers reached a pinnacle of success, Andy Gibb’s personal and professional lives were in turmoil. The recording sessions had begun for his third album while The Bee Gees were still on tour but were soon shelved. “He tried recording without Barry, but he felt uncomfortable and had to wait,” a friend said. As insecurity and drugs — reportedly cocaine and Quaaludes* — took their toll, Andy became more and more unreliable.
The Bee Gees’ Spirits Having Flown tour ended in October, and Barry went back into the studio to try to help his youngest brother. The process was slow and painful to all involved. At this point, Andy was no longer able to contribute much, so After Dark was Barry creating an album of songs he thought would suit Andy’s voice, which due to his failing health was not so strong here, with its thin raspy qualities more emphasised.
“By the time we got to that last Andy album,” said Albhy Galuten, “he [was] in such bad shape that we were just doing something to put on it. It wasn’t an Andy album any more, it was a big contractual obligation.”
Time after time, Andy wouldn’t appear for recording sessions, leaving Barry to sing lead on the demos for the album. “He broke studio dates,” Maurice recalled. “He loved making records, but he didn’t show up for the vocal tracks.”
In 1985, Andy himself admitted, “I am sure you heard of my drug problem that I had. I checked myself into a place for it, it started around then very lightly. The kind of drug that I was doing was very big in Florida about that time and of course the rest of the world … cocaine. What happened is I started not turning up for recording sessions, leaving Barry to cover for me. On a couple of my albums you will hear Barry singing a line and you think it’s me, but it was really him. Me and Barry have an uncanny similarity vocally. We are the closest mentally too, and writing style, everything. He is the first boy born, and I am the last boy born and it’s funny. The other two, there is no resemblance …”
Copyright filings tell a story: there were a few Andy-written songs that were not used, leaving only two co-written with Barry on the finished album. Two songs were left over Bee Gees�
�� tracks written by Barry, Robin and Maurice. Barry collaborated with Albhy on ‘Falling In Love With You’, and wrote all the other songs himself. The album began to take on the feel of a Barry Gibb solo album, “except that it wasn’t Barry doing his vision,” Albhy observed, “it was Barry trying to rescue his brother, which is always somewhat disingenuous.”
To be fair, Barry wrote some very good songs for this album: the up-tempo ‘After Dark’ and ‘Wherever You Are’ surround ‘Desire’ to lead off the first side, and Andy does a good job with the quiet beat of ‘Dreamin’ On’ at the end of the album. The two songs by Barry and Andy are both quiet ballads, ‘One Love’ and ‘Someone I Ain’t’, needlessly buried in the middle of side two.
“ ‘After Dark’ is a single that was never released and I wish it was,” Andy said in 1981. “To this day, it still should have been a single. I believe it was the strongest cut on that album.”
“I … remember the song ‘After Dark’,” Albhy said. “That was a great track … We used Michael and Randy Brecker and David Sanborne on, and it was incredible, the horn parts on it. If you listen to that, all the background chorus parts were all sung by Barry. The stuff that sounds great is all actually Barry. Andy was pretty absent.”
The production team of Barry, Karl and Albhy had their work cut out for them, trying to pull together an album with an unreliable star. “By that point, Andy was hard to work with,” Albhy recalled. “So you would have songs that would not quite make the grade, start to work on it and put it away, and say maybe it’ll resurface later … It was not as easy to get stimulated about writing good Andy songs because he was a basket case. He wouldn’t show up, he wasn’t there.”
The lead single ‘Desire’ is the only released recording featuring all four Gibb brothers. The copyright office copy is labelled “Bee Gees”. There was some talk of Andy appearing on the ‘Spirits Having Flown’ album although in the end he did not. This song might have been a little close to ‘Too Much Heaven’ in sound. The Bee Gees’ harmonies at any rate help cover for Andy’s lead voice.