The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  “It was the worst feeling of my life, and I was crying my eyes out, and I said, ‘I know a psychiatrist who lives two doors down from me.’ I had heard about him in Malibu and that was the turning point. He has been fantastic to me. We see each other every day and he literally saved my life.”

  A family friend said later, “[Andy] lost all control. The doctor and the family decided there was no alternative. Andy needed round-the-clock hospital care. They chose St. Francis Hospital in Santa Barbara because it was secluded and quiet.”

  Andy registered at the hospital under the pseudonym of Roy Lipton, his middle name teamed with the name of one of America’s most popular brands of teabags. As the hospital catered principally to aged patients, it seemed unlikely that the teen idol would be recognised. “Doctors at the hospital said Andy was suffering from nervous exhaustion,” said the friend. “His father called it a nervous breakdown.”

  During his three-day hospital stay, doctors ordered complete bed rest and tranquillisers, but he remained obsessed with the thought of a reconciliation with Victoria. Time after time, he made desperate telephone calls begging her to come and see him, pleading with her to give their relationship one last chance. She tried to comfort him with platitudes about remaining friends, but to no avail.

  Andy left the hospital with his parents and spent some time recuperating on a friend’s ranch before returning to his Malibu home. Seventeen-year-old Beri briefly abandoned drama school and moved in with him to keep a watchful eye on him. “I missed five weeks of school being with Andy, but I felt better being there. It helped him a lot that I was there and that he didn’t have to look for me. He could just walk from his bedroom to mine when he needed to talk.”

  Barbara Gibb was a frequent visitor, too, providing “some fabulous meals” for her two youngest children. “I can only cook spaghetti and Andy only cooks for himself,” Beri explained.

  For awhile, Andy seemed to have made a recovery. “He’s writing music again, and he may go back to Solid Gold. Now he’s taking it easy,” Beri said.

  Soon, a healthy-looking Andy Gibb appeared on Good Morning, America, telling Joan Lunden, “I have been to hell and back. I had a very, very bad nervous breakdown. There was a lot of pressure on me and Victoria. There was a sweet dream of a relationship, and also a nightmare at some point. She’s a very ambitious girl, and I think it was mutual. I think we both pressured each other too much. We couldn’t spend five minutes apart from each other. We split up several times before the final split. It was inevitable, it had to happen. I thought so much of the girl and I still do …”

  Although he told Joan, “I think it is very important to my fans to know exactly what has happened to me, to know that they should not do this to themselves. I think it’s very vital,” he was still not ready to admit the extent of his drug problem. “I just fell apart. I turned to drugs for a month,” he said. “I did an awful lot of cocaine, which I no longer do … I gave up everything… I started missing tapings of Solid Gold. I would not turn up for tapings, very bad boy. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about people. I didn’t care about life.”

  Andy was still mindful of his image, trying desperately not to disappoint the fans who had been “through ups and downs” with him. “They’ve never really quite known the truth of what I’ve been through or the things that I’ve done. I’m no longer a teenybopper idol,” he said.

  The story of the innocent young pop star whose life was nearly destroyed by the older woman was the stuff of tabloid headlines. “I felt like a black-widow spider,” Victoria was quoted as saying. “I know how it looks from the outside, especially as I didn’t come forward. Everybody just assumed I split with Andy. But I didn’t want to go into it at the time, and that is something I will have to live with. There is no point in defending or explaining what actually happened, but it would be unfair to say it was my choice to end the relationship. What I know is that I tried everything that I was capable of, that I think any human being would be capable of in an effort to rescue someone that you love very much. And, there came a point in time, when I had to face the fact that I could go on trying to rescue Andy and sacrifice my own life, or I had to stand apart and hope that he would, that he would be able to help himself.”

  Understandably bitter after the break-up, Andy claimed that Victoria’s obsession with her age and appearance indirectly led her to her second husband. “We went to this plastic surgeon, Dr Harry Glassman,” he said. “I waited in his office while the surgery was being done. I used to joke with her about her refusal to come out of her darkened bedroom for two weeks after the operation and she’d get hysterical. She wouldn’t let anybody in the room except me. She’s dead scared of getting old. That was her big problem.”

  In 1985, he further told interviewer Bob Durant, “I want to state that I am very happy for her marriage now, and we have made amends as I have congratulated her and wish her all the happiness in the future, but Victoria is a woman that has done everything that it would take to get where she is today. She has done it all, believe me. She had a drug problem when I met her, she was an alcoholic, and a coke problem and I was off it. Just because of sexual things and other things, we got back onto it together and that got me heavily back into it … and then we stopped. When we really fell in love, we agreed to stop everything, because we didn’t like each other on drugs. At the very end of it all, after about 15 months or something, we just started arguing, I don’t think we were meant to be. She is a very seductive woman … very few men can resist her … But I will say that she took me basically back to it … but I wish her all the best.”

  *Methaqualone, a central nervous system depressant. In small doses, it causes a feeling of euphoria; in larger doses, it causes a reduction in heart and breathing rates and a drop in blood pressure. Speech becomes slurred and reflexes are affected. Users rapidly become dependent and withdrawal is said to be more intense than withdrawal from heroin. The mixture of alcohol and Quaaludes is a deadly combination.

  33

  MEANINGFUL SONGS

  (IN VERY HIGH VOICES)

  AFTER THE GRUELLING schedule of The Bee Gees’ Spirits Having Flown tour, 1980 marked the beginning of an emphasis on projects outside the confines of the group. “Up until then,” explained Barry, “we’d always used our own voices as the instruments for our songs and it’s like switching instruments. Suddenly you can stretch the songs, you can make them do other things because it’s someone else.”

  There were also the awards to collect, a tribute to the group’s resurgence in popularity. At the seventh annual American Music Awards, The Bee Gees took away the trophies for Favourite Band, Duo or Group in the Pop/Rock category and Favourite Album in the Pop/Rock categories for both. The group also made recordings and filmed commercials for TDK Japan.

  As he had been at the end of the previous decade, Robin was the first to break away from The Bee Gees’ activities in late 1979 by working with Blue Weaver to produce the Sunrise album for soul singer, Jimmy Ruffin. “I’ve known Jimmy for years, and one day he simply phoned me up and asked if I would like to produce some tracks for him,” Robin explained. “I said yes, and it all evolved from there.”

  “I met Robin Gibb years ago — a really nice person, he was even more reclusive than I, so we got on well,” Jimmy recalled. “We talked a lot about working together then suddenly with Saturday Night Fever and all the other stuff, they became so hot [that] we couldn’t work together until 1979. So we made an album and almost immediately the record company went out of business.”

  They began with the two songs from The Bee Gees’ recording sessions, ‘Where Do I Go’ and ‘Nobody’. Of the latter, Blue said, “It was written during the Spirits time but rejected. That was a Bee Gees’ backing track and I used it.” Robin reworked the lyrics, and ‘Nobody’ became ‘Forever’. Jimmy also recorded a soulful version of the first Gibb/Weaver collaboration, ‘Songbird’.

  A very different and almost country number was ‘Where Do I Go?’, wri
tten by all four Gibb brothers for Spirits Having Flown. For the Sunrise album, it became a duet with Jimmy and Marcy Levy*, then best known as Eric Clapton’s backing vocalist and the co-writer of his hit, ‘Lay Down Sally’.

  Blue and Robin collaborated on the remainder of the songs, including the first single. “The original lyric that Robin came up with for ‘Hold On (To My Love)’ was, ‘I can’t laugh, I can’t cry’,” Blue recalled. The single was released in February on both sides of the Atlantic and reached number seven in the UK and number 10 in the US. The single, however, failed to showcase Jimmy’s voice. A disco number, the track was not representative of the album. On the other hand, almost nothing would have been representative, as the producers handed Jimmy quite a variety of fare.

  Robin’s R&B ballad style all the way back to ‘I Can’t See Nobody’ was modelled after singers like Jimmy, and his rougher voice adds a warmth to these songs.

  The most successful song was ‘Searchin’ ’, a fine piano melody by Blue in the tradition of his songs with Barry, married in this case to Robin’s bluesy “if I could live my life over again” lyrics. ‘Two People’ and ‘Changin’ Me’ owe a lot to Jimmy’s vocals to be convincing but they work.

  The album followed in May. The cover photo appears to be from Miami, where part of the album was recorded. The earlier songs were recorded at a studio in Syosset, not far from Robin’s house on Long Island, where both he and Blue lived at the time. Another single, ‘Night Of Love’, was released but failed to reach the charts.

  Following their work with Jimmy Ruffin, Robin and Blue collaborated on a song for the soundtrack of the RSO movie Times Square, and Blue was credited with composing the film score. If Stigwood was hoping for a repeat of the success of Saturday Night Fever with this film, he was disappointed. Robin recorded their composition, ‘Help Me!’ as a duet with Marcy Levy, which featured in the end credits of the film. The pair recorded a video for the song, which was released as a single, but it reached only number 50 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and failed to chart at all in Britain.

  They also composed another song, ‘Touch Me’, originally written for fellow RSO recording artist Linda Clifford, which Robin convinced Marcy to demo, against her better judgement, according to Blue. “I don’t think she sang those lyrics willingly,” he said. Robin’s suggestive words like “Touch Me … hold me there … feel me there…” proved to be a little too hot to handle, and the track never went beyond that initial working demo stage.

  Maurice and his family had returned to their home for a quiet Christmas, but in late December, he was admitted to a private London clinic.

  On his release two weeks later, he was met by Yvonne and the couple’s four-year-old son Adam. While in light of subsequent revelations, it might be assumed that he was receiving treatment for alcoholism, Maurice insisted at the time, “There was nothing seriously wrong with me. I was just shattered from a heavy concert and recording schedule. My doctor thought it would be a good idea for me to get away from it all. Now I feel on top of the world.”

  Back in good spirits, Maurice began composing incidental music, which he described as “a sort of Star Wars come Love Story, for the soundtrack for The Geller Effect, a proposed RSO film based on psychic spoon-bender, Uri Geller, which would ultimately be shelved. When this project fell through, he turned his hand to an instrumental album, tentatively titled Strings And Things.

  * * *

  Barry had by far the highest profile of the group — producing Barbra Streisand’s album. Maurice recalled that The Bee Gees were asked which artist they would most like to produce. “We said, ‘Barbra Streisand.’ … Then, about a week later, Charles [Koppelman] called and said ‘I heard in the papers that you’d love to do Barbra.’ So this is how the Barbra situation came about. She said she was very interested.”

  Interested she might have been, but as Koppelman remembers it, there were some hurdles to be overcome. “Obviously at times Barbra had some trepidation,” he said, “and at times, I’m sure Barry had some concerns. I’m sure Barry was apprehensive at some point that Barbra wouldn’t like the music, or that she’d want her vocals too far out and the tracks too far back. I’m sure Barbra at certain times was concerned that she didn’t want a Bee Gee-esque album.” Nevertheless, Barry was extremely enthusiastic about working with Barbra, as he claimed she had been his favourite singer ever since he first heard her perform ‘People’.

  Although it has come to be seen as Barry’s project, the idea actually had begun as a group concept. Koppelman suggested a few songs to The Bee Gees. They listened to them and felt they could do better.

  “We then submitted five of our own songs,” Barry recalled. “Barbra liked them and asked us to write five more … We set out to make the great Streisand LP that she never made.” While Maurice was hospitalised, Barry and Robin wrote ‘Woman In Love’, ‘Run Wild’, ‘Promises’ and ‘Life Story’.

  ‘Guilty’ was written with Robin and Maurice, the only three-way collaboration of the LP. “When we wrote that stuff for Streisand,” Maurice explained, “we knew what her voice was, so we heard it in our head, so could you imagine her singing something like … this? And we’d go into the writing. And we’d use her voice as the instrument to interpret the song…”

  Once the decision was made, the songs seemed to appear out of nowhere. “I’m pretty sure when we did the Streisand album, [Barry] wrote and demo’d the whole album in a week,” Albhy Galuten marvelled. “Well, maybe not the demos, but a week’s worth of writing, for 10 or 12 songs, a few of them which became smashes. I think the normal process would be about half a day to write a song, which is not that far away from most people. The 80 per cent on the creative stuff happens almost instantly, like it would form in his head, and the rest would be details.”

  In the process of writing the songs, Barry said, “[Barbra] became the adventure. I knew what she was capable of doing. I mean, if you write the script for an actor, you know what the spectrum of the actor is, what the actor can do, so you can write scenes that you would not write for another actor. So in this case, this is what happened with Barbra Streisand. I was able to almost write a screenplay for her, to make her do something.”

  There were still some early concerns. “I’d heard about the time ‘Evergreen’ was written and how Paul Williams was sent backwards and forwards to write lyrics — and I was afraid that was going to happen to me,” Barry confessed. “But the wonderful thing is, it never did. Apart from the fact that Barbra’s a total professional, she’s a very nice lady. You can’t go wrong with an artist like that.”

  Although there were no altercations, Barbra was not afraid to speak her mind when she had concerns. “She questioned the line, ‘It’s a right I defend/Over and over again’,” Barry recalled. “At first she felt that it was a little bit liberationist; that it might be a little too strong for a pop song.” She allowed herself to be convinced, and the line stayed.

  According to one industry insider, “Streisand’s group spoke to Stigwood, and all was very jolly until they asked him for a cut of the publishing. But Stigwood wouldn’t give up one lousy E-flat to them. Not this tycoon. In making deals and pulling in money he was a pro; he could outwit the best of them.”

  Not only did Robert Stigwood keep the publishing rights, he was said to have asked for three-quarters of the CBS advance and royalties, a deal which he saw as only fair since Streisand was only one voice and there were three Bee Gees. Rumour has it that Streisand replied, “But they all sound alike. How much for just one?”

  It was finally agreed that Barry would perform and co-produce the LP with Karl Richardson and Albhy Galuten. He would receive half the royalties on the duets with the full producer’s fee and royalty for each record and tape sold. It was said that Stigwood later billed Barbra Streisand for the use of Barry’s face and body on the album cover, but she refused to pay.

  Robin recalled that the album was intended as a change of styles for the singer. “She wanted to make an album th
at was a popular music album as opposed to Broadway orientated songs that she had been used to doing,” he explained. “She wanted to do a contemporary album of songs that would be heard generally on Top 40 radio.”

  “She wasn’t into doing live performances at that point,” Barry added. “She wanted to make an album and she wanted to make it very contemporary, and I suppose we were the most contemporary people around at that point. So she aimed right at us and we did the project.”

  Initially, Barry admitted to some reservations about working with the diva. “Only because I’d heard all those stories about Barbra — that’s she’s a tough lady to work with. People feel that she comes on very strong, that you’ll get all kinds of arguments from her. That’s the rumour around the business, and Barbra’s heard it herself.

  “I wasn’t going to do the album at one point. I was an absolute nervous wreck before we started … And she is this enormous star. That’s got to intimidate anyone. I didn’t want to work with her at first, but my wife told me she’d divorce me if I didn’t!”

  As Albhy recalled it, “Barry just wanted to work with Streisand. It was an incredible opportunity … I’ve come to know her and we’ve had a good relationship. I worked on a record for her after that on my own.”

  Charles Koppelman, the president of the New York based Entertainment Company, which produced the four previous Barbra Streisand albums, admitted, “This project could have been a disaster. You’re dealing with a lot of egos, mine included. And this wasn’t one song, it was an entire album. But it went much smoother than any of us anticipated.”

  Although Barry admitted, “We treaded on eggs until we actually got to know one another,” in the end, he said, “I have to say she was extremely pleasant to work with, and this is not just show business talk. She seemed to come across as an absolute lady.”