Contents
Title Page
Also by David N. Meyer
Dedication
Epigraph
introduction
“lollipop”
bee gees’ 1st
odessa
“nervous wrecks”
“please pretend it’s not them”
saturday night fever
Photo Insert
sgt. pepper’s lonely hearts club band
spirits having flown
andy gibb
“the enigma with the stigma”
“walkin’ by the railroad”
“down came the sun”
barry gibb’s first ever solo concert
selected bibliography
acknowledgments
source acknowledgments
index
copyright
also by david n. meyer
Twenty Thousand Roads:
The Ballad of Gram Parsons and
His Cosmic American Music
The 100 Best Films to Rent
You’ve Never Heard Of
A Girl and a Gun:
The Complete Guide to
Film Noir on Video
dedication
to and for
Jené LeBlanc
with love
Devin McGinley
Lester Bangs
epigraph
The essence of BeeGeeness, the reason why I love them so, is that they’re so astonishingly unhip.
—Simon Frith,
“Confessions of a Bee Gees fan,” CREEM
Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something that was this big and this important and this great will never die. For a few years and maybe many years it will be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented and sneered at or worse, completely ignored. People will laugh at John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and going like this! (Shoots fist into the air diagonal to body.) Those who didn’t understand will never understand. Disco was much more and much better than that. Disco was too great and too much fun to be gone forever. It’s got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our lifetimes.
—Josh Neff,
The Last Days of Disco
written and directed by Whit Stillman
The central difficulty in analyzing the Bee Gees’ lyrics is that in order to understand them, you have to forget that the Bee Gees wrote them.
—Bruce Harris, “Please Read Me:
A Definitive Analysis of the Bee Gees’ Lyrics,” Jazz & Pop
introduction
Beyond the basic Bee Gees mystery of “who are these guys?” lies the more pervasive and enduring mystery of “why do we all so respond to their music?” When I started this book and began to tick off Bee Gees lyrics in my head, I was surprised at how many songs I remembered whole or in part. I was also surprised, given that I cannot carry a tune, at how many I could hum or sing. When I asked my music-obsessed friends—none of whom ever mentioned the Bee Gees—I learned that all of them could hum or sing multiple Bee Gees songs.
The Bee Gees are everywhere and in everyone’s heads, and still—outside their legion of die-hard fans—don’t get the respect they deserve. They are never held up as icons of anything we hold up pop stars as icons of: not of genius or sex appeal or style or innovation or imagination or transgression.
The most unfair and least accurate slander to hurl at the Bee Gees is “imitators.” Over the decades, so many rock and cultural writers—most of whom should have known better—defaulted to that slander instead of listening with open ears. To name only the best-known examples of the Bee Gees’ singularity, “Jive Talkin’” sounds like nothing else before or since. It’s wholly original; revolutionary. “New York Mining Disaster 1941 (Have You Seen My Wife, Mr. Jones?)” and “To Love Somebody,” ditto. “Nights on Broadway” and “Stayin’ Alive,” like “Jive Talkin’,” owe nothing to nobody. The early Bee Gees may evoke the Beatles or the Hollies. The middle Bee Gees may evoke Donovan. The later Bee Gees may evoke Stevie Wonder. But that’s all they do, evoke.
In their early days, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones imitated or covered their influences. Both bands’ early records feature covers of—or direct cops from—their idols. Few accused them of imitation, either because nobody knew the music of their influences (Irma Thomas’s version, for example, of “Time Is on My Side” for the Stones or the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” for the Beatles) or because by the time the Beatles and Stones imitated their influences, their influences had become part of the canon (Muddy Waters for the Stones, for example, or Little Richard for the Beatles). The Bee Gees came to rock and roll so late, and were so young when they hit big, that their main influences were still on the charts.
You might hear aspects of the Beatles or Herman’s Hermits or the Band or Eddie Kendricks or MFSB in their music. But all Bee Gees songs, no matter how clearly an influence can be perceived, sound like the Bee Gees. And the Bee Gees, unlike every one of their peers, never covered anybody. Their records contain only originals. The Bee Gees belong to no broader musical movement and work in no genre save the one they invented.
Except disco.
The top-selling acts in pop music have sales totals so close, if you start rounding off to millions of units, that comparing their successes becomes absurd. The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Garth Brooks, Madonna and the Bee Gees: nobody has moved more product.
The Bee Gees never get their proper due, in part, because they always seemed odd—off, somehow—always awkward and clueless. Never mind that nobody achieved remotely their level of success showcasing such misguided fashion sense, not even Garth Brooks. Never mind Bee Gees’ bowl haircuts in the late 1960s and, really, never mind the windblown sateen disco jackets and crotch-grabbing glimmering trousers with two-foot flairs, because during disco, everybody dressed like that. Give the Bee Gees a fashion period and they always chose the worst possible options.
No matter how they tried, their innate yobbo insecurities—their enduring self-perception as penniless, twerpy, working-class outcasts—led them to make self-defeating, self-defining choices. In defense of what they knew to be true, like most twerpy outcasts, they developed an uncrackable arrogance, even when they dressed like their mother bought their clothes at the Dollar Store. Or, at the bespoke rock-and-roll version of the Dollar Store. Always trying too hard, the Bee Gees never got near hipness or cool.
There’s so much they never got. Even when selling 25 million copies of one album, the Bee Gees always seemed on the outside looking in, noses to the glass, half disdainful, half dying for an invitation to the party. Their pre–Saturday Night Fever lyrical content suggested few other concerns—all those aching orchestral elegies to alienation, loss and heartache. Were they singing about unrequited love or their inability to connect in the world, or were they singing about dealing with one another? Robin said of their lyrical content: “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to hear a song about my emotions.” Viewed through that prism, it was only popcraft.
As family acts go, the Bee Gees are an anomaly. Given their longevity, universal popularity, sales figures and idiosyncratic sound, they’re anomalies on pretty much every level. But most family acts—like most successful child stars—have at least one abusive parent. Most family acts never outgrow the abuser who controls them. And woe betide the offspring who demonstrates genius in the face of a mother’s or father’s mere talent. When an abusive parent sees the child moving beyond his or her control—from Mozart onward—violence is the default response.
The first and worst rock father that comes to mind is Murry Wilson, sire of three-fifths of the Beach Boys: fat, balding, oily hair,
cheap suits, jaw-up posture, pushing himself forward like the worst bullying salesman. Murry the abuser, fond of popping out his glass eye at parties and shouting at his son in the studio. Murry shouting at his son Brian—the American Mozart—that Brian’s version of a song didn’t sound as good as Murry’s version. Murry, beating Brian so badly and so often that Brian ended up deaf in one ear and mad as a Hatter. Brian eventually severed ties with Murry, but not until Murry had inflicted so much damage that his son could never be what he might have become with the blessing of paternal love. Or even the absence of paternal hate.
Such behavior was anathema to the loving Hugh Gibb, perhaps the most fortunate child-managing parent in the history of child-managing parents. Mr. Gibb had, prior to guiding his boys’ early career, demonstrated that he was the absolute model of a guy who could fuck up a baked potato. Hugh never succeeded at anything. He had, however, played drums in dance bands, and he had an ear. His boys—the thirteen-year-old fraternal twins Maurice and Robin and seventeen-year-old Barry—barnstormed Australia, singing the songs Hugh insisted they sing: English music-hall ditties or standards that were already three generations out of date. Slowly the boys came to listen to—though they don’t sound like they ever fully understood—the music their contemporaries were listening to and creating. Then things began to happen.
Ever the anomaly, Hugh never seems to have resented his boys’ success. He never seems to have intruded in their lifestyle or tried to shape their music. It’s as if the unlikeliest person to do so recognized the Gibb boys’ genius, found his role and peace serving it, and stayed out of its way. How many parents could do that?
But, after the single luckiest act of his life, his only moment of unvarnished good fortune—sending his boys’ acetates to Robert Stigwood—Hugh Gibb proved inert as a parent, passive and onlooking. The Bee Gees’ true paternal figure became and remained their mentor and manager, Robert Stigwood. Stigwood evinced all the mythological paternal aspects of provider, arbiter, would-be destroyer and aspirational model. Decisive, relentless, impatient, ambitious, aesthetic, ruthless and grasping, Stigwood would supply the fuel, the drive and the all-necessary object of resentment and inspiration that Hugh Gibb could never provide.
Despite Stigwood’s power over them, the Gibbs were and remain a closed shop, a family affair. Hugh and Barbara lived most of their lives with one son or the other. Their sons had enormous mansions, but still. The boys wanted their parents close and vice versa. Is that touching and inspiring, or perverse and unsettling? Are those ideas even mutually exclusive when applied to families?
Anyone who’s been in a band—a band that made a living being a band—will tell you: being in a band is more complicated than family, more complicated than friendship, more complicated than brotherhood, more complicated than marriage.
Being in, say, a quartet is not like being in four marriages. It’s like being in four to the power of four marriages. Every relationship intersects every other and every relationship within the band is affected by every relationship without. Band members—Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, Yo La Tengo and the Raveonettes aside—don’t usually expect sex from their band mates, and so bands lack the primal pressure valve and intimacy restorer that marriages rely upon. Band members—Richard and Linda Thompson aside—don’t usually have children together, and so can’t find in all the humbling aspects of parenthood what all parents discover: a constant reminder of their total lack of hot-shittedness.
In working bands, work schedules, travel circumstances, and the likelihood of drug, alcohol and crappy food consumption raise the pressure. Add to that pressure that any successful band is either an absolute monarchy—the Ramones or the Rolling Stones—or an absolute democracy—R.E.M. or U2. There is no middle ground. All band power-paradigms devolve into one or the other or the band breaks up. Either somebody is in charge or everybody is in charge. Either someone is telling you what to do all the time while ignoring your suggestions, belittling your input and making more money, or you have to put up with everyone’s stupid face and stupider opinions that you’ve seen and heard a million times already. How does any band survive?
The short answer is: by every band member resenting, if not loathing, every other band member and being resented, if not loathed, in return. Except for when two band members get along for a while and resent everybody else together. And by all the ancillary benefits that band life provides. What makes that resentment even more virulent is that every band member needs every other to do the one thing in life that grants each the most joy and self-satisfaction. That paradigm, too, is inescapable. Doubters need only listen to Mick Jagger’s solo records. Or Keith’s.
When asked—during the era of rumors of George Harrison quitting the band—if he ever considered joining the Beatles, Eric Clapton said: “They were like the most close-knit family. And so the cruelty and the viciousness could be unparalleled.” And the Beatles weren’t even related, let alone brothers. The Beatles all made viable, best-selling music on their own, even Ringo. Free of the group, George blossomed; John, in his way, blossomed. Paul stayed the same, but he made a pile doing so. Each learned they did not need the others to express themselves or please the marketplace. When the Gibb brothers tried separating, they learned the opposite.
The inescapable dynamics of band and family life make the Bee Gees even more anomalous, opaque, indecipherable and bizarre. They composed, played and toured together for forty years! With their parents right there on the bus, in the studio, waiting in the kitchen, minding the kids, loading the dishwasher all wrong, etc. If family dynamics are unbearable and band dynamics are unbearable, how did the Bee Gees bear it?
One way was by conspicuous consumption of almost anything that could be consumed—women, clothes, drugs, liquor, cars, boats, houses, etc. But compensatory overconsumption’s a sadly normal feature of family life and one great allure of being in a band. That the Bee Gees’ success allowed them to consume like King Farouk seems hardly worth mentioning. The wages of their various sins became all too apparent over the years.
Most family acts that endure for decades cite outside religious influences. Not the Bee Gees; they learned how to live with each other, however painfully. Also, they never trusted anyone outside the family, save Stigwood. Periodically, they didn’t trust him, either. Until the various resentments became too deep, they took advice and support from one another. And for decades, the Gibb twins took orders from Barry.
Hands down, Barry won the Gibb genetic lottery.
From the earliest photographs of the boys performing together in their pathetic tuxedos in the dinner theaters of Australia, seventeen-year-old Barry looked indestructible. As the band got popular, then famous, then forgotten and then more famous than anyone in popular music before them, Barry became only more radiant. The Beta twins, Robin and Maurice, took second and third to Barry’s incontrovertible Alpha. Andy, some years later, had the looks and energy to surpass the twins, but proved weaker on the inside. Andy had Barry’s head hair and chest hair and teeth and inner glow. But Andy lacked a sufficiently bulletproof shell to live the famous Gibb life. That life ate him up. Barry gobbled it down and asked for more, never once saying either “please” or “sir.” Now, Barry’s the last man standing.
Barry evokes a centaur. His long glossy mane and glowing equine eyes, that Roman nose with its great horsey nostrils and those piano-key teeth shining above an endless jaw just waiting for a bit. He looks like a stallion, of course, which means he bestrides the planet as he pleases and as Keith Richard said: “has the right to piss in the street.” In those outsized eyes burns the flame of shrewdness, remove, constant strategy and no small amount of hostility. Barry possesses the voice of an angel, and that isn’t a devil on his shoulder. It’s a chip, and fifty years of unimaginable success have neither reduced nor dislodged it. Barry’s a centaur, and he’s also always been Odysseus, a cunning, distanced man prepared for the journey, determined not merely to survive but to prevail, to cope with whatever and im
pose his will. Barry is not a guy to get lost in song, to give in to the frailer emotions. And so far, Barry’s never been bested.
You might think that between the Beatles and McCartney’s solo records, Sir Paul is the most successful, Alpha of the Alphas. But Paul never purpose-built #1s for others. Barry has written double-digit #1s for other artists, songs tailored to their sounds and personae that rang the bell worldwide. When he was only twenty-two, Barry wrote the greatest Otis Redding song Otis Redding never recorded, “To Love Somebody.” And if Otis never recorded it—he died before he could—everyone else on the planet did. Barry’s purpose-built #1s are hard to identify because he seldom copped to writing something for somebody else. He’d say: “Oh, I found an old song and it worked out for them.” Only Odysseus pulls off such self-deprecating boasting.
Barry’s Alpha-hood spawned some tough moments. Barry stopped letting Robin sing lead, even on Robin’s own compositions. Robin absorbed a hard lesson in what it meant to be a Beta younger brother, one of many such lessons inflicted over the decades. Maurice had subsumed those same lessons long before. Maurice, who—until alcohol overtook him—could play any instrument he touched, routinely spent three-quarters of a set onstage without getting near a mike. Andy Gibb was handed a career based on singing songs that Barry had written or co-written and produced. The gig paid large, and made Andy an international heartthrob. But Andy couldn’t live out the basic premise—that his career was Barry’s Lite—and his overconsumption took a bad turn.
Throughout the years, no matter how successful or reviled, the Bee Gees remained, in so many ways, ridiculous. Their ridiculousness forces even those who love them to shrug and smile. Those who find the Bee Gees a contemptible plastic amalgam of cheesy pop and pernicious disco still admit, in whispers, to having deep emotions or meaningful memories built around one or two Bee Gees’ tunes.
Everyone on the planet knows all or part of a Bee Gees song. No matter who you ask, no matter his or her level of hipness, musical sophistication, literacy, geographical location or familiarity with the English language; in Timbuktu or Mindanao, in Buenos Aires or Shanghai, in Kiev or Nairobi, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, or Gainesville, Georgia, stop the first person you see who’s older than fifteen and ask them to hum a Bee Gees song. Not to name one—to hum or sing. And they will, smiling guiltily. Then ask them the same thing about Garth Brooks . . .
The Bee Gees Page 1