The Bee Gees

by David N. Meyer

  With the Beatles or Madonna, that kind of global market penetration makes instinctive sense. It’s easier, somehow, to acknowledge that their songs are in the ether.

  The Bee Gees are the ether.

  The Bee Gees made hits for forty years, they sold a quarter of a billion albums, everyone on earth knows their music and yet, they still seem like they don’t really belong.

  “lollipop”

  The Bee Gees’ origin story is straight out of Dickens: so difficult and so foreordained. They came out of nothing, worked their asses off and were incredibly lucky. But, like the show-biz cliché that they are, every time they got a lucky break, they had the will and talent to make the most of it. Their ambition never flagged. Among the most compelling conundrums of the Bee Gees’ rise is, Where did they get their drive, their motivation, their determination to overcome every obstacle?

  Most likely, they did not get it from their dad, Hugh Gibb. Hugh was a pretty good drummer. In all the universe, there are only two kinds of drummers. There are the bullying, atavistic, wildly talented, competitive madmen who will only play it their way and insist that you do, too. Avatars of the first kind are Ginger Baker of Cream, jazz great Elvin Jones and big-band psychotic Buddy Rich. That’s the first kind of drummer. The second kind is everybody else. The second kind of drummer is best characterized by Ringo. When asked why he became a drummer, Ringo said the bass was “too hard.” Hugh Gibb is the second kind of drummer.

  Hugh had a dance band during World War II. As a musician, he was granted a deferment from military service. He met Barbara May Pass in 1941 at a gig in Manchester, England. Barbara sang occasionally. Some histories present her as a professional vocalist; that’s an exaggeration. They dated for three years and married on May 27, 1944. As they emerged from the church, they passed through a column formed by Hugh’s band members, their instruments held aloft in a gleaming V-shaped roof of unplayed music protecting the newlyweds. Seven months later, Barbara gave birth to their first child, Lesley, and shortly thereafter, the Gibbs moved to the Isle of Man—in the Irish, or Manx, Sea—between northern England and Northern Ireland. Hugh found a steady gig playing the tourist hotels on the Isle.

  Barry Gibb was born on September 1, 1946. In the signature event of his early childhood, he spilled a cup of scalding tea on himself at eighteen months. Barry went into a coma and was ill for half a year. The accident and the illness seemed to slow his development. On December 22, 1949, Robin and Maurice, fraternal—not identical—twins, were born, in that order. Later in life, Maurice would assume the role of conciliatory middle brother and Robin the role of perpetually petulant younger brother.

  Things turned tough for Hugh in 1954; the cream of his band split the isle for better work on the mainland. In 1955, Hugh lost his contract with the hotels and took odd jobs to pay the rent.

  “As much as our mother doesn’t like to hear about it today,” Robin said, “we were flat broke. It was post-war Britain and people were finding their feet. I have memories of my father counting out pennies to see if we’d make it to the end of the week. It was almost Dickensian. But we weren’t aware of finances. We were too busy having fun.”{1} The family moved back to the mainland, to the grimy, industrial city of Manchester. Almost all English rock stars born in this era, whether in big cities or rural areas, stress how gray and desolate post-war England could be. Gas and sugar were rationed; unemployment was rampant. In a gray, harsh nation, few places were as gray and harsh as Manchester. It was one tough town.

  The Gibb boys had little or no parental supervision. They ran rampant. All three were obsessed with fire, and proved to be urchin pyromaniacs. “We used to set fire to allotments and shops,” Barry said.{2} “Barry and Robin used to set fire to shops and billboards and things,” Maurice said.{3} While such behavior used to be regarded as pathological, current thinking suggests that the urge to light things up and burn them down is a natural aspect of childhood development. In other children, however, this urge is often subject to parental restraint. “We’re more like friends than parents,” Barbara Gibb later told an interviewer. “We’re not pushy—we just get a kick out of being with the boys.”{4}

  In the Bee Gees’ official autobiography, Barbara Gibb laughingly characterized young Robin as “a firebug.” Robin would come home from school, grab matches from the kitchen and take off. Barry planned their fire expeditions; Robin usually caught the blame. “The police would come to the door all the time demanding that our parents ‘get these boys off the streets,’” Barry said. “We were going to end up in Borstal (the fearsome English reform school/juvenile penitentiary) if our parents didn’t take control. Mum and dad were trying to earn a living—I don’t think they were aware of what we were doing.”{5} In a town as hard as Manchester, the nine- and six-year-old brothers Gibb were already regarded as a threat to public order.

  The boys started singing together under the loose guidance of their father. One of their first numbers was “Lollipop” by the Mudlarks, perhaps the most content-free hit of the doo-wop era. They soon moved on to originals. “When I was about ten, and Robin and Maurice about seven,” Barry said, “we started writing songs. Now that’s a bit young for writing songs and we certainly didn’t write anything that was worth anything. We wrote one song called ‘Turtle Dove’ and another about a year after that called ‘Let Me Love You.’ We were little kids sitting at home thinking, ‘Let’s write songs.’ We had natural three-part harmony . . . No one knew how we got it, least of all us, but we had it without understanding anything we were doing. There was something there that said, ‘You guys are going to be on stage the rest of your lives.’ There wasn’t any question what we were going to do . . . we knew where we were going and what we wanted to do even as children.”{6}

  All future performers seem to say this; it’s a trope of success. In the Gibbs’ case it seems to be true. As boys they never pursued anything else—excepting fire—and poured all their energy into developing as singers and performing. The need to be seen, to be acknowledged by a crowd, came as naturally to them as harmony. “Even in those early years,” Hugh Gibb said, “their whole lives revolved around waiting to be discovered. They’d stand on street corners singing ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ to passersby. They had to have an audience.”{7}

  On a fateful Christmas in 1955, Barry got a guitar; or maybe he got it for his birthday. As with so many foundation myths, the details are murky. “I got a guitar for my ninth birthday,” Barry said. “The guy who lived across the road from us had just come back from Hawaii, so he taught me that tuning. ‘That’ll get you started,’ he said, and I never changed from that tuning!”{8} Barry was probably taught an open tuning, in which the strings are tuned down to form a chord without fretting. This eases learning the basics of creating harmonious sounds on a guitar, but would confound anyone trying to play complex lines or learn detailed fretwork. This never posed a problem for Barry, who viewed his voice as his instrument and approached the guitar as a prop and songwriting tool. The unusual chord progressions that become natural in open tuning in some part explain the singular sound of their first hit, “New York Mining Disaster 1941 (Have You Seen My Wife, Mr. Jones?).”

  Local kids would perform every week at a Manchester movie house, the Gaumont Theatre. They’d mime to a current hit record played on a scratchy phonograph backstage. “We used to watch them every week,” Robin said. “We thought: ‘Why can’t we do something like that?’ There were five of us, Maurice and Barry and myself, and our neighbors Paul Frost and Kenny Oricks. We called ourselves the Rattlesnakes.” The Rattlesnakes decided to mime to the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie.” “The Saturday morning came, just before Christmas,” Robin said. “We were going up the stairs of the Gaumont when Barry dropped the record! It smashed. We thought: ‘What are we going to do?’ Barry had his guitar, which he had taken along to help the miming, and he suggested that we really sing. So out we went and sang ‘Lollipop’ by the Mudlarks, and it went well . . . and that was
how the Bee Gees began.”{9}

  As every great origin myth must, this tale features the perfect Jungian symbolic moment. Barry, the eldest, the Alpha, the most ambitious, the one with the guitar, bears the precious object—the record. But that precious object also contains falsity—under the spell of that falsity, the boys will deny their gifts and only pretend to sing. When Barry enters the temple—the Gaumont Theatre—in a moment of apostasy, he drops the sacred object; he smashes it to the floor. With that “accident,” Barry frees himself and his brothers from imitation, from false performance, from false ceremony, from living a lie in front of the congregation. Barry, consciously or not, had no interest in going onstage and faking anything. By smashing the record, he allowed the brothers’ true natures to be revealed. Smashing the record meant that the Gibbs expressed themselves in their own voices. Smashing the record gave their voices primacy. Smashing the record meant they were ready to own their abilities and own the ritual of performance.

  “It was amazing,” Barry said. “I started singing and trying to play, and suddenly I found the six-year-old twins with me doing three-part harmony. I fiddled with the guitar until I found my own chords. I still play that way.”{10} The urchins were in business. They sang in theaters, talent shows and on street corners. Passersby would fling coins at them and they’d root around the Manchester gutters, scrabbling for every copper. “Our next date was at the ­Walley Range Odeon,” Robin said. “Maurice and I added banjos. We did the Palentine Theatre as Wee Johnnie Hayes and the ­Bluecats—Barry was Johnnie Hayes. We got £5 a week for our act. This was in 1958 and we went on doing matinee performances for about two years.”{11}

  Their first adult gig came shortly after the Odeon. Hugh’s band was playing the Russell Street Club. He snuck the boys through the backdoor and rushed them up onstage before anyone could stop them. The crowd loved the brothers.

  The British had transported convicts and undesirables—mostly Irish—to Australia since the “First Fleet” established a penal colony there in 1788. Australia was built and maintained for decades on the slave labor of convicts administered by a series of corrupt gangs of soldiers and their administrative lackeys. A gold rush in the 1850s brought Englishmen to Oz of their own volition, and “transportation” began to wind down. But traditions die hard in the UK, and in the late 1950s, England began to encourage emigration. Australia needed families to rebuild the post-war economy. England, paralyzed by terrible unemployment, fearing labor unrest, sought to reduce the number of the unemployed not by hiring them, but by chucking them out of the country. The solution was simple: transport the unemployed and undesirable to Oz at state expense, and let them make the best of things when they disembarked.

  The police came, as they often did, to the Gibbs’ door in July of 1958. The boys were becoming worse delinquents; their public performances had not deterred their vandalism. The brothers were considered such a menace at ages twelve and nine that they were being thrown out of the toughest town in England and ordered overseas. It was that, or Borstal. An added inducement to the authorities for shipping out the Gibbs was Hugh’s chronic unemployment, and his place on the dole. He was considered a drain on the Manchester economy. “The policemen had three words for my dad,” Robin said. “‘The ‘Ten Pound Plan.’ Our behaviour and dad’s inability to find an income was the reason we left. Parents [paid] 10 pounds each and kids [traveled] free. We went by ocean—12,000 miles over five weeks.”{12}

  The family arrived on September 1, Barry’s twelfth birthday. Hugh took a miserable job as a salesman—traveling on the massive truck convoys known as “road trains” that served the consumer needs of boondock towns and isolated ranches in the outback. He would be gone for months at a time. When he returned, his gambling and living expenses had eaten most of his pay. The family was destitute. Within a year of landing, the boys were selling sodas at a racetrack, the Brisbane Speedway. As they sold, and when they weren’t, they sang for tips and to draw customers. Once again, the crowd threw money at them and the boys scrabbled around gathering it up. “Not that we ever put any pressures on them,” Hugh said. “Most kids want to be train drivers at one time or another, but singing was the only thing the boys ever wanted to do. We couldn’t stop them. It’s no secret. They kept us going for a long time.”{13}

  Bill Good, a local racer, heard the boys and had them sing over the racetrack loudspeakers during breaks. Bill Gates, a local disc jockey, heard the brothers at the track and recorded them for his radio show. “They had a unique sound even then,” Gates said. “We bought them new guitars and made tapes for air play. This got them known, and jobs followed in hotels . . . until the problem of their ages arose [with the Child Welfare office]. At early recording sessions the big problem was keeping the twins from wrecking the place. We’d spend a whole day mucking around trying to get them organized. Barry could knock out a song in five minutes. One time we had three songs ready to tape and wanted another. We asked Barry if he had a song written and he replied: ‘No, but I’ll write one now.’”{14}

  Bill Gates and Bill Good created the name, the Bee Gees, from their own initials. Though stories vary over time and with who’s doing the telling, it seems that the brothers Gibb’s name or initials never figured in their professional moniker. Yet, they never changed it. They got famous Down Under as the Bee Gees, and the Bee Gees they remained.

  The radio shows brought requests from local TV, and by 1960 the boys were regular visitors to the households of Brisbane. “My boys have got the show business bug,” Barbara said. “I can’t remember when the boys haven’t been singing. On the boat coming to Australia they entertained the passengers all the way.”{15} “Show business,” Robin said, “is something you have to have in you when you’re born.”{16} From the start, the boys never saw themselves as rock and rollers or folkies or as belonging to any type of music or scene. They were performers, in show business, and their duty was to the audience, not themselves.

  The brothers set up a pretend studio beneath their home to practice for their TV appearances. Maurice, aged ten, told the Australian Women’s Weekly: “We have a different script every day, and we’re always changing the floor plan and the sets around.”{17} “We got on to television in Brisbane in 1960 with our own show, ‘Cottie’s Happy Hour,’” Robin said. “We got very big in Brisbane. The three of us played Surfer’s Paradise at the Beachcomber Hotel for six weeks, three shows a night.”{18}

  Barry, age thirteen, told the Weekly, “I like to make up the tunes I sing. I get the words from romance magazines and stories my 16-year-old sister, Lesley, reads.”{19} Barry was writing songs in a serious, professional way, looking for a hit. Robin joined him, and later, tried to take more than his share of the credit. “The first song we ever wrote was ‘Let Me Love You.’” Robin said. “Our first songwriting success was ‘Starlight of Love,’ which was recorded by producer Col Joye and got to No. 1. We became an overnight success but our first hit didn’t come until 1965, although the Bee Gees were always big TV-wise.”{20}

  As their fame increased, Bill Gates no longer wanted to deal with the logistics. Hugh was reluctant to take the reins, but Barbara insisted. She wanted any managerial money kept in the family and she wanted the boys to have paternal supervision. “Is it my job or is it going to be them?” Hugh told the Bee Gees’ official biographer, David Leaf. “I felt their future’s going to be stronger than mine, so, to be quite frank, they kept us. I gave up my work to drive them around. They were only kids; they had to have somebody. I never wanted to be their manager, but by force of circumstances I had to be.”{21} “If he would’ve had his opportunity in his own life he would have been a big star,” Barry said. “But he didn’t, so it was through us that he was going to make it.”{22} “We’re an extension of father’s frustration. He never quite made it, but he can live it with us.”{23}

  It’s never easy for anyone when children start supporting parents. The “parentified child” is a recurring motif for every child performer. The kids
have to take on aspects of adulthood they cannot perceive or understand, but they do understand that crucial roles are being reversed. Hugh would try to maintain control by making the boys sing and dress like little adults—like his modeling of proper showbiz. The boys would react to the discomfort of the situation by turning Barry into the surrogate father. Barry could write songs and play the guitar—he was the de facto breadwinner. The twins looked up to and followed Barry as if he were the parent. By turning a brother into a paternal figure, the twins only delayed their own development. This dynamic functioned for a good long while. But when it blew up, as it did during the recording of Odessa in 1969, there would be considerable collateral damage.

  The boys played a lot of dives, and always for adult audiences. “The only way we could capitalize on our popularity as boys in Australia was doing club work for an adult audience,” Maurice said. “The rock ‘n’ roll touring circuit for kids hadn’t completely happened yet.”{24} “We used to hit clubs in Australia where I’d have to sneak them ’cause of their ages,” Hugh said. “But even then they had a professional show. I’ve always enjoyed the touring more than the studio work.”{25} “We worked places,” Maurice said, “where the men were so drunk they couldn’t stand up, so they would fight sitting down. Wonderful, innocent times they were.”{26}

  Referring to such a brutal memory as “wonderful” and “innocent” might be the essence of denial. Maybe the boys didn’t know how tough their circumstances were, but no child likes to watch drunken adults beating one another. Any kid who lives through that while having to be “professional”—which means masking one’s true feelings—can scarcely be called a youngster. Traveling and performing under those conditions taught the boys early, if it taught them nothing else, to depend only on one another. As is often the case for the parentified child, there is no actual childhood.