The Bee Gees

by David N. Meyer

  The boys thought they’d be singing for their supper the entire voyage. “We got on the boat,” Maurice said, “and they didn’t even know we were supposed to be there. If Dad hadn’t gone to see the purser, we could’ve travelled for free and never worked. But we only did about six shows in six weeks.” “The entertainment room was over the captain’s cabin,” Barry said, “which was good for us because he said, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want entertainment at certain times, because I’ve got to go to bed.’ The captain called the purser in and told him he didn’t care. So we did one show a week.” Those shows were encouraging. The kids on board turned every performance into a celebration. “Puff, the Magic Dragon” was a particular crowd-pleaser.

  “We worked our way over,” Maurice said. “We had heard that the original Seekers [a folk group that hit with “I’ll Never Find Another You” and “Georgy Girl”] had worked their way to England, too.”{47}

  “We stopped off in India, the Middle East, Cairo, the Pyramids,” Barry said. “And the things we discovered in back street bazaars! You could buy bottles of Dexedrine, every kind of stimulant, no questions asked. We were on a ship, but we flew all the way.”{48} “We were up all night writing,” Robin said, “because we’d bought some Dexedrine in Aden. It was legal there. There was a war in Aden, and warships in the harbor. We went into a drugstore, and the owner said, ‘There’s a war on, and I’m getting out. Here, take what you want.’”{49}

  “Spicks and Specks” became the top single in Oz more or less while the family was still on the Fairsky. It’s a structurally complex song, built on weird chords. The chopping guitar, bouncy beat and layered voices evoke Herman’s Hermits. In mid-bounce, though, the songs stops dead and Barry sings a—soon to be characteristic—solo lament with no instrumental backing. A Beatles-esque cornet takes the song out. “Spicks” is a sophisticated pop construction, a harbinger of the idiosyncratic lyrics, rhythms, pacing and embellishments that would become the Bee Gees’ sound.

  If the music of your puberty shapes your taste for the rest of your life, what about your scars from the same period? Their #1 caused little rejoicing among Barry, Maurice and Robin. They’d been treated shabbily, they knew it, and were in no mood to savor the irony. Their feeling toward Australia was good riddance and kiss my ass. They looked toward England feeling like battle-scarred veterans of the record label wars.

  And like teenagers on Dexedrine.

  The Fairsky docked in Southampton on February 6. The family stayed the night in a crap hotel in London. They reached out to Colin Petersen and he found them a cheap furnished flat. Colin was from Brisbane. When he was nine he starred in the Australian movie Smiley. He also had roles in The Scamp and A Cry from the Streets. Colin starting drumming at twelve, and joined the Australian band Steve and the Board. They moved to Sydney in 1965 and released their first single on Spin. He met the Bee Gees in Sydney, and moved to England shortly before they arrived in London.

  “When we arrived in London,” Barry said, “we had nothing. We were unknown. We had no recording contract and no work.”{50}

  “So we reach England,” Robin said, “and what happens when we arrive? The first people we meet coming off the ship is another rock group who advised us to go back. They told us the Walker Brothers were fading and Eric Clapton was rising and they tried to convince us not to try to make it in England. That gave us the added incentive to give it a go. We had sent tapes ahead before we left Australia and had hopes that someone who heard them would contact us.”{51}

  Hugh’s luck is worth pondering, as is Barry’s. Hugh never caught a break on his own, yet the Bee Gees’ luck in those early years was phenomenal. Hugh, in his determined but hardly dazzling way, attempted things that never work out for anyone, and yet, for his boys, they did. Before leaving Australia, Hugh had sent acetates of Bee Gees material, along with a painfully earnest letter, to several UK labels and management outfits.

  Hugh’s letter arrived at NEMS on December 3, 1966, and read in part:

  This is just a preliminary letter to advise you of the arrival in London of a young vocal group, who, having reached the top of their field in this country, are returning home to the UK to further their career. They are the “Bee Gees,” who consist of three brothers, Barry Gibb, aged 19, and twins Robin and Maurice, aged 16. . . .

  Although still youngsters, the boys have had an enormous amount of experience in all facets of show business: TV, recording, pantomime, hotel and club work etc. Naturally, their records have been aimed at the teenage market and at the time of writing they have a hit record, “Spicks & Specks,” which has just reached the number 3 position in every state in Australia. We quite realise that this does not mean very much overseas, but considering the enormous size of Australia, this is considered quite a fest here.

  That Hugh cited “pantomime” and “hotel and club work,” suggests that he had not the slightest idea of what the music business in England would be like.

  Like every other manager of every other aspiring band on the planet, Hugh sent music to NEMS. The odds of anyone at NEMS sorting through their weekly pile of unsolicited material to uncover a diamond in the rough are incalculable. Yet, somebody did. Epstein handed the acetates off to Stigwood. He played them, and, being Stigwood, starting searching for the Bee Gees.

  That is the canonical version, as told in the Bee Gees’ authorized biography and elsewhere.

  There’s another, only slightly less romantic version, and it showcases every bit as much luck. It might also have the virtue of being true. In 1966, a representative of Barry’s Australian publisher reached out to Ronald Rennie, the managing director of Polydor, UK—a small subsidiary of the enormous German record label. Rennie received recordings of “Spicks and Specks” and other tracks. Rennie wrote back to Festival as a preliminary to making a deal to release the Bee Gees music on Polydor in the UK. If the music sold well enough, Rennie would bring the band from Oz to tour.

  But suddenly, here’s Barry off the boat, making the rounds, with no idea that Festival had reached out to Polydor. Barry knocked on Rennie’s door, introduced himself and gave Rennie another set of acetates. Rennie thought Barry had appeal, and called his buddy Robert Stigwood to suggest that Stigwood immediately sign the Bee Gees and manage them.

  Stigwood knew where the boys were and how to reach Hugh because Rennie told him. Rennie knew that because Barry had left him a contact number. Showman that he was, Stigwood never spilled the beans.{52}

  However it happened, Stigwood thought what he heard had promise. Since he wasn’t going to manage the Beatles, Stigwood was searching for a vocal group he could guide and shape, one that might possibly outdo the Beatles. Stigwood never thought small. His ambitions were matched by Barry’s.

  “One night in 1967, I turned up at Robert Stigwood’s place,” Paul McCartney said. “He said, ‘What do you think of this record?’ And he played some young songwriters. It was a couple of their early songs. I liked them, and he said, ‘Oh, great, ’cause I’m thinking of signing them.’ And that was the start of them for me.”{53}

  “I loved their composing,” Stigwood said. “I also loved their harmony singing. It was unique, a sound only brothers could make.”{54}

  Stigwood found out the Gibbs were heading to England. He knew the date of their arrival. One way or another, Stigwood got the phone number of the rental house they’d occupied for only two days. He called and kept calling. Hugh had never heard Stigwood’s name; he only knew about Epstein. When he first called, the boys were out making the rounds.

  “We trudged around Denmark Street,” Maurice said, “and saw the manager of The Seekers, the manager of Cliff Richard, and they all told us we were wasting our time. We were staying in a semi-detached in Hendon wondering what to do when my mother said we’d had a call from Robert Stickweed. We had no idea who that was.”{55} Stigwood asked them to come around. They met briefly and scheduled an audition.

  “We did our nightclub act,” Maurice said, “and he watched a
nd listened and never smiled once. Then he said, ‘Be at my office at six o’clock,’ and we were and we signed contracts.”{56} Within less than a month of getting off the boat, the boys signed five-year deals: recording contracts, publishing contracts and management contracts. They were Stigwood’s and he was theirs. The five-year deals started out with £25 a week for each.{57} That was not bad money for 1967; five-year deals were unusual at the time. Stigwood was investing for the long term and wanted his investment locked up. The day they signed, Polydor, under a deal with Festival, released “Spicks and Specks” in the UK.{58}

  Describing Stigwood at the time, Barry said: “He looked Edwardian, with sideburns and a velvet-lapel jacket, Oscar Wilde-ish, with grayer hair. We went into his office, next to The Palladium in Argyll Street, and he gave us 20 pounds each to buy clothes in Carnaby Street.” Carnaby Street was the epicenter of Swinging London and the locus of all the groovy clothing stores.

  Barry returned to the office wearing a black shroud, tights and carrying a sword. Eric Clapton was already in the NEMS elevator, dressed head to toe as a cowboy. As the elevator rose, the two eyed one another and neither said a word.{59}

  Peter Brown, a personal assistant to Brian Epstein and the Beatles who went on to be president of RSO, chronicled the Fab Four and their scene in The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles. “Brian hated the Bee Gees from the start,” Brown wrote, “perhaps because they weren’t his discovery. When Stigwood told Brian on the phone that he had bought 51 percent of the Bee Gees’ publishing for NEMS for £1,000, Brian shouted, ‘Well that’s a thousand out the window!’ Almost immediately the Bee Gees had a number-one hit single with their own composition, ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941,’ and Brian was even more annoyed.”{60}

  A thousand pounds for 51 percent of the Bee Gees’ publishing proved to be one of the greatest bargains in music industry history, as later Bee Gee lawsuits against Stigwood attempted to prove. Paul Simon, when asked what he learned writing songs in the factory atmosphere of the Brill Building, said: “I learned to keep my publishing.” The Bee Gees, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, would come to legal blows with their management over getting a fair share of what was owed them.

  Stigwood set the Bee Gees up with Dick Ashby as their factotum, manager of the day-to-day and go-to guy when the Bee Gees wanted to communicate with the world or vice versa. Stigwood went off to America to find a US label for the band. Epstein wanted them to sign with Capitol, which handled the Beatles in the US. Capitol had famously screwed Epstein on the Beatles’ US royalty deal. Epstein’s continued loyalty to Capitol suggests—as do several Epstein contemporaries—that Epstein didn’t understand how thoroughly he’d been hosed. Stigwood certainly did. Atlantic had signed Cream and Stigwood got along well with Atlantic’s legendary president, Ahmet Ertegun. It took a while, but Atlantic signed the Bee Gees for £80,000, the largest contract given to a new group at the time.

  The Bee Gees headed into Polydor studios in London in late April 1967. They brought in drummer Colin Petersen and Aussie guitarist Vince Melouney to round out their lineup. “I didn’t even know they were in England until they phoned,” Vince said. “I had known them in Australia. We worked in the same places and did session work together. Everybody knows everybody else in Australia. They said they would like me to play guitar on the session. That first time in the studio together we recorded ‘New York Mining Disaster.’ After that I joined the group.”{61}

  The band worked on material written since their last recordings made in Oz. They did not recycle older songs. Stigwood tells a story of a power failure at Polydor, and of the boys sitting on the stairs in the dark. Inspired by the claustrophobic feel, they wrote “Mining Disaster,” he says, in ten minutes. “There was a power outage at this demo studio at Polydor at Stratford Place in London,” Maurice said. “The lights had gone out. We walked outside the studio and into the hall, and there was this echo that came from the ground floor right up to where we were on the fourth floor. There was this whole atmosphere of being in a mine hole.”

  “We were sitting in the lounge, in the dark, and we got the first line,” Barry said. “‘In the event of something happening to me.’ And we thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good line, people will know what we’re talking about.’”{62}

  The single was released on April 14, 1967. Stigwood bought a full-page ad, citing the band as “the most significant new musical talent of 1967.”{63} “When people put out ads saying you’re the most significant new talent of 1967,” Robin said, “you’ve got to live up to it. So you do as much as you can to keep away from the basic chords and rhythms.”{64} “The old concept of writing about love and romance as the basis of every pop song has changed,” Barry told Melody Maker. “We still write romance songs, but most of our writing is about contemporary things, situations, people. The Beatles have started to write about subjects not connected with love. We do too. ‘New York Mining Disaster’ is about some people trapped in a mine.

  “We can write a song about almost anything, to order. We write all the time. We finish four or five songs a week on average. We drive the producer and technicians mad. We have nothing worked out. We sit about and think up a subject, then write a song on the spot. We did the whole of our first LP like this. We may all have ideas beforehand, but we’re never sure what the end product is going to be like until we’re in the studio.”{65} “It’s really the only way we can work—spontaneously, off the cuff.”{66}

  “New York Mining Disaster 1941 (Have You Seen My Wife, Mr. Jones?)” introduced one of the band’s many quirks: a preference for parentheses in their song titles. It would persist at least until 1979’s “Spirits (Having Flown).” Most reviews gave the song respect—which it deserved, as it went to #14 on the US charts and #12 in the UK. But the first review raised the dreaded B-word. “The Aussie Bee Gees group are now in Britain—and very talented they are, too,” Melody Maker proclaimed. “A story-in-song ballad that’s folksy in some respects, and a bit like the Beatles in other ways. Fascinating harmonies, underlined by cello, and a lyric that keeps you glued to the speaker. I found it wholly gripping—congrats to the boys.”{67}

  Stigwood, Polydor and Atlantic were determined to promote the boys as the next Beatles. That meant telling everyone that the Bee Gees had a Beatles-like sound and a round of Stigwood-­generated rumors that this or that apocryphal DJ mistook “Mining Disaster” for a new Beatles single. Right from the jump, the band had to endure Beatles comparisons. But “Mining Disaster” does not sound like the Beatles. The song is startling, original and just plain weird. It doesn’t sound like anyone but the Bee Gees.

  The Bee Gees could not read or write music. Sometimes they hummed approximations of the horn and string parts for Bill Shepherd, their composer-arranger. Sometimes, Shepherd composed Bee Gees horn and string arrangements himself. During this period, the Bee Gees took credit for a number of in-studio things they did not do, and it’s not entirely clear who did what. Later in their career, the Gibbs—and especially Barry—would meticulously hum or whistle exactly the horn or string parts they wanted. It’s likely that for “Mining Disaster,” Shepherd originated the parts.

  “Mining Disaster” is a good old-fashioned tragic saga, a throwback to English and Irish folk ditties and skiffle tragedies. The guitar strums a skiffle beat, the foundation of so much early UK pop, which the Beatles hadn’t used unironically in some time. It’s easy to picture Lonnie Donegan or Pete Seeger a decade earlier on a grainy black-and-white telly, strumming away with his head thrown back, shouting out “Mining Disaster” with unbearable folkie sincerity. But the song is odd, off in an ineffable way, like many of the Bee Gees’ early hits. There’s an air of otherness, something askew in its sincerity and solemnness. The arrangement, especially of the harmonies, is sophisticated far beyond the boys’ years.

  “They have been hailed as ‘new Beatles,’” Melody Maker said. “And even compared to the Beatles sound-wise, though they refuse to agree that the
ir music has any Beatle flavourings.” “I think it’s because we write songs and are with the same management, NEMS, that the comparisons have arisen,” Barry said, disingenuously, as if that very management had not been flogging the comparison worldwide.{68} “There are no songs you could say were Beatles’ songs, or tunes or words you could say were Beatles’ words,” Maurice said, unknowingly beginning a ten-year process of defending the band’s originality. “Our harmonies are sometimes similar. But we can’t sing any differently, we don’t consciously try to sound or not try to sound like anybody. All I can say is we try to be ourselves.”{69} “We made a demo once,” Robin said, protesting too much. “Just a rough recording, and we thought it sounded Beatle-ish so we threw it away.”{70}

  On May 11, the boys made their first appearance on the iconic British music TV show Top of the Pops. They shared the bill with the Rolling Stones, the Move and the pop singer Lulu, Maurice’s future wife. Lulu performed her recent hit “The Boat I Row.” Lulu was tiny, with enormous, lovely eyes and a megawatt smile. She had a perky, indefatigable Georgy Girl persona—down to earth, working class, accessible—and a soaring voice. She was, even then, a wise showbiz pro. Lulu and Maurice remember checking one another out that day, but they did not speak. From there, the band appeared on Beat-Club, the German equivalent of Top of the Pops. In late May, the Bee Gees played live at Liverpool University, and in June at the Saville Theatre in London and at concert venues around the country, including Manchester, the city they once tried to burn down.

  Shortly after their Top of the Pops appearance, Lulu got a call from her friend Joanne Nuffield. “Maurice Gibb fancies you,” Nuffield told her. Maurice was too shy to call Lulu himself. And despite Nuffield’s urgings, Lulu didn’t call Maurice. They met by chance in the south of France, when the Gibbs were staying at Stigwood’s house. A week later, Maurice called Lulu up in London, and took her to see Pink Floyd. They tried to have a romance, but Lulu’s career was thriving. She was busier than Maurice and ambivalent about him. They “often had to make do with talking on the phone.”{71}