The Bee Gees

by David N. Meyer

  Everything came to a head in January 1969.

  Robin thought Stigwood was the instigator. Stigwood thought it was business as usual.

  Robin believed he had been promised that his opus “Lamplight” would be the A-side of the first single from Odessa. Stigwood instead made Barry’s “First of May” the A-side, with “Lamplight” the B.

  “We never decide on what we are going to release,” Barry said, “until we have finished in the studio. We always let Robert Stigwood decide what to release—he has the knack of picking the right one and it saves any argument.”{159} “I worked and worked and worked on that ‘Odessa’ track,” Robin said. “I got a ring from Stigwood to say it was the greatest pop classic he had ever experienced. He said it was stupendous, and I used to get calls from him at three and four and five and six in the morning telling me the same thing. I thought it was going to be the new single.”{160}

  Barry tried to cast it as a misunderstanding between Robin and Stigwood with himself as a powerless, neutral observer. “I had thought that it might be ‘Melody Fair,’ but if Robert says ‘First of May’ then ‘First of May’ it is, whether it is a flop or a hit.”{161} By February, Barry, trying to save the band, backtracked from his talk of leaving. “When I said that it was after the failure of ‘Jumbo’ and it was a frustrating time. I thought the time had come when we should make some kind of move . . . not leaving pop entirely but going into films. That way you can stay with the kids but be seen by more people. I had the offers and I thought why the hell not—why not for me, why not for the brothers and Colin? Instead of us doing this we have found a more sensible way. Like Maurice was on Lulu’s show playing the piano with an orchestra. None of the kids would have expected to see him there without the Bee Gees. Another time it may be Robin on his own.”{162}

  “First of May” did well, but not as well as “Message” or “Joke.” It reached #6 in the UK but only #37 in the US.

  Maurice and Lulu married amid a media circus on February 18 at St. James’s Church in Buckinghamshire. Three thousand fans surrounded the church and blocked the local roads. Barry, the best man, hindered by the insanity, showed up late. Siblings Andy and Lesley Gibb and Lesley’s daughter Berri were among the pages and bridesmaids.{163} The morning after, Lulu was back at the BBC rehearsing.

  Maurice was drinking heavily. He wrecked his Bentley convertible, bashed up his face and passed it off as nothing. Lulu was astonished by the constant arrival of checks for Maurice—“some of them for hundreds of thousands of pounds.” Maurice paid them no mind, cramming them into drawers and forgetting them. He liked to buy stuff, and his brothers fought to keep up. “The rivalry between the brothers was obsessive,” Lulu wrote. “One couldn’t have something without the other wanting it, whether it be a house, a particular car, or even a dog. At the same time there was a bond that was impossible to break. They could say anything they liked to each other, whatever the criticism, but heaven help anybody from outside the family who did the same. The boys would immediately leap to each other’s defense.”{164}

  Odessa was released in early March 1969. It eventually went to #10 in the UK and #20 in America. The album is an earful, an eyeful and a handful. The original double gatefold jacket was clad in heavyweight, maroon, fake flocked velvet; the band’s name is rendered in gold to evoke the era of Odessa’s supposed narrative. The velvet had an unpleasant, cloying feel, but it did give the jacket heft. That heft cost a fortune to manufacture, and caused allergy problems for those packaging the record. There are no group photos.

  In their groping after profundity, the Bee Gees predicted an era of pretension in album covers and content. The Beatles were moving on, but everyone else seemed stuck trying to match their earlier, more ponderous achievements. Odessa, though featuring several stellar songs, collapses under the weight of its own baggage. The endless opening and closing tracks are sentimental and ­derivative, harder to sit through than “Number 9” on the White ­Album.

  Those tracks, and the weaker cuts, though never worthy listening on their own terms, prove fascinating in a career-plateauing, band-imploding sort of way. Somehow glossing over the overreaching orchestral horrors that take up half the LP, Bee Gees’ fans and revisionists cite Odessa as a masterpiece. As the record stands, it’s hardly that. The Bee Gees’ gifts don’t incline toward masterpiece albums. They’re pop synthesists: hit makers. They write singles.

  In the British film Chariots of Fire, a sprinter—who’s wound a little too tight—hires a coach. He tells the coach that he wants to give up the hundred-meter dash and become a miler. The coach shakes his head with rueful insight. “Sprints,” he says firmly “are for neurotics.” The coach is telling the sprinter: There’s too much in your head for you to focus for an entire mile. You’re a neurotic and best suited for brief, immersive experiences. As are the Bee Gees.

  In the course of their career, the Bee Gees have proven themselves ultra-marathoners of the highest order; no one has shown their stamina over the long haul. But in the studio, album by album, they’ve always been sprinters: one song at a time. For Odessa, each was sprinting on his own.

  If Odessa had been released as a single album instead of a ­double—featuring only the best songs—it would be the greatest record of the Bee Gees’ career; the nearest thing to a masterpiece they ever produced.

  “The Bee Gees’ image—adolescent and sentimentally moral—obscures the reality of their artistry and the true depth of their work,” Bruce Harris wrote in Jazz & Pop. “On the surface, the Bee Gees might appear to be any other Top 40 bubblegum band, augmented by a flashy arranger, an oversized string section, and their own precocious habit for writing lushly pretty tunes.”

  (Clearly, what makes a top 40 bubblegum band has not changed much since 1970.)

  “The problem lies in the fact that the group’s image keeps interfering with what the lyrics to many of their songs are actually about,” Harris goes on with uncanny accuracy. “The Bee Gees are most widely known through their hit singles which, though often rather morbid for AM Radio (“New York Mining Disaster 1941” and “Got to Get a Message to You”), are still their lightest ­material. Even in some of their most brooding work, throughout the Odessa album, their music remains uncomfortable and paradoxically melodious, thereby belying the murkier aspects of the lyrics. 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.”{165}

  Odessa’s title/opening track functions like the overture to Lawrence of Arabia; it insists that something big and serious is about to happen. A preciously orchestrated, Beatles-esque, literal-minded story, “Odessa” is warbled (and warbled and warbled) operatically by Robin from the perspective of a lost sea captain, or someone. Lacking lyrical sense, melody and a hook, “Odessa” sounds exactly like something composed by someone determined to out-music his bandmates. Lyrically, it wants to set the stage and context for the songs that follow, but no narrative unites the disparate tracks. While compelling as a curiosity—like the more ornate, “conceptual” cuts or the orchestral/choral tracks—“Odessa” remains pretentious and unlistenable.

  Barry’s “You’ll Never See My Face Again” lays out the family feud and Barry’s feelings plain as plain. It’s his most bitter song, and, incongruously, one of his most lovely, with a hummable melody and lilting strings. Barry strums that acoustic hard, his anger apparent in every chord, but sings with uncharacteristic relaxation and patience. He cites all possible words having been spoken, all vows having been broken and how he laughs when someone claims friendship. It’s over, Barry says, and he won’t be around anymore. For a lesser ego, the finality of “Face” would suggest it be tracked as the album’s closer. That would not do for Barry. He disassociates himself from the ensuing record and from his brothers on the second track.

  On “Black Diamond,” a naked plea for inner peace, Robin sings without his usual quaver over—for him—simple, clean production. The song’s driven
by Maurice’s unusually forceful bass. There’s no mistaking the pain in Robin’s voice as he sings about someone who’s about to leave either him or a place he loves. The song is a testament to the beauty and power of Robin’s voice, especially since he doesn’t bury it in his usual rococo arrangements. “Black Diamond,” Robin’s hymn to leaving the band, is placed on the album as an immediate response to “Face.”

  “Marley Putt Drive,” Barry’s and Colin’s homage to the Band’s “The Weight,” is a remarkably whimsical collaboration between Barry and Robin, given the circumstances. The song features the drum opening, cadence, vocal patterns and melody of “The Weight.” Barry enlisted soulful picker Bill Keith—who played banjo for Neil Young—for that rootsy feel. Barry performs an able impression of Rick Danko, one of the Band’s four lead singers. The lyrics—another of Barry’s nursery rhyme sagas with an O. Henry ending—are beyond idiocy.

  “Edison” is an eccentric, haunting Gibb tour de force; Barry and Robin harmonizing beautifully in an ode to, of all things, inventor Thomas Edison. The arrangements are strange in that Bee Gee way—they sound like nothing else yet register as almost familiar. The melody drops away for a segment of uncharacteristic 4/4 followed by exquisite a capella harmony. The repeated hook of “Edison came to stay” is one of their most unforgettable. “Melody Fair” is twee to the tenth power, a pop take on Fairport Convention and the like, but the chorus offers lovely harmony from Barry and Maurice. Odessa’s sophisticated arrangements and shimmering production are a leap forward, and grant even the weaker tracks staying power.

  Maurice, too, was developing his own ideas and musical identity. “Suddenly” is Maurice’s only solo lead vocal and asks the musical question, which seems appropriate in his circumstance: “How can you tell if humans are real?” It’s the most rocking and singable cut on Odessa. Maurice’s interest in American rootsy sounds is clear, but foremost, “Suddenly” is a perfect Donovan cop; its slow build, thick drums, jaunty guitar and conversational vocals evoke any of Donovan’s hits. Maurice’s vocal is so immediate and straightforward, sung with such ease, lack of affect and good humor. His voice is a treasure; it’s a shame Maurice sang so few leads.

  “No record encapsulated the Gibb brothers’ majestically skewed pop vision like Odessa,” Alex Petridis wrote in the Guardian. “Which amid the usual gorgeously orchestrated heartbreak, featured mock national anthems, country and western, and a title track that set a new benchmark for their magnificent oddness: harps, flamenco guitars, mock-Gregorian chanting, a burst of Baa Baa Black Sheep, lyrics about icebergs and vicars and emigrating to Finland. Quite what Odessa’s concept was supposed to be remains a mystery, but it’s the kind of album you listen to rapt, baffled as to what’s going to happen next.”{166}

  “Give Your Best” is Barry’s further venturing into his concept of American country-influenced roots music. It’s a song of further, angry separation. Barry claims he’s ready to fight, and will offer his best only to his friends. There’s no mention of family. The song, in a departure for Barry, really swings, with a clippity-cloppity rhythm that evokes Tony (“Knock Three Times”) Orlando collaborating with Jim (“Spiders and Snakes”) Stafford. The vocal melody seems inspired by the New Seekers’ “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” which was a later hit for Melanie.

  “Lamplight” is not as strong a single as “First of May.” It’s ponderous, with soaring hymnlike harmonies. There’s no hook; “Lamplight” takes a while to get to the point. “Black Diamond” feels more immediate and true, but Robin belts out the vocal of “Lamplight,” hitting impossibly high notes. The complexity of his arrangement, with its stop-start guitar, would transfer poorly to AM radio or the tinny speakers of 1969 cars. It’s not a likely single.

  “First of May” suffers from Barry’s cornball tendencies, here indulged to the fullest. He cites childhood, Christmas trees and the vicissitudes of fate as the source of a lost and yearned-for Eden. The strings are unabashedly sentimental, ladled on with a trowel. Lyrically, it’s a nursery rhyme, but the melody would make this a much-covered number, one that burrows into the listener’s head. In opposition to the frank rage of “Face” and “Friends,” “First” is Barry’s lament over the estrangement between his brothers, and his fervent declaration that their “love would never die.” Barry’s superb—and for him, restrained—singing, coupled with the poignant vocals-only fade-out, make the song an obvious choice for Odessa’s first single. What’s really weird is that “First” sounds so much more like a Robin song than a Barry song. At first it seems reasonable to think that Robin’s real beef was that Barry took Robin’s song away from him and sang the lead. On further reflection, though—in the prescient words of musical scholar Devin McGinley—“If Barry can demonstrably write in almost anyone else’s style, why not his brother’s?”{167}

  “First of May” was a killer single, a hit waiting to happen. Any objective assessment would conclude that Stigwood was not being unfair to Robin, but making a reasoned commercial choice.

  Molly, Robin’s wife, thought he was getting screwed. She committed the cardinal sin of band girlfriends/wives; she inserted herself in the process by going public. She spoke to the Daily Mirror, commencing a pattern of the band communicating through the press, often to the same reporter in the same article. “Robin doesn’t want the glamour,” Molly said. “But he does want some credit and is being ignored. I can’t take it anymore. Someone has to say something.”

  “There is a rift between us,” Robin told the paper. “I am not on talking terms with Stigwood. I wish I knew where we were all heading. I am talking to my brothers but the relationship has been strained lately and this is not good for the group. As for Molly, she has got the right to say what she wishes although I am not worried about who gets credit myself . . . It’s the Bee Gees as a unit I’m more worried about.”

  Barry, condescending as much as he could, said: “These are the aches and pains of growing up and of life in the pop world. Robin’s getting into manhood and marriage has a lot to do with changes of attitude. When you’ve got a wife you’ve got her views and thinking to consider. Molly is a nice person and I like her a lot. I don’t want to say anything more because she’s married to my brother and we’re not going to fall out.” “I’m sorry Molly feels this way,” Stigwood said, in the opening salvo of a campaign to cast Molly as a band-disrupting Yoko Ono figure, “but the rule is I don’t consult wives in the business affairs of the group. It is untrue to say we don’t give Robin enough credit or that he is ignored.”{168}

  Robin felt differently. On March 19, 1969, he left the Bee Gees.

  “nervous wrecks”

  I have no intention of returning to the group. I would rather sweep roads or lay carpets.

  —Robin Gibb{169}

  Between their arrival in England in February 1967 and their breakup in March 1969, the Bee Gees created, recorded and pretty much produced four albums—First, Horizontal, Idea and the double album Odessa—while writing every song for every record, save one cut by Vince. They toured, did TV, radio and press, dealt with contracts, saw America and Europe, hit #1, went quintuple platinum, fell in love, married, fell out of love and got divorced.

  The pace of their output seems impossible and self-destructive by today’s standards, but was considered normal for the time. In the same period, the Rolling Stones released Between the Buttons, Their Satanic Majesties Request and Beggars Banquet. The Beach Boys, suffering a breakup themselves, released Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends and 20/20. Dylan, who barely survived a frantic period of his own, released only John Wesley Harding; Nashville Skyline appeared a month after Odessa. Meanwhile, the Beatles, incredibly, put out Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, White ­Album and Yellow Submarine.

  Toward the end of this era of frenzied production, the Stones dumped Brian Jones; Brian Wilson, heartbroken over his bandmates’—his brothers’ and cousin’s—refusal to record vocals for his masterpiece Smile, quit the Beach Boys; the Beatles
were hardly speaking and Dylan was emerging from a self-imposed isolation. Nobody survived intact. And here were the Gibbs; kids keeping pace with the greats. The strain was intolerable.

  The Bee Gees were younger than any of those bands. In March 1969, the twins were only nineteen and Barry twenty-two. Unlike the Stones, Beatles, Beach Boys or Dylan, they grew up as exiles with no home in rock and roll and no understanding of the emerging lunacy surrounding the music. They arrived in the UK as naifs. They landed in the heart of Swinging London, a Darwinian youthquake of music, drugs, alcohol, fashion, sex, young success and the systemized destruction of existing notions of adult behavior. Those raised in England, and more accustomed to its ruthless, unending status wars—like the Stones—functioned well. Others arrived better equipped to star in such a scene. Before Jimi Hendrix hit London, he’d served in the 101st Airborne and played a million dates on the chitlin’ circuit backing, among others, the Isley Brothers. Hendrix arrived knowing exactly who he was. The Gibb brothers didn’t know shit. They had to figure it all out for themselves, remain productive and cope with an avalanche of distractions.

  The Stones, Beatles, Beach Boys and Dylan grew up in the countries of their success, surrounded by family, friends, bandmates—a larger community of identity and support. Scenes coalesced around each band or performer. Each had lives outside their bands, and each had people to lean on who had nothing to do with their music or their families. Not the Bee Gees; they landed in England as strangers from a strange land. Their London community was a product of their success. Throughout this tumultuous time, they only had each other; no safety valves, no completely disinterested allies. It’s a wonder they stayed together as long as they did.

  Like everyone else in Swinging London, along with money, sex, fashion, liquor and unimaginable freedom, the Bee Gees discovered drugs. “We were known affectionately throughout the music business as Pilly, Potty and Pissy,” Maurice said. “I was the piss artist, Barry was the pot-head and Robin was the pill-head.”{170} By “piss artist,” Maurice means alcoholic. Barry blew his share of weed, though to little visible effect. Robin liked pills. In those days, “pills” meant speed: amphetamine in a variety of forms and doses. If you did “pills” and stayed awake for days, then you needed the opposite “pills” to get to sleep. Those doing speed also did downers. It was a hard cycle to break and regular—or, as in Robin’s case, continual—consumption of “pills” did not improve anyone’s disposition. Those with a tendency to paranoia or a persecution complex—or those who had to collaborate with others in high-stress situations—grew increasingly sensitive, impatient, unreasonable, suspicious and solitary.