This review, while in substance in accord with most other reviews of Main Course, proves to be a comparatively reasonable assault. Other reviews were openly contemptuous and vituperative. In its almost perfect wrongness on every point, this review encapsulates the entrenched critical hostility to the Bee Gees, and how determined critics were to defy the evidence of their own ears. This critic, and others, failed to grasp how revolutionary and enduring Main Course’s better songs would prove to be.
“Jive Talkin’” is, simply put, one of the best singles ever cut and has outlasted all the songs it’s accused of imitating.
The critic is right about one thing: Main Course was and remains the Bee Gees’ best-sounding record, and likely their best LP overall. As usual for the band, it has two great cuts, two decent cuts and the rest are, for the Bee Gees, high-grade filler. But the great cuts are game changers. “Jive Talkin’” is the pinnacle of their career. It does cop, in the most intelligent way, Steve Wonder’s clavinet riffs from “Superstition” and the pre-disco ascending and descending bass lines from underrated bass futurist Freddie Graham. Graham first blew the music world’s mind with those riffs on Sly Stone’s “You’re the One” by Little Sister and later made them a household sound on Sly’s Fresh. If you have to steal from someone in art, it’s wise to steal from the best, and for once, the brothers did.
These are not straight thefts; they are appropriations in pursuit of an original sound. Barry’s languid strumming reveals a gift no one knew he had. It’s a smoother version of Kool and the Gang’s signature chicka-chicka and a more Funky Nassau version of KC and the Sunshine Band’s homogenized Caribbean strumming. Nothing that came before from Barry’s right hand sounds like that, though it does evoke the immortal rhythm riff from Shirley and Company’s classic dance track “Shame, Shame, Shame.” These are earmarks of the song, and worth commenting on, but they remain part of a complete whole. “Jive Talkin’” cannot be reduced to its component parts.
No one in his or her right mind, save the Bee Gees, would have broken up all that smooth dance funk for a whimsical, seemingly pointless, 9/16 break. But it’s the break that marks the song’s singularity, makes it so eccentric and lets DJs sort out the timing for endless club versions.
“Jive Talkin’” is also a stutter song, a prized pop pigeonhole, and joins the company of other great stutter songs: “My Generation” by the Who, “Changes” by David Bowie, “Benny and the Jets” by Elton John and Bob Seeger’s “Katmandu.”
As for the critical charges of “blackface,” or the Bee Gees attempting to sound black, the most astonishing aspect of “Jive Talkin’” is its racelessness. Within the first ten seconds of any Kool and the Gang song, it’s clear they’re African American. Within the same time frame of KC and the Sunshine Band, it’s clear their intention is to make a white sound. Ten seconds of the Average White Band might fool you, but thirty seconds in there’s no doubt that they are correctly named. “Jive Talkin’” sounds neither black nor white; it exists in a whirling limbo of all the sounds in the air at the time of its making; the result is pure Bee Gees.
“It was a departure from the ballad style we were most often associated with,” Barry said of “Jive Talkin’.” “When it became a hit, people started saying that we had stepped down to be a disco group which was a put down to disco music as well. We don’t think disco is bad music; we think it’s happy and has a wide appeal. It’s for people to dance to; that’s what it’s all about. We decided to try something lighthearted, and we did. We didn’t cunningly go into disco music to gain greater strength in the record market as some people implied. We simply try to embrace all kinds of music, whatever music there is.”{270}
“Nights on Broadway” melds old-school Bee Gees bombast with a gentler vocal approach over contemporary synth riffs. The introduction of falsetto into their familiar soaring harmonies makes the song leap out of the speakers. On an AM radio in a moving car, it sounded totally new. “Wind of Change” is pretty much a Spinners (“Rubber Band Man”) backing track with the Gibbs singing over it. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Barry’s vocal approach is much influenced by Eddie Kendricks’s proto-disco “Keep on Truckin’.”
After those first three cuts, the discernable influences really get eclectic. “Songbird” and “Country Lanes,” with their hesitant piano lines and country-tinged guitars, mimic Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection. “Edge of the Universe” proves to be the second-best cut on the album. It doesn’t sound like anyone save the Gibbs, though an argument could be made that the driving piano comes from Bob Seeger. Arif Mardin figured out how to take ideas that had failed the band on their last three records and make hits out of them. The less said about “Fanny,” the better. It’s a Robin one-off dirty joke, either for the benefit of, or at the expense of, their gay audience.
After Main Course exploded, plans were made to record the follow-up, Children of the World, with Arif at Criteria. But RSO severed its distribution agreement with Atlantic; Arif was an Atlantic employee and Atlantic was not going to loan him out. The Bee Gees went to LA to work with producer Richard Perry, famed for his bright, shiny production on albums by Harry Nilsson, Linda Ronstadt and Carly Simon. Perry was not a good fit.
The Bee Gees’ future producer Albhy Galuten said, “They decided that they would come back to Miami and try to make the record with [Criteria engineer] Karl Richardson. At the time, I was in the UK producing a band named Bees Make Honey. I had been dropped by Atlantic [as an in-house producer] and was hired as a producer where I had a budget and a hotel room and a meal allowance and could actually hang out and make a record. I was finishing the last mix when I got a call from Karl Richardson. Karl said, ‘I’m here with the Bee Gees. We’re trying to make a record, and they could use a producer. When are you coming back?’ I said, ‘I’m on a plane in a few hours.’”{271}
Before teaming up with Karl to become the fourth and fifth Bee Gees through their most productive and popular years, Albhy Galuten had a remarkably full and varied career as a sideman and producer. Whenever music history was made, Albhy was there. A dropout from the Berklee College of Music, Albhy played with the legendary southern soul studio outfit Charlie Freeman and the Dixie Flyers; he worked as an assistant on Layla and played keyboards on a couple of Layla cuts as well; he played on “Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae; played keyboards for Jackie DeShannon; produced Jellyfish, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton and played with Aretha Franklin, Rod Stewart, Kenny Loggins, Wishbone Ash, Chris Hillman and the Eagles. Albhy’s perfect pitch, wide-ranging experience, determination, patience and relaxed perfectionism made him the dream producer for Barry.
Albhy first heard the Bee Gees, like most people, on his car radio: “I was driving in the car,” he said, “and heard ‘Mining Disaster’ for the first time, I thought it was a Beatles song. Because at the time, being a Beatles song meant ‘Here’s a song that sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before, it must be the Beatles’ because they were the only ones who broke ground.”{272}
Albhy said, “I got off the plane and came directly over. They were already in the studio. They were tracking ‘You Should Be Dancing.’ I don’t remember my comments. I think I probably thought it was good. I was pretty tired. I wouldn’t have been nervous. Had I known what it was going to become in my career, I might’ve been nervous. To me, after working with Eric Clapton or Rod Stewart, the Bee Gees were just another band. I remember I left early that day. They said, ‘We’ll see you tomorrow.’ So I came back and began coming in every day and working on what I do as a producer.”{273}
Children of the World came out in September of 1976. It went to #8 in the US. “You Should Be Dancing” became a #1 hit, spending twenty weeks on the Billboard charts, along with charting worldwide on pop and adult contemporary lists, and “Love So Right” reached #3, maintaining its place for fourteen weeks. “Boogie Child,” the weakest single, still made it to #12 and spent fifteen weeks on the charts.
“We wanted an album tha
t was more nervous,” Maurice said. “We felt Main Course was too varied. There were too many directions. We wanted to take the R&B flavour a step further with Children.”{274}
“From mushy pop ballads,” Rolling Stone’s critic wrote of Children of the World, “through late-Sixties psychedelia and low-key rock, the Bee Gees have demonstrated a chameleon like ability to adapt to disparate pop trends. These days, as they said on the Tonight Show with their best Cockney accents, ‘Rhythm & blues is what’s happening.’ Audacious, right? Well, not exactly. Some of their stuff is really good, better than poseurs like Wild Cherry, AWB and Kokomo.”{275}
The critics didn’t see that these songs, however they were aimed at the time, would reach way past disco. The champion of the album is “You Should Be Dancing,” with its bottomless stack of layered guitars, old-style funk horns and a guitar solo that prefigures “Thriller.” “Boogie Child” is an embarrassment; the group does try to sound like AWB or Wild Cherry—precisely the limited white funk–imitators that the Bee Gees transcended with “Jive Talkin’.” Here, for the only time, an accusation of blackface might not be inappropriate. The rest of the album falls somewhere between those two poles: original and groundbreaking takes on funk and poorly conceived imitations of it. Alan Kendall’s lead guitar work stands out, and Barry chicken-scratches with the best.
When Children broke huge, Robin said, “We’re becoming bigger now than we ever were before. No-one would ever have thought that it would happen.”{276} “We were always writing the kind of music we do now,” he claimed. “But we weren’t putting it down right. We were writing R&B, but we weren’t going in an R&B direction.”{277}
“[Record labels] were the same as they are now—they want to tell you what to record,” Barry said. “When ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’ became a No. 1 record, they didn’t want to hear us do anything else but ballads.”{278}
“We’ve always been able to play different kinds of music,” Maurice said. “But we never had the backing. When we were going with softer material like ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?’ and ‘Run to Me,’ I think that’s all people wanted to hear from us. I don’t believe that our audience would have accepted our new songs then. We were not devoting enough time to our albums. We recorded Mr. Natural while on tour. Every time we had a few days off, we’d be shooting back to New York to do a few tracks. When we finally finished, we knew we could do better work.”{279}
“We’d been doing this new sound for years,” Robin insisted, unconvincingly. “In dressing rooms, planes. Just never on record. The black influence was our original one. Long before the pop ballads. It’s the way we thought and felt, so we were, in a sense, going back to our roots. ‘To Love Somebody’ was written for Otis Redding. Otis came to see Barry at the Plaza in New York one night, said he loved our material and would Barry write him a song? We were stuck in a niche; and after a couple of ballads—‘Lonely Days,’ ‘Mend a Broken Heart’—went to number one, we couldn’t get out of it. But first and always, we are songwriters; we explore all avenues.”{280}
“He pointed us in the right direction,” Barry said, speaking of Arif Mardin. “We love that direction, it mustn’t be the be-all and end-all. We’re going to continue in that direction, but if we keep doing it for another five years, we’ll be back in the wilderness again.”{281}
saturday night fever
People crying out for help. Desperate songs. Those are the ones that become giants. The minute you capture that on record, it’s gold. “Stayin’ Alive” is the epitome of that. Everybody struggles against the world, fighting all the bullshit and things that can drag you down. And it really is a victory just to survive. But when you climb back on top and win bigger than ever before—well, that’s something everybody reacts to. Everybody.
—Barry Gibb{282}
None of us expected it to be so big.
—Maurice Gibb{283}
Disco is not the Bee Gees’ fault.
They are not to blame.
In an episode of an American sitcom, two students—a straight African American girl and a gay white boy—sit down to talk to a teacher. The boy says: “She’s black. I’m gay. We make culture.” In America, truer words were never spoken. The brothers Gibb are demonstrably neither, and were never part of the thriving underground then increasingly overground black, gay and jet-set club scene based on dance music (and sex and drugs) that exploded—as ever, in a diluted form—into the mainstream. The Bee Gees’ only crime was to help make disco popular. Very, very popular.
They did this by selling 25 million copies of a double album between 1977 and 1980, at the time the most copies of any sound recording sold since the advent of sound recording. It’s one thing for, say, Lady Gaga to get 80 million hits on YouTube. It’s nice, but her audience didn’t have to do much. To move 25 million double units in the late 1970s, about 20 million people had to get in their cars, drive to a record store, take out their wallets, buy the damn thing, carry it home, undo the shrink wrap and slap it on the turntable. Then their friends all had to go out and do the same thing. To date, over 40 million copies of Saturday Night Fever (SNF) have sold.
Saturday Night Fever was a hit like nothing before and hardly anything since, spending twenty-four consecutive weeks at #1 from January to August of 1978. The single “How Deep Is Your Love” stayed in the top 10 for seventeen straight weeks. No other Billboard single had ever done that. In February and March of ’78, three singles from the record made the top 10 twice. During March and April, “Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive” both hit #1 and spent time at #2. “Night Fever” was #1 for eight weeks in a row and “Stayin’ Alive” was #1 for four. Yvonne Elliman’s cover of the Bee Gees’ “If I Can’t Have You”—the fourth single from the album—charted for six months and made #1; the Tavares’ cover of “More Than a Woman” stayed in the top 100 for five months. The Saturday Night Fever double LP remained in the top 200 from November 1977 to March 1980: twenty-nine consecutive months.
Some of the songs have aged poorly, some well and one is immortal.
“Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours sold between 9–10 million units at $7.98,” Al Coury explained in 1978, citing then-current prices. “Before that the big album was Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive, which did 7–8 million at $6.98 originally and then $7.98. Before that it was Carole King’s Tapestry, which did 10–12 million, with most of the sales at $5.98. Saturday Night Fever became the top-grossing album of all time when it hit 8 million units (because of its higher price).”{284}
The soundtrack proved such a monster because, Bee Gees aside, it was packed with known disco songs from brand name bands in a range of dance styles and demographics. KC and the Sunshine Band, Kool and the Gang, the Trammps, M.F.S.B., Yvonne Elliman, Ralph McDonald, Tavares, Walter Murphy: you could put on SNF and have a dance party without lifting the needle. When you needed to sit down and cool off, you could ignore the unlistenable soundtrack cuts from hack composer and Francis Ford Coppola brother-in-law David Shire, who had to be the luckiest man in show business to get his clueless disco-lite onto the LP.
Saturday Night Fever—the movie and the double LP—demonstrated the scale of the disco market and others rushed in to service and earn off that market. The soundtrack hit first and fueled the movie; then the movie hit and refueled the soundtrack. In that way, SNF is analogous to Woodstock—the event, the movie and the soundtrack album.
The message of Woodstock was not that 400,000 longhairs could come together peaceably for three days of music and love. The real message of Woodstock was that there were 400,000 longhairs, and all of them willing to travel and spend to revel in longhairdom. And if 400,000 would travel, then millions more must be waiting at home, along with their younger brothers and sisters, all ready to pay to demonstrate their longhairedness. Woodstock showed mainstream and niche marketers alike that profits awaited on the hippie bandwagon, and everybody got on board. No one had any idea of the scope of the sales opportunities until Woodstock hit. Sudde
nly, longhairedness was not aberrant. It was the new normal—the everyday face of the youth market. And so it was with Saturday Night Fever.
Disco haters talk about SNF and disco as a pernicious, undermining of the popular will. They should instead recognize SNF as the absolute manifestation of that will. Bill Oakes—then head of RSO and husband of Yvonne Elliman—believes that disco was not only well entrenched in America before SNF, but had already peaked. “These days,” Oakes told W magazine, “Fever is credited with kicking off the whole disco thing—but it really didn’t. Truth is, [SNF] breathed new life into a genre that was actually dying.”{285}
Saturday Night Fever showed how nationwide the disco market could be. Not only for disco music, but for discos themselves, disco sound systems, disco dance floors that lit up, rotating mirrored disco balls for clubs, homes and cars, disco clothing, disco haircuts, disco dance lessons, anything that cohered to disco. How could it not be huge? American white people love dancing that involves simple moves repeated over and over and over to a beat that never changes—like punk rock and the pogo, or country line dancing. That’s why disco took over mainstream America, black and white, while, say, Parliament-Funkadelic took over people who could actually dance.
Discotheque culture had been around a long time before the Bee Gees put it in every home. Discotheques, or at least people dressing up and going out to dance to records, had been around for decades.
Dancing to records—rather than to live music—in clubs began as a counterculture of resistance in pre–World War II Nazi Germany. In Hamburg, in the 1930s, the Swing Kids—mostly high schoolers—rejected National Socialism and the forced regimentation of the Hitler Youth by meeting in clubs and rented halls to swing dance to American jazz. Nothing could have been more verboten; jazz was the antithesis of the Nazi credo. It was individualist “degenerate” jungle music played by “Negroes” and distributed by Jews. The Swing Kids’ preference for “effete” English fashion, long hair on the boys and learning enough English to decipher song lyrics was further proof of their anti-German, antisocial “decadence.” The scene revolved around records because German radio never played such music. As the Swing Kids movement spread, underground dance clubs popped up in other cities. A crackdown in 1941 greatly reduced the number of Swing Kids but increased the determination of the survivors.
The Bee Gees Page 14