The rundown, mangy atmosphere quickly dashed whatever fantasies the Bee Gees might have had of a luxurious retreat in a continental castle. The château proved something of a shithole—poorly heated and badly furnished. Maurice, in particular, hated the place. The winter weather was oppressive; there was no television and nothing to do. There were only two functioning showers. The band, the crew and the few wives that had come along all queued up for the bathrooms. Recording began around two in the afternoon and usually lasted until three or four in the morning. No one wanted to play before they’d showered to get warm, and it took until midafternoon for everyone to stand in line and get their bathing done.
The studio itself was no marvel. “After Elton John left,” Richardson said, “the owner of the studio smashed it to smithereens and rebuilt what was left in a second-story loft within the castle. When I arrived there was a terrific buzz on everything—it was all ungrounded. So I spent the first two days grounding the place.”{300}
Robin had a different take on the vibe in Hérouville. “There were so many pornographic films made at the Château,” he said. “The staircase where we wrote ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ all those songs, was the same staircase where there’ve been six classic lesbian porno scenes filmed. I was watching one called Kinky Women of Bourbon Street, and all of a sudden there’s this château, and I said, ‘It’s the Château!’ These girls, these dodgy birds, are having a scene on the staircase that leads from the front door up to the studio. There were dildos hanging off the stairs and everything. I thought, ‘Gawd, we wrote “Night Fever” there!’”{301}{302} Robin was known for his constant drawing of explicit stick figures featuring exaggerated male sexual organs. He left plenty of them on the walls of the Honky Château. One writer described them as “grotesque, elflike creatures who scurry about with enormous genitals and ravenous stares.”
The studio was jury-rigged at best. The control-board fader knobs were painted with different-colored nail polish, and some had contacts so worn the audio would drop out if they were slid past a certain point. The playing musicians—Maurice, Blue, Dennis, Alan and Barry—set up in a main room with overhead beams, a space offering little of the expected studio sound-baffling.{303} It was a tough space in which to get a clean recording. There was no easy way to isolate the instruments and Karl Richardson remembers a lot of “leakage.”
But the château was self-contained, far from distractions and inexpensive. Management had paid for a month in advance.
“It was a serviceable studio, a little tricky,” Albhy Galuten said. “The piano was near a window that was generally open, so it wasn’t in tune much. There was a control room that looked into the studio, and a sort of an anteroom you could use like a vocal booth. It was not highly maintained in the technical sense. They did have an ATI console, which was considered a high quality, high fidelity [board]. We took advantage of the liveness [of the room].
“The musician is more important than the instrument, which is more important than the microphone, which is more important than the console, which is more important than the tape recorder. The further you get from the performer the less important it is.
“You could make great live recordings there. It’s a matter of the engineer’s capability.”{304} “Since I started working with Karl, I’ve never had to worry about the sound. I get a buzz on with the people we’re working with and concentrate on that. Karl never has to worry about the production and arrangement of the song. We don’t get in each other’s way.”{305}
However uncomfortable or unhappy with their surroundings the Gibbs might have been, they let Albhy and Karl figure out how to make the studio suit their needs. The band sat down and got to work. Barry, the driving creative force, was writing funk pop songs. The song structures are based on repeating figures or figures of constant, repeating change or both—similar to the song structures from the heyday of Motown. The parts fit together schematically, layered with care, and there’s little room for improvisation. On first hearing or on the thirtieth, the songs remain hard, glossy objects—polished to a high sheen. Bee Gees detractors talk about a mechanistic quality; an almost inhuman perfection that suggests studio musicians running down carefully orchestrated charts. Maybe it’s the overly finished aspects of the songs that lead people to forget that the Bee Gees were a real band.
Barry was in charge and Maurice was often drunk, passive and ineffectual; Robin made “suggestions,” as one studio presence put it, and his suggestions were heeded, by and large. “Robin had great instincts,” the studio source said. The brothers had worked with the same musicians—Blue, Alan and Dennis—for at least two years and two albums and two tours. They enjoyed the instinctive mutual understanding and chemistry that only comes from extended, repetitive studio work and close listening. Blue, Alan and Dennis were not hired guns. They played on the road, they played with the brothers for fun, they trusted one another and were vested in the music. Albhy and Karl were integral members of the band.
There endures a jumble of assertions—a lack of a definitive version—about who did what and who should get credit for which finished part. “That is me playing the “Stayin’ Alive” lick,” said Alan, “although several people lay claim to coming up with it. Dennis says it was me. Maurice used to say it was him. My recollection is extremely hazy due to my drug and alcohol abuse.”{306}
Everyone had ideas together and everyone figured out how to make those ideas come alive. For example, the musical track for “How Deep Is Your Love” came mostly from Blue. But for some reason, Albhy played Blue’s piano part on the recordings made at the château. Maurice later claimed to have played both the bass and the synclavier strings; he tried to deny credit to both Ahlby and Blue Weaver.{307}
The Bee Gees had a sound, a product of seven musicians working together. Barry dominated the sound, not only by his falsetto, his songwriting and his willpower, but also by his underrated rhythm guitar. “A lot of that was Barry’s right hand,” Richardson said. “Every one of those records has some form of acoustic guitar with Barry going ching-ching-ching. Whether it’s hidden or not, it’s there, driving the track along.”{308}
“Somewhere along the line,” Arif Mardin said, “Barry became completely in tune with the times. That’s the phenomenon. It hasn’t happened many times before, but he has totally locked into what people are hearing. And what they want to hear. This is surely his time.”{309}
The work was collaborative, dominated by Barry. The songwriting began with Barry’s ideas, and those were sometimes a lyric line looking for a melody, and sometimes a finished song complete in every detail. “[Blue Weaver] had a lot to do with the creation of ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’” Albhy said. Barry asked Blue: “What’s the most beautiful chord you know?” Blue replied: “E flat.” Barry had Blue play the chord and Barry’s lyrics tumbled out. “In other times he might’ve been a co-writer on that song,” Albhy said. “Barry would sit down at the piano, and the song would spew out of him. He didn’t like the process of saying ‘Well, you wrote 10% of this song.’ You were either in for 50% or not in at all. Blue’s misfortune for ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ was that he was not in.”{310}
“The songwriting was exquisite,” Karl said. “At that point all we could do was screw it up. Barry came up with the initial idea, and he and Blue Weaver developed it. Blue was on electric piano, Barry on acoustic guitar, and in an afternoon they wrote ‘How Deep Is Your Love.’” The music was written in a couple of hours. Barry, Robin and Maurice huddled together and came up with most of the lyrics later that day. I think the second verse still needed to be written—there was a lot of ‘hummeny, hummeny, hummeny’—but three or four days later we were doing the vocals.”{311}
Barry—like Robin and Maurice—never wrote down what he heard in his head. “When I walk into the studio, I have a complete picture of what the song will be like as a record,” Barry told Mitch Glazer for Playboy. “I know when and where the strings will be, what the horns shou
ld be like; the finished product. You try to share your picture to a certain extent, because whoever wrote the song can’t give the picture away; it’s impossible. My original struggle with Albhy was about this. I would play him a song on the guitar and he couldn’t hear how it would come out. He’d say, ‘I just can’t see it.’ But what made it work was that he trusted me and went along blind in some cases. That’s how our production started. On a song like ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ I could hear the choir and the orchestration, but I couldn’t put it into practice, translate it for the musicians. That is what Albhy does.”{312}
“The Bee Gees have this tendency to disobey the laws of music because they are not formally schooled in it,” Karl said. “They don’t even know the names of the chords they write with. But if they’d studied formally, they’d have never sung the melodies they do.”{313}
“We can’t write music,” Robin said. “Semi-quavers and all that stuff, I wouldn’t know a semi-quaver from a black hollow!”{314} “At this point in our lives,” Barry said sensibly, “learning to read music might take something away from us that has been natural all our lives.”{315}
Barry likes to toss this off as normal procedure and Albhy understates everything. But the images that arise are near to incredible: Barry playing a little of what he hears—and to paraphrase rock critic Robert Christgau writing of folksinger Phil Ochs: Barry’s guitar playing would not suffer were his right hand webbed—stopping, explaining, moving on. Imagine the frustrations built into this scenario, and Barry is not the most patient of men.
Also imagine the trust between Barry and Albhy, between Barry and the band, between the band and Albhy, between Albhy and Karl. And the awe that Barry must inspire, walking into this crappy, freezing, underequipped studio, three thousand miles from home, undaunted, with a hit song in all its parts running like a movie in his head. Barry hummed the string parts he wanted; he guided Blue, Alan and Dennis, Maurice. When Barry had an idea, everybody knew they would manifest that idea in its complexity from Barry’s head onto the tape. They also knew that Barry wrote hits.
“I distinctly remember Barry saying: ‘Boy, Karl, have I got a song for you,’ and sitting down to play ‘Stayin’ Alive’ on an acoustic guitar,” Karl Richardson said. “It was like a chant and it was unbelievable. I said ‘Barry, don’t forget that rhythm. That’s a number one record.’ I knew, five bars in, no questions asked. You couldn’t get past the intro without knowing it was a smash.”{316} Engineers always say this later about songs that turn out to be smashes. But Richardson, an engineer to his core, never engaged in hype. He’s a calm and steady presence. If he got excited, then the moment of hearing the song for the first time must have been exciting.
“Blue, Barry and I would sit down and say ‘That chord sounds great there, but how about when the guitar player goes “dang, wa-tang”?’” Albhy said. “‘Do you want the seventh in the chord or do you want to leave that hole there?’ Those were the kinds of things that had to be worked out.”
“It’s obviously easy,” Robin said, getting breezy about the backbreaking work of others. “We’ve all got the same kind of brain wave.”{317} “There was a period of time when Robin was important,” a regular studio presence said. “Maurice would come in with his Perrier bottle with vodka, I assume, in it. Robin would come in, maybe once a day and he’d say, ‘That’s not getting the emotion. This should be in two parts, that’s too busy.’ He would make executive producer sort of comments, which were useful.”{318}
“Robin is the objective production ear,” Karl said. “The rest of us—Barry, Maurice and Albhy—get so close to the music, we do so many different experiments, that we can’t always tell what sounds good. Robin comes in and calls it in a moment; it doesn’t work or it sounds great.”{319}
“Robin’s opinion was very valuable,” Albhy said. “Carl and I sat in the control room all the time. Blue and Denis were there more than Maurice and Robin. The day to day in the trenches was me, Barry and Karl. It was clearly Barry’s vision. If Barry felt strongly about something, Karl and I would relent. Generally one of us would agree with him anyhow, because we knew it was what Barry wanted. We were executing Barry’s vision.”{320}
“It was orchestrated,” Albhy said. “It was a process and it was all about ‘head charts’; creating in the studio. ‘Gee, OK, that’s the part of the verse for the keyboards.’ Then we would go for the performance. All of the arrangements were done on the spot and the performance was executed until it felt good. That was the standard. It didn’t matter how we got there—whether something was thrown together or it was one take—our concern was that it felt good, that it made a statement. How it’s done, I don’t know. I know the end product. If that’s accepted, then how it came to be is just detail.”{321}
“Barry,” Albhy, said, in the understatement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “is meticulous about pitch and meter.”{322} Barry at times demonstrated what songwriter Randy Newman has described as “the greatest gift,” a gift for melody. Barry also was gifted with, always relied on and had trained over decades his absolute perfect pitch. Barry heard everything. What he heard in his head, he expected to hear on the tape. Barry’s work ethic made that happen and he had a team that worked as hard as he did. If Barry, Albhy and Karl were awake, they were at the control board.
“Without them,” Barry said, “I doubt that I would be able to express exactly what I want on a record. It would be far too much for my little head to comprehend. Their expertise in the studio really makes things happen.”{323}
“The Bee Gees usually work from about three until midnight,” Albhy said. “You’re not a slave to the music, but you’re dependent on their inspiration at the moment, or maybe your own. If you’re excited about something and something is working, you can’t leave.”{324}
“They went out into the studio and nailed it,” Karl Richardson said. “It didn’t take long. If they didn’t get the execution or the balance, it was easier to do it again. It would take longer to argue about it than to redo it, as they were all natural vocalists. Barry Gibb doesn’t really have vibrato, he has tremolo, so his intensity changes but not necessarily his pitch. Whereas Robin has fast vibrato and there are lots of pitch changes. [Maurice] was somewhere in between. Depending on where he was in his range, Maurice either had a little bit of vibrato or just straight tone. So, the distinctiveness was all three voices combining to make this unusual blend that you’d never get anywhere else. Nobody was tracking each other’s vibrato, I can tell you that.”{325}
Then, out of the blue, in the midst of work, everything changed. Stigwood told the band to forget about writing for an album, and to adapt what they already had for his upcoming movie soundtrack.
“You’ve got to remember,” Barry said much later, “we were fairly dead in the water in 1975. The Bee Gees sound was basically tired. We hadn’t had a hit record in about three years. We had to find something. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”{326} “The Bee Gees were making their 35th comeback,” said Peter Brown, who had been a high executive at RSO. “Robert was very close to them. He’d developed them, produced them, he’d looked after them. At the same time, of course, he owned their management, their record label and their music publishing. So when Saturday Night Fever hit, Robert had the movie, their management, their publishing and the record deal.”{327}
“Robert Stigwood flew up and told us the basic idea of his movie,”{328} Maurice said. “It was hard to get them to read anything,” Stigwood said. “So I described the story.”{329} “He asked if we’d like to write the music for it,” Maurice said. “In those days it was like ‘Wow! Movie music!’ [Back then] you would pay people to get your songs in a film.”{330} “We played him demo tracks of ‘If I Can’t Have You’ and ‘More Than a Woman.’ He asked if we could write it more disco-y. We’d also written a song called ‘Saturday Night,’ but there were so many songs out called ‘Saturday Night,’ even one by the Bay City Rollers, so when we rewrote it for the movie,
we called it ‘Stayin’ Alive.’”{331}
According to the Bee Gees’ autobiography, Stigwood explained the plot and the boys leapt at the chance to create pure disco material. Both “Night Fever” and “Staying Alive” were written to align with the film’s themes, and as possible titles.{332} They wrote the songs and recorded rough demos in “two and a half weeks.” Stigwood liked everything, but couldn’t understand why the most danceable song’s chorus went “Stayin’ alive / Stayin’ alive.” He wanted a chorus of “Saturday night / Saturday night.” The band told him there were too many songs out already called “Saturday Night” and they wouldn’t write another one. Barry told Stigwood to accept “Stayin’ Alive” or the Bee Gees wouldn’t let him have their current songs for the movie. Maurice said: “Then we wrote ‘Night Fever’ and Stigwood changed the movie’s title to Saturday Night Fever from Saturday Night.”{333}
“To me,” Robin said, “Saturday Night Fever sounds like some sleazy little porno film showing on the corner, second billed to a film called Suspender Belts.”{334}
Maurice later claimed to be gobsmacked at how well the song lyrics fit the film; the brothers had never been given a script and they would never read one. Travolta’s showcase dance number is set to “You Should Be Dancing” rather than the newer Hérouville material because the actor had been rehearsing to “You Should Be Dancing” for two months. He was reluctant to scrap his work and shift to a new number.{335} Travolta’s insistence helped make the song a hit for a second time.
“We weren’t looking at Fever as a career vehicle,” Maurice said. “We got caught up in the Robert Stigwood syndrome: Anyone he managed he also wanted involved in his film projects, as opposed to keeping them separate. He asked for songs, we gave him songs off what would have been our next studio album.”
The Bee Gees Page 16