Maurice, Barry and Robin, 1978.
Andy, 1979.
Maurice, Barry and Robin, 1979.
Bee Gees’ manager Robert Stigwood, 1979.
Maurice, Robin and Barry; Spirits Having Flown tour, 1979.
Andy and Victoria Principal, 1983, promoting their single “All I Have to Do Is Dream.”
Dwina Gibb, Robin John and Robin, 1986.
Andy’s wife Kim Reeder and their daughter Peta, 1988.
Maurice, Robin and Barry, Sydney, Australia, 1999.
sgt. pepper’s lonely hearts club band
While we were filming Sergeant Pepper, we wrote songs like “Tragedy” and “Too Much Heaven,” and then “Shadow Dancing,” all in one day. That’s three hit singles in less than 24 hours. So the drugs must have been good that day.
—Maurice Gibb{362}
It was the best of times, we had the worst of films.
—Robin Gibb{363}
It’s not easy to make the worst movie ever made.
In cultures where cannibalism carries religious or spiritual overtones—as opposed to its occasional appearance when folks just get really, really hungry—the act of consuming your dead enemy or beloved grandpa supposedly transfers to the diner the power, soul and positive attributes of the eaten. But if certain rituals are improperly performed or righteous respect not paid, then the consumed can rise up within the consumer and, you know, consume him. In ancient myth, the daring mortal Prometheus stole fire from the Greek gods. For messin’ where he shouldn’t have been a-messin’, the gods had Prometheus chained to a seaside rock and summoned birds to peck out his liver for all eternity.
This is kind of what happened to the Bee Gees with Sgt. Pepper’s.
The Bee Gees learned the hard way that you can Meet the Beatles—and, as the eighth-grade joke went when that album was released, you can “Beat the Meatles”—but you can never beat the Beatles. Barry seemed obsessed with trying, to slight reciprocation. Maurice met John Lennon once and ended up irritated, intimidated and moved to ingratiation.
“Robert introduced us,” Maurice said. “He said, ‘John, this is Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, a new group I just signed up,’ and I said, ‘It’s nice to meet you, John,’ and he said, ‘Naturally.’ So I said, ‘Oh, stuff you!’ A little bit later he came over and offered to buy me a drink. He said, ‘I like you, you know.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I like the way you answered that.’ I said, ‘Does that mean we’re friends then?’ And he said, ‘You bet.’” They went for drinks at the Speakeasy during a Cream concert where Maurice sat between Lennon and Keith Moon.{364}
It’s hard to find an interview wherein Paul, John, George or Ringo even mention the Bee Gees. Barry chose the Beatles as his nemesis, but always felt invisible to them. He told Timothy White: “George Harrison always said, ‘you were four years later than us; we were four years earlier than you.’ That’s the way he put it to me, and I’d never known until then whether the Beatles even thought about the Bee Gees being around.”{365}
“The brothers suffered greatly during the late Sixties from the Beatle thing,” Stigwood said. “When their first single, ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941,’ was released, everyone thought it was the Beatles. That hurt them badly”{366}
This was a widely held, or at least widely published view, when the Bee Gees first hit. In 1967, Richard Goldstein wrote: “More than common management, this new combo shared something musical with Lennon and McCartney: their sound. ‘New York Mining Disaster—1941’ would have been a credible title for a new Beatle composition, and the production (intoning strings to back a sparsely tragic tale) would have been an appropriate sequel to ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ Even the vocal phrasing—clipped, soft and incredibly sad—had a certain McCartney quality to it. Heads shot back when the radio announcers revealed that the Bee Gees were themselves.”{367} Even Barry said, well after the fact: “We were Beatlish in the early days. Our melodies lent themselves to that style. Thank God we got away from them. It could have led us further and further astray.”{368}
But “New York Mining Disaster 1941” doesn’t sound anything like the Beatles. Its familiar strumming guitar comes not from the Beatles, but straight out of the skiffle music scene that influenced almost every early British pop band. The Bee Gees’ first #1 in Australia—“Spicks and Specks”—apes Herman’s Hermits, not the Fab Four. The 1968 release of tracks recorded in Australia between 1963 and 1966, Rare, Precious & Beautiful, showcases songs that do sound much like the Beatles in form, harmony, guitar and mood. It speaks—like everything else—to Barry’s pop genius that at eighteen he could perfectly imitate the full range of early Beatles sounds. Nobody else in England at the time—and everybody was trying as hard as they could—even came close.
Viewed from fifty years on, it’s clear that the Bee Gees’ first four hit singles are theirs alone. It took guts, conviction and even self-delusion on the part of the band and Stigwood to release music so idiosyncratic, so unlike the popular hits of the day. “Words,” “Massachusetts” and “Got to Get a Message” take nothing from the Beatles.
How could they? The Bee Gees were never rock and rollers. Their sound did not combine American postwar R&B and seminal African American rock acts with English pub and dance-hall traditions. The Bee Gees never vested in rock’s 4/4 driving beat—the signature of the Liverpool sound known as “the beat”—that served as the Beatles’ namesake. The Bee Gees’ music never, in any iteration, bore the foremost quality of the Beatles: raucous joy.
The Bee Gees were the least likely guys on earth to cover, let alone understand, for example, “Dizzy Miss Lizzy.” They didn’t holler out harmonies, seldom improvised and held themselves aloof from the emotion of their music. Unfortunate, then, that the Bee Gees undertook the deeply thankless task of covering—cannibalizing—the Beatles’ least rock and roll, most mock-profound album. But mock-profundity was, after all, Barry’s stock in trade.
The whole debacle was Stigwood’s fault. According to the Bee Gees’ autobiography, making a movie of the Beatles’ album had been “a pet project of Stigwood’s for a number of years.”{369}
On November 17, 1974, Stigwood’s production of a theatrical musical version of Sgt. Pepper’s began a seven-week run at New York’s Beacon Theatre. Tom O’Horgan, an off-Broadway experimental theater director who worked with the pioneering downtown theater company La Mama, directed. Rock critic Robert Christgau, who found the show “one-dimensional schlock,” wrote: “Artistically as well as commercially (the Beacon wasn’t one-third full on the fourth day of the run) ‘Sgt. Pepper’ is a flop.”{370}
Stigwood closed the show after six weeks. Not, he insisted, because it was a commercial failure, but because it wasn’t what he had envisioned. In April 1976, Stigwood sought out rock critic Henry Edwards, who would later author Stardust: The David Bowie Story and function as John Lennon’s secretary-turned-mistress May Pang’s co-author for her tell-all, Loving John: The Untold Story. Stigwood wanted Edwards, who had never written a screenplay, to write a Sgt. Pepper’s movie. Shortly before Sgt. Pepper’s was released, Henry wrote of his experience in the New York Times: “[Stigwood] had first tried to put ‘Sgt. Pepper’ on stage. The result was an evening of razzle-dazzle production numbers that tried to duplicate the sound of the classic Beatles album. It was an artistic failure, but the production was selling tickets when Mr. Stigwood closed it. He wanted to rethink it—for film. If there’s one rule that stands above all others in Hollywood, it’s that if at first you don’t succeed, don’t under any circumstances, try again. Mr. Stigwood was preparing to break this rule.”{371}
Edwards told Stigwood he saw the film as a modernizing of a “World War II-era musical.” Edwards loved MGM musicals from the golden age of Hollywood and told Stigwood he wanted to make “the musical of the future.”{372} Edwards cited the heyday of the studio system, when lyricists would throw out ideas, studios would summon their stars and start shooting the next week. Edwards said Stigwo
od listened with care, “aware that giving them his O.K. would result in a film as unconventional as it would be expensive. Grinning, he said, ‘It has the right feel to me.’”{373}
The Beatles had always been leery of Stigwood—back in the day NEMS paid him off to go away. Stigwood returned seeking use of their songs and for once in his life he did not get the best of a deal. “It took about a year to negotiate,” Stigwood said. “Anything to do with the Beatles is complicated. But I must say, they were cooperative.”
Cooperative to the point of producing a phone-book-size contract and demanding rights of approval over Stigwood’s choice of screenwriter and director.{374} Stigwood also agreed that a Beatles management company rep—that is, a snitch in service to John or Paul—could attend the screenings of each day’s footage. That Stigwood surrendered so completely speaks to his mad desire for the material. Had the Beatles wanted to screw him, they could have rejected one draft or director after another and kept Stigwood dangling for years. Maybe they found Stigwood’s concept so farcical they said yes as a lark. Or maybe, like everyone else involved before production began, they thought Stigwood would make a mint. Tommy, released a year before, did; so did Jesus Christ Superstar. That’s what Stigwood did: he made mints. Nobody could conceive that the picture might tank.
Edwards said: “We want to create a movie that’s a movie, not a Beatles film. It’s even set in the present, not the sixties.”{375} Edwards culled 22 songs—out of the 29 to which Stigwood secured the rights—from Sgt. Pepper’s, Abbey Road, and Let It Be to flesh out the skeleton of his screenplay. Stigwood held a production meeting in Acapulco. “The traditional method of reducing the cost of a movie is to excise whole scenes,” Edwards said. “But at the Acapulco meeting, Mr. Stigwood interrupted the discussion of which chunks should go: ‘I love it all too much,’ he said, ‘for any of it to be discarded. Let’s find creative ways to do it for less.’”{376}
The film’s production designer, Brian Eatwell, was on an MGM back lot in Culver City, California, when he discovered the small-town set used in Mickey Rooney’s 1930s and ’40s nauseatingly innocent Andy Hardy films. The set had the atmosphere Edwards sought when describing a modern remake of a 1920s musical. Stigwood dispatched two hundred carpenters to work twenty-four-hour shifts to rebuild the quaint town square for Sgt. Pepper’s. That was not exactly doing things for less.
The film generated a lot of pre-production good will. The New York Times reported breathlessly on invitations going out to various stars offering them parts: the Eagles, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Bing Crosby, Bette Midler and many others.{377} Rolling Stone reported that the Bee Gees would only narrate the film, not star in it.{378} The invitations raised the specter of Tommy, a kitchen-sink picture in which half the roles could have been played by anybody. The Who’s rock opera, however loosely structured, gave the film something Harry Edwards would have to concoct—a coherent narrative. Anyone who owned Tommy the record came to Tommy the movie knowing how events would unfold; the movie functioned like a Classics Illustrated version of the album. Director Ken Russell, a madman and visual decadent, understood that Tommy would work best as a series of more or less disconnected musical vignettes. He threw ideas at the wall—and at Anne-Margaret—and kept what stuck. That approach worked fine for a story that audiences already knew. Stigwood’s mood swings with regard to Pepper’s—at times penny pinching and at others overindulgent—started the boulder of disaster rolling before a single frame was shot.
For his director, Stigwood chose—and the Beatles apparently approved—Michael Schultz, who came up through New York City’s Negro Ensemble Company, a theater group. Schultz made his directorial debut with Cooley High (1975). His second film was 1976’s fondly remembered, unintelligible, episodic, black stoner comedy Car Wash, which featured an all-star cast—Richard Pryor, the Pointer Sisters, Antonio Fargas, Bill Duke and George Carlin—and, in keeping with most stoner comedies, no discernable story line. The soundtrack did a lot better than the film. The title song hit #1; “I’m Going Down” and “I Wanna Get Next to You” both cracked the top 10. Schultz later made the episodic, cringe-worthy Krush Groove, an almost unwatchable yet indispensable guide to New York mid-eighties rap, break dance and b-boy culture starring Sheila E, Run-DMC, the Fat Boys, Kurtis Blow, Bobby Brown and Blair Underwood. Schultz has since enjoyed a respectable forty-year career directing television. Stigwood’s hiring the inexperienced Schultz makes a certain sense. With Car Wash, Schultz turned an underwritten screenplay into respectable grosses and killer soundtrack sales.
But Car Wash starred comedians, who know how to fill the screen. Richard Pryor’s director, however inexperienced, needed only to say “action” and “cut” and Pryor would do the rest. The Bee Gees, as rank amateurs, required a director they would respect and listen to. Hiring David Lean, however, might not have made any difference. Stigwood’s concept ignored an immutable law of show business: rock stars cannot act—any more than movie stars can rock and roll. The two jobs demand opposite energies and sensibilities, and pretty much nobody makes the transition.
The Beatles, the exceptions who prove every rule, were charming enough in Hard Day’s Night and Help! Ringo showed a flare for channeling Ringo-ness onscreen and he made a nice half-assed second career of doing just that. There is only one fully realized movie performance by a rock star: Mick Jagger’s messianic, satanic incarnation of, in his words, “a projection of the director’s fantasy of who he thinks I think I am,” in Nicholas Roeg’s hallucinatory, perverse Performance. Mick played an italicized version of himself, but at least he could do that. The Bee Gees showed few gifts as thespians. They, like every other musician who tried acting—from George Strait to 50 Cent—only embarrassed themselves. (Except for Queen Latifah.)
The Bee Gees’ terrible performances were not their fault. They fell in with Stigwood’s fantasy. When the cameras started rolling, they reverted to the baseline performance mode that had worked for them since they were children: show up and smile. No director could make film actors of the Gibbs with such craptastic, superficial material. They had no idea what they were getting into, and when they discovered they possessed no appropriate skill sets, it was too late.
“Do you realize what Stigwood’s doing?” Edwards said. “He’s got a writer who never wrote a movie before. The director never directed a musical or a white movie before. And the stars never acted before. Can you imagine what [the studio executives] think about this?”{379}
Whatever they thought, Stigwood’s amateurish enthusiasm extended to the casting. For the female lead—named Strawberry Fields, no less—he chose Sandy Farina, an unknown singer who had never acted in a film, and appeared in only one other picture after—The Toxic Avenger, a Troma Studio mega-low-budget classic. She later co-wrote Barbra Streisand’s #1 “Kiss Me in the Rain.” The Bee Gees can’t act, but Sandy Farina simply disappears, even when delivering her lines or singing her heart out. Farina has perfectly negative onscreen charisma and often looks terrified.
To round out the inappropriate cast, Stigwood brought in another amateur: Peter Frampton, the elfin singer-guitarist who rose to prominence with the blues-shouters Humble Pie. Regarded as a guitar prodigy, Frampton achieved worldwide fame with 1976’s Frampton Comes Alive!, a double album that became the benchmark for absurd breakout sales until Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Saturday Night Fever. Comes Alive! spent fifty-five weeks in the top 40 and sold 13 million copies by the time shooting on the film began.
Controversy surrounds the album, primarily because those who worked on it claim there was nothing “live” about it. One insider said: “After six months of overdubs the only thing live was the crowd noise.” The fearsome Dee Anthony, a larger than life personality who cultivated a thug image that was the opposite of Stigwood’s urbane presentation, managed Frampton. Anthony managed crooner Tony Bennett for a decade; he and his brother handled King Crimson, Traffic, Jethro Tull, J. Geils and Joe Cocker, among others. In 1976 and ’
77, Anthony was named Billboard’s Manager of the Year, whatever that means. Anthony and Stigwood, the two most powerful and intimidating musical managers of their day, formed an unholy alliance. Stigwood, recognizing that Frampton was younger and cuter than the Bee Gees and, at the moment, the most popular musician on the planet, cast Frampton in the lead role, Billy Shears. Frampton couldn’t act, either.
Post-production on Saturday Night Fever ended in April of 1977; Pepper’s began filming in October. When shooting started, the Bee Gees had not yet sold more copies of a record than any other record since there were records. Their musical and contractual obligations had been fulfilled. They were a band between projects. SNF was in the can; Here at Last . . . was doing extraordinarily well.
The usual Stigwood hype began innocently enough. Robin, talking about the decision to record Beatles songs for the Sgt. Pepper’s soundtrack: “When we were first signed by Robert Stigwood to Brian Epstein’s NEMS firm, much of our excitement came from being represented by the same company as the Beatles.” Barry: “If there is any music in the world we would record, any artists in the world we would feel pleased to be associated with, it’s the Beatles. We were almost listening to our own story. It’s not quite the same, not as glorious. But it is the story of a group that goes to the top.” Maurice said: “Robert always pictured us as being the band. Peter Frampton was the hottest property. It was the Bee Gees and Peter. By the time we’d finished the film, we’d become the band.”{380} That’s what they said before the film was released. By the time the picture hit the theatres, their positions would change.
After behaving contrary to his interests in hiring the writer, director, female lead, co-star, cameos, bit players and “villain” band, Stigwood did something that was not self-destructive. In 1976 he had approached the Beatles’ producer George Martin about arranging the music for the film. Martin, the incarnation of an English silver-haired eminence, had signed the Beatles to EMI and produced every one of their records. He was widely regarded, even by the Beatles, as a key component of their sound. Martin’s plummy accent and bemused remove only bolstered his reputation for integrity and for being a no-bullshit personality. He put Stigwood off again and again. Stigwood’s increasingly large payment offers and Martin’s concerns about his legacy led him to finally take the gig. “I didn’t want to do the project at first,” Martin said, “but I was persuaded because Peter Frampton was riding so high back then and I admired the Bee Gees. The premise was that it was a film score and not a record album. I did the best solo job I could, and I was faithful to the arrangements, but they were not mere copies. The music was right for the film but wrong for the Bee Gees—and their disco sound would have been unsuitable. With all the different songs we used, it’s a pity that the film wasn’t called Sgt. Pepper’s White Abbey Road. I have no regrets, though.”{381} Martin was worried, for good reason, that if he did not arrange the music, someone else would do a worse job. “If the film is a total flop,” Martin said, “my name will be mud. And if it’s good, it will be mud.”{382}
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