The band took a break from Criteria and headed to Los Angeles for the gala, star-studded July 18 premiere of Sgt. Pepper’s at the Palladium Theater. Peter Frampton, badly injured in a car wreck, could not attend. Commentators later blamed the forestalling of his career on Sgt. Pepper’s. But it was the automobile accident, not the movie, that kept Frampton out of the public eye and unable to record. Three days later, the film premiered at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The city declared Sgt. Pepper’s Day and all proceeds from the premiere went to one of the Bee Gees’ favorite charities, the NY Police Athletic League.
On July 23, 1978, the Sgt. Pepper’s soundtrack was released. The movie came out the next day. Expectations were high. Al Coury, never one to understate, said: “It could make Saturday Night Fever look like a punk album; like a test run for the main event.”{399} “Kids today don’t know the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper,” Robin told Playboy, though it might have been speed doing the talking. “And when those who do see our film and hear us doing it, that will be the version they relate to and remember. Unfortunately, the Beatles will be secondary. You see, there is no such thing as the Beatles. They don’t exist as a band and never performed Sgt. Pepper live. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed. When you heard the Beatles do Long Tall Sally or Roll Over Beethoven, did you care about Little Richard’s or Chuck Berry’s version? The only credit the Beatles get on this film is for songwriting.”{400}
Despite all the SNF love, and despite SNF holding at #8 eight months after its release, it was not going to be as if the Beatles never existed. From the moment radio began playing the record, according to Rolling Stone, “stations reported negative feedback from listeners, who requested the original Beatles versions.”{401} Capitol Records, the Beatles’ US label, couldn’t resist getting in a dig. “Ours,” Capitol’s Dennis White told Rolling Stone, “is doing as well as the soundtrack in a lot of areas.”{402}
Sgt. Pepper’s debuted at #5 on the Billboard charts and stayed there six weeks. Much of that chart position came from pre-orders and there would be millions of unsold returns. According to Bee Gees archivist Joe Brennan: “RSO made two million copies of the expensive two-LP set, which had an embossed front cover, special inner sleeves, and a poster. Counterfeiters who had made a tidy profit on Saturday Night Fever managed to get copies of the music and artwork ahead of release and added to the overabundance of product. At that time stores were allowed to return unsold albums for credit. Record business insiders said that it was the first album to ‘return platinum,’ and that because of the counterfeiting it returned more than it shipped. RSO destroyed hundreds of thousands of copies, and despite that the album was a familiar sight in cutout bins for years to come.”{403}
“We shipped triple platinum,” Gershon said. “That was unheard of. Lo and behold—the movie stiffed. The album stiffed.” Anticipating a success similar to SNF, organized crime record bootleggers printed untold quantities of fake copies. “The FBI,” Gershon said, “told us that the word got out to the guys driving a convoy of trucks that the Pepper’s [bootlegs] were valueless. They found them all dumped on the side of some road in Southern California. We sent out three million albums. And we probably had to take back more than four million returns.”{404} Gershon means that the fakes were so good no one could tell real albums from bootlegs. The bootleggers got paid their refunds, as did the legit retailers.
“It was the beginning of the end,” Gershon said. “Robert said we’re a small record company. Why bother staying in a business that is no longer very profitable.” Stigwood, never one to back a slow horse, said that while SNF was still setting records for sales. Prior to the film’s opening, Stigwood had been planning a “Heartland-based amusement park, a television movie on the production of the film and a novel version of the story.”{405} The film’s reception put an end to those plans.
The reviews were not kind. Even Janet Maslin, who could find the virtue in any film she chose to promote, no matter how abysmal, wrote: “This isn’t a movie, it’s a business deal set to music.”{406} Marilyn Laverty wrote in Record Mirror: “This film is one of the classic characterizations of the late ’70’s era, the quintessential statement of the cynicism and vacuousness of the corporate entertainment biz. Working from the proven commercial precept that a sucker is born every minute, those responsible for both the film and the album soundtrack can flaunt the success of their theory. The two-record soundtrack, one of the most expensive pop sets ever in the US, has an astounding initial shipment of 3.5 million copies. There are a lot of chumps out there plopping down 15.98 dollars retail cost for the privilege of hearing the Bee Gees prove THEY AREN’T nearly as interesting as the Beatles.”{407} According to Paul Nelson in Rolling Stone, Robert Stigwood and Dee Anthony “masterminded a double fiasco so unique it should win some kind of award for ineptness beyond even the normal call of duty. Stigwood and Anthony not only produced one of the worst movies ever made, but also managed to trash whatever rock & roll reputations such Seventies artists as Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees had before this excremental soundtrack was released. To be fair, the movie does show a certain charm in its relentlessly stupid grasp of the obvious. When Frampton sings ‘The Long and Winding Road,’ for instance, he is walking down a long and winding road. You keep laughing and thinking it can’t get any worse. But it does.”{408}
Despite the film’s unspeakable reviews, Robin’s revelatory “Oh! Darling” hit #15 on the singles charts; Aerosmith’s cover of “Come Together” made the top 40. Earth, Wind and Fire’s—they were in the movie, too—“Got to Get You into My Life” went platinum. When the movie tanked, it took the soundtrack with it. Sgt. Pepper’s fell out of the top 100 after only six weeks.
“The movie was, to be polite,” Al Coury said, “something less than an overwhelming success at the box office.”{409}
Paul McCartney, after admitting he had not and would not see the movie, said: “I thought that they couldn’t make a film of it. We used to be stoned all the time and talk about things like that and say, ‘Hey, what a great film this would make.’ But we used to say that the trouble is that people are all freaking out on acid with this album. You’re never gonna be able to get those big elephants that are coming through their heads. You can’t capture it: Once it gets to be a film, it’s always going to be plodding compared to the album. Those days it was a fantasy thing; it all took place in your mind, and it would really be harder than anything to capture that feeling. And from what I’ve heard of the Stigwood thing, it doesn’t seem to have captured it.”{410}
“I just feel sorry for Robert Stigwood, the Bee Gees and Pete Frampton for doing it,” George Harrison later said, “because they had established themselves in their own right as decent artists and suddenly . . . it’s like the classic thing of greed. The more you make the more you want to make, until you become so greedy that ultimately you put a foot wrong. And even though Sgt. Pepper is no doubt a financial success, I think it’s damaged their images, their careers, and they didn’t need to do that.”{411}
“I hated doing the film, recording the music,” Robin said after it tanked. “We didn’t have a chance to act because we didn’t talk. We were just mouthing Beatles’ lyrics. And I am not happy singing other people’s songs.”{412}
“I spoke to George about a year after it was out,” Maurice said, years later. “He told me he loved it—he thought that we sang the songs marvelously.” In response, Barry said: “But no one ever wrote us and said, ‘Great work, lads.’”{413}
“It should have had more excitement,” Robin said. “As we were making it, I was thinking, ‘I hope they are going to put some visual effects in here.’ When I saw it, it was exactly how we shot it, nothing was improved. On the set the camera is pointed at you and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘It’s gotta be more than just me sitting here in this room, ’cause nothing’s happening.’ Then you see the film and that’s all there is.” When asked how he would have preferred the film to be done,
he added: “Well, Saturday Night Fever had fucking in the back seat, you know. I mean that is the kind of film people are seeing these days. Sgt. Pepper comes out and people sort of expect to see fucking every now and then, but there were no fucks, you know? It was too goody-goody. I knew the film wasn’t going to be a big hit. Well, better luck next time.”{414}
“You don’t watch it,” Barry said. “You tolerate it.”
Robin answered. “Our Sgt. Pepper? With hand on heart, that was the biggest load of shit ever.”{415}
spirits having flown
The Bee Gees came away from Sgt. Pepper’s with plenty of plausible deniability. It wasn’t their project; it was Stigwood’s. It wasn’t their record; it was Martin’s. No one told them how crude the film would be; no one explained anything about acting; they had no input into the story; they had to share screen and music space with Frampton. Happily for them, no one cared. Sgt. Pepper’s collected its share of condemnation and sank, never to be seen again, beneath the juggernaut sales of SNF. Ben Fong-Torres wrote in Rolling Stone that RSO expected to “do about $250 million in the US alone in 1978.”{416}
Despite his poor-mouthing over Pepper’s failure, Stigwood took home 45 percent{417} of the gross of Saturday Night Fever, the movie, which did $285 million worldwide. He was in fine shape and, as ever, wanted more. So did the Bee Gees. With a discipline that few bands could have matched, they headed back to their beloved home base, Criteria Studios in Miami. By March of 1978, they were in their usual groove, working from 3:00 p.m. to midnight on a new record. “In this position,” Barry said, referring to the pressure caused by the success of SNF, “we are constantly up against the wall with people saying, ‘Please us!’ It’s an invisible thing, but you can feel that wall behind you, and you can hear the whole industry saying, ‘Give us a surprise, we expect you to outdo yourselves.’”{418}
The pressure was unrelenting in part because they were growing ever more famous, and attention from their fans rose accordingly. Tour boats drove by Barry’s waterfront home in Miami Beach several times a day. “It’s like living in a bloody goldfish bowl,” Barry said. “We’ve asked them if they could please keep the boat at least 200 yards out, but they don’t. The boats come past every hour on a nice day, and the people all have cameras and binoculars. They have a Universal Tours-type bus that comes down our road every hour with loudspeakers. The Miami Herald did us a real nice favor last year: they printed our address, with a picture of the front gates. You can’t stop the press from doing these things. They can say, ‘Oh, who do they think they are? They’ve got everything they want. So let’s play a little game.’ But they oughta try playing that game for a while. Imagine all these people coming past. I’m fortunate to live well, but on the other hand, if you’ve got a family, there’s got to be a little bit of privacy.”{419}
“[Fans] are out here all the time,” said Peter Wagner, one of the Bee Gees’ drivers. “They sit there waiting for them to come out.” “These kids are consumers,” Barry said. “You’ve got to give them equal time. You can’t go through life saying ‘No autographs’—y’know, the Paul Newman syndrome. It’s what you wanted, what you worked for. The other day there were four or five kids standing outside the studio and they had each bought a copy of our new album. The only thing I could think of saying was, ‘Would you play it as much as you can and come back and tell me which songs you liked best?’ It’s important, and it’s nice to get input from people.”{420}
Part of their relentless drive to outdo themselves with the SNF follow-up—and part of the replenishing of the perpetual chip on Barry’s shoulder—came courtesy of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences’ shocking refusal to recognize any of the songs from SNF. Not one track received a 1977 Oscar nomination. The movie got zilch as well—a total shutout. Stigwood was outraged. He filed a formal complaint with the Academy and milked the publicity for all it was worth.
The competition was tough. John Williams was a lock for Best Score for Star Wars. The Best Song Oscar went to “You Light Up My Life,” as rendered by Pat Boone’s ultra-vanilla, one-hit daughter Debbie. Except for “Nobody Does It Better,” from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, the other nominees were all middle of the road whitebread. No matter how many weeks SNF and its singles spent at #1, losing out to “You Light Up My Life” would have irked a saint, never mind someone as competitive and ready to perceive a snub as Barry.
John Rockwell, writing in the New York Times, damned the band with faint praise while acknowledging that the Academy had screwed them: “Conservative professional organizations such as those that award the Oscars have generally picked the safe and old-fashioned over the contemporary, so the slighting of the Bee Gees by the Oscars is no surprise. But it’s ironic, for ultimately the group represents the spirit the Oscars prize. The Gibb brothers are basically pop craftsmen, cranking out entertainment in response to the fashions of the day. When the disco trend sputters out, the Bee Gees will probably rally and reappear a few years later purveying the next hot style.”{421}
No wonder Barry was so driven and resentful. His band—his blood kin—could not catch a break. The Bee Gees invented a new recording technology, defined the zeitgeist, converted a nation to their sound, broke every sales record there ever was and filled the charts with original material. Then the New York Times, hardly a cultural trend spotter, derides them as herd followers.
Barry told David Leaf: “[The success of SNF] made us work harder. We haven’t been able to sit down and say, ‘Jesus, last year was amazing.’” Barry was thrilled to be away from Hérouville and back in his own, familiar universe. “The studio is my spaceship. I lose all sense of the outside world. I turn into the music. I have the studio personality, the patience and the perfectionism. The moment when the song is realized is my payoff.”{422}
As the band settled into its work routine, Maurice’s usual breakfast consisted of Coca-Cola and scotch. If he was awake, he drank. Maurice claimed that he had hurt his back and couldn’t play, so Alan Kendall and studio ace Harold Cowart took over the bass parts. “I had to sit there,” Maurice told the press, “and tell the bass player what to play. It was a bitch.”{423} Maurice hid booze around Criteria; a worker renovating the bathroom had sixteen liquor bottles fall onto him through the ceiling. Maurice said: “My brothers could never understand how, when I was in the studio, I would have only two beers and get sloshed as a newt. I had backup everywhere—in the glove box, under the seat, wherever.”{424} It was around this time that Maurice first began to admit to his drinking problem. He blamed his drinking on the stress of balancing his professional and personal lives. “I was burning the candle at both ends,” he said later. “My body couldn’t take it.{425}
There are many unsubstantiated and unattributed tales of Maurice’s drunken antics and nonstop drinking from this era; they have to be taken as gossip. But the sheer volume of those tales—including the ones that Maurice supposedly told on himself—suggest that Maurice’s alcoholism was beyond control. To paraphrase AC/DC guitarist, songwriter and singer Angus Young describing his brother Malcolm’s habits: “Playing interfered with his drinking.” Barry and Robin came to see that Maurice would not heed their advice or accept their care. Maurice did not contribute a bass part to any Spirits tracks. Blue, Dennis, Alan and Cowart alternated his bass parts. Additionally, Joe Lala added percussion, George Terry played guitar and Herbie Mann blew flute on “Spirits.” Chicago was cutting their Hot Streets album in the studio next door; the Chicago horns—James Pankow, Walter Parazaider and Lee Loughnane—sat in on “Stop (Think Again).”
On May 27, 1978, as the band labored away, the Stigwood co-produced movie Grease, starring John Travolta, hit the theaters. An adaptation of the stage play, the film needed, in Stigwood’s opinion, a hit single. A title song was added, sang by Four Seasons songwriter and lead singer Frankie Valli. It slowly climbed to #1, hitting the top on August 26, 1978, where it stayed for two weeks. Before it hit #1, the Rolling Stones briefly displac
ed SNF at the top. RSO, in the person of Al Coury, went batshit.
Al Coury went to the Billboard offices: “I screamed and yelled. I really thought Grease was gonna replace Saturday Night Fever at Number One. I honestly believed and I tried to convince the trades that at the time they made the Stones Number One, my Grease album was outselling the Stones. Their argument to me was, ‘Well, what do you care? You’re gonna be Number One next week, anyway. What are you hassling over a lousy fucking week for?’ But goddamnit, my fucking plan was to be Number One all year!”{426}
Barry wrote “Grease,” of course. In an hour or two.
“Robert Stigwood called up,” Barry said. “And said he and [film co-producer] Allan Carr had everything they wanted for the film Grease, but the strangest thing is that they didn’t have a song called ‘Grease.’ They asked me if I would write a song for the movie. I went and sat back in the lounge and basically sketched the song out while I was watching television. I didn’t think that much of it. The word was that Allan Carr didn’t really like it, but Robert Stigwood did. [Frankie Valli] was real smart casting, because they found someone to sing it that reflected that era.”{427}
“To write songs with Barry,” Albhy Galuten said, “I referred to the process as the Barry Society, because he would sit down at the piano, and the song would spew out of him. You could tell by the way he was singing what the next chord was that he wanted. Then he would write all the lyrics. Sometimes he would write a song in ten minutes. He would give you half writers on it. He didn’t like the process of saying well, you know, you wrote 10% of this song. You were either in for 50% or not in at all. For Bee Gees songs, you were kind of never in. For songs for other people you were in.
The Bee Gees Page 21