“One of the financial repercussions is that when we were working at Barry’s house, Robert Stigwood called up and said, ‘I need a song called “Grease.”’ And Barry said, ‘What do you mean a song called “Grease”?’ Stigwood said; ‘You know, like “Grease,” like “ba da ba da ba da ba da GREASE!”’ And Barry was like, ‘Sure.’
“So, I think I had to go somewhere. Barry said, ‘Well, I think we should sit down and write this song “Grease.”’ I said: ‘You know, you hear this stuff, you hear the chords in your head. You know what chords you’re looking for. Sometimes when I play a chord, you go “No, no not that one, that one!” So you know what chords you’re hearing. You know the melody. You know the words. I think you could write the whole song in your mind. Just write down the words, remember the melody, and we’ll find out what chords you were imagining later.’ And he said, ‘Okay, I’ll try that.’ I left. And he did just that, except he wrote all of ‘Grease.’ Had I stayed there and written the song with him, I would’ve made a lot of money.”{428}
A tossed-off #1 single was the least of what went on at Criteria. The boys had comedy routines, most revolving around sixth-grade-level dirty jokes that they’d honed over the years. It’s hard to believe, given their trials and success, and hard to remember, that as they recorded the music that would become Spirits Having Flown, Barry was only thirty-two and the twins newly twenty-nine.
The Gibbs wrote, directed, videotaped and starred in videos of their comedy skits. They made a lot of them and watched them over and over. Maurice showed a journalist a Betamax video tape titled “Collected Items.” The tape held roughly an hour of blackout comedy skits that were intended as parodies of TV news and shows. Among the skits were “a cinema verite minidocumentary about an inept band cutting its debut record, entitled ‘Wankers by the Moonlight’; a Don Kirshner-style conversation-at-the-piano with an effeminate pop-schlock songwriter; a current events talk show called The Eugene Shitass [pronounced sheit-arse] Report and 80 Minutes, a TV news-magazine featuring an interview with Robin playing a noted surgeon after the first successful penis transplant.”{429}
That tape apparently showcased the apex of the Bee Gees’ comedy stylings—the others were nowhere near as funny. Producing the skits was a regular hobby for the band during recording. The penis surgery is the strangest of the lot and the most aligned to Robin’s sense of humor. “Robin’s into blue humor,” Karl Richardson told Circus Weekly. “I don’t know if you’d be able to print his jokes. He also draws caricatures of everybody and hangs them up in the studio. If a group gets too serious and stops bantering when they record, you stagnate and lose your creativity.”{430}
This was the first time the band recorded using multiple twenty-four-track machines. “It was so stimulating to be able to take 18 tracks of Barry singing,” Albhy said. “No one had been able to do that before. Barry wanted things a certain way. He had a vision. Those years we were together I tuned into his vision. Feel, pitch, meter were incredibly important to him.
“We started doing the multi-track overdubs on the song ‘Too Much Heaven,’ and there were 18 tracks of Barry singing. Eighteen tracks, all done live and with no guide vocal track. Not one. Michael Jackson, for instance, when he doubled a vocal in the studio, he would want the vocal he was doubling”—a vocal track he had already recorded to his satisfaction—“playing back in his headphones as he sang the new doubling vocal. The recorded vocal would be in one ear of his headphones, and he took the other ear off to hear himself sing along with it. That’s what everybody did.
“Barry didn’t do that. Barry knew exactly what he wanted to sing, and he would sing exactly that. He had unbelievable control. So when you listen to those 18 vocals in ‘Too Much Heaven,’ it was three-part harmony, each part tripled in two octaves. There were three parts on each of the three bottom voices and three parts on each of the three top octaves. Barry would sing each track without listening to any other. Every breath, every meter, every pitch and every vibrato was exactly in tune and in time. He would take these 18 tracks, literally one after the other. I’d push the faders up and all 18 would be exactly together in tune, in time and breathing at the same moment. I don’t believe there’s ever been a craftsman like that in the world.”{431}
As rightfully in awe as Albhy was of Barry’s virtuosity, he saw something being lost among the Bee Gees in the deus ex machina. “They say that technology is magic until you understand it,” Albhy said. “Stimulus is important. Some bands are stimulated with drugs and manage the drug intake so they’re at the right high for the job at hand. You stimulate people by not allowing them to get too excited if its not the final take, so you can, in a coitus interruptus sort of way, keep people’s vibe right. Having a new technology, being able to do things that you have never done before, is a stimulus as well, a creative stimulus. And so having multiple 24 tracks was stimulating, being able to make the multiple tracks of ‘Too Much Heaven’ or ‘Tragedy.’”
“The point is, we’re talking about—for the first time—an essentially unlimited number of tracks. You can keep what you have and then go on and try something else. And this was new, before we’d all gotten spoiled. Do something new, do extra double tracks, have your cake and eat it too. So that was the beginning of not playing live as a band.”{432}
Every available track encouraged breaking the music down into increasingly smaller component parts. Each musician plays only a portion of a song until it’s perfect, then plays the rest, portion by portion. Something of the collective sound and feel is lost in the process.
“Is there a specific, graphable connection between the increase of control and the lack of spontaneity in the studio?” Albhy said. “Do they weave back and forth? Are they absolutely in opposition, do you just have to figure out how to make them harmonize?”{433}
These philosophical questions were being played out daily in the studio. In an NBC television special aired in 1979, Barry spoke with interviewer David Frost about building a song. “When the voice drops out, the instrument that comes in has to be really interesting. And when the instrument drops out and the voice comes back, that has to be even more interesting. So where there’s an empty space, it has to be filled.” Having 24 tracks available put even more pressure on Barry to find something to fill every moment of every song. And fill them he did.{434}
“Whatever the new album is, I can tell you the pressure was mountainous to follow up Saturday Night Fever,” Barry said. “And we felt that there was great pressure to follow up Children of the World with Saturday Night Fever. And Children of the World followed Main Course, which everyone was talking about! It always goes on that way. I mean if Spirits is a monster—pray that it is—then once again we’ll be against the wall.”{435} With every confidence that the record would be a monster, the band shifted its workaday life from recording to preparing for what would be their grandest, most ornate tour.
The Bee Gees rented a warehouse from TK Records—KC and the Sunshine Band’s label—not far from South Beach in Miami. They wanted their own, private rehearsal space and built a full-size stage with a lighting rig and sound system to hone their live show. The band commissioned Karl and Albhy to build a studio in the warehouse and to have it ready when they came back from their tour. They christened the studio Middle Ear.
Karl and Albhy created an enormous one-room space—twenty-eight by thirty-eight feet, with twelve-foot ceilings and a six-by-six-foot isolation booth for vocals—using only part of the warehouse. The studio featured wood-slatted walls “dotted with indentations into which amplifiers and microphones can be positioned to create a wide diversity of niche space ambiences.” The slatted walls were, as explained by Albhy “to break up the sound so that there would not be even reflections. If all sound reflects in the same way, it creates bumps in certain frequencies and if the walls are smooth it creates extra ambience.” Every piece of gear was to the moment and state of the art. Middle Ear was for the Bee Gees only. They recorded at Middle Ear from its compl
etion in 1980 until 1993. Once it opened, fans stood in front of its doors all day, rather than at Criteria.{436} After 1993, the Bee Gees rented Middle Ear out to other bands. “The studio has been broken-in in the best way a studio can be,” said one tenant. “The boys developed it into a warm, personal and creative space. There’s nothing cold or impersonal about it. It’s a single-room facility, so when an artist rents it out, it’s all theirs. And everything comes with it; there are no additional rental charges.”{437}
As the release of the first single neared, Barry was already defensive. “We spent ten months doing this new album,” he said. “You’ve gotta believe that a lot of times we cut a track, then said, ‘No! No good!’ A lot of tracks we cut a dozen times. We did not want to go wrong with this album. And a few critics will say that we did. Our father always said, ‘Look, no one ever criticizes you when you’re down; you only get the criticism when you’re up, so shut up.’ We try to live like that, or at least live with it. But I’ve never gotten over harsh criticism. I can never pick up a review and finish it if the guy doesn’t like the album, ’cause the rest of my day is screwed up. It’s so painful.”{438} Before the first single came out, Stigwood, never one to lag when it was time to hype, said: “Not only do I think it’s the best album [the Bee Gees have] ever done, I think it’s the best album I’ve ever heard.”{439}
November 18, 1978, saw the release of the first single, “Too Much Heaven.” The single charted for twenty-one weeks, hit #1 on January 6, 1979, and held the top spot for two weeks. “Heaven” gave the Bee Gees their seventh #1 of the 1970s, which made them the band with the most top singles in the decade. The Gibbs donated all proceeds of “Heaven”—$7 million—to the United Nations children’s charity UNICEF, once called the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.
The English television host and celebrity interviewer David Frost promoted a benefit concert, Music for UNICEF. Knowing of their connection to the charity, Frost reached out to the Bee Gees in March 1978. “People have come to us and said, ‘Do you realize how much power you have now? You could change the world with some of the things you say.’” Barry said. “And I say to them, ‘Leave me alone.’ Power is fleeting; so is ego. When you start putting religion or whatever into it and tell the world how it can be saved, it rubs up against people. Politicians have no idea how to save the world, so why should pop stars? Instead you can do things like the UNICEF thing, which is a positive move to help children.”{440} The Bee Gees sent letters to schools and children’s organizations, suggesting they hold fund-raising disco dances to raise money for UNICEF. The Music for UNICEF broadcast featured a wide range of top stars who agreed to donate their performances.
George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 was the first of the rock-celebrity, all-star charity blockbuster concerts, and perhaps the subject of Barry’s jab at pop stars who “tell the world how it can be saved.” But if the idea of marshaling pop music for charity was hardly new, the breadth of the talent and the worldwide broadcast was. The Bee Gees were ahead of the curve, prefiguring shows like Live AID, Farm AID and the multi-celebrity charity shows that have become regular features of the concert landscape. Music For UNICEF was recorded live and broadcast the next day, January 9, 1979, on NBC, after two weeks of setup. The timing was perfect as promotion for the release of Spirits Having Flown.
Someone in the live audience said: “If you look at the yearly record sales of the people here, it is equal to the gross national product of some of the member states of the UN. Throw a bomb in here and you have knocked out half the music industry.” Frank Rocco, the talent coordinator on the project said, “They do not normally allow liquor to be brought into the UN, but we told them, ‘Hey, some of the guys here do their jobs a little bit differently than you may be used to.’ They were cool about it and let us bring it in.”{441}
Among the performers were Donna Summer, Kris Kristofferson, John Denver, Olivia Newton-John, Rod Stewart, Rita Coolidge and, fresh off their one-song appearance in Sgt. Pepper’s, Earth, Wind and Fire. Ken Ehrlich, one of the show’s producers, said: “A lot of massive egos were sublimated for the cause.”{442} Rod Stewart sang “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” and got treated like Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show. Because the program was broadcast worldwide, which meant a large non-Western audience, Stewart was shown only from the waist up.
Spirits Having Flown was released on January 26, 1979. Punk rock had gone from pure rage to slowly inching into the mainstream. Commercial funk music was both glossy and raw. Spirits, owing to the depth of its twenty-four-track production, had a rich, shiny, but artificial and overproduced sound. It’s slickness worked against it as far as the critics were concerned. Bee Gees’ fans loved it even while disco was starting to fade.
Because disco songs are long and disco listeners expected extended sets, disco radio shows could not offer the conventional number of commercial breaks per hour. This made disco a tough format to sell in syndication. Large, disco-crazy markets, like New York and Miami, had entrenched disco radio shows. Smaller Midwestern cities seldom offered disco on the airwaves. Jim Kefford, who led a company that produced taped radio shows for syndication, said: “I remember calling one station owner in the Midwest and asking, ‘How’s disco doing in your town?’ He said, ‘Well, we had one. But it closed.’” Leo Bortel, a former radio DJ and owner of a Cleveland discotheque, said about the difficulty of establishing disco as a radio format: “If you present this music differently than it is heard in the clubs, it stands out like a sore thumb.”{443}
Billboard reported that by the end of 1979, radio in New York was shifting from music identified as disco. Frankie Crocker, a New York DJ who in the beginning of 1979 said disco had “replaced rock and become a whole new culture,” opened a show in December 1979 by saying he would play music that made listeners “think a little more”—and less disco. In December, a station that had called itself “Disco And More” embraced “the Sounds of the 80s.”{444}
Looking back years later, Barry said: “There seems to be an inclination to reject certain artists at the end of each decade in favor of the new decade and what that might bring. We were always a target for that.”{445} Barry has a point. The first single, “Too Much Heaven,” has nothing to do with disco. It’s a glossy funk love ballad in the style—especially in the solo vocal—of the Delfonics’ “La La Means I Love You.” The lead vocals and arrangement reflect the influence of the later, softer work of Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire. The harmony on the chorus shifts out of soul mode, though, and becomes pure Bee Gees. As Barry and Robin argued to anyone who would listen, “Heaven” is modern—at that time, current—R&B, not disco. Despite the cornball opening, somewhat juvenile lyrics and an excess of falsetto, “Heaven” remains one of the great high school slow-dancing songs of all time.
On January 12, the Bee Gees were awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They went to LA for the ceremony and thousands of fans jammed the streets. On February 15, SNF won four Grammy Awards. The record won Album of the Year; “Stayin’ Alive” was nominated for Song of the Year but did not win. The Bee Gees won Producer of the Year, Best Arrangement of Voices and Best Pop Vocal Performance.
“Tragedy,” the second single from Spirits, was released February 17, 1979, debuting at #4. By March 24, it was #1, stayed at the top for two weeks and in the charts for twenty weeks total. By March, it was #1 in the UK and Canada. If the critics were tired of the Bee Gees, the record-buying public was not.
“Tragedy,” with its amazing stacked Barry self-harmonies, ain’t exactly disco either. The rhythm section features the classic disco hit-hat shuffle, but the guitar licks and synthesizer accents evoke Electric Light Orchestra. The song’s bombastic layered sound and pushier, grander-than-disco dance beat suggest that Barry was listening to a lot of Giorgio Moroder, the groundbreaking producer behind Donna Summer’s breakout hits, and of Blondie, David Bowie and Irene Cara. “Tragedy,” like much of Moroder’s post-disco work, d
raws on disco elements, but reaches beyond for a richer, self-consciously epic aural landscape.
Rock critic Stephen Holden recognized an international sound. He wrote that the Bee Gees had melded American R&B with “Europop production.” Holden argued that the Beatles did something similar, but in all the world, he’s the only person who ever thought so. Holden astutely recognized what today is known as Esperanto Pop; music that shares certain pop—as opposed to rock—values can originate anywhere on the globe and find an audience anywhere else. Esperanto Pop, like the Bee Gees, is not limited to the culture or language of its origin. ABBA and Korea’s K-Pop are two of the most cited examples. Much of Spirits fits that model. “Tragedy” features several ABBA motifs and “Spirits (Having Flown),” for all the emptiness and insincerity of its lyrics, is Brazilian bossa nova filtered through Miami’s Funky Nassau sound. Holden, having accurately parsed what the Bee Gees were doing, and even praised them, proved that he had only raised the Beatles as a straw man with which to batter Spirits. “The global consciousness that the Gibbs conjure,” he wrote, “is far different from that of the Beatles, who embodied a nonbureaucratic world community of hippie individualists. The Bee Gees’ global village would be a junior high of androgynous, conformist goody-goodies: a world with no violence or sex, only puppy love, and every toy in creation. That’s why Spirits Having Flown is a Sunday-school heaven of eternal childhood, stringently regulated by angels.”
Holden’s perceptions only went so far. He also wrote: “From the beginning, the Bee Gees’ mating of pop and R&B was shaky.”{446} That is patently, absurdly untrue: ass backward to the highest degree. The essence of—the predominant aspect of, the best-selling and most widely imitated aesthetic of—the second half of the Bee Gees’ career is their genius merging of pop and R&B.
The Bee Gees Page 22