Andy began to write songs: “I was 13. And there was this Swedish girl who was 16. I was head over heels in love, but she seemed like an adult. I wrote this song. I told Barry about it one night when just the two of us were together. He asked me to play it for him, but I said, ‘No, no, not for you of all people. You’ve written good songs, you know what good songs are.’ He insisted—and when I finished, he said that he was amazed, that I’d proven to him I could write. Then he told me the important thing was to keep writing”{473}
At times, his brothers took the stage at his gigs. In 1977, Andy told the Lakeland Ledger: “My brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice would come down to the club and get up and sing with me. We’d have a four-part harmony going that sounded absolutely amazing.”{474} Barry was Andy’s idol. He copied Barry’s singing style; he tried to hold and play his acoustic guitar like Barry.
Andy told Robert W. Morgan: “I didn’t have permanent friends. I’ve always been surrounded by people in the business . . . all my friends were older than me. And it was always ‘tipsy’ (moving) in my family as far back as I can remember. We never stayed in a house more than 8 or 9 months. We never lasted a year at any one house, I don’t know what it was, we would have to get up and move somewhere else.”{475}
By 1973, Hugh and Barbara, tired of Ibiza, moved to the Isle of Man. Andy hated it and Barbara stepped into the breach. She bought Andy the equipment to start a band. Hugh found him a gig at a hotel. Andy put together a group of locals barely older than himself. To the band’s displeasure, Barbara, as bankroller and mom, insisted on naming the band. Andy let her; he was sixteen. His letting her unknowingly set the pattern for the rest of his music career: older family members would always make the decisions for Andy.
Barbara chose Melody Fair. Or maybe Melody Fayre. Or even Melodye Fair; confusion exists over the spelling. However it was spelled, the other guys in the band hated it, but what could they do? Andy told Circus magazine: “In 1973 we moved to the British Isle of Man, and I put my first band together for one year, named Melody Fayre [sic] after a song from my brothers’ Odessa album.”{476} “Melody Fair” concerns a girl who needs to comb her hair in order to be beautiful. It’s a mighty twee name for an all-guy rock band.
As they put together a set list, Andy’s taste came to the fore. He liked Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond and “The Long and Winding Road.” Before Melody Fair’s first gig, Barry came back to the Isle of Man and helped finalize the list, which included Elton John’s “Rocket Man” and “I Gotta Get a Message to You.” When the band played their first show, Barry was front and center. The show was a success, and the band members remember Andy as being shy and ill at ease around the girls in the audience.
In 1981 Andy told Robert W. Morgan: “It was a different life I’ve had from most kids. I left school young and I think my whole youth was kind of a risk in a way, a big gamble. I didn’t have any education to fall back on if things didn’t work out. If I didn’t make it in singing or didn’t make it in show business, I didn’t think there was anything else I could do.”{477}
Melody Fair played a series of barely paid gigs at venues like the Peveril Hotel on Loch Promenade. The boys made a couple of pounds for each show. Andy’s name was prominent on the posters. When Barry was in town, he came to every performance. Barry made the other Melody Fairs self-conscious. The band quickly depleted all the local possibilities, but was not ready for London and lacked original material. An interim step was needed. Andy told Morgan in 1978: “At the end of that year, Barry and my dad said: ‘Australia.’ [They] suggested I go out there and try to become a big name there like they originally did. So they controlled [my career] even from that point. Before I [had] any single at all, they were guiding [me] and planning for the future. They were planning for me to eventually come back to America, for Barry to produce me at the right age and to sign with RSO. Even when I was young they told me basically how they had it all worked out and I let them do it . . . it went pretty nice.”{478}
Barry told Circus: “We talked Andy into going to Australia for his performing apprenticeship like we did ten years before. He needed to get his legwork in without the rest of the world knowing what he was doing.”{479}
Andy’s bandmates were not all willing to move six thousand miles from home; only two agreed to go. They timed their arrival to coincide with the Bee Gees’ 1974 tour. The boys shared the Bee Gees’ hotel, rode in the band’s limos to their shows and jammed in hotel rooms with the brothers. The luxury, normal for Andy, blew his bandmates’ minds.
Australian Col Joye handled their Australian career. He wanted to record the band, and that meant song writing. The group wrote together, later claiming that Andy composed lyrics but lacked discipline and never wrote anything down. They also maintain that they supplied most of the musical backing. They cut “To a Girl” at Joye’s studio, along with some demos, but the track was never released. Andy later recorded three of their demos—“Westfield Mansions,” “Flowing Rivers” and “Words and Music”—on his solo albums.
When the Bee Gees left Sydney for their tour, Andy and his band moved to less prestigious lodgings. The other boys complained that while Barbara claimed to be hustling gigs, she was more concerned with keeping a tight rein on Andy. She got the band excited over upcoming shows that never worked out. Tours backing bigger Australian bands were discussed, but never materialized. The boys’ savings dwindled. Barbara refused to put them on salary, insisting that upcoming performances would pay them all they needed. The boys found crap part-time jobs. They were not happy. Andy went to the beach.
Andy performed “To a Girl” on Australian TV. He left the band behind in Sydney to go to Melbourne for regular TV and game show appearances. He had time and energy for his solo performances, but little for the Fair. His bandmates took the hint and went back to the Isle of Man, embittered and broke.
Col Joye announced auditions and a local three-piece, Zenta, were hired to back Andy. Andy’s management released “Words and Music” as a single and it got some airplay. Andy was to record “Can’t Stop Dancing,” written by Ray Stevens—the American singer-composer of the immortal “Ahab the Arab,” which hit #5 in the US in 1962. Andy cut part of an album and another single, but nothing from those sessions was released.
Andy said: “I had one single out in Australia and it never did anything. [Australia’s] a great training ground, because you can be the biggest name in Australia and without outside help you will not get heard outside of Australia. You can make a lot of mistakes there and there are also very tough audiences.”{480} He spoke of driving five hundred miles one way to the state capital city of Adelaide, only to discover that no gig awaited. Andy’s biggest show in Australia came when he and Zenta opened for the Sweet (“Ballroom Blitz”) in Sydney on August of 1975. Andy might not be the first guy you’d pick to open for a blistering glam-rock guitar band, but he told of being assaulted by groupies after the show, so he must have made an impression. Andy and Zenta went on to support the Bay City Rollers on a short tour. It’s ironic that Andy complained about shrieking teenage girls who drowned out the band they’d come to see. Soon, the same girls would be shrieking for him, and louder.
Andy met Kim Reeder, sixteen. A sweet girl from around the way, Kim lived near Andy in Sydney. As was the habit of the Gibb boys when they met the women who would become their first wives, Andy fell instantly for Kim. Kim told Susan Duncan of the Australian Women’s Weekly: “When we were together, we did really simple things—we’d go to dog shows, the movies, we’d go fishing at four o’clock in the morning. When he was living in Australia, he never seemed to want or to need drugs. And he was so loving. He latched onto our family in those early days like a lifeline. None of us was impressed with his brothers or his background. My dad is a bricklayer and my mum was a machinist. It’s hard to impress people like us, so we loved Andy for what he was—a bright, enthusiastic and considerate person.”{481}
Kim and Andy were inseparable. According to Kim, they
had an “understanding” that they would wait to marry until they were older. But Barry reached out to Andy in June 1976. It was time for Andy to come to America. Robert Stigwood would become his manager and Barry would produce his records. “I want to produce you,” Barry told Andy, calling after a show in Alaska.
Andy gave Kim the news and proposed. He pressured Kim as her family and his sought to delay the nuptials. Nobody thought it was a good idea except Andy, including Kim. She told Susan Duncan: “I never thought about marriage except to think that one day we would probably do it, but Andy got a call from his brother, Barry. It was time for Andy’s career to be launched in a big way. The Gibb family mapped their careers with precision and great professionalism. When Andy told me he’d been summoned, he said we’d have to get married before he left so I could go with him.”
Despite the warnings and reservations of both families, Andy refused to go to America without Kim. They married in Sydney on July 11, 1976, at the Wayside Chapel in Sydney. Kim: “[Andy] gave me money from his Christmas club account to buy a wedding dress. I’d shown him how to work those accounts the year before and taught him to save money for the first time in his life.”{482} Andy and Kim flew to Robert Stigwood’s estate in Bermuda for their honeymoon.
Awaiting the newlyweds were Barry and Stigwood. Andy and Kim may have thought they going to have a romantic idyll in the sun, but Barry forced Andy’s attention toward his career. Stigwood told Andy what his future would be and Andy signed with RSO. While Kim sat on the beach, Andy tried to write, but mostly he watched Barry.
Andy told Robert W. Morgan in 1981: “Robert Stigwood and my brother Barry asked me to fly out to Bermuda as kind of a honeymoon-cum-working set-up to meet with Barry and to sign up with Robert for RSO Records. This was all at Robert’s home in Bermuda. And me and Barry locked ourselves in a bedroom and Barry just started writing, and when Barry writes it is hard to collaborate with him, because he is so quick. And before I knew it he was starting to do the chorus (sings) ‘I just want to be your everything,’ and I thought ‘wow, what a hook,’ it was right in there.”{483}
Perhaps Andy felt the oncoming steamroller looming. He’d sung in bars for blondes and tips and toured Australia singing mostly other people’s material, waiting for his call to the big time. When the call came, Andy learned on the first day what the big time entailed: his seventeen-year-old bride ignored as his beloved older brother, writing before his eyes and in minutes, created the song that would define him. What Andy got to do was sit and watch; Barry didn’t need his help. Whatever collaboration Andy envisioned was reduced to its essence: the pro shows the new guy how it’s done. The dynamic between the brothers was set. Did Andy feel grateful for the gift he was about to receive? Or was his shaky self-worth diminished further when he—a talented, charismatic amateur—came face to face with genius and the methods genius demands?
Some reports have Andy and Kim going back to Australia before recording began at Criteria Studios. Others have them moving straight from Bermuda to Miami, where Karl Richardson, Albhy Galuten and Barry ran the sessions. Galuten assembled a band: a veteran of the Funky Nassau sound and a collection of southern-soul session musicians with a number of Atlantic tracks to their credit, including guitarist Cornell Dupree. When asked how he chose the eccentric ensemble, and what the guys assembled had to do with Andy’s sound, Galuten said only: “I chose from among the local musicians I knew could play.”{484}
Guitarist Joe Walsh of the Eagles visited the sessions and guested on “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.” Walsh’s sitting in led to claims from Andy about the “country-rock” sensibility that he says pervades the record. There is an attempt at 1976 Los Angeles soft rock semi-country that seems as forced and ersatz as the Bee Gees/disco-lite that dominates the record. The jaunty track “Come Home for the Winter” features fingerpicking, pedal-steel guitar, Eagles-like flourishes at the end of each verse and multi-track vocals on the choruses that evoke the horror that is Dan Fogelberg.
“Let It Be Me” runs with an almost–shuffle beat, more pedal-steel accents and Tony Joe (“Polk Salad Annie”) White–style wah-wah solos. Andy tries to sing in a bouncy country rhythm, but sounds like he’s reciting a nursery rhyme. The problem is the dissonance between Andy’s obvious sincerity and the equally obvious synthetic quality of his material. The two hits—and what astonishing hits they proved to be—“Everything,” and “(Love Is) Thicker Than Water” were Barry’s. The rest are Andy’s, mostly written during his time in Australia. The album, though produced with a glossy sheen, proves shockingly inconsequential, even with all the soulful playing the Criteria pros provide. What Barry, Maurice and Robin could all do at eighteen, Andy could not; write and sing something profound, unique, memorable and moving. Despite Andy’s inexperience, the same mystery attaches to his songs as to his brothers’: Are they attempts at commercial pop or do they contain at least some self-expression? Andy often accused himself of lacking interior substance. His first record proves his case.
Of “(Love Is) Thicker Than Water,” Andy told Robert W. Morgan: “Even though it says on the credits ‘B & A Gibb,’ it is really Barry’s song. It is hard to write with Barry, but he said: ‘Help me think of a great title.’ That was a period where Barry was thinking of titles first and seeing how they would inspire him to write a song. We were thinking of good titles and I said: ‘How about thicker than water?’ I did not say: ‘Love is . . .’ just ‘thicker than water.’ He said: ‘That’s great!’ Then [Barry] came up with [Andy sings]: ‘Love is higher than a mountain, love is thicker than water.’ He just went on from there.”{485}
Barry split the songwriter credit and royalty with Andy. In the understatement of his career, Andy said: “I like to do most of my own material, but I don’t mind having Barry involved in one or two.”{486}
Billboard reported that during this Bermuda writing session, Barry and Andy also wrote “(Love Is) Thicker Than Water,” which Stigwood wanted to issue as the first single. Three days before the scheduled release date he changed his mind and put out “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.”
Of his own abilities, Andy said: “I don’t arrange. I read chord sheets in bars and count in timing but I can’t read notes. I can’t read intricate parts of the music. I’d love to be able to do that, but not one member of my family can read the music. A lot of my songs sound distinctly Bee Gees in places, but as far back as I can ever remember that’s how I’ve sung. I don’t think there’s any way I could change. I would be worse if I had a different voice. This is my voice, and these are mostly my songs.”{487}
Andy and Kim headed for Los Angeles and set up housekeeping. Andy’s friends and bandmates in Australia never mentioned Andy having any great fondness for or issues with drugs. But as soon as he arrived in LA, Andy vanished—much to his wife’s surprise—down the LA cocaine wormhole. In California, Andy discovered three things: he liked cocaine a lot, he could afford a lot of it and there were a lot of people who wanted to hang out with him while he did it. His transformation from sweet kid to sweet kid who did a ton of cocaine was almost instantaneous. As was his transition from sweet kid playing covers in Australia to married man awaiting the release of his first album on a major red-hot label.
“I Just Want to Be Your Everything” entered the Billboard charts at #88 on April 23, 1977. It took fourteen weeks to hit #1 and stayed there for three weeks. That is a long grind to the top—reflecting genuine grassroots popularity—and an even longer time to stay in the public pop consciousness. The Emotions knocked “Everything” out of #1 with “Best of My Love,” but “Everything” stayed in the top 10 and regained #1 after a month. No song before had ever made the top spot, fallen off and returned. Ever. “Everything” remained in the top 40 for twenty-three weeks—from May to October—and reached #19 on the Black Singles chart, an impressive feat.
In June 1977, while “Everything” was working its way up the charts, Andy appeared on Top of the Pops. Bands usually lip-synched on tha
t show, but Andy appears to be singing live, as Barry was known to do. Andy looks impossibly young and a bit shattered. Live TV’s famous for terrible makeup. Andy’s seems to have been laid on with a trowel. But in close-up, under the pancake, he’s pale, haggard and his eyes are swollen. Andy wears a guitar as a prop; it’s not plugged into anything. He strums away, awkwardly, gamely, and with weird self-taught mannerisms, bar chording with his left thumb. Most revealing is that throughout the song Andy keeps looking down at his left hand for the chord changes. And the chords in “Everything” are not that hard; maybe Andy didn’t know how to play his own song. Of the myriad clips of artists appearing on Top of the Pops, Andy’s the only one checking his left hand.
From the perspective of thirty years on, learning that Andy had a #1 single at a time of the Bee Gees’ dominance of the charts might raise the specter of the RSO public relations machine manipulating the process, or of payola or some other contrivance. The first notion that comes to mind is of the song shooting to #1 on the week of its release, as if RSO employees all over America raced into the record stores that reported sales to Billboard and raced out with wheelbarrows full of the single, artificially driving it up the charts. But the song’s progress renders those fantasies fantastic. “Everything” entered the charts low and built an audience, an army of listeners and buyers, that got bigger and bigger and bigger. It was a legitimate, monster hit.
Circus magazine interviewed Hugh. “I’m not all that surprised,” Hugh says. “I taught Andy and the Bee Gees their stage techniques: how to walk on, smile, bow, dress. And I arrange Andy’s stage program and lighting. Once he walks out there he almost never stops moving. The sweat pours out, he shakes his head and sprays the first four rows.”{488}
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