Of that era, Kim Reeder told Susan Duncan: “The hangers-on in the rock industry are like piranhas. They hang around stars and offer drugs as a way of making friendships. I suppose they think the stars will become dependent on them for drugs. I kept finding buckets of bleach around the flat. I finally understood that’s how cocaine was tested for purity. If a substance floated to the top, then talcum powder had been added. If the drug sank, it was pure. So we argued. But he was trapped so quickly. Some people have addictive personalities and he was one of them. He wasn’t a bad person, he was a wonderful person. I don’t think he could handle the fame, the pace—everything—so quickly. It all happened so fast. He seemed to have it all, but really, he had nothing.”{489}
If Andy suffered from feeling a fraud, much in his success fueled it. His brother wrote both hits on his record. The world pretty much ignored Andy’s originals. Of his first record, Andy said: “I always thought that people were buying my records as an extension to the Bee Gees. I was automatically getting the Bee Gee fans who liked that sound and I never thought there was any individual thing in there that they liked.”{490}
He told Teen Beat magazine: “I have evolved totally from what the Bee Gees have done. I have no ‘roots’ of any kind and I’m the first to admit I’ve not paid my dues musically speaking. My brothers handed it down to me on a silver platter. I know that people try for years to break into even the lowest level of the music business, and I just stepped into the top level. I never even had to audition. So it doesn’t bother me when people connect my break with my brothers, because I realize that, without them, I would not be where I am. But it also makes me feel that I haven’t paid my dues.”{491} No other star with a platinum album and three #1 singles ever described himself as so bereft.
His mother remembered a telling moment: “We were in Dallas once, driving from the airport, and he saw the Arena had ‘Andy Gibb’ and [below] ‘Younger brother of The Bee Gees.’ He went crazy. His personal assistant had to go get it taken down. Things like that would upset him.”{492}
By the time Andy left LA to tour opening for Neil Sedaka in August, Kim was in Australia, pregnant and ignored. Kim said: “I told him I had been to the doctor and I was having a baby. It wasn’t planned or anything, it just happened. He was a bit two-ways about it at first. I think he thought I had come at a bad point in his career—his songs were just starting to catch on.”{493}
Andy did not listen to Kim’s entreaties about drugs, or anything else. She fled back to her family. Andy claimed that “my wife said I’m a slave to fame but it’s just not true. She left me before my first record was a hit. Her mother came and took her away from me. It’s all very sad—she’s a lovely girl. But she came from a working class family in Sydney and she couldn’t cope with show business. If I had to go out in the afternoon and do an interview she’d blow her top. We were together 98 per cent of the time and I worshipped her. I would never look at anyone else. I used to think, ‘Oh God it’s such a shame—we have so much more to come but she’s not going to be able to handle it.’”{494} Kim said: “I was so lonely and wasn’t feeling well because of the baby. I left him to make him see sense. If I couldn’t get him off the drugs, no one could. I couldn’t sit by and watch him do it to himself. He was self-destructing.”{495}
His performances were not being well received. John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times: “He has a plaintive, whispery, throbbing tenor that recalls the Bee Gees, yet his musical style naturally doesn’t rely on that group’s harmonies, nor does it emulate its current mode of balladic disco. His style is set firmly into the kind of up-tempo middle-of-the-road that will surely dominate Las Vegas and the suburban theatres for years to come—a kind of grudging admission on the part of the adult schlockmeisters that once upon a time, in some distant realm, rock and roll did exist. Mr. Gibb is handsome in a carefully coiffed way but [his] set wasn’t very interesting. This looked like an obvious talent that has sold itself out to the packagers and merchandisers a bit too soon. Not too soon for commercial success, of course, but too soon for any real individuality to have developed. Mr. Gibb, for all his good looks, sounded like an old man’s idea of what a young man’s music should be about.”{496}
Obviously, Rockwell set himself up as a defender of rock and roll and Andy as one of its besiegers. With American punk rock raging—though never on the radio—and the airwaves full of disco, many felt rock needed defending. A new Gibb brother with a #1 record seemed the manifestation of all that was banal and conformist in commercial music. Andy proved an easy target, and his material, aside from the Barry-penned hits, was baby food. As a young man overwhelmed by a sense of a lack of identity, Andy’s show was not exactly self-expression. It was a performance, entertainment, and almost too earnest, given the superficiality of Andy’s material. Critical opinion would later vary little from Rockwell’s. Rockwell, blaming handlers and shadowy image-consultants, found it hard to conceive that Andy’s show might be precisely what Andy thought it should be and enjoyed doing.
Andy played the decadent, infamous Sunset Strip bacchanal and hangout, the Roxy. Stigwood coroneted Andy onstage by handing him his gold record for “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.” Andy returned to Miami Beach and, living his self-parody to the hilt, moved into an eighty-foot houseboat that had belonged to a recently deceased Miami drug lord. It featured a round bed with a mirrored ceiling overhead. The former owner had been shot to death in that mirrored room, and there was a grand piano in the main lounge. People magazine reported that “Andy’s only home is his boat, berthed in Miami. He chats incessantly about compass calibrations, autopilots and radar, and carries two semiautomatic machine guns, a .357 magnum and a riot gun, to protect the three-stateroom, three-head (bathroom) cruiser from modern-day Caribbean pirates.”{497} By the time Andy spoke to People, he no longer kept his pet lion cub, Samantha, on the houseboat. She shared the space with Andy for a while after he bought her at auction, but Andy “donated her” to the Miami Zoo. Speaking from Australia, Kim’s response to Andy’s new digs was: “I think the houseboat sounds unpleasant and kinky.”{498}
On August 27, Andy’s album Flowing Rivers climbed into the Billboard top 40. It charted eighteen weeks, peaking at #18.
Kim told the Australian Weekly: “There I was, sitting at home with Mum and Dad, pregnant, believing Andy would be with me for the baby’s birth because he’d promised, no matter what, he would be there, and suddenly the Sydney press were calling, telling me a press release had gone out saying that Andy and I were getting a divorce. The divorce papers arrived two weeks before Peta was due. I don’t think I stopped crying until her birth.”{499}
People reported that Kim was “dependent on $51.70 weekly Australian welfare, and has retained a lawyer.” “We’re discussing a separation agreement,” contends Andy. “Funds have been and are still available for her use.”{500}
Andy never went to Australia. He filed for divorce from the States, and by filing in advance of their baby’s birth, sought to keep their child from being his legitimate heir. On January 25, 1978, Kim gave birth to their daughter, Peta Jaye Reeder Gibb. The Reeder family sought counsel to fight for Peta’s future.
The UK’s Daily Mirror gave Kim’s separation from Andy the full tabloid treatment. Under the headline please tell him, kim asks mirror, the article began: “Kim Gibb, the estranged wife of pop star Andy Gibb, wonders if her husband is even aware he has a six-week-old daughter. Kim has not heard from him since she gave birth to Peta in January. And she has been unable to penetrate the protective screen around her husband to tell him of the birth.” The Mirror further claimed: “In a midnight telephone call from Sydney, Kim asked if the Daily Mirror’s New York bureau had heard if Andy was aware of the birth. ‘Does Andy know he’s got a daughter? That’s all I want to know,’ Kim said. ‘I can’t get in contact with him and his associates have made sure I can’t get his number. If you are speaking with him would you tell him she looks very much like him. She has his nose and his mo
uth and his eyes. And she has his brown hair. Actually, Andy has blond hair now, but it is brown underneath. I know, because I dyed it.’ Meanwhile, Andy left the Bee Gees’ family compound in Miami yesterday—after a lavish party to celebrate his 20th birthday—for a European concert tour.”{501}
A month later the Mirror reported: “Kim Gibb, estranged wife of millionaire pop star Andy Gibb, had a joyful reunion with her daughter, Peta, at Sydney Airport yesterday. Mrs. Gibb had returned from New York where her lawyer, Mr. L. Gruzman, worked out a settlement believed to be almost $250,000. Smiling happily and smothering Peta with kisses, she said she was looking forward to ‘some peace and quiet.’ Mrs. Gibb would not give any details of the settlement. She said she had not seen her husband during her three weeks in America. ‘All the discussions were handled by lawyers, we had about 15 between us,’ Mrs. Gibb said. ‘All I want to do now is settle down with Peta.’”{502}
By most estimates, Andy had already made between one and two million dollars, with more pouring in. A quarter-of-a-million-dollar settlement for his child was nothing compared to what she and her mother might have been entitled to in a divorce in a community property state like California. Given how close-knit the Gibb family had always been, and how his other brothers remained committed to their children, Andy’s behavior toward Peta could be explained by that old reliable—denial—or perhaps by a combination of youthful selfishness, drugs or simple terror at the idea of responsibility.
It was time for a new album, Shadow Dancing. Journalist, screenwriter and producer Mitch Glazer reported on the sessions for Playboy. As he drove to Criteria with Maurice, Andy’s “Thicker Than Water” came on the car radio. Maurice told Glazer: “It’s funny; years ago, we’d been furious if Andy bumped us from number one. Jesus, the three of us were fighting amongst ourselves to be the biggest star. Now, like Barry says, it’s all in the family. Barry wrote and produced the bloody song, anyhow.”{503}
The co-producers were Karl Richardson, Albhy and Barry. When Andy goes into the booth, he wants it darker. Barry tells him: “Now, Andy, come closer to the mike and get a little sexy with these lyrics.” Andy answers: “It’s hard to get horny in a hospital.” Barry guides Andy, asking for one more take. And another. Barry’s relaxed, and by his demeanor communicates to Andy that the evening is no big deal, no stress. Andy seems to nail the song, and behind the glass the producers all smile. Barry still asks his younger brother, “Can you beat it, mate?” Andy tries again. Glazer wrote: “To watch this process is to watch success.” Barry later told Glazer: “We overdubbed a breath once. The song was right, but there was a breath missing, so I went in there and put it in.”{504}
Shadow Dancing, despite or because of Barry’s level of control, proved a retrenchment. The songs Barry wrote for Andy, like the hit “Shadow Dancing,” seem even more like pallid, second-rate Bee Gees songs than Barry’s songs on Andy’s first record. “Shadow Dancing” has a decent hook, but runs out of steam even on the Bee Gees version. Gone are the country rock attempts of Andy’s first album. The disco-derived dance and soul music is generic and contentless, save the consistently soulful guitar and whimsical Barry White–style strings. Andy’s voice sounds weaker, reedier, with less punch and more breathiness. His breathiness or Barry’s, who can say?
The question of why Barry couldn’t or didn’t create first-rate material for his beloved little brother raises potential issues of sibling rivalry. Maybe Barry didn’t want to be overshadowed, maybe Andy couldn’t tell the difference between bad material and good, maybe he couldn’t stand up to his big brother. Albhy Galuten maintains that Barry only wanted the best for Andy and never sabotaged him consciously or otherwise.
Galuten wanted to set up collaborations for Andy with other songwriters, foremost among them John Oates of Hall and Oates. Andy was psyched, but Stigwood lowered the boom. He absolutely forbade Andy—as communicated via Galuten—to write with anyone other than his brothers. Andy certainly couldn’t stand up to Stigwood. Neither did Galuten, but he could reasonably claim to be a hireling, and forced to obey. Barry, the one Gibb who could brace Stigwood, remained silent.
A Gibb insider believes that Stigwood wanted control over Andy as a pop product, which meant controlling what Andy wrote and sang. Stigwood did not want Andy discovering a world outside his brothers and RSO. The insider offers a simple reason for Stigwood’s rigidity: If a Gibb writes a song, Stigwood owns a piece. If an outside collaborator comes in, Stigwood owns a smaller piece.
Andy set out to tour Europe behind Shadow Dancing. On the first day, he fell asleep during a live radio interview. Unable to finish a photo shoot a few days later, Andy flew home and the tour was cancelled. Andy told Robert W. Morgan: “For three weeks we would be going from 6 in the morning until 2 in the morning. I was getting called away to all these meetings, not being able to finish my meals. I broke down, it certainly wasn’t mental, it was a sort of physical collapse and we had to cut the tour a few weeks short and bring me home to Miami. I get tired very quickly.”{505}
Barry said: “First fame is a dangerous thing. You read about yourself, believe what people say about you, you believe that you have something special to say, and God speaks through you and the public need to know, you know. This happens to you when you become famous for the first time, and especially on an international level. So I think it was a little crazy for him for a while.”{506}
“(Love Is) Thicker Than Water” was another slow builder. Barry’s composition bumped Barry’s composition “Stayin’ Alive” from #1, held the top for two weeks and was then bumped by Barry’s composition “Night Fever.” “Shadow Dancing” followed, and that Barry composition stayed at #1 for seven weeks. Andy’s first three singles—Barry compositions all—hit #1. No artist—not Elvis, not the Beatles, not the Bee Gees—had done that before. If Andy had feared success, now he had good reason to fear failure. Because anything less than a #1 would be seen as exactly that.
Andy launched a US tour and played the sex symbol in satin trousers. Stan Soocher wrote up the tour for Circus magazine and stayed on message, pinning Andy’s collapse in Europe on the long hours and grueling schedule of promotional events. He titled his piece “Andy Gibb Is More Than Just a Clone of His Successful Siblings,” which states the problem and the supposed solution. Andy wasn’t a Bee Gees clone—that was news. Andy walked into the interview and “he picks up a copy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ‘I ought to read this,’ he decides, tilting his freshly combed golden mane. A gold medallion with a diamond in the center hangs around his neck. ‘Robert Stigwood, my manager, gave me this. It says, “Happy Gold Christmas.” My brothers all have platinum ones. I’ll be getting a new one soon.’”{507}
“Everlasting Love” went to #5 in the US in July. Shadow Dancing went platinum. Andy’s singles brought Flowing Rivers along in their wake, and it went platinum as well. As the tour ended, RSO released “Our Love (Don’t Throw It All Away),” written by Barry and Blue Weaver. The single made #9 in America and no impression on the UK charts.
It’s a weak ballad in Andy’s hands, with soaring MFSB strings and a glistening Fender Rhodes as the lead instrument. The song’s designed as a voice showcaser, and Andy showcases some range, reaching high and coming close to hitting the notes he’s aiming for. But Andy leaves the impression of a poor Barry Gibb impression. Barry seems to have written the song for his range, not Andy’s.
The later Bee Gees version of the song sounds richer, more detailed in production, and though the arrangements are almost identical, far more professional, accomplished and polished. The Bee Gees version can be listened to repeatedly; Andy’s sounds like a low-fi knockoff. The difference between the two versions is shocking, and in that gap lies Andy’s dilemma. He wasn’t Barry, but Barry kept giving him Barry material and producing that material at lower-than-Barry standards.
But with three #1s, a #9, two platinum records and girls going ape on two continents over Andy’s satin trousers, who was going to sl
ow the gravy train? Conversely, who wouldn’t stand on such a pinnacle and realize there was only one direction to go—besides Barry, of course? Andy had risen further faster younger than anyone in the history of pop music. He showed little inclination toward moderation.
Barry said: “With the sudden success he’s had, his head has been turned around. We’re concerned for the boy. There’s a lot of heavy drugs around, a lot of shady characters, and he’s not always within the realms of the family.”{508}
His mom said: “He never grew up. He was like Peter Pan. He was just like a little boy all of his life. He was a baby all his life.”{509}
Andy, with his usual optimism, told Robert W. Morgan: “They’re going to bury me tomorrow . . . 20 years old and three #1s is a lot; and I’m just worried about 10 years or all those years until I’m 30.”{510}
Andy went back to the studio without Barry. Maurice said: “I think he thinks that he still had to prove himself to be as good as we were in many ways, or to gain the same success. I think that there’s always that brotherly, sibling type of rivalry.”{511} The sessions came to naught as Andy’s drug use accelerated and he embraced the incarnation of late 1970s and early ’80s Miami: Quaaludes.
’Ludes—the long-since outlawed and discontinued synthetic barbiturate-like methaqualone—were super-downers that gave the user’s perceptions a thick, sensual glow and a sense of moving through the world in slow motion. Folks liked to combine them with cocaine to go up and down at once; ’ludes cut the edginess of coke and coke cut the syrupiness of ’ludes. It was a popular and debilitating combination, best undertaken by those who spent their evenings being driven around, and not driving. Add a little alcohol and the most likely event was a period of horny agitation followed by a deep restful snooze. Unless you were twenty years old, and had even more coke to wake back up with.
The Bee Gees Page 26