The Bee Gees

by David N. Meyer

  On March 6, 1992, one day after what would have been Andy Gibb’s thirty-fourth birthday, Hugh Gibb died at seventy-six. The cause of death was listed as internal bleeding. After Andy died, Hugh lost interest in his life, and his interest in drink, always substantial, increased. Hugh lies buried next to Andy in Los Angeles.

  “I believe all this was meant to happen,” Barry said. “I miss my father of course, but he stopped living when Andy died and I’m sure he’s happier now.”

  Robin was feeling on the outs of popular music. Or, in other words, he felt old. Anyone who begins a sentence with “kids today” feels old. “Kids today,” he said, “are being starved of a certain standard of music. Pop music has lost its colour, its vitality, its excitement, its means of being different—there are so many guidelines imposed on it these days. The great new songwriters of the Nineties are not being developed. This is sound bite time. There’s also the feeling around that pop music may have peaked. It stormed forward with the Beatles, who took it to a new level, suddenly it was credible. The Sixties barnstormed the avenues of creativity. In the Nineties, it’s a question of where do we go from here? It’s not a question of what the next trend is, it’s a question of what else is there?”{598}

  Speaking of Saturday Night Fever, Robin said: “This was the peak of record sales in all of history. Since 1967, there have only been three albums that have truly affected the culture, and that’s Sgt. Pepper [Robin refers to the Beatles record, not the Bee Gees film soundtrack], Fever and Thriller. There’s not many people who know what that feels like. We’re like the guys who have been to the moon.”{599}

  When the band was down, Robin complained. When they were up, he gloated. Regardless, like his brothers, he always went back to work. By the 1990s, none of the brothers ever needed to work again, even were they to start buying small countries. It’s said of Hemingway that he killed himself because he knew he could not write like he used to, but he could not stop writing. Neither could Barry. And if he couldn’t stop, neither could his brothers.

  On April 22, 1997, the Bee Gees released Still Waters. Their record label had rejected an earlier version, a collection of ballads. Still Waters is glossy Bee Gees generica. Only “Alone,” with its doo-wop influenced choruses and driving beat, stands out. Even so, Still Waters reached #28 in the US and #5 in the UK. The album was an unqualified success, their best-selling since Spirits. Worldwide, it went quadruple platinum. “I Could Not Love You More” and “Still Waters (Run Deep)” both made UK’s top 20. Arif Mardin returned to produce, along with four other producers. Barry sings most leads. There’s a pronounced 1980s drum sound and Van Halen guitar-solo aesthetic. Still Waters’ commercial reception made it clear that the Bee Gees’ audience was aging along with the band and was present and loyal in huge numbers.

  “What you are getting is an honest album from us,” Barry said. “For a few years, people were saying, ‘Oh, it is a Bee Gees record, don’t even listen to it.’ That is what hurt us the most—the idea that you shouldn’t even play it, that radio stations might have ‘Bee Gees-free weekends.’ The heart and soul you hear on our songs in this new album is our hunger. In each track, there’s the idea that no matter who surrounds us, we are really alone anyway, individually, deep inside, so we may as well concentrate on living up to things we should demand and expect of ourselves. What came out of the last decade for us, spiritually, was maybe a new level of humility, compassion. We call ourselves the enigma with the stigma. The thought within the first single, ‘Alone,’ is that nobody really wants to be alone, and when you’re in pain, nobody else feels it. But these actually can be good reasons to reach out.”{600}

  On October 20, 1997, the Bee Gees committed the public relations error of appearing on Clive Anderson’s BBC talk show. Anderson behaved famously like an asshole on-air—Anderson was renowned for obnoxiousness and for asking offensive questions in a rat-a-tat style.{601} The interview starts innocuously. Anderson hammers away about their history, giving the band enough rope to hang themselves. Robin stays calm and self-possessed; Maurice tosses in a laconic one-liner now and then. When Clive shifts the tone of his questions, which he does constantly, Barry reacts each time. Barry waits to dominate the conversation in his usual ­control-freak fashion, leaning forward and interrupting his brothers, but Anderson proves too slippery. When Anderson raises the issue of the band splitting, the show grows tense. Anderson and Barry spar over calling the band “tossers” [masturbators], but Barry defends his family with ease. What he cannot handle is when Anderson singles out the other brothers for praise. The anger in Barry’s face kicks up a notch when Clive mentions Robin’s hit “Saved by the Bell.” Barry instantly reminds him that at the same time, he and Maurice put out “Don’t Forget to Remember.” Clive says: “I forgot that one.” Though there’s been an undercurrent to Clive’s remarks, Barry takes that mild, punning comeback as putting his song down in favor of Robin’s and as a final straw. He stands up and stalks out. Robin follows. Maurice hangs a bit and says: “Well, I guess I should leave.” Clive says; “You could speak for the other two.” Maurice answers: “I don’t do impressions,” and ambles off.

  Barry had said at the onset of the 1990s: “I want to see the Bee Gees where they are not made fun of. That’s my cause. And I’ll go on until that happens. It may never happen, but I don’t care. I’m prepared for the fight.”{602}

  In November of 1997, the Bees Gees filmed One Night Only—a live performance before ten thousand fans in Las Vegas—for broadcast on February 14, 1998, on HBO. Their band of anonymous backing pros is tight, and the brothers are in good voice. Robin looks remarkably healthy. His appearance here is the benchmark against which his later deterioration would be measured. The band preferred doing large-scale one-off shows to touring. “We’re not going to go and slog our guts out and not have fun,” Maurice said. “You do two shows in a row, we need a night off, especially when you’re doing falsettos—that’s a killer, you need three days’ rest after a show!”{603} One Night Only yielded both a live CD and a DVD. Barry’s bad back had worsened, and the band regarded this gig as a possible final show. They did twenty-four songs; a demonstration of their stamina and drive.

  On May 5, 1998, Stigwood’s Saturday Night Fever stage production opened at the London Palladium. Stigwood had said many times how SNF the movie succeeded because he never took out the “fucks” and “shits” that the studio demanded he remove. Promo material for the stage play, however, emphasized that “the stage musical has been adapted and is suitable for all the family. There will be no foul language, drug use or violence against women.”{604}

  There were two new Bee Gees songs in the play. Neither had been written expressly for the show. “It’s My Neighborhood” was later covered by Celine Dion and “Immorality” appeared on the Bee Gees album One. The play ran for almost two years in the West End and garnered three Laurence Olivier nominations.

  The success of the stage play was read as proof that the Bee Gees had returned. David Adelson, the managing editor of Hits magazine, said: “The Bee Gees are once again a combination of cool and kitsch. They evoke favorable memories and seem to have won a renewed respect, proving that longevity enables certain artists to become hip again. If you survive long enough, you can thrive again.”{605}

  Nik Cohn, the originator of the Fever story, had a different take: “The consensus seems to be that the ’70s are a laugh—a camp fad no more profound than pet rocks and hula hoops. ‘It’s all so uncool, it’s cool,’ one young vision in paisley polyester informed me. The recent debut of Saturday Night Fever—The Musical in London stirred more wariness in me than glee. Nor was my confidence level helped by my next-door neighbour. When I told him I was flying to England to catch the opening night, he gave me a pitying look and muttered, ‘I’d fly to England to miss it.’”{606}

  “We’re not a nostalgia act,” Robin insisted. “We’re still making contemporary music.” “A segment of the industry wanted to shed the whole disco movement,�
� Barry said, accurately. “We were the heads they put on a stick.” “A lot of bad records were made in that era,” Robin said, hitting the nail on the head, “but the Bee Gees’ songs hold up and will still be in clubs in 2050. It was exciting, progressive R&B, and the world went mad. The backlash was led by dinosaur critics who thought rock and heavy metal were the only music people should hear.” Barry described their 1990s comeback as “the greatest shock.” “People are liking songs,” he said, “that weren’t supposed to be liked anymore.” “We’re persistent little buggers,” Maurice said.{607}

  One Night Only, the album, was released on November 3, 1998. It stayed in the charts for thirty-six weeks, until July 1999, and sold 2 million copies. The DVD sold 1,700,000 copies in the US alone, making it one of the most successful music DVDs.{608}

  The TV broadcasts once again bore out Stigwood’s belief in cross-promotion, a practice the boys adopted as their own. When One Night Only aired in the UK, sales of the album went up by 546 percent the next week. Sam Wright, the head of TV promotions at Polydor, said: “It was amazingly valuable. It was a real talking point. People kept ringing us up, asking us for a copy. It really re-positioned [the Bee Gees].”{609}

  One Night Only hit Australia on March 17, 1999. Forty-four thousand tickets sold the first day and the one-off show sold a total of 61,000. “It’s the biggest top show undertaking,” the local promoter said, “that I’ve been involved in.”{610}

  On October 21, 1999, SNF opened on Broadway. “The film affected people in two ways,” the director, Arlene Phillips said. “They either remember John Travolta in his white suit, and the music and the discos, and they forget about the story. Or they remember the quite-shocking story. And it seems that nobody really ever remembers the combination of the two. There’s a lot that one can hardly bear to watch or look at. And somehow in musical theater, the question arises . . . how far do you go into the depths of the story with all the ugliness and still enjoy this disco music? It was very hard to get the balance right.”{611} “The music sounds distant and tinny, as if it were being played on some souped up 8-track tape system,” wrote New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, letting his response to the overture stand in for this take on the entire play. “Against the odds, there is nothing at all infectious about it; your tappable feet and snappable fingers stay alarmingly still. And there arises an ominous feeling that any nostalgia on offer here is not of the wet warm embracing kind but more of the freeze-dried variety.”{612} Despite lukewarm reviews, by opening night the show had sold $20 million of advance tickets and it ran for 501 performances.

  In April of 2001, the Bee Gees released This Is Where I Came In. The album hit #6 in the UK and #16 in the US, demonstrating the strength of the Bee Gees’ audience. The album suggests that the success of One Night Only rejuvenated the band. The title track is their most intelligent, fully realized, sing-alongable, compelling song in years.

  In the sparse intro, Robin sings over Maurice picking guitar. Barry comes in for a verse, and all three soar together. Robin sings a solo verse in strong, full voice. The hook of the song sounds half stolen from Toto’s Africa, but after their previous anemic efforts, the single presents the Bee Gees as a band reborn, confident and willing to attempt new forms. They’ve clearly been listening to 1990s dance music. “Walking on Air” evokes ABC; “Voice in the Wilderness” features a Nine Inch Nails–influenced rave-up with severe ’90s dance-music production. “Embrace” and “Walking on Air” would sound at home on a Pet Shop Boys album—not surprising, since the album’s co-producer, Peter-John Vettese, also produced the Pet Shop Boys. The Bee Gees’ voices merge with the instrumentation as they had not in years. Even the video is witty and well executed, with the band looking remarkably unselfconscious. Robin appears well fed and healthy.

  “We didn’t want one of those big production things,” Barry said. “This album for us is variety. It stands on its own—it’s not like another Fever or Main Course or anything before. We thought, ‘How many different kinds of songs can we do?’ And we gave each other the space to go away individually and come up with things ourselves—which we used to do without any feelings of malice. So we did four songs together, and three or four each, and chose from them. It’s our definitive album of our collaborations and their diversity.”{613}

  The Bees Gees seemed poised for a great leap forward.

  “walkin’ by the railroad”

  Maurice, a longtime, hard-drinking alcoholic, always said that John Lennon gave him his first taste of real liquor. Maurice was a mythomaniac, and Lulu recalls him making up stories about time spent with John and Yoko, but this has the ring of truth.

  Of his early drinking days Maurice said: “I was into beer and stuff. Then, at the Speakeasy club, Lennon said: ‘Scotch and Coke, innit?’ Cream were playing that night. It was a star-studded evening. You must remember, these guys [the Beatles] are our gods! John was my guru. He said ‘Scotch and Coke’—yes! And I’d never drunk Scotch and Coke in my life. I was 17. All of a sudden I’m hanging out with him. And there’s Keith Moon. There’s Pete Townshend. There’s Otis Redding. To be thrust into the middle of it, sitting having drinks with your idols . . . So if he’d said cyanide, I’d have drunk it. One moment I was looking at a Beatles fan club book and five months later we were in a club with them. We felt part of something although we were 16 or 17 years old.{614} I can still feel the nervousness in my stomach. I was with John many times when he was tripping, and I didn’t know he was tripping. Oh, he was funny [on LSD]. He was so funny. When he got drunk, he was real arrogant, a pain in the ass. But when he was tripping, the drink would counter it. So he was always in between. He’d become sarcastically funny, not sarcastically arrogant, and he became tremendously lovable. We had many late nights doing that shit. Throwing up in the back of his white Roller. At that time, it was multi-colored.{615}

  “Ringo was my neighbour and we were going to Tramp every night, parking our Mini Coopers outside the Speakeasy and driving home totally blitzed. It was good fun. No one had minders then—we used to get drunk with Prince Charles at Tramp, and Michael Caine and Peter Sellers’d be in the corner. When I was married to Lu, the doorbell would go at three in the morning and it would be Rod Stewart or David Bowie. We’d go down in our dressing gowns and get the bar open.”{616}

  With the success of Saturday Night Fever, Maurice’s drinking, and its effects, took a turn. “Every day,” he said, “I didn’t want to get up. I had all these beautiful things around me and I didn’t appreciate a damn thing. Had my own Falcon 20 jet, you know. Hardly ever used it. I sold all that shit. Sold my boat. ’Cos I wasn’t happy with me, and it was the boozing, of course. I was totally unhappy, even though we were having hit records and getting on great.”{617}

  Before Andy died, Maurice had achieved a functional level

  of sobriety. After Andy’s death, Maurice’s drinking increased. Whether he had too much time on his hands, the relative hard times the band was facing, or as he said, guilt he felt for not being able to communicate with Andy before he died, Maurice blamed Andy. Alcoholics need someone to blame. “I liked drinking because it was sociable,” he said. “It was going to the pub and having a pint. It was a way of life. I became a Jekyll and Hyde figure. I was never physically abusive but I was vicious with my tongue. After Andy’s death it got worse. I drank and drank to numb my mind.”{618}

  On October 4, 1991, Maurice pulled a gun on his family in their house in Miami. He had been on a monthlong brandy binge, drinking every day from the moment of awakening to the moment of passing out. He ran upstairs, grabbed his handgun and came back down. “I was waving a gun around and stuff like that,” he said. “And normally I don’t even like guns.”{619} “He came out with a gun,” Maurice’s son Adam, who was sixteen at the time, said. “I couldn’t believe it and then my mum said: ‘Go upstairs and get some clothes’ and I thought ‘Oh my God, he’s going to shoot us.’” “The kids were scared to death,” Yvonne said. “He said he had to d
o something about this problem and he cried and cried.”{620} “I didn’t have a blackout,” Maurice said. “I remembered all of it. That scared the hell out of me. I asked my daughter to throw the gun in the bay, which she did. I said: ‘I’ve just got to do something about this.’ I’d reached the bottom and I couldn’t take any more. I didn’t like being that person. I became that monster.”{621}

  Yvonne took the children and ran to Barry’s house. She called Maurice and told him she would not come home until he straightened out. Maurice says he drove himself to rehab the next day. “If I was her I’d run out,” he said. “If I could run away from me I’d run away from me.”{622}

  Maurice broke down during a group session in rehab after citing how much Yvonne had supported him. He called her; the next day was their sixteenth wedding anniversary. “She sent me a card saying, ‘We’ve gone this far together, it can only get better.’”{623} When Maurice got out of rehab, he was down with the program. “AA,” he said. “Regular meetings. Staying in contact with people in the program. See, all my friends now are on the program. They’re not the people I used to booze with or go to pubs with. They say ‘people, places, and things.’ I don’t hang out with the same people I used to hang out with, I don’t go to the same places. And the things that used to make me drink—I don’t let them bother me any more.”{624}

  On February 23, 1992, Maurice and Yvonne renewed their wedding vows. “We thought it would be a good time to celebrate,” Maurice said. “Not only our marriage but also my life as a non-drinker and non-drug abuser. It’s a funny thing, but it also marks our starting a new life—new journey—together. Yvonne supported me through the bad times; it’s hard to find a lady like that.”{625} In July, Maurice appeared on Fighting Back, a BBC show hosted by actress Lynn Redgrave. Stars from various fields came on to talk candidly about their illnesses and how they had dealt with them. “This is a wonderful form of giving back in return for all the help I was given when I was in trouble,” Maurice said. “I felt that the main point of this programme was to get across to other alcoholics and their families that something can be done and that they are not struggling alone.”{626}