So Now It's Okay to Like the Bee Gees?

Barry Gibbs, the last living Bee Gee, is playing to large crowds in a solo U.S. tour in 2014. He started in the huge Boston Garden, which is where I once saw the Rolling Stones. It's very big.

 Rolling Stone (the magazine) celebrates this with a collection of YouTube versions of "13 Essential Barry Gibb Tracks," most of them from the Bee Gees, beginning in the late 60s. The accompanying paragraphs are laudatory. They suggest that David Bowie essentially copied the Bee Gees in his early albums. So it's okay to like the Bee Gees now? Finally?

 When they started, the reigning tastemakers at Rolling Stone considered them Beatles Lite. Their middle period albums were ignored, their hits ridiculed. And that's before they rode the Disco wave with their songs in Saturday Night Fever, which was of course beneath contempt.

 Contempt was the attitude we faced when we included their first albums in our 1967-68 continuous play mix back in the Galesburg House for the Bewildered (169 W. First Street, now a national historical monument. Wait--update: they tore it down) where the tunes of that fantastic year were our senior year soundtrack at Knox College. Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Creem, Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Buffalo Springfield, even Vanilla Fudge, but...the Bee Gees?

Two of the 13 Essential Tracks are from those first two albums.  "New York Mining Disaster 1941" is an acknowledged classic from their first one, and their first radio hit.  "To Love Somebody" also from that album (not in this list) was even bigger. "Holiday" was the third hit from the Bee Gees First.

But the critical bloom was off the rose already by their second album Horizontal, so the surprise of the Rolling Stone choices is "World," which led off the album and is immediately picked up thematically and musically in the next track.  Their daffy surrealism turned eerie, approaching what French surrealists like Eluard and Apollonaire might have written if they were in a rock band.  "Daytime Girl" sets a pattern of dreamy forboding.  Still, they could craft a radio hit when they wanted--though "Birdie Told Me" is a classic pop song, the album's hit turned out to be the melodic and yearning "Massachusetts."  Though "World" made the Brit charts, it was too weird for the US, or in those days, Rolling Stone.  Now apparently it's an essential.

By the time of their double album Odessa (with the red felt cover--I've still got it) the Bee Gees were more often ridiculed than respected.  Still, I continued to purchase and listen to every Bee Gees album in the early and mid 70s. Idea played at Iowa, Mr. Natural in PA. My allegiance while I was writing about rock at the Boston Phoenix was considered a puzzling eccentricity.  I do remember reading one writer somewhere (it may have even been on an album cover) brave enough to write a positive essay, though a lot of it was about how quixotic he was considered, how defensive he sometimes had to be.

 Now Bruce Springsteen is doing a Bee Gees song--and one from the disco era--and Gibb is doing a Springsteen (neither of them terribly good at it.) But that's less of a departure than Rolling Stone's--musicians by and large did not buy into the snobbery. Many recorded Bee Gees songs and copied their riffs. Musicians are like that.  (Irony here is that Jon Landau, by now the multimillionaire manager and former producer for the Boss, was the reigning imperial power as the record review editor at Rolling Stone in those years that established the Bee Gees as bad taste.)

 So I welcome the conventional wisdom to what I already knew: the Bee Gees were unique, unquestionably strange, but frequently haunting and oddly joyful.  I'm glad that at least one of them lived long enough to get some love as well as fame and fortune.  Welcome to the fan club.

Remembering the Bee Gees

Robin Gibb died last week.  Partly because of the coincidence of Donna Summer's death a few days earlier, the Bee Gees retrospectives emphasized their disco period.  While they sold a lot of records with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and for a few later albums, I was listening to the Bee Gees from their U.S. debut in 1967. 

Bee Gees 1st, with its psychedelic cover, was in the pile of rotating albums that fall, along with Buffalo Springfield's first, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Tim Hardin, John Wesley Harding, the Doors, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, the previous spring's Sergeant Pepper, etc. 

Their second album--Horizontal-- came out that winter, along with Magical Mystery Tour, the Stones' Her Satanic Majesty Requests, Disraeli Gears, Strange Days, Vanilla Fudge, more Airplane, Hendrix... Their sound and songs were part of the soundtrack of my senior year of college, and the house at 169 West First Street, otherwise known as the Galesburg Home for the Bewildered.

They had the Beatles patina, but more like the next Beatles thing.  Maybe because their first hit was "New York Mining Disaster 1941" they were given to anthemic surrealism, mixed in with rhythm and blues flavored radio songs like their second hit and one of their most enduring songs, "To Love Somebody."  The surreal flow of their lyrics grabbed me.  Not only pondering poetic possibilities under the influence of this or that, but feeling the emotional undertow, and the feeling expressed in those voices.  I mean, who else could get away with a poignant memory song like "Red Chair, Fade Away?" Or the odd U.S. hit "Holiday?"

"Horizontal" went even stronger towards a novelistic surrealism, a poetic freedom that no one else dared.  It opened with two slow songs, "World" and "The Sun Will Shine," with lines that barely related and lyrics that wandered, quoted an old ballad, observed, expressing a youthful yearning and yet a larger melancholy of time.  Even a lovely song like "Day Time Girl" made more poetic than literal sense.  But they still had the ability to construct tight pop tunes for radio hits, like "Birdie Told Me," although the enduring hit from the album, "Massachusetts," also struggles to stay between the lines.  Nevertheless, they had the sound.

But among the avid listeners of most of the people and bands I named from 67-68,  mine was a minority view.  The Bee Gees were mostly dismissed.  But I didn't care much.  I kept buying and listening to their albums.  I played "Idea" in my single long, narrow room tacked onto a real building in Iowa City, as I tried to navigate the Writers Workshop and the draft, as well as, you know, relationships.  I was such a Beatles fan that in that room I once fought off depression by going through the paperback novelization of the Beatles' movie "Help!" and correcting the dialogue, because I remembered it all from seeing the movie so many times.  But I embraced the Bee Gees, too.  I recall reading an interview with Robin Gibb who said he heard music everywhere--the sound of an airplane engine gave him the melody of "I Started a Joke," one of the hits from this album, along with "I've Gotta Get a Message to You."  I understood that completely.  And I also needed that other message: "Hold on, hold on."

By spring I was pondering their strange double album, "Odessa," with its red felt cover.  Again, the tangled history of a disaster in the title song.  The antic melodies, the wandering ballads.  It was stranger than ever, maybe too ambitious, but something about it held me--some feeling within the excesses, some sense of a meaning just obscured.

The Brothers Gibb broke up, reunited with "Two Years On" and its radio hit, "Lonely Days."  What a song!  Those harmonies, breaking into painful solos.  "Trafalgar" (another historical theme cover and song) starts with "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," and their sound is starting to change.  Though their "Mr. Natural" album was a popular low point, I really liked a song called "Dogs"--nobody but the Bee Gees could have written and sung it.  When I first heard "Nights on Broadway" and "Jive Talkin'" on their album "Main Course," I didn't think disco.  Everybody was doing that beat, even the Eagles.  The song I liked most was "Edge of the Universe."

But then came Saturday Night Fever, and they were officially disco.  I bought their "Spirits Having Flown" and  "Children of the World" albums, I liked them, I was happy for their success, but when I unloaded almost half of my record collection before heading for the West Coast, those records didn't make the trip.

It is incredible to realize that they made all this music in about 12 years.  Only five individuals or groups had sold more records--more than Michael Jackson, not to mention the Stones, the Doors, Dylan, etc. by the time they were inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.  They were lucky to have a very persistent and not unhucksterish promotor, Robert Stigwood, right from their late 60s beginning.  He packaged and repackaged them endlessly even in the lean years.  His judgment wasn't always great--witness their greatest flop, the Sergeant Pepper movie.  But he stuck with them. 

Robin's twin brother Barry is the last Bee Gee left. The Wikipedia entry mentions a possible movie in development about their lives, produced by Steven Speilberg.  For people like me who were there for it all, the Bee Gees were part of the soundtrack that kept us going.  A bunch of their songs will haunt me for the rest of my days.  Their classic songs that have been recorded by others will stay in the pantheon.  And their harmonies will remain unique, lifting up those lonely days.