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Category:    Home > Essays > Music > Biography > History > The Music Legacy Of The Bee Gees.

The Music Legacy Of The Bee Gees.

 

By Nicholas Sheffo

 

 

The third of our series about music acts not getting the credit they deserve these days for various reasons brings us to one of the longest and most enduring family acts in music history.  Along with The Jacksons, Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Osmonds (more popular over the years than you might have realized), The Beach Boys, The Carpenters and other great family acts over the years who may have fared better overseas than in the U.S. (Tim & Neil Finn for example of Split Enz and Crowded House), The Bee Gees remain the most successful family music act of all time.

 

Like The Osmonds and The Jacksons, they had their youngest brothers become a breakout solo artist (Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson were part of the original family act, while Andy Gibb was never an official member of The Bee Gees) with each solo artist having at least one smash hit among their solo efforts (Osmonds’ Go Away Little Girl remake was #1 for three weeks, while Jackson’s Billie Jean and Gibb’s Shadow Dancing spent 7 weeks at #1 each remaining their biggest solo hits ever and saddest of all, the latter two left us long before they should have) establishing their independence from their brothers.

 

Born in England, The Brothers Gibb were a family music act as children long before anyone expected a British Invasion, so they were in effect a few years ahead of it and The Beatles.  When 1964 arrived, they were in Australia but ahead of the curve, so when they returned to England in 1967, the adult-era hits began.  Their early hits were not trying to sound like The Beatles or any other act from the various waves of that invasion, so they stood out and became respected in the industry as well as music favorites.  Signed to Atco, they logged over a dozen hits and sold well.  After a few years without hits, they signed with RSO Records and immediately found an instant smash hit with Jive Talkin’ and this time, they were ahead of the curve again that became the Disco Era which their hits would help to define.

 

While Andy logged solo hits quintessential of the era (Shadow Dancing, I Just Want To Be Your Everything, Love Is (Thicker Than Water), (Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away, An Everlasting Love) that all could have worked for the group and are sometimes confused with their hits, The Bee Gees moved from working with the amazing Arif Mardin to a pair of producers who gave them their peak sound: Karl Richardson & Albhy Galuten.  With the group, the sound of a grand classical pop sweep in their arrangements would redefine the band and become their peak sound remaining with them and all their work henceforth, extending to work with Andy Gibb, artists on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (the biggest-selling double album of all time), the hit Emotion by Samantha Sang (later remade by Destiny’s Child) and a series of albums produced by the same team for some of the biggest singers in the business.

 

Starting with Barbra Streisand’s massively successful Guilty, the team would follow up with Dionne Warwick’s Heartbreaker, Diana Ross’ Eaten Alive and Kenny Rogers’ Eyes That See In the Dark, all of which produced big hits (including the various title songs, Woman In Love, Take The Short Way Home, Chain Reaction, This Woman, Islands In The Stream, etc.) long after the Disco era was over and the group remained highly respected within the industry.

 

Yet that still amazingly leaves the actual Bee Gees own hits which span a much longer period than merely the Disco Years.  With some of the most distinct and formidable harmonies in music history, here are my choices for the ten songs that most endure and most define The Bee Gees Legacy…

 

 

1)     How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? – This 1971 classic remains one of their most loved, most enduring and most revered hits (also one of the most remade) as this dead-on ballad (written by the trio who co-produced with Robert Stigwood) is darkly beautiful and shows a unique side of pain and relationships.  The vocal performances are like no other and fit right in with the singer/songwriter movement in tone and feel.  Robin and Barry share lead vocals.

 

2)     I Started A Joke – Barry Gibb was not always the lead singer of the group as this underrated 1968 hit with Robin Gibb on lead vocals proves, from the same team as Broken Heart, Robin shows his range and empathy as much as any singer of the time and it is well written to boot.

 

3)     Massachusetts – From the same team in 1967, the band pulled off this hit that sounds like many of the records of the time, yet does not sound as dated and in part, it is because it is not as rushed and the vocals are more effective than many similar slow, sad ballads of the time.

 

4)     I Gotta Get A Message To You – If the above hits do not show the band had a sincere edge of blues in their music, this great hit also shows they were doing something with soul genre forms long before they worked with Arif Mardin, featuring another great composition and vocal by the trio co-produced with Stigwood that holds up incredibly well. 

 

5)     Jive Talkin’ – This 1975 chart topper was not only an instant comeback hot for the group, but partly foreran the Disco style, introduced the beginnings of their falsetto style they would use in their Disco hits and its influence extended to other genres (including Lindsey Buckingham’s Second Hand News for his band Fleetwood Mac) in what was a glossy, upscale pop record with a good backbeat that opened up the next era of pop music.  Though the clever critic Nelson George would label this a record that was part of the “white negro movement”, I felt that was unfair and misses the idea of music as art that crosses borders.  That moniker could apply to other attempts by the group to do soul records (Boogie Child is not as successful for instance), but it oversimplifies what they accomplished with this record.

 

6)     Fanny (Be Tender With My Love) – The peak of their falsetto hits is this ultimate love song in that style that goes all the way with the style (it was their mother’s favorite song) that is unusual in its multilayered vocals, mix and approach, yet it works and shows of the Gibbs’ singing capacities at their best that could never be faked in a studio.  This was also produced by Arif Mardin and written by the group.

 

7)     Nights On Broadway – More than any other record, this Arif Mardin production is the one that actually captures the sense of “street” (at least for the band) that made their later Disco hits credible, but tends to be a richer record than most they cut later and mixes the falsetto and standard vocal approach.

 

8)     Love So Right – This early co-production with Karl Richardson & Albhy Galuten from 1976 set the tone for the their work while retaining everything they gained with Arif Mardin in this exceptional falsetto hit that shows great range within that boundary and also happens to be a well written and arranged song.

 

9)      Love You Inside Out – Free of Saturday Night Fever, the band cut a mixed album in Spirits Having Flown, but two of its biggest hits remain their best-ever records.  At this point, they were on top of the world and you can hear that in the all-the-way boldness of this production to the vocals and the way the trio just keeps pushing in the song to the end.

 

10)  Tragedy – Concluding with this hit, you’ll note I purposely skipped the obvious hits from Saturday Night Fever and not because they are good or bad records, but because the group was much more than those hits that almost stereotyped them.  They push the high end of falsetto directly and all the way in a way few vocal bands could hope to and both songs make a fitting coda to the end of that peak era.

 

 

After Disco ended, they had their solo projects, the star vocal albums noted above and eventually more albums minus falsettos finding another sound to continue their career on with including hits for Stayin’ Alive, a bizarre Sylvester Stallone-directed sequel to Saturday Night Fever that included the hits The Woman In You and Someone Belonging To Someone (plus the infamous Frank Stallone hit Far From Over which got more radio airplay than any of The Bee Gees cuts!) and other hits afterwards like One and You Win Again.  They never had the same success again, but also became the target of an anti-Disco campaign that was actually (we now know; none of it having anything to do with the misguided Sgt. Pepper’s feature film either) a hate campaign against anything counterculture, Disco or about political progress.  Neo-Conservatives (and other haters) knew it would be hard to go after gay men, soul acts or African American artists and KC & The Sunshine Band were more easily dismissed as well as being a U.S. act, but in The Bee Gees these Right-Wing politicos found the perfect whipping boys and they became the first (and still only act) in music history to be instantly removed from radio as if Disco (read The Civil Rights Movement) never happened including “Bee Gees-Free Weekends” on radio stations.  It remains one of the most embarrassing incidents in U.S. radio history.

 

Now over 30 years later when music is so bad and the record industry is in flux, any label would sign a band like them in a minute and is a remainder of better days for music, radio and the arts.  Maurice Gibb passed away in 2003, but even he got to see them comeback and once again get the respect they deserve.  After all, they were more than just a Disco act that had huge hits.  They were one of the biggest music acts of all time.

 

For more on the band, start with this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9232/Ultimate+Bee+Gees+(Reprise+Records

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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