People crying out for help. Desperate songs. Those are the ones that become giants. The minute you capture that on record, it’s gold. “Stayin’ Alive” is the epitome of that. Everybody struggles against the world, fighting all the bullshit and things that can drag you down. And it really is a victory just to survive. But when you climb back on top and win bigger than ever before—well, that’s something everybody reacts to. Everybody.
—Barry Gibb{282}
None of us expected it to be so big.
—Maurice Gibb{283}
Disco is not the Bee Gees’ fault.
They are not to blame.
In an episode of an American sitcom, two students—a straight African American girl and a gay white boy—sit down to talk to a teacher. The boy says: “She’s black. I’m gay. We make culture.” In America, truer words were never spoken. The brothers Gibb are demonstrably neither, and were never part of the thriving underground then increasingly overground black, gay and jet-set club scene based on dance music (and sex and drugs) that exploded—as ever, in a diluted form—into the mainstream. The Bee Gees’ only crime was to help make disco popular. Very, very popular.
They did this by selling 25 million copies of a double album between 1977 and 1980, at the time the most copies of any sound recording sold since the advent of sound recording. It’s one thing for, say, Lady Gaga to get 80 million hits on YouTube. It’s nice, but her audience didn’t have to do much. To move 25 million double units in the late 1970s, about 20 million people had to get in their cars, drive to a record store, take out their wallets, buy the damn thing, carry it home, undo the shrink wrap and slap it on the turntable. Then their friends all had to go out and do the same thing. To date, over 40 million copies of Saturday Night Fever (SNF) have sold.
Saturday Night Fever was a hit like nothing before and hardly anything since, spending twenty-four consecutive weeks at #1 from January to August of 1978. The single “How Deep Is Your Love” stayed in the top 10 for seventeen straight weeks. No other Billboard single had ever done that. In February and March of ’78, three singles from the record made the top 10 twice. During March and April, “Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive” both hit #1 and spent time at #2. “Night Fever” was #1 for eight weeks in a row and “Stayin’ Alive” was #1 for four. Yvonne Elliman’s cover of the Bee Gees’ “If I Can’t Have You”—the fourth single from the album—charted for six months and made #1; the Tavares’ cover of “More Than a Woman” stayed in the top 100 for five months. The Saturday Night Fever double LP remained in the top 200 from November 1977 to March 1980: twenty-nine consecutive months.
Some of the songs have aged poorly, some well and one is immortal.
“Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours sold between 9–10 million units at $7.98,” Al Coury explained in 1978, citing then-current prices. “Before that the big album was Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive, which did 7–8 million at $6.98 originally and then $7.98. Before that it was Carole King’s Tapestry, which did 10–12 million, with most of the sales at $5.98. Saturday Night Fever became the top-grossing album of all time when it hit 8 million units (because of its higher price).”{284}
The soundtrack proved such a monster because, Bee Gees aside, it was packed with known disco songs from brand name bands in a range of dance styles and demographics. KC and the Sunshine Band, Kool and the Gang, the Trammps, M.F.S.B., Yvonne Elliman, Ralph McDonald, Tavares, Walter Murphy: you could put on SNF and have a dance party without lifting the needle. When you needed to sit down and cool off, you could ignore the unlistenable soundtrack cuts from hack composer and Francis Ford Coppola brother-in-law David Shire, who had to be the luckiest man in show business to get his clueless disco-lite onto the LP.
Saturday Night Fever—the movie and the double LP—demonstrated the scale of the disco market and others rushed in to service and earn off that market. The soundtrack hit first and fueled the movie; then the movie hit and refueled the soundtrack. In that way, SNF is analogous to Woodstock—the event, the movie and the soundtrack album.
The message of Woodstock was not that 400,000 longhairs could come together peaceably for three days of music and love. The real message of Woodstock was that there were 400,000 longhairs, and all of them willing to travel and spend to revel in longhairdom. And if 400,000 would travel, then millions more must be waiting at home, along with their younger brothers and sisters, all ready to pay to demonstrate their longhairedness. Woodstock showed mainstream and niche marketers alike that profits awaited on the hippie bandwagon, and everybody got on board. No one had any idea of the scope of the sales opportunities until Woodstock hit. Suddenly, longhairedness was not aberrant. It was the new normal—the everyday face of the youth market. And so it was with Saturday Night Fever.
Disco haters talk about SNF and disco as a pernicious, undermining of the popular will. They should instead recognize SNF as the absolute manifestation of that will. Bill Oakes—then head of RSO and husband of Yvonne Elliman—believes that disco was not only well entrenched in America before SNF, but had already peaked. “These days,” Oakes told W magazine, “Fever is credited with kicking off the whole disco thing—but it really didn’t. Truth is, [SNF] breathed new life into a genre that was actually dying.”{285}
Saturday Night Fever showed how nationwide the disco market could be. Not only for disco music, but for discos themselves, disco sound systems, disco dance floors that lit up, rotating mirrored disco balls for clubs, homes and cars, disco clothing, disco haircuts, disco dance lessons, anything that cohered to disco. How could it not be huge? American white people love dancing that involves simple moves repeated over and over and over to a beat that never changes—like punk rock and the pogo, or country line dancing. That’s why disco took over mainstream America, black and white, while, say, Parliament-Funkadelic took over people who could actually dance.
Discotheque culture had been around a long time before the Bee Gees put it in every home. Discotheques, or at least people dressing up and going out to dance to records, had been around for decades.
Dancing to records—rather than to live music—in clubs began as a counterculture of resistance in pre–World War II Nazi Germany. In Hamburg, in the 1930s, the Swing Kids—mostly high schoolers—rejected National Socialism and the forced regimentation of the Hitler Youth by meeting in clubs and rented halls to swing dance to American jazz. Nothing could have been more verboten; jazz was the antithesis of the Nazi credo. It was individualist “degenerate” jungle music played by “Negroes” and distributed by Jews. The Swing Kids’ preference for “effete” English fashion, long hair on the boys and learning enough English to decipher song lyrics was further proof of their anti-German, antisocial “decadence.” The scene revolved around records because German radio never played such music. As the Swing Kids movement spread, underground dance clubs popped up in other cities. A crackdown in 1941 greatly reduced the number of Swing Kids but increased the determination of the survivors.
In 1942, leader of the SS and German police chief Heinrich Himmler sent a memo regarding the Swing Kids to his underling, Reinhardt Heydrich—the feared organizer of the Final Solution—that read, in part: “My judgment is that the whole evil must be radically exterminated now. All ringleaders . . . into a concentration camp to be re-educated . . . It is only through the utmost brutality that we will be able to avert the dangerous spread of Anglophile tendencies.”{286} After that, anyone caught swinging, or looking like they did, ended up in death camps.
From its earliest days, then, dancing to records in clubs involved an underground culture, a forward fashion sense, secrecy and danger.
French citizens blasted American “Negro music” at top volume in below-street-level clubs and restaurants during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Playing the records as loud as possible meant that Germans outside the clubs couldn’t hear anything anyone inside was saying. Devout Nazis were repulsed by the music and wouldn’t come near it, and the less devout didn’t dare. Loud jazz provided perfect security.
At the end of World War II, urban Europeans were vested in a culture of records—rather than dance bands—playing in clubs. The first commercial disco, Paris’s Le Whisky à Go-Go—not to be confused with the LA rock club of a similar name—opened in 1947. The walls were made from whiskey crates decorated with labels of various scotches, stacked floor to ceiling. A whiskey bar was an anomaly, and an instant hit, in a wine-drinking nation. Remarkably, there were two turntables, playing 78 rpm records.
Régine Zylberberg worked there, became manager, and in the late 1950s opened her Chez Régine in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It became a legendary place for dancing to records and introducing new jazz cuts at the height of the era of the American expatriate jazz musician in Paris. Régine’s featured a professional DJ.
Discotheque invaded New York City via the Peppermint Lounge, a seedy gay bar and sailor hangout on Forty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue, pretty much the epicenter of seedy New York nowhere at the time. The rise of the dance the Twist in 1960–61 helped make the Peppermint Lounge a success. The Twist was a worldwide phenomenon in its day, like Saturday Night Fever. Hank Ballard did the first version, then Chubby Checker broke it nationwide twisting on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. The celebrities of the day would go slumming at the Peppermint Lounge to twist the night away. The DJs played mostly early sixties pop soul records, the various twisting hits like the Isley Brothers “Twist and Shout” and selections from easy-listening compilations sold at supermarkets, like Enoch Light’s 1964 Discotheque Dance . . . Dance . . . Dance.
The next significant discotheque was Arthur, created by actor Richard Burton’s ex-wife Sybil. Opening in 1965, Arthur epitomized the jet-set disco. The initial investment came from Sybil Burton’s alimony. Eighty-eight celebrities—including conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein, composer Stephen Sondheim, director Mike Nichols and actors Lee Remick, Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, among others—ponied up $1,000 each to provide the rest of the funding. The club was named for a moment in the Beatle’s first film, A Hard Day’s Night. A square from Squaresville asks George Harrison: “What would you call that hairstyle?” George replies: “Arthur.” Arthur broke new ground with its linked turntables run through a mixer connected to the amplification system. The renowned sound and lighting designer Chip Monck—who gained a different sort of fame as the voice of Woodstock—set up the Arthur sound system in stereo.
Arthur served as a model for Studio 54. For the first time, patrons had to pass an overt inspection at the door, and risk being rejected on the sidewalk. Mickey Deans, who would go on to be Judy Garland’s fifth and final husband, was the night manager and believed in “body fascism,” that is, the natural social supremacy of the smoking hot. His door policy sought to create a precise mix of titled Europeans, beautiful young things, celebrities, New York bluebloods and outrageous night people. Arthur showcased New York’s mixed after-midnight universe, where stars mingled with gay culture and really good-looking “normal” New Yorkers. DJ Terry Noell had two turntables and played mostly soul music—with Motown dominant—and the sounds of Swinging London and Carnaby Street British Invasion.
The disco-defining game-changer was the Church, in Hell’s Kitchen, later known as the Sanctuary. In 1969, Francis Grasso—a kid from the outer boroughs like SNF’s Tony Manero—became the precursor of all modern DJs when he created the first extended mixes by switching between two copies of the same record on two turntables. Because he could best run the switch during drum solos, his sets were all about the break. Grasso played African music like Babatunde Olatunji’s “The Drums of Passion,” and conga-heavy Latin music. Another crowd favorite was the long version of the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” with its tick-tocking cowbell—which made switching between turntables easy to time—and extended psychedelic drum break. Grasso could make the song last as long as his crowd wanted to dance. The Sanctuary is supposedly the birthplace of the dance the Bump. Around this time in 1969, the first song appeared featuring the distinctive chugging disco bass-line, unchanging shuffle beat and soaring strings, the Four Tops’ “Don’t Bring Back Memories.” Another proto-disco cut was written and produced by Sly Stone: Little Sister’s “You’re the One.” Larry Graham, Sly’s bass player, created what would become a widely copied, thumb-popping, disco-style bass line on several cuts on Sly’s 1973 album, Fresh.
The next important scene was the Loft, conceived and run by David Mancuso, on Broadway in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. In 1970, Soho after dark was a deserted wasteland, a desolate, garbage-strewn backwater. Because the Loft had no liquor license, it was spared the vice squad entrapment seductions and harassing police presence suffered by most gay bars. The Loft served no food or drinks; the crowd was young and liked LSD. The psychedelic mind-set didn’t sit well with songs that ran only two minutes fifty-nine seconds. The Loft DJs sought out and showcased longer tracks, like Eddie Kendricks’s groundbreaking, eight-minute “Girl You Need a Change of Mind,” and his equally epic “Keep on Truckin’.” The most legendary and influential proto-disco track was “Soul Makosa” by African saxophonist Manu Dibango. After the Loft’s DJ David Mancuso put it into heavy rotation, “Soul Makosa” became an underground smash and widely imitated.
Studio 54 opened in an old CBS radio and TV Studio on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan in 1977. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager had a specific, but wide-open concept: to bring the energy and glamour of the underground gay clubs out in the open and to meld that with show business, international society, fashion and New York money. The atmosphere was glitzy and decadent, the decorations lavish and the bartenders and waitresses all famously beautiful. Author Truman Capote said of the staff: “You can’t have a candy store without candy.” The door policy was—by design—capricious, ruthless and humiliating. Steve Rubell said, “We turned away the president of Cyprus because he looked boring.”{287} According to cultural commentator Sara Stosic: “Schrager/
Rubell . . . were famed for a selective screening policy on who was allowed into their venue, building on the idea of ‘inclusive exclusivity’. . . where access was granted on an economic factor, looks, or social standing. Schrager/Rubell pioneered the ‘velvet rope’—in their opinion a ‘democratic process to exercise the same discretion people exercise when inviting people into their home.’”{288}
“The criteria for entrance are unwritten and, at best, whimsical,” wrote rock critic Dave Marsh. “Prestige is at stake, so fame counts, but conformity to certain sartorial standards also plays a part. Sometimes the owner himself is perched at the door to make these key decisions, guarding the Studio gate like St. Peter on Quaaludes.”{289} Model and Vogue Italia editor Bethann Hardison said: “Studio 54 changed the world. That’s why you could go to Bosnia or some small, obscure place and there’ll be some fool standing outside with a red velvet rope.”{290}
“I’ve been to a lot of night clubs,” Truman Capote said, “and this is the nightclub of the future. It’s very democratic. Boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else—all one big mix!”{291}
“By going to this venue at midnight,” Stosic wrote, “one knew that everybody they wanted to see would be right there, and that seems to have been the beauty of it. One didn’t have to go to five restaurants and three clubs and six parties. It was midnight and everybody was at Studio. Everybody perceived [Studio 54] to be immune to the law and whatever one did would not enter into the rest of their lives. There seemed to be no concept of punishment and morality. In the words of Studio 54 co-owner Steve Rubell (who was paraphrasing William Blake): ‘The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’”{292}
That freedom extended only so far, it turned out. One of the owners bragged during a TV interview of out-earning the Mafia and said: “What the IRS don’t know won’t kill it.” Unsurprisingly, the IRS subsequently raided the club and convicted the owners of tax evasion. Each served thirteen months in prison.{293}
Studio 54 lured folks from every borough of New York, hence the lines around the block. For the working-class aspirants in those lines, 54 was the big-time, Manhattan version of the infinitely less glamorous discos and dance clubs that operated in neighborhoods around the city. Saturday Night Fever had its genesis in one of these clubs even before 54 opened. Or, more accurately, SNF’s genesis came from a great fraud spun around one of those clubs, a bold lie that could never be perpetrated today, an article about a real dance club and a scene that never existed.
On June 7, 1976, New York magazine published the article “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” by English pop culture observer Nik Cohn. Cohn wrote one of the first books of rock criticism, 1969’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, featuring capsule biographies of James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Who and other founding figures. Cohn’s friendship with the Who and willingness to shoot his mouth off led him to be credited by Pete Townshend as the inspiration for—or at least the suggester of—“Pinball Wizard.” He worked with Dutch artist Guy Peellaert on the seminal, licentious illustrated volume of imagined rock-star fantasies Rock Dreams, wrote collections of essays and, later, an in-depth, loving exploration of New Orleans rap and hip-hop. “Tribal Rites” was Cohn’s first piece for New York. In the introduction he writes: “Everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved.” Nothing, however, in the piece turned out to be factual; Cohn made it all up.
Stigwood, never shy about taking credit for anything that ever happened anywhere, claims to have been contacted by Cohn some months before the article appeared. Cohn wanted to write a movie for Stigwood but had no firm ideas. Stigwood told him to keep in touch and send him whatever he wrote. Stigwood frames the story to present himself as having his finger on the pulse not of what was happening, but what was going to happen. And, as usual, Stigwood actually did.
Cohn posits a young working-class Italian, Vincent, from the insular Brooklyn Italian neighborhood of Bay Ridge. Vincent works in a hardware store by day, stocking paint. By night he’s the best dancer at the Bay Ridge disco 2001 Odyssey. Cohn writes that Vincent is known as a “Face” and his dancing gang of buddies as “Faces.”
Cohn copped to “Tribal Rites” being fiction in 1996. “My story was a fraud,” he said. “I’d recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush Mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road. All I’d intended was a study of teenage style. Even its fakery had been based on the belief that all dance fevers were interchangeable.”{294}
A “Face,” as anyone who’s seen the movie adapted from the Who album Quadrophenia knows, was a cool Mod—natty, tailored, speed-taking, customized Italian motor scooter–riding urban English “youth” dandies from the early sixties who made the pages of Life magazine engaging in fistfight riots on Brighton Beach with the Mod’s archenemies, the leather-jacketed Rockers. The “Ace Face,” as portrayed in the film by Sting, had sharp, raw silk suits, a buff Vespa and to-the-minute razor-cut hair. Cohn so transposed his Mod from Shepherd’s Bush that he had the Bay Ridge kids slinging Mod slang.
Cohn’s gang of Faces are dead-end guys who spend their menial-job pay on plumage for the club. What makes them different, what allows them to believe that they are different, is that they really can dance and they dress with what passes for style in Bay Ridge. As Cohn puts it: “To qualify as an Odyssey (the name of the club where the Faces dance) [one] needed to be Italian, between 18 and 25, with a minimum stock of six floral shirts, four pairs of tight trousers, two pairs of Gucci loafers, two pairs of platforms . . . and he must know how to dance.”{295}
The dance floor was sacred. Anyone who came in wearing the wrong clothes or pulling dated moves wrecked the vibe and was quickly made unwelcome. That atmosphere was straight out of Mod culture, whose in-club competition to be styling in the proper manner was ferocious. Cohn describes a Darwinian hierarchy in which the threat of public humiliation maintains the club’s standards of cool, dress, dance and decorum. Vincent led every dance, calling out moves, counting the beat, directing traffic. Off the dance floor, the girls chase Vincent, but he keeps his remove. When he worries, he worries about his nonexistent future. That one day he’ll be too old to dance or somebody will dance better and he’ll be left with nothing but the hardware store. The article ends with Vincent and the Faces heading off into the night, deeply dissatisfied with themselves, looking for somebody—anybody—to beat up.
It’s a good story, a classic tale of a doomed gunslinger. He became the fastest gun in his little town, but outside his little town, his skills not only mean nothing, but come with an expiration date. The movie’s plot expands on Vincent and his terror of a dead-end life, of being unable to love and of yearning for a shot at a future, possibly as a dancer, in the real world, namely, Manhattan. In the screenplay by Norman Wexler, who won an Oscar for the screenplay for Serpico, Vincent gets renamed Tony Manero.
“[Robert] called me and told me to pick up New York magazine with an article in it by Nik Cohn called ‘Tribal Rites of Saturday Night,’” Al Coury said. “I went down to the lobby to get it and [Stigwood] called me back and said: ‘I’m going to take that story and make a movie and you are going to have the biggest soundtrack ever.’”{296} Stigwood bought the screen rights to the story less than twenty-four hours after it appeared in print. Cohn got $90,000—pretty big potatoes in 1976—and wrote the first draft of the screenplay. Some versions of the history have Stigwood so intent on securing Cohn’s article that he gave Cohn a big fee and a percentage of the soundtrack royalties. If true, Cohn certainly never had to work again. The rationale for this version is that Stigwood didn’t think soundtracks sold that well and so had little to lose. But that doesn’t sound like Stigwood: he never gave away percentages, he kept his partnerships to a minimum and he was adamant from the start that the movie and the record would be enormous.
“Disco was happening,” said Freddie Gershon. “But it was not yet the worldwide craze. It was the smart set and the gay set. Which was sometimes the same set. It hadn’t spilled over. But Robert saw what was happening in Brazil. We went on the maiden voyage of the Concorde from Paris to Rio. Rio was rough, and exotic and the music never stopped. Stigwood saw it in England, France, Germany. [Disco] was going down the social strata. Five years earlier it would have been effete for men to even be on the dance floor. Now men were becoming peacocks. It was Robert’s instinct that a Tony Manero existed in every community in the world.”{297}
Legendary music producer Sam Phillips always said that if he could find a white man who sang like a black man, he would make a million dollars. Then one day Elvis Presley walked into Sam Phillips’s Sun studio . . . Stigwood’s vision paralleled Phillips’s. If only he could create a straight dancing idol and a credible world in which straight guys vied to be the best dancer, he would make a lot more than Phillips’s puny million. Tony Manero—as portrayed by John Travolta—was that guy.
The Bee Gees flew to France in January or February of 1977.{298} They did not go there to record Saturday Night Fever. At the time, they knew nothing about it. What they knew was that they needed to write and record tracks for a new, as yet unnamed, studio album, their follow-up to Children of the World. They also had to mix a double live album from their recent LA Forum show. A combination of factors landed them outside Paris, at the Château d’Hérouville.
“For tax purposes,” Karl Richardson said, “they needed to make records outside the United States or the UK.” Dick Ashby booked them a month in Hérouville.{299} The eighteenth-century château was a live-in work environment featuring the sixteen-track Strawberry Studios, built by film-score composer Michel Magne in 1970. Elton John recorded there in 1972. After his LP came out, the place became forever known as Honky Château. It’s an idyllic spot. Van Gogh painted in the meadow below the château, and composer Frédéric Chopin and author George Sand (real name: Amantine Dupin) used the château for their secret trysts. Sweet, Cat Stevens, T-Rex, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd all recorded at the Honky Château.
The rundown, mangy atmosphere quickly dashed whatever fantasies the Bee Gees might have had of a luxurious retreat in a continental castle. The château proved something of a shithole—poorly heated and badly furnished. Maurice, in particular, hated the place. The winter weather was oppressive; there was no television and nothing to do. There were only two functioning showers. The band, the crew and the few wives that had come along all queued up for the bathrooms. Recording began around two in the afternoon and usually lasted until three or four in the morning. No one wanted to play before they’d showered to get warm, and it took until midafternoon for everyone to stand in line and get their bathing done.
The studio itself was no marvel. “After Elton John left,” Richardson said, “the owner of the studio smashed it to smithereens and rebuilt what was left in a second-story loft within the castle. When I arrived there was a terrific buzz on everything—it was all ungrounded. So I spent the first two days grounding the place.”{300}
Robin had a different take on the vibe in Hérouville. “There were so many pornographic films made at the Château,” he said. “The staircase where we wrote ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ all those songs, was the same staircase where there’ve been six classic lesbian porno scenes filmed. I was watching one called Kinky Women of Bourbon Street, and all of a sudden there’s this château, and I said, ‘It’s the Château!’ These girls, these dodgy birds, are having a scene on the staircase that leads from the front door up to the studio. There were dildos hanging off the stairs and everything. I thought, ‘Gawd, we wrote “Night Fever” there!’”{301}{302} Robin was known for his constant drawing of explicit stick figures featuring exaggerated male sexual organs. He left plenty of them on the walls of the Honky Château. One writer described them as “grotesque, elflike creatures who scurry about with enormous genitals and ravenous stares.”
The studio was jury-rigged at best. The control-board fader knobs were painted with different-colored nail polish, and some had contacts so worn the audio would drop out if they were slid past a certain point. The playing musicians—Maurice, Blue, Dennis, Alan and Barry—set up in a main room with overhead beams, a space offering little of the expected studio sound-baffling.{303} It was a tough space in which to get a clean recording. There was no easy way to isolate the instruments and Karl Richardson remembers a lot of “leakage.”
But the château was self-contained, far from distractions and inexpensive. Management had paid for a month in advance.
“It was a serviceable studio, a little tricky,” Albhy Galuten said. “The piano was near a window that was generally open, so it wasn’t in tune much. There was a control room that looked into the studio, and a sort of an anteroom you could use like a vocal booth. It was not highly maintained in the technical sense. They did have an ATI console, which was considered a high quality, high fidelity [board]. We took advantage of the liveness [of the room].
“The musician is more important than the instrument, which is more important than the microphone, which is more important than the console, which is more important than the tape recorder. The further you get from the performer the less important it is.
“You could make great live recordings there. It’s a matter of the engineer’s capability.”{304} “Since I started working with Karl, I’ve never had to worry about the sound. I get a buzz on with the people we’re working with and concentrate on that. Karl never has to worry about the production and arrangement of the song. We don’t get in each other’s way.”{305}
However uncomfortable or unhappy with their surroundings the Gibbs might have been, they let Albhy and Karl figure out how to make the studio suit their needs. The band sat down and got to work. Barry, the driving creative force, was writing funk pop songs. The song structures are based on repeating figures or figures of constant, repeating change or both—similar to the song structures from the heyday of Motown. The parts fit together schematically, layered with care, and there’s little room for improvisation. On first hearing or on the thirtieth, the songs remain hard, glossy objects—polished to a high sheen. Bee Gees detractors talk about a mechanistic quality; an almost inhuman perfection that suggests studio musicians running down carefully orchestrated charts. Maybe it’s the overly finished aspects of the songs that lead people to forget that the Bee Gees were a real band.
Barry was in charge and Maurice was often drunk, passive and ineffectual; Robin made “suggestions,” as one studio presence put it, and his suggestions were heeded, by and large. “Robin had great instincts,” the studio source said. The brothers had worked with the same musicians—Blue, Alan and Dennis—for at least two years and two albums and two tours. They enjoyed the instinctive mutual understanding and chemistry that only comes from extended, repetitive studio work and close listening. Blue, Alan and Dennis were not hired guns. They played on the road, they played with the brothers for fun, they trusted one another and were vested in the music. Albhy and Karl were integral members of the band.
There endures a jumble of assertions—a lack of a definitive version—about who did what and who should get credit for which finished part. “That is me playing the “Stayin’ Alive” lick,” said Alan, “although several people lay claim to coming up with it. Dennis says it was me. Maurice used to say it was him. My recollection is extremely hazy due to my drug and alcohol abuse.”{306}
Everyone had ideas together and everyone figured out how to make those ideas come alive. For example, the musical track for “How Deep Is Your Love” came mostly from Blue. But for some reason, Albhy played Blue’s piano part on the recordings made at the château. Maurice later claimed to have played both the bass and the synclavier strings; he tried to deny credit to both Ahlby and Blue Weaver.{307}
The Bee Gees had a sound, a product of seven musicians working together. Barry dominated the sound, not only by his falsetto, his songwriting and his willpower, but also by his underrated rhythm guitar. “A lot of that was Barry’s right hand,” Richardson said. “Every one of those records has some form of acoustic guitar with Barry going ching-ching-ching. Whether it’s hidden or not, it’s there, driving the track along.”{308}
“Somewhere along the line,” Arif Mardin said, “Barry became completely in tune with the times. That’s the phenomenon. It hasn’t happened many times before, but he has totally locked into what people are hearing. And what they want to hear. This is surely his time.”{309}
The work was collaborative, dominated by Barry. The songwriting began with Barry’s ideas, and those were sometimes a lyric line looking for a melody, and sometimes a finished song complete in every detail. “[Blue Weaver] had a lot to do with the creation of ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’” Albhy said. Barry asked Blue: “What’s the most beautiful chord you know?” Blue replied: “E flat.” Barry had Blue play the chord and Barry’s lyrics tumbled out. “In other times he might’ve been a co-writer on that song,” Albhy said. “Barry would sit down at the piano, and the song would spew out of him. He didn’t like the process of saying ‘Well, you wrote 10% of this song.’ You were either in for 50% or not in at all. Blue’s misfortune for ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ was that he was not in.”{310}
“The songwriting was exquisite,” Karl said. “At that point all we could do was screw it up. Barry came up with the initial idea, and he and Blue Weaver developed it. Blue was on electric piano, Barry on acoustic guitar, and in an afternoon they wrote ‘How Deep Is Your Love.’” The music was written in a couple of hours. Barry, Robin and Maurice huddled together and came up with most of the lyrics later that day. I think the second verse still needed to be written—there was a lot of ‘hummeny, hummeny, hummeny’—but three or four days later we were doing the vocals.”{311}
Barry—like Robin and Maurice—never wrote down what he heard in his head. “When I walk into the studio, I have a complete picture of what the song will be like as a record,” Barry told Mitch Glazer for Playboy. “I know when and where the strings will be, what the horns should be like; the finished product. You try to share your picture to a certain extent, because whoever wrote the song can’t give the picture away; it’s impossible. My original struggle with Albhy was about this. I would play him a song on the guitar and he couldn’t hear how it would come out. He’d say, ‘I just can’t see it.’ But what made it work was that he trusted me and went along blind in some cases. That’s how our production started. On a song like ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ I could hear the choir and the orchestration, but I couldn’t put it into practice, translate it for the musicians. That is what Albhy does.”{312}
“The Bee Gees have this tendency to disobey the laws of music because they are not formally schooled in it,” Karl said. “They don’t even know the names of the chords they write with. But if they’d studied formally, they’d have never sung the melodies they do.”{313}
“We can’t write music,” Robin said. “Semi-quavers and all that stuff, I wouldn’t know a semi-quaver from a black hollow!”{314} “At this point in our lives,” Barry said sensibly, “learning to read music might take something away from us that has been natural all our lives.”{315}
Barry likes to toss this off as normal procedure and Albhy understates everything. But the images that arise are near to incredible: Barry playing a little of what he hears—and to paraphrase rock critic Robert Christgau writing of folksinger Phil Ochs: Barry’s guitar playing would not suffer were his right hand webbed—stopping, explaining, moving on. Imagine the frustrations built into this scenario, and Barry is not the most patient of men.
Also imagine the trust between Barry and Albhy, between Barry and the band, between the band and Albhy, between Albhy and Karl. And the awe that Barry must inspire, walking into this crappy, freezing, underequipped studio, three thousand miles from home, undaunted, with a hit song in all its parts running like a movie in his head. Barry hummed the string parts he wanted; he guided Blue, Alan and Dennis, Maurice. When Barry had an idea, everybody knew they would manifest that idea in its complexity from Barry’s head onto the tape. They also knew that Barry wrote hits.
“I distinctly remember Barry saying: ‘Boy, Karl, have I got a song for you,’ and sitting down to play ‘Stayin’ Alive’ on an acoustic guitar,” Karl Richardson said. “It was like a chant and it was unbelievable. I said ‘Barry, don’t forget that rhythm. That’s a number one record.’ I knew, five bars in, no questions asked. You couldn’t get past the intro without knowing it was a smash.”{316} Engineers always say this later about songs that turn out to be smashes. But Richardson, an engineer to his core, never engaged in hype. He’s a calm and steady presence. If he got excited, then the moment of hearing the song for the first time must have been exciting.
“Blue, Barry and I would sit down and say ‘That chord sounds great there, but how about when the guitar player goes “dang, wa-tang”?’” Albhy said. “‘Do you want the seventh in the chord or do you want to leave that hole there?’ Those were the kinds of things that had to be worked out.”
“It’s obviously easy,” Robin said, getting breezy about the backbreaking work of others. “We’ve all got the same kind of brain wave.”{317} “There was a period of time when Robin was important,” a regular studio presence said. “Maurice would come in with his Perrier bottle with vodka, I assume, in it. Robin would come in, maybe once a day and he’d say, ‘That’s not getting the emotion. This should be in two parts, that’s too busy.’ He would make executive producer sort of comments, which were useful.”{318}
“Robin is the objective production ear,” Karl said. “The rest of us—Barry, Maurice and Albhy—get so close to the music, we do so many different experiments, that we can’t always tell what sounds good. Robin comes in and calls it in a moment; it doesn’t work or it sounds great.”{319}
“Robin’s opinion was very valuable,” Albhy said. “Carl and I sat in the control room all the time. Blue and Denis were there more than Maurice and Robin. The day to day in the trenches was me, Barry and Karl. It was clearly Barry’s vision. If Barry felt strongly about something, Karl and I would relent. Generally one of us would agree with him anyhow, because we knew it was what Barry wanted. We were executing Barry’s vision.”{320}
“It was orchestrated,” Albhy said. “It was a process and it was all about ‘head charts’; creating in the studio. ‘Gee, OK, that’s the part of the verse for the keyboards.’ Then we would go for the performance. All of the arrangements were done on the spot and the performance was executed until it felt good. That was the standard. It didn’t matter how we got there—whether something was thrown together or it was one take—our concern was that it felt good, that it made a statement. How it’s done, I don’t know. I know the end product. If that’s accepted, then how it came to be is just detail.”{321}
“Barry,” Albhy, said, in the understatement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “is meticulous about pitch and meter.”{322} Barry at times demonstrated what songwriter Randy Newman has described as “the greatest gift,” a gift for melody. Barry also was gifted with, always relied on and had trained over decades his absolute perfect pitch. Barry heard everything. What he heard in his head, he expected to hear on the tape. Barry’s work ethic made that happen and he had a team that worked as hard as he did. If Barry, Albhy and Karl were awake, they were at the control board.
“Without them,” Barry said, “I doubt that I would be able to express exactly what I want on a record. It would be far too much for my little head to comprehend. Their expertise in the studio really makes things happen.”{323}
“The Bee Gees usually work from about three until midnight,” Albhy said. “You’re not a slave to the music, but you’re dependent on their inspiration at the moment, or maybe your own. If you’re excited about something and something is working, you can’t leave.”{324}
“They went out into the studio and nailed it,” Karl Richardson said. “It didn’t take long. If they didn’t get the execution or the balance, it was easier to do it again. It would take longer to argue about it than to redo it, as they were all natural vocalists. Barry Gibb doesn’t really have vibrato, he has tremolo, so his intensity changes but not necessarily his pitch. Whereas Robin has fast vibrato and there are lots of pitch changes. [Maurice] was somewhere in between. Depending on where he was in his range, Maurice either had a little bit of vibrato or just straight tone. So, the distinctiveness was all three voices combining to make this unusual blend that you’d never get anywhere else. Nobody was tracking each other’s vibrato, I can tell you that.”{325}
Then, out of the blue, in the midst of work, everything changed. Stigwood told the band to forget about writing for an album, and to adapt what they already had for his upcoming movie soundtrack.
“You’ve got to remember,” Barry said much later, “we were fairly dead in the water in 1975. The Bee Gees sound was basically tired. We hadn’t had a hit record in about three years. We had to find something. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”{326} “The Bee Gees were making their 35th comeback,” said Peter Brown, who had been a high executive at RSO. “Robert was very close to them. He’d developed them, produced them, he’d looked after them. At the same time, of course, he owned their management, their record label and their music publishing. So when Saturday Night Fever hit, Robert had the movie, their management, their publishing and the record deal.”{327}
“Robert Stigwood flew up and told us the basic idea of his movie,”{328} Maurice said. “It was hard to get them to read anything,” Stigwood said. “So I described the story.”{329} “He asked if we’d like to write the music for it,” Maurice said. “In those days it was like ‘Wow! Movie music!’ [Back then] you would pay people to get your songs in a film.”{330} “We played him demo tracks of ‘If I Can’t Have You’ and ‘More Than a Woman.’ He asked if we could write it more disco-y. We’d also written a song called ‘Saturday Night,’ but there were so many songs out called ‘Saturday Night,’ even one by the Bay City Rollers, so when we rewrote it for the movie, we called it ‘Stayin’ Alive.’”{331}
According to the Bee Gees’ autobiography, Stigwood explained the plot and the boys leapt at the chance to create pure disco material. Both “Night Fever” and “Staying Alive” were written to align with the film’s themes, and as possible titles.{332} They wrote the songs and recorded rough demos in “two and a half weeks.” Stigwood liked everything, but couldn’t understand why the most danceable song’s chorus went “Stayin’ alive / Stayin’ alive.” He wanted a chorus of “Saturday night / Saturday night.” The band told him there were too many songs out already called “Saturday Night” and they wouldn’t write another one. Barry told Stigwood to accept “Stayin’ Alive” or the Bee Gees wouldn’t let him have their current songs for the movie. Maurice said: “Then we wrote ‘Night Fever’ and Stigwood changed the movie’s title to Saturday Night Fever from Saturday Night.”{333}
“To me,” Robin said, “Saturday Night Fever sounds like some sleazy little porno film showing on the corner, second billed to a film called Suspender Belts.”{334}
Maurice later claimed to be gobsmacked at how well the song lyrics fit the film; the brothers had never been given a script and they would never read one. Travolta’s showcase dance number is set to “You Should Be Dancing” rather than the newer Hérouville material because the actor had been rehearsing to “You Should Be Dancing” for two months. He was reluctant to scrap his work and shift to a new number.{335} Travolta’s insistence helped make the song a hit for a second time.
“We weren’t looking at Fever as a career vehicle,” Maurice said. “We got caught up in the Robert Stigwood syndrome: Anyone he managed he also wanted involved in his film projects, as opposed to keeping them separate. He asked for songs, we gave him songs off what would have been our next studio album.”
Regarding the sequence of events, Robin and Barry disagree with Stigwood’s chronology, the timeline in their autobiography and each other. Robin insisted that the five songs—“How Deep Is Your Love,” “If I Can’t Have You,” “More Than a Woman,” “Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive”—were written before Stigwood told them about the movie. Barry characterized that as “quite incorrect.” Since they disagree, no printed account or interview since agrees, either. Accounts also differ as to Stigwood’s influence on the songwriting. “Robert would tell them what the scene was about and what tempo and rhythm to use,” Al Coury said, “and the boys would write it in the way he wanted.”{336} So, in the Bee Gees’ version, they dictate terms to Stigwood, threatening to withhold their songs; in Coury’s version, Stigwood dictates to them . . .
Melody Maker captured their gestalt in an interview from December 1976: “Barry Gibb, the best looking of the three, with his coiffured hair and neatly trimmed beard, is a natural leader, holding down most of the conversation. Maurice, who is balding slightly, is perhaps more open and honest, but is held down by Barry. Robin, of the buck teeth, fly-away hair and intense falsetto voice, limits himself to rather cynical quips, most of which include rather bad language. They all tend to talk at once, frequently contradicting each other and indulging in arguments over small details.”{337}
“To be able to watch the creative process when I was with Robert in France was a thrill,” Freddie Gerson remembered. “The Chateau was a cold, depressing place. [The Gibbs] were more than a little cranky. When Robert explained this plot about some Italian kids in Bay Ridge, I never thought it would come together. But as Robert played tapes of just vocals and acoustic guitar, it was clear something very special was happening. They were all hits.”{338}
The songs cut at Hérouville were “roughs,” guide tracks for the final versions to be recorded at Criteria. There, extra instrumentation would be layered on, the vocals sung line by line as Barry wanted and new parts overdubbed. Stigwood’s description of the film and demand for soundtrack material changed the vibe at the château. The band worked with renewed purpose. The sessions caught fire.
Albhy described the setup for “Night Fever”: “The group had the hook line and rhythm—they usually pat their legs to set up a song’s rhythm when they first sing it—and parts of the verses. They wrote the song in the castle stairway, which had natural echo. They had the emotion, same as on the record. We put down drums and acoustic guitar first so the feel was locked in. The piano part was put on before the bass, then the heavy guitar parts. Next came the vocals. A lot of the words are left out at first. Only the chorus and key words are locked in, and the rest is scat vocals because they find nice holes rhythmically to put words in that way. So they end up putting different lyrics in unusual places.”{339}
“You’re using the tape machine like a composer,” Richardson said. “You start with no preconceived ideas, and when you keep working, it becomes unique.”{340}
“It’s easy to find something that works,” Albhy said. “But it’s hard to find something that really helps. On ‘Night Fever’ the sound of the verses is heavy guitar playing, long chords, and on top a harpsichord, one electric guitar playing octaves, triangle and lead guitar with muted strings through a wah-wah. It’s mathematical, calculated—but the mathematics is in retrospect. You try to communicate with people’s hearts.”{341}
On “Night Fever,” “Maurice was playing bass with his pick,” Richardson said. “Dennis Bryon was playing drums; Blue Weaver keyboards; Alan Kendall rhythm guitar; and Barry was playing rhythm and singing the pilot vocal. The drums were the only thing retained [at Criteria] from this live track—it was a complete take, not comped—and all the other parts were overdubbed, like the keyboard part that was carefully crafted. Many parts weren’t there from the start.
“[But] ‘Night Fever’ [on the record] is the rough mix. We mixed that song in 10 minutes. We had overdubbed all these synthesizer pads, extra guitar notes, little percussion instruments and so on, and we kept mixing it again and again and again, and finally we played the rough mix and everybody said it felt better. We had a demo of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ from France, with the brothers singing, Blue playing keyboards and Mo playing bass, and right up until the final mix we would play that rough mix from France to use as a guide, because feel was everything to us.”{342}
Barry remembers Stigwood’s instructions about “Stayin’ Alive”: “Give me eight minutes—eight minutes, three moods. I want frenzy at the beginning. Then I want some passion. And then I want some w-i-i-i-ld frenzy!”{343}
“Stayin’ Alive” is among the band’s most enduring songs and by far the best cut on SNF. It has enthralled and irritated millions through the years. Its lyric: “We should try to understand / The New York Times’ effect on man” ranks high among the band’s most gnomic, and proves a strong contender for the band’s second most misunderstood. The first most misunderstood being “Let’s do it in your butt” from “You Should Be Dancing” (the actual lyric seems to be “What you doin’ in the back?” though some also advocate “What you doin’ in your bed in the back?”). “Stayin’ Alive” is the Bee Gees’ best-known song, an irresistible dance track and a watershed in recorded music history.
That watershed is a powerful secret at the beating heart of “Stayin’ Alive.” The song marks the first appearance of what would become a staple of modern recording: the drum loop.
The drum loop is called a loop because that’s what it was: a circle, a sacred hoop, an actual loop of recording tape containing one sound—the sound of one drumbeat—cycling through the recording heads of the master recorder over and over. As with many industry-changing inventions, the drum loop came about as a simple, functional solution to an immediate problem. The immediate problem was that the drummer wasn’t around.
The Bee Gees got things done. They had to record the song. Dennis’s father suffered a health crisis and Dennis went to England to be with him. “‘Stayin’ Alive’ didn’t sound steady enough,” Richardson said. The boys wrote “Night Fever” thinking it would be the lead song of the film and the first single. “Everybody was happy with the way ‘Night Fever’ turned out,” Richardson said. “It had spark and it sounded wonderful.”{344}
But Stigwood and the film’s producers thought “Night Fever” was too mellow and not strong enough to be the lead single, which—since the album was coming out in advance of the movie—would also be the lead promotional piece for the film. The band turned their attention back to “Stayin’ Alive.” With Dennis gone, Barry wondered if the percussion sounds built into the studio’s Hammond organ could provide a stronger, livelier beat. No one had ever attempted to use the built-in Hammond rhythm tracks like that before. Albhy and Karl thought it might work if the tracks were carefully “augmented by Barry’s own rhythm guitar.”{345}
“We were able to get a 4/4 beat out of the Hammond, but when Barry played along to it we didn’t like the result,” says Richardson. “Albhy and I came up with the idea of finding two bars [of actual drums] that really felt good, and making an eternal tape loop.”{346} Richardson’s first idea was to record “two bars of the four-track drums from ‘Night Fever,’” rerecord them over and over and over, and put all those rerecords together to make a new, separate drum track that was as long as the song itself. But, as Karl, Albhy and Barry listened to the song repeatedly to find the best single beat to rerecord, Richardson or Galuten or both decided to copy one bar for a loop.
“Back then, drum machines were really primitive,” Albhy said. “I had a brainstorm and told Karl we should take a bar from ‘Night Fever,’ which we had already recorded, and make a drum loop.” Barry, Karl and Albhy went back and listened to “Night Fever” for another marathon session, searching for the drumbeat best suited to “Stayin’ Alive.” “To make the loop, we copied the drums onto one quarter-inch tape,” Albhy said. “We had nothing to do [at Hérouville]. There was no TV, there was nothing. We got up in the morning and hung out in the studio all day long. The idea of spending an hour trying to make a drum loop was . . . why not? We had nothing but time.”{347}
Karl: “The tape was over 20 feet long and ran all around the control room—I gaffered some empty tape-box hubs to the tops of mic stands and ran the tape between the four-track machine and a 24-track deck, using the tape guides from a two-track deck for the tension. Because it was 4/4 time—just hi-hats and straight snare—it sounded steady as a rock.”{348} “Karl took a boom microphone stand, with the boom horizontal, parallel to the ground,” Albhy said. “He threaded the loop into the tape machine and the loop was too long for the supply and takeup reels, so Karl taped them down so they wouldn’t spin. He set the microphone boom stand a few feet from the tape recorder and ran the tape over the horizontal part of the boom stand and down across a seven inch reel. We pressed play and the drum loop played.”{349}
“As we started to lay tracks down to it,” Albhy said, “we found that it felt really great—insistent but not machinelike. It had a human feel. By the time we had overdubbed all the parts to the songs and Dennis came back, there was no way we could get rid of the loop. Everybody knows that it’s more about feel than accuracy in drum tracks. I wish now I knew which bar it was. That’s a great sounding bar.”{350}
“The loop was so popular because it has a feel,” Albhy said. “Live drummers sometimes slow down or speed up, but the feel inside the bar can be amazing. The feel changes based on the dynamic. It’s not like sampling where you have an individual drum. We thought that this bar would be replaced by real drums later. Because it had never been done before, we didn’t know—nobody knew at the time—that a good-feeling bar repeating incessantly has an unbelievable feel. ‘Stayin’ Alive’ has an insistent rhythm unlike anything you heard before.
“Because of the drum loop, it was the first song where we overdubbed instruments one at a time,” Albhy continued. “We’d fixed things, we’d rerecorded things, but [this was the first time] that we recorded one instrument at a time.”{351}
Maurice had to be taught the “Stayin’ Alive” bass line, someone hanging around the sessions asserts. “Maurice was not a session musician. Generally, pitch is not a problem if you’re playing electric bass. But meter was critical. Maurice was shown the bass part, and played along with it. Karl and Albhy marked the notes that were out of time, early or late, and Maurice would take another pass at it. Karl would punch in and out (meaning stopping and restarting the tape) for each note that was funny. Albhy and Karl fixed all notes until the bass part was completely right.”
“The ‘You Should Be Dancing’ bass line is very much a Maurice bass line,” the studio source goes on. “Whereas the ‘Stayin’ Alive’ bass line is a healthy bass line. ‘Stayin’ Alive’ was one of those rooted bass lines. Barry was playing guitar and Robin and Maurice were out in the studio working on the song. The keyboard part was all Blue Weaver. Blue was independent. He did not like to take direction and he was a creative musician.”
So, there it is . . . the recurring motif, stated as baldly as possible. Maurice could not come up with a bass part complex enough for the material, and had trouble learning the bass parts he had to be taught. Unsurprisingly, nobody fought the dissemination of this idea with greater tenacity than Maurice. In 1979 he told Rolling Stone: “I’d like to clear this point up. I know there are rumors that Barry does more on our records than Robin and I. I don’t know how that rot got started, but I hate and resent it. It’s a load of shit. People get that impression because Barry’s out front a lot and gets quite a bit of attention for his work with Karl and Albhy on other people’s songs, and for his work with [brother] Andy. But as far as our records are concerned, we all contribute equally and all produce equally.”{352}
Only, they didn’t. They hadn’t contributed or produced equally since they reunited after the post-Odessa breakup, and seldom before that. When the brothers got back together there was no doubt who was in charge, and one glance at the band playing live or in their music videos only confirms it. Barry ran the show. That dynamic was a harsh toke for Maurice, no doubt—and worse for Robin—but the hard truth, nonetheless. Neither Robin nor Barry ever made any strong assertions in support of Maurice’s claims.
“I wouldn’t call [Maurice] a nonentity,” the studio guest said. “But he was more of a social entity than a musical entity.”
The infinite universe of music nerds on YouTube helps back up the assertions about the difference between Maurice’s “You Should Be Dancing” bass line and the bass on “Stayin’ Alive.” Plenty of players have posted videos of themselves playing the bass line along with the song. Hearing the bass separate from the mix is revealing. The bass on “You Should Be Dancing” has a programmatic feel. It’s a relatively simple, easily memorized piece played over and over with no variation. The bass walks the 1-2-3-4 beat, comps during the bridge and tosses in a little riff under the lyric “You should be dancing.” It’s funky enough, if unrelated to any other instrument except the drums.
The bass in “Stayin’ Alive” is aggressively syncopated and showcases a sophisticated compositional sensibility. In the early verses the bass stays simple, keeping out of the way, providing a steady bottom. As the song progresses, the bass intertwines with the equally complex guitar, suggesting that the same person wrote for both instruments with their interplay foremost in mind. The bass comps during the chorus, leaving plenty of room for the vocals. A close listen to the bass line, even as played by amateurs in their bedrooms, strongly suggests that the same musician could not have conceived the two parts.
“That steady, steady [drum] track gave us the groove we wanted, and we then overdubbed everybody to it,” Richardson said. “The guys did their vocals, Alan played the guitar riff, Blue played electric piano and an ARP string synth and when Dennis returned he overdubbed the toms, crash and hi-hat. He loved it. A case of a lot less work. On the record sleeve, the drummer on ‘Stayin’ Alive’ was listed as Bernard Lupé; a sort of French version of the famous session drummer Bernard Purdie. We received an unbelievable amount of calls looking for this steady drummer named Bernard Lupé. You know, ‘This guy’s a rock! I’ve never heard anyone so steady in my life!’”{353}
“The loop crossed the boundary, giving us music that was in time with a good feel,” Albhy said. “If I had been working for a technology company then and knew what I was doing, I would have tried to patent the idea. Nonetheless, it changed a lot of things. That first loop was a watershed even in our life and times.”{354}
That loop—the infectious, driving pulse of the song—had “quite a career in its own right,” Karl said. The loop ended up as the drumbeat for “More Than a Woman,” and for Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” which Barry would write and produce.
“We knew we had a smash track,” Karl said. “John G. Avildsen—the director of Saturday Night Fever—envisioned setting one of Travolta’s dance numbers to ‘Stayin’ Alive.’” He asked Stigwood if the Bee Gees could provide a slower tempo bridge section so Travolta and partner Karen Lynn Gorny could go all slow-mo as they fell in love on the dance floor. Once that heart-stopping moment had been established, the dance beat would return, and the two would celebrate their love with even more ecstatic disco-ing. Travolta didn’t like the idea; he’d been rehearsing to “You Should Be Dancing” for two months for his big solo number and to the more recent rough of “More Than a Woman” for the pas-de-deux.
“Robert wanted a scene that was eight minutes long,” Barry said, “Where Travolta was dancing with this girl. It would have a nice dance tempo, a romantic interlude and all hell breaking loose at the end. I said, ‘Robert, that’s crazy. We want to put this song out as a single, and we don’t think the rhythm should break. It should go from beginning to end with the same rhythm, and get stronger all the way. To go into a lilting ballad just doesn’t make sense.’”{355}
“They did write a bridge,” Karl Richardson said, “and there is a version of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ where the song changes key and turns into a slow ballad for 16 or 32 bars. Then there’s a big drum break and everything reverts to normal. After the bridge had been recorded and I’d spliced it into the track, Albhy and I stared at each other and said ‘We just ruined a hit record.’ We turned to Barry and said ‘We can’t use this. We’ve screwed up a number one record,’ and Barry said ‘Yeah, we have.’ So, we put the tape back together without the new bridge and called Stigwood to say ‘This is bogus. We’re not doing it.’ And that’s when Stigwood fired the director.”{356}
Poor John Avildsen. For all his experience, he did not recognize nor sufficiently kowtow to his most crucial constituency—Stigwood and Travolta. He also apparently didn’t understand how to shoot dance sequences, or at least not to Travolta’s specifications. Travolta called Stigwood in tears and told him he was leaving the picture. This was not movie-star grandstanding because, at the time, Travolta was not a movie star. SNF was his breakout opportunity, so Travolta had little leverage. His strong reaction was heartfelt passion from an actor who knew that the one moment that could change his career forever was being compromised. Coincidentally, Travolta also knew that the film itself was being undermined. This was a rare intersection of artist’s vanity and practical vision. In the movies, there is no more powerful moral force.
Travolta’s complaint was that Avildsen refused to shoot Travolta’s big dance number from the floor up, so that all of Travolta’s body—from his head to his toes—could be seen in the frame. Travolta wanted to be seen dancing. He didn’t want edits going back and forth from his upper body to his feet; he wanted no suggestion that some stunt dancer was making moves for him. Travolta asked for an old-fashioned movie-musical straight-on wide shot capturing all the dancers in their disco lines, with Travolta front and center. However commonsensical the idea, Avildsen wouldn’t do it.
Multiple sources claim that Avildsen did not want the Bee Gees music in the movie in the first place and resisted their songs from the start. But the Bee Gees were Stigwood’s band and any director would have to have known going in that they were part of the deal.
Stigwood called Avildsen. The passing of time has allowed many different versions of that call to be cited, and the two best come from Stigwood. “The other night I fired the Saturday Night director,” Stigwood said. “It was a terrible coincidence, too. When I was firing him, the message came through that he’d been nominated for an Academy Award (for directing Rocky). I had to break off and congratulate him in the middle and then carry on with the foul deed.”{357} In an even better version, Stigwood claims to have said to Avildsen: “I have good news and bad news.” To which Avildsen naturally replied: “What’s the good news?” Stigwood said: “You’ve been nominated for an Oscar for directing Rocky.” Avildsen: “And the bad news?” Stigwood: “You’re fired.”
In all the universe, only Robert Stigwood gets to have such conversations.
“I’m sorry the picture isn’t going to happen,” John Avildsen told the New York Times. “Why I was fired is a matter of opinion and I’d rather not dwell on it.”{358}
John Badham replaced Avildsen. For the discerning filmgoer, Badham’s greatest claim to fame is his sister, Mary Badham, who played the unforgettable Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Badham’s sole major directing credit before SNF was the James Earl Jones–Richard Pryor baseball farce, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings. Badham turned out to be both biddable and able to direct a cogent dance sequence. Oddly though, in the finished film, as Travolta and Gorny swirl about the floor to “Night Fever,” there remain a number of shots from below, framing the two against the disco ceiling as they turn arm in arm. Could these have been left over from Avildsen’s time at the helm? The dancers are shown only from the waist up. Travolta was right: they look ridiculous.
The sessions at Hérouville lasted for two months. When Karl wasn’t attending to all that SNF demanded, he was, at Stigwood’s behest, mixing the Bee Gees’ next release—Here at Last . . . The Bee Gees . . . Live—a double LP and the band’s first live album. It captured their December 20, 1976, concert at the Los Angeles Forum, which was broadcast live on the radio on the King Biscuit Flower Hour. A television special of the show had been planned. Wally Heider’s Record Plant mobile unit, the best mobile recording studio in the world, was on-site to capture the audio. The video proved subpar and no completed version of the show has been released. The Bee Gees finished up at Hérouville in the late spring of 1977.
Timbales and other percussion for “Stayin’ Alive” were overdubbed at Criteria by Joe Lala. The Miami String Section made Blue Weaver’s synthesizer lines more majestic. More strings were added during sessions at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. SNF’s final mix was done back at Criteria. Post-production work finished on the album in April 1977.
With only six tracks from the Bee Gees, the soundtrack needed padding. Bill Oakes was president of RSO and is credited with “Album Supervision and Compilation.” That suggests he picked the other material and was responsible for the order of the songs on each side. Whoever chose it, the non–Bee Gees material on the record is mostly second-rate, both second-rate disco and second-rate compared to each band’s best work.
Oakes was, at the time, married to Yvonne Elliman. Elliman starred as Mary Magdalene on Broadway in Jesus Christ Superstar. Throughout the mid-1970s she sang backup for Eric Clapton on record and onstage. Her voice can be heard on his “Lay Down Sally” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” There had been talk of her covering “How Deep Is Your Love” for SNF, but Stigwood vetoed that idea. He thought more of the song than the Bee Gees did, and he insisted that their version go on the album. The band had recorded “If I Can’t Have You,” but Elliman’s version appears on the soundtrack. Produced by disco maven and Gloria (“I Will Survive”) Gaynor producer Freddie Perren, the song’s both bouncy and pallid, riddled with flute flourishes, and Elliman’s voice is no revelation. As with a lot of disco, the song has no climax or peak, only the same refrain repeated endlessly. Even so, it charted from late January until June of 1978 and spent a week in mid-May at #1. Compared to the Bee Gees’ other songs on the album, it’s weak. Their own version of the song has no more force or staying power than Elliman’s.
David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain” is a five-minute-thirteen-second argument for the horror of all music piggybacked onto disco by those who had no understanding of rhythm or dance music. A studio source maintains that Shire came in, picked up the assignment to create “soundtrack” filler, wrote his pieces and recorded them, all on the same day. They sound like it. There’s no telling how much money Shire made from that one day of half-hearted effort.
M.F.S.B. had strong credentials, but their “K-Jee” is not only generic material for the band, it’s generic instrumental disco. Which is a shame; there are far better M.F.S.B. tracks to choose from. Mother Father Sister Brother or, as they were better known, Motherfucking Soul Band, had a hell of a résumé. They wrote and performed the theme for Soul Train and were the house band for famed Philly producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff at Sigma Sound. There they backed Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the O’Jays, the Spinners and the Stylistics, among many others. It’s hard to find a worse song in their catalog than “K-Jee.”
Kool and the Gang’s “Open Sesame” is another convincing argument for the reverse-Midas touch of disco. Kool and the Gang was not a disco band; they played hard-core funk. This layering of disco tropes over a speeded-up version of their signature sound is dispiriting. Like “K-Jee,” it did not chart as a single.
“Boogie Shoes,” by KC and the Sunshine Band, sounds like every KC song, which sound like every other KC song. It’s hooky, innocuous, content free and happy, reflecting KC’s ingenious whitening of the Funky Nassau sound, with its calypso influences and cruise-ship version of the rock-steady beat. “Boogie Shoes,” which charted for ten weeks in early 1978 and peaked at #35, didn’t sound like disco then and doesn’t today.
Tavares was a vocal group of long standing, whose 1975 R&B chart #1, “It Only Takes a Minute,” made the UK top 10 decades later when covered by boy band Take That. The Bee Gees liked the Tavares’ sound. Al Coury said:“The Bee Gees wrote [‘More Than a Woman’] and gave it to Tavares. We wanted to give them a shot; they said they’d bring it home.”{359} Their manager later lamented that the Tavares’ version was too disco for their more traditional black R&B constituency, but it charted for fourteen weeks, reaching #32. Later, desperate along with everyone else to escape the stigma of SNF, their manager said: “The totality of our show has nothing to do with disco.”{360}
The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” is one of the welcome exceptions on SNF. A classic dance track, and proof of how driving, funky and galvanizing good disco could be, “Inferno” combines archetypal disco arranging with old-school R&B throat clearing, grunting and soul shouting. The chicken-scratch wah-wah guitar, string charts, keyboard riffs and repetitive bass are pure disco, but the break, the harmonies and the shout-back chorus owe their sound to Stax-Volt and the traditions of southern soul. It charted for nineteen weeks and spent two weeks at #11.
“Calypso Breakdown” is uncut Funky Nassau run through a disco mixer. It’s a not much of a track, but does offer a textbook of combining preexisting sounds to make a sure-fire club hit. The unchanging cowbell gave DJs a clear metronome to guide switching from one copy to another. The bass line and unbroken cymbal riff echo—not to say copy—“Soul Makossa,” but the song never takes off. It does, however, by its inclusion, draw attention to the remarkable career of its composer and producer, Ralph MacDonald. A life-long percussionist, MacDonald joined Harry Belafonte’s band at age seventeen. MacDonald co-wrote “Where Is the Love,” which hit #5 for Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. He co-wrote “Just the Two of Us” for saxophonist Grover Washington and singer Bill Withers; that got to #2. His New York Times obituary described MacDonald as “the ghost behind the hit records of a multitude of 1970s and ’80s pop stars.” Though “Calypso Breakdown” hardly showcases MacDonald’s true skills, it’s nice to see him get some of that SNF money.
Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” is a disco novelty cut featuring moments from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony over corny strings, bombastic horns and secondhand clavinet riffs that evoke the worst of Deodato. And what’s worse than Deodato?
The inclusion of “A Fifth of Beethoven” suggests that somebody at RSO both liked and saw the market potential in novelty tracks. Nowhere was this canniness more evident than in Stigwood’s treatment of Rick Dees, the auteur behind “Disco Duck.” Dees, a “personality” on radio and TV, wrote the track as a disco parody; it features in-rhythm quacking and is even more unlistenable than that sounds. Dees released the track on a small label, expecting little. Stigwood heard it, recognized its potential and bought the master tape for $3,500. Fueled by RSO’s promotion, “Disco Duck” went on to spend October of 1976 at #1. RSO secured permission to put “Duck” on the soundtrack of the film. Dees took the offer assuming his song would be on the album. Alas for him, “Duck” can be heard only as background music in one scene. Dees claims he lost $2.5 million by not being smart enough to insist that his cut make the record.
The Bee Gees’ tracks, save one, have not aged well. “More Than a Woman” and “How Deep Is Your Love” are pablum. A close read of the lyrics suggests that both songs spring from Robin’s juvenile sense of humor. Like Main Course’s “Fanny,” the lyrics of “More Than a Woman” seem both a wink to, and a dirty joke at the expense of, disco’s gay demographic. When asked what the lyrics to “Woman” were about, Robin said, in one of his classic retorts: “Three tits, two vaginas.”{361} What Robin meant is anybody’s guess; he loved to blow off interviewers with those sorts of quips. “How Deep Is Your Love” addresses another of Robin’s recurring obsessions, if his studio-wall drawings are any guide: penis size. Perhaps this issue stemmed from sibling rivalry. Maurice—Robin’s fraternal, but not identical, twin—answered to a long-standing family nickname: Moby.
The saccharine, unchallenging production of “How Deep Is Your Love,” “More Than a Woman” and “Night Fever” underscores, as always, the packaging genius of the Gibbs and their production team. Nightclub performers would be crooning all three for another decade. The irresistible pop power of the melodies overcomes Barry’s screechy falsetto and any lyrical content. The cuts are as hummable as the lyrics are instantly forgettable. Does anyone actually know a verse lyric to “More Than a Woman”? Has anyone who heard it once ever forgotten the chorus?
At least “Night Fever” changes between verse and chorus, but like “Deep” and “Woman,” fights against a layer of studio gloss that holds the song at a remove. That gloss deadens the funky rhythm guitar and shrouds the nice wah-wah vamping and sustained guitar drones during the breaks. That guitar work—and these three tracks—exemplify an unsolvable problem of Bee Gees music of this era: the willful mediocrity of the second-rate songs pushes away the listener. But the popcraft, production and musicianship remain compelling. These are mediocre songs that, when broken into their component parts, prove textbooks in understanding pop, how to embellish, how to build pieces that add up to a whole. Few bands present this dilemma. Most second-rate or really annoying songs eventually fade away. Not these. Simply focusing on, say, the killer guitar part on “Night Fever” keeps the listener engaged. It’s a conundrum. These songs are so part of the cultural ether, and so in everyone’s heads, that a clear aesthetic read on them proves almost impossible.
No late-period Bee Gees track offers a greater conundrum than “Stayin’ Alive.” It’s a killer song, as modern today as the day it was recorded, with that perfect funk drum-loop barely lagging the beat and the grunting chorus driving it on. Like “Jive Talkin’,” it plays as essentially raceless. The song is actually slower than it sounds, which springs from the tension between the lagging beat and the pushing bass. That tension brings the funk, and some part of your body will move whenever this song comes on. Today it carries so much cultural baggage that whenever it does come on—in a TV show, on the radio, ironically on a film soundtrack, as somebody’s ring tone—everybody smiles. “Stayin’ Alive” is beloved, and for good reason. It sounds like the Bee Gees; nothing and nobody else.
A closer listen reveals the core problem. There is something grating about “Stayin’ Alive,” and the louder the volume, the more grating it becomes. Listen to, for instance, the vocal-only tracks of the Beatles, the Beach Boys or even Little Feat—something easy enough to do these days; they’re all on YouTube someplace—and you hear music of the spheres. The vocals are lovely, heartfelt and transcendent even, or especially, when they’re not perfect. The vocal tracks for the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and the revelations of process to be heard there, are unforgettable. The vocal-only tracks from “Stayin’ Alive” are hard, ugly and effortful. The falsetto harmonies, which worked so well on “Jive Talkin’,” sound forced and revved up, like the Chipmunks overdosing on Adderall. Barry shouts and grunts with off-putting aggression. The harshness of the vocals is a hidden time bomb in the song, making it hard to listen all the way through.
The problem with the Bee Gees’ music during this era can be summed up in one tough question: Could Barry hear the difference? Could he tell his best work from his second best? The Spanish have a proverb which translates: “Too much perfection is a mistake.” Did Barry’s mania for control and pop perfectionism stifle the soul in his soul music? “Stayin’ Alive” is a mechanistic artifact from a mechanistic genre, and tragically, soulless at its core.
Danceable as hell, though . . .
“Stayin’ Alive” spent less time at #1 than any other #1 on the LP.
The lineup of novelty cuts and second-rate songs from bands that had done much better work suggest bottom-feeding, that RSO sought the cheapest material to fill out the record, a time-honored practice with soundtracks. SNF’s success put an end to that practice, as studios discovered the earnings a well-constructed soundtrack could bring. But it does raise the question of whether, despite investing so much of his own money in the project, Stigwood was having second thoughts, whether he did not believe that the record was going to have legs. This notion is reinforced by Bill Oakes’s attitude when he mastered the LP.
In October of 1977, Bill Oakes ran the mastering sessions for Saturday Night Fever. He seems, like others, to have run out of interest in and patience for the project. He feared the cultural wheel had already turned and that SNF would be left behind. Oakes told Anthony Haden-Guest: “We started at midnight and went on till dawn, and by this time I was absolutely fried. I had been listening to disco for so long, I never wanted to hear the stuff again. I wanted to get it over with. The word was that people had had enough; the Deadheads were coming back. Heavy Metal was making a run at it. That’s it! Let’s move on. Tom Petty was auditioning for a label deal with Capitol that night. I thought that sounded interesting. But they kept calling me down the corridor with the master. ‘C’mon! We’ve got to listen to another track! Tavares, pumping away.’ Great! I won’t have to listen to it again. I was going to hand [the master tape] to the record company, and they would do what they would. It was in the back of my car. I was between La Brea and Hollywood as dawn broke, sitting behind a truck with a bumper sticker that said ‘Death to Disco.’ I was sitting there thinking, perhaps it is. It’s too boring to think of. I drove home, and left the master in the car.”80
SNF’s album packaging might not have seemed cheesy and cheap in 1976; to see the LP today is a shock. The front cover features Travolta in classic one-hand-raised disco pose, pointing upward to a shot of the Bee Gees in disco-white ensembles. The inside of the gatefold hasn’t a word of text or detail about the record. Instead, there are nineteen photographs of Travolta from the film, with a montage of his most iconic moves in the center. The back of the jacket showcases a crop from the front-cover photo of the Bee Gees, and incongruous promo shots of Elliman and Tavares. It looks like Stigwood spent as little as possible on the jacket.
Making sure product kept moving through the pipeline, Stigwood released Here at Last . . . The Bee Gees . . . Live in May 1977. It went quadruple platinum, selling over 4.5 million copies and hitting #8 in the US. A live version of “Edge of the Universe” (from Main Course) reached #16 on the US singles charts. For any other group, this level of success would be a career milestone, proof that fans still cared enough to gobble up a live record in astounding quantities. And proof that the Bee Gees’ fan base remained, at minimum, almost 5 million strong. But given events that were coming down the pike, Here at Last in the eyes of the public, the label, the band and history proved merely a footnote.
As RSO’s formidable publicity machine geared up for the December release of Saturday Night Fever, the Bee Gees embarked on another of Stigwood’s grand adventures.