The Bee Gees came away from Sgt. Pepper’s with plenty of plausible deniability. It wasn’t their project; it was Stigwood’s. It wasn’t their record; it was Martin’s. No one told them how crude the film would be; no one explained anything about acting; they had no input into the story; they had to share screen and music space with Frampton. Happily for them, no one cared. Sgt. Pepper’s collected its share of condemnation and sank, never to be seen again, beneath the juggernaut sales of SNF. Ben Fong-Torres wrote in Rolling Stone that RSO expected to “do about $250 million in the US alone in 1978.”{416}
Despite his poor-mouthing over Pepper’s failure, Stigwood took home 45 percent{417} of the gross of Saturday Night Fever, the movie, which did $285 million worldwide. He was in fine shape and, as ever, wanted more. So did the Bee Gees. With a discipline that few bands could have matched, they headed back to their beloved home base, Criteria Studios in Miami. By March of 1978, they were in their usual groove, working from 3:00 p.m. to midnight on a new record. “In this position,” Barry said, referring to the pressure caused by the success of SNF, “we are constantly up against the wall with people saying, ‘Please us!’ It’s an invisible thing, but you can feel that wall behind you, and you can hear the whole industry saying, ‘Give us a surprise, we expect you to outdo yourselves.’”{418}
The pressure was unrelenting in part because they were growing ever more famous, and attention from their fans rose accordingly. Tour boats drove by Barry’s waterfront home in Miami Beach several times a day. “It’s like living in a bloody goldfish bowl,” Barry said. “We’ve asked them if they could please keep the boat at least 200 yards out, but they don’t. The boats come past every hour on a nice day, and the people all have cameras and binoculars. They have a Universal Tours-type bus that comes down our road every hour with loudspeakers. The Miami Herald did us a real nice favor last year: they printed our address, with a picture of the front gates. You can’t stop the press from doing these things. They can say, ‘Oh, who do they think they are? They’ve got everything they want. So let’s play a little game.’ But they oughta try playing that game for a while. Imagine all these people coming past. I’m fortunate to live well, but on the other hand, if you’ve got a family, there’s got to be a little bit of privacy.”{419}
“[Fans] are out here all the time,” said Peter Wagner, one of the Bee Gees’ drivers. “They sit there waiting for them to come out.” “These kids are consumers,” Barry said. “You’ve got to give them equal time. You can’t go through life saying ‘No autographs’—y’know, the Paul Newman syndrome. It’s what you wanted, what you worked for. The other day there were four or five kids standing outside the studio and they had each bought a copy of our new album. The only thing I could think of saying was, ‘Would you play it as much as you can and come back and tell me which songs you liked best?’ It’s important, and it’s nice to get input from people.”{420}
Part of their relentless drive to outdo themselves with the SNF follow-up—and part of the replenishing of the perpetual chip on Barry’s shoulder—came courtesy of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences’ shocking refusal to recognize any of the songs from SNF. Not one track received a 1977 Oscar nomination. The movie got zilch as well—a total shutout. Stigwood was outraged. He filed a formal complaint with the Academy and milked the publicity for all it was worth.
The competition was tough. John Williams was a lock for Best Score for Star Wars. The Best Song Oscar went to “You Light Up My Life,” as rendered by Pat Boone’s ultra-vanilla, one-hit daughter Debbie. Except for “Nobody Does It Better,” from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, the other nominees were all middle of the road whitebread. No matter how many weeks SNF and its singles spent at #1, losing out to “You Light Up My Life” would have irked a saint, never mind someone as competitive and ready to perceive a snub as Barry.
John Rockwell, writing in the New York Times, damned the band with faint praise while acknowledging that the Academy had screwed them: “Conservative professional organizations such as those that award the Oscars have generally picked the safe and old-fashioned over the contemporary, so the slighting of the Bee Gees by the Oscars is no surprise. But it’s ironic, for ultimately the group represents the spirit the Oscars prize. The Gibb brothers are basically pop craftsmen, cranking out entertainment in response to the fashions of the day. When the disco trend sputters out, the Bee Gees will probably rally and reappear a few years later purveying the next hot style.”{421}
No wonder Barry was so driven and resentful. His band—his blood kin—could not catch a break. The Bee Gees invented a new recording technology, defined the zeitgeist, converted a nation to their sound, broke every sales record there ever was and filled the charts with original material. Then the New York Times, hardly a cultural trend spotter, derides them as herd followers.
Barry told David Leaf: “[The success of SNF] made us work harder. We haven’t been able to sit down and say, ‘Jesus, last year was amazing.’” Barry was thrilled to be away from Hérouville and back in his own, familiar universe. “The studio is my spaceship. I lose all sense of the outside world. I turn into the music. I have the studio personality, the patience and the perfectionism. The moment when the song is realized is my payoff.”{422}
As the band settled into its work routine, Maurice’s usual breakfast consisted of Coca-Cola and scotch. If he was awake, he drank. Maurice claimed that he had hurt his back and couldn’t play, so Alan Kendall and studio ace Harold Cowart took over the bass parts. “I had to sit there,” Maurice told the press, “and tell the bass player what to play. It was a bitch.”{423} Maurice hid booze around Criteria; a worker renovating the bathroom had sixteen liquor bottles fall onto him through the ceiling. Maurice said: “My brothers could never understand how, when I was in the studio, I would have only two beers and get sloshed as a newt. I had backup everywhere—in the glove box, under the seat, wherever.”{424} It was around this time that Maurice first began to admit to his drinking problem. He blamed his drinking on the stress of balancing his professional and personal lives. “I was burning the candle at both ends,” he said later. “My body couldn’t take it.{425}
There are many unsubstantiated and unattributed tales of Maurice’s drunken antics and nonstop drinking from this era; they have to be taken as gossip. But the sheer volume of those tales—including the ones that Maurice supposedly told on himself—suggest that Maurice’s alcoholism was beyond control. To paraphrase AC/DC guitarist, songwriter and singer Angus Young describing his brother Malcolm’s habits: “Playing interfered with his drinking.” Barry and Robin came to see that Maurice would not heed their advice or accept their care. Maurice did not contribute a bass part to any Spirits tracks. Blue, Dennis, Alan and Cowart alternated his bass parts. Additionally, Joe Lala added percussion, George Terry played guitar and Herbie Mann blew flute on “Spirits.” Chicago was cutting their Hot Streets album in the studio next door; the Chicago horns—James Pankow, Walter Parazaider and Lee Loughnane—sat in on “Stop (Think Again).”
On May 27, 1978, as the band labored away, the Stigwood co-produced movie Grease, starring John Travolta, hit the theaters. An adaptation of the stage play, the film needed, in Stigwood’s opinion, a hit single. A title song was added, sang by Four Seasons songwriter and lead singer Frankie Valli. It slowly climbed to #1, hitting the top on August 26, 1978, where it stayed for two weeks. Before it hit #1, the Rolling Stones briefly displaced SNF at the top. RSO, in the person of Al Coury, went batshit.
Al Coury went to the Billboard offices: “I screamed and yelled. I really thought Grease was gonna replace Saturday Night Fever at Number One. I honestly believed and I tried to convince the trades that at the time they made the Stones Number One, my Grease album was outselling the Stones. Their argument to me was, ‘Well, what do you care? You’re gonna be Number One next week, anyway. What are you hassling over a lousy fucking week for?’ But goddamnit, my fucking plan was to be Number One all year!”{426}
Barry wrote “Grease,” of course. In an hour or two.
“Robert Stigwood called up,” Barry said. “And said he and [film co-producer] Allan Carr had everything they wanted for the film Grease, but the strangest thing is that they didn’t have a song called ‘Grease.’ They asked me if I would write a song for the movie. I went and sat back in the lounge and basically sketched the song out while I was watching television. I didn’t think that much of it. The word was that Allan Carr didn’t really like it, but Robert Stigwood did. [Frankie Valli] was real smart casting, because they found someone to sing it that reflected that era.”{427}
“To write songs with Barry,” Albhy Galuten said, “I referred to the process as the Barry Society, because he would sit down at the piano, and the song would spew out of him. You could tell by the way he was singing what the next chord was that he wanted. Then he would write all the lyrics. Sometimes he would write a song in ten minutes. He would give you half writers on it. He didn’t like the process of saying well, you know, you wrote 10% of this song. You were either in for 50% or not in at all. For Bee Gees songs, you were kind of never in. For songs for other people you were in.
“One of the financial repercussions is that when we were working at Barry’s house, Robert Stigwood called up and said, ‘I need a song called “Grease.”’ And Barry said, ‘What do you mean a song called “Grease”?’ Stigwood said; ‘You know, like “Grease,” like “ba da ba da ba da ba da GREASE!”’ And Barry was like, ‘Sure.’
“So, I think I had to go somewhere. Barry said, ‘Well, I think we should sit down and write this song “Grease.”’ I said: ‘You know, you hear this stuff, you hear the chords in your head. You know what chords you’re looking for. Sometimes when I play a chord, you go “No, no not that one, that one!” So you know what chords you’re hearing. You know the melody. You know the words. I think you could write the whole song in your mind. Just write down the words, remember the melody, and we’ll find out what chords you were imagining later.’ And he said, ‘Okay, I’ll try that.’ I left. And he did just that, except he wrote all of ‘Grease.’ Had I stayed there and written the song with him, I would’ve made a lot of money.”{428}
A tossed-off #1 single was the least of what went on at Criteria. The boys had comedy routines, most revolving around sixth-grade-level dirty jokes that they’d honed over the years. It’s hard to believe, given their trials and success, and hard to remember, that as they recorded the music that would become Spirits Having Flown, Barry was only thirty-two and the twins newly twenty-nine.
The Gibbs wrote, directed, videotaped and starred in videos of their comedy skits. They made a lot of them and watched them over and over. Maurice showed a journalist a Betamax video tape titled “Collected Items.” The tape held roughly an hour of blackout comedy skits that were intended as parodies of TV news and shows. Among the skits were “a cinema verite minidocumentary about an inept band cutting its debut record, entitled ‘Wankers by the Moonlight’; a Don Kirshner-style conversation-at-the-piano with an effeminate pop-schlock songwriter; a current events talk show called The Eugene Shitass [pronounced sheit-arse] Report and 80 Minutes, a TV news-magazine featuring an interview with Robin playing a noted surgeon after the first successful penis transplant.”{429}
That tape apparently showcased the apex of the Bee Gees’ comedy stylings—the others were nowhere near as funny. Producing the skits was a regular hobby for the band during recording. The penis surgery is the strangest of the lot and the most aligned to Robin’s sense of humor. “Robin’s into blue humor,” Karl Richardson told Circus Weekly. “I don’t know if you’d be able to print his jokes. He also draws caricatures of everybody and hangs them up in the studio. If a group gets too serious and stops bantering when they record, you stagnate and lose your creativity.”{430}
This was the first time the band recorded using multiple twenty-four-track machines. “It was so stimulating to be able to take 18 tracks of Barry singing,” Albhy said. “No one had been able to do that before. Barry wanted things a certain way. He had a vision. Those years we were together I tuned into his vision. Feel, pitch, meter were incredibly important to him.
“We started doing the multi-track overdubs on the song ‘Too Much Heaven,’ and there were 18 tracks of Barry singing. Eighteen tracks, all done live and with no guide vocal track. Not one. Michael Jackson, for instance, when he doubled a vocal in the studio, he would want the vocal he was doubling”—a vocal track he had already recorded to his satisfaction—“playing back in his headphones as he sang the new doubling vocal. The recorded vocal would be in one ear of his headphones, and he took the other ear off to hear himself sing along with it. That’s what everybody did.
“Barry didn’t do that. Barry knew exactly what he wanted to sing, and he would sing exactly that. He had unbelievable control. So when you listen to those 18 vocals in ‘Too Much Heaven,’ it was three-part harmony, each part tripled in two octaves. There were three parts on each of the three bottom voices and three parts on each of the three top octaves. Barry would sing each track without listening to any other. Every breath, every meter, every pitch and every vibrato was exactly in tune and in time. He would take these 18 tracks, literally one after the other. I’d push the faders up and all 18 would be exactly together in tune, in time and breathing at the same moment. I don’t believe there’s ever been a craftsman like that in the world.”{431}
As rightfully in awe as Albhy was of Barry’s virtuosity, he saw something being lost among the Bee Gees in the deus ex machina. “They say that technology is magic until you understand it,” Albhy said. “Stimulus is important. Some bands are stimulated with drugs and manage the drug intake so they’re at the right high for the job at hand. You stimulate people by not allowing them to get too excited if its not the final take, so you can, in a coitus interruptus sort of way, keep people’s vibe right. Having a new technology, being able to do things that you have never done before, is a stimulus as well, a creative stimulus. And so having multiple 24 tracks was stimulating, being able to make the multiple tracks of ‘Too Much Heaven’ or ‘Tragedy.’”
“The point is, we’re talking about—for the first time—an essentially unlimited number of tracks. You can keep what you have and then go on and try something else. And this was new, before we’d all gotten spoiled. Do something new, do extra double tracks, have your cake and eat it too. So that was the beginning of not playing live as a band.”{432}
Every available track encouraged breaking the music down into increasingly smaller component parts. Each musician plays only a portion of a song until it’s perfect, then plays the rest, portion by portion. Something of the collective sound and feel is lost in the process.
“Is there a specific, graphable connection between the increase of control and the lack of spontaneity in the studio?” Albhy said. “Do they weave back and forth? Are they absolutely in opposition, do you just have to figure out how to make them harmonize?”{433}
These philosophical questions were being played out daily in the studio. In an NBC television special aired in 1979, Barry spoke with interviewer David Frost about building a song. “When the voice drops out, the instrument that comes in has to be really interesting. And when the instrument drops out and the voice comes back, that has to be even more interesting. So where there’s an empty space, it has to be filled.” Having 24 tracks available put even more pressure on Barry to find something to fill every moment of every song. And fill them he did.{434}
“Whatever the new album is, I can tell you the pressure was mountainous to follow up Saturday Night Fever,” Barry said. “And we felt that there was great pressure to follow up Children of the World with Saturday Night Fever. And Children of the World followed Main Course, which everyone was talking about! It always goes on that way. I mean if Spirits is a monster—pray that it is—then once again we’ll be against the wall.”{435} With every confidence that the record would be a monster, the band shifted its workaday life from recording to preparing for what would be their grandest, most ornate tour.
The Bee Gees rented a warehouse from TK Records—KC and the Sunshine Band’s label—not far from South Beach in Miami. They wanted their own, private rehearsal space and built a full-size stage with a lighting rig and sound system to hone their live show. The band commissioned Karl and Albhy to build a studio in the warehouse and to have it ready when they came back from their tour. They christened the studio Middle Ear.
Karl and Albhy created an enormous one-room space—twenty-eight by thirty-eight feet, with twelve-foot ceilings and a six-by-six-foot isolation booth for vocals—using only part of the warehouse. The studio featured wood-slatted walls “dotted with indentations into which amplifiers and microphones can be positioned to create a wide diversity of niche space ambiences.” The slatted walls were, as explained by Albhy “to break up the sound so that there would not be even reflections. If all sound reflects in the same way, it creates bumps in certain frequencies and if the walls are smooth it creates extra ambience.” Every piece of gear was to the moment and state of the art. Middle Ear was for the Bee Gees only. They recorded at Middle Ear from its completion in 1980 until 1993. Once it opened, fans stood in front of its doors all day, rather than at Criteria.{436} After 1993, the Bee Gees rented Middle Ear out to other bands. “The studio has been broken-in in the best way a studio can be,” said one tenant. “The boys developed it into a warm, personal and creative space. There’s nothing cold or impersonal about it. It’s a single-room facility, so when an artist rents it out, it’s all theirs. And everything comes with it; there are no additional rental charges.”{437}
As the release of the first single neared, Barry was already defensive. “We spent ten months doing this new album,” he said. “You’ve gotta believe that a lot of times we cut a track, then said, ‘No! No good!’ A lot of tracks we cut a dozen times. We did not want to go wrong with this album. And a few critics will say that we did. Our father always said, ‘Look, no one ever criticizes you when you’re down; you only get the criticism when you’re up, so shut up.’ We try to live like that, or at least live with it. But I’ve never gotten over harsh criticism. I can never pick up a review and finish it if the guy doesn’t like the album, ’cause the rest of my day is screwed up. It’s so painful.”{438} Before the first single came out, Stigwood, never one to lag when it was time to hype, said: “Not only do I think it’s the best album [the Bee Gees have] ever done, I think it’s the best album I’ve ever heard.”{439}
November 18, 1978, saw the release of the first single, “Too Much Heaven.” The single charted for twenty-one weeks, hit #1 on January 6, 1979, and held the top spot for two weeks. “Heaven” gave the Bee Gees their seventh #1 of the 1970s, which made them the band with the most top singles in the decade. The Gibbs donated all proceeds of “Heaven”—$7 million—to the United Nations children’s charity UNICEF, once called the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.
The English television host and celebrity interviewer David Frost promoted a benefit concert, Music for UNICEF. Knowing of their connection to the charity, Frost reached out to the Bee Gees in March 1978. “People have come to us and said, ‘Do you realize how much power you have now? You could change the world with some of the things you say.’” Barry said. “And I say to them, ‘Leave me alone.’ Power is fleeting; so is ego. When you start putting religion or whatever into it and tell the world how it can be saved, it rubs up against people. Politicians have no idea how to save the world, so why should pop stars? Instead you can do things like the UNICEF thing, which is a positive move to help children.”{440} The Bee Gees sent letters to schools and children’s organizations, suggesting they hold fund-raising disco dances to raise money for UNICEF. The Music for UNICEF broadcast featured a wide range of top stars who agreed to donate their performances.
George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 was the first of the rock-celebrity, all-star charity blockbuster concerts, and perhaps the subject of Barry’s jab at pop stars who “tell the world how it can be saved.” But if the idea of marshaling pop music for charity was hardly new, the breadth of the talent and the worldwide broadcast was. The Bee Gees were ahead of the curve, prefiguring shows like Live AID, Farm AID and the multi-celebrity charity shows that have become regular features of the concert landscape. Music For UNICEF was recorded live and broadcast the next day, January 9, 1979, on NBC, after two weeks of setup. The timing was perfect as promotion for the release of Spirits Having Flown.
Someone in the live audience said: “If you look at the yearly record sales of the people here, it is equal to the gross national product of some of the member states of the UN. Throw a bomb in here and you have knocked out half the music industry.” Frank Rocco, the talent coordinator on the project said, “They do not normally allow liquor to be brought into the UN, but we told them, ‘Hey, some of the guys here do their jobs a little bit differently than you may be used to.’ They were cool about it and let us bring it in.”{441}
Among the performers were Donna Summer, Kris Kristofferson, John Denver, Olivia Newton-John, Rod Stewart, Rita Coolidge and, fresh off their one-song appearance in Sgt. Pepper’s, Earth, Wind and Fire. Ken Ehrlich, one of the show’s producers, said: “A lot of massive egos were sublimated for the cause.”{442} Rod Stewart sang “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” and got treated like Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show. Because the program was broadcast worldwide, which meant a large non-Western audience, Stewart was shown only from the waist up.
Spirits Having Flown was released on January 26, 1979. Punk rock had gone from pure rage to slowly inching into the mainstream. Commercial funk music was both glossy and raw. Spirits, owing to the depth of its twenty-four-track production, had a rich, shiny, but artificial and overproduced sound. It’s slickness worked against it as far as the critics were concerned. Bee Gees’ fans loved it even while disco was starting to fade.
Because disco songs are long and disco listeners expected extended sets, disco radio shows could not offer the conventional number of commercial breaks per hour. This made disco a tough format to sell in syndication. Large, disco-crazy markets, like New York and Miami, had entrenched disco radio shows. Smaller Midwestern cities seldom offered disco on the airwaves. Jim Kefford, who led a company that produced taped radio shows for syndication, said: “I remember calling one station owner in the Midwest and asking, ‘How’s disco doing in your town?’ He said, ‘Well, we had one. But it closed.’” Leo Bortel, a former radio DJ and owner of a Cleveland discotheque, said about the difficulty of establishing disco as a radio format: “If you present this music differently than it is heard in the clubs, it stands out like a sore thumb.”{443}
Billboard reported that by the end of 1979, radio in New York was shifting from music identified as disco. Frankie Crocker, a New York DJ who in the beginning of 1979 said disco had “replaced rock and become a whole new culture,” opened a show in December 1979 by saying he would play music that made listeners “think a little more”—and less disco. In December, a station that had called itself “Disco And More” embraced “the Sounds of the 80s.”{444}
Looking back years later, Barry said: “There seems to be an inclination to reject certain artists at the end of each decade in favor of the new decade and what that might bring. We were always a target for that.”{445} Barry has a point. The first single, “Too Much Heaven,” has nothing to do with disco. It’s a glossy funk love ballad in the style—especially in the solo vocal—of the Delfonics’ “La La Means I Love You.” The lead vocals and arrangement reflect the influence of the later, softer work of Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire. The harmony on the chorus shifts out of soul mode, though, and becomes pure Bee Gees. As Barry and Robin argued to anyone who would listen, “Heaven” is modern—at that time, current—R&B, not disco. Despite the cornball opening, somewhat juvenile lyrics and an excess of falsetto, “Heaven” remains one of the great high school slow-dancing songs of all time.
On January 12, the Bee Gees were awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They went to LA for the ceremony and thousands of fans jammed the streets. On February 15, SNF won four Grammy Awards. The record won Album of the Year; “Stayin’ Alive” was nominated for Song of the Year but did not win. The Bee Gees won Producer of the Year, Best Arrangement of Voices and Best Pop Vocal Performance.
“Tragedy,” the second single from Spirits, was released February 17, 1979, debuting at #4. By March 24, it was #1, stayed at the top for two weeks and in the charts for twenty weeks total. By March, it was #1 in the UK and Canada. If the critics were tired of the Bee Gees, the record-buying public was not.
“Tragedy,” with its amazing stacked Barry self-harmonies, ain’t exactly disco either. The rhythm section features the classic disco hit-hat shuffle, but the guitar licks and synthesizer accents evoke Electric Light Orchestra. The song’s bombastic layered sound and pushier, grander-than-disco dance beat suggest that Barry was listening to a lot of Giorgio Moroder, the groundbreaking producer behind Donna Summer’s breakout hits, and of Blondie, David Bowie and Irene Cara. “Tragedy,” like much of Moroder’s post-disco work, draws on disco elements, but reaches beyond for a richer, self-consciously epic aural landscape.
Rock critic Stephen Holden recognized an international sound. He wrote that the Bee Gees had melded American R&B with “Europop production.” Holden argued that the Beatles did something similar, but in all the world, he’s the only person who ever thought so. Holden astutely recognized what today is known as Esperanto Pop; music that shares certain pop—as opposed to rock—values can originate anywhere on the globe and find an audience anywhere else. Esperanto Pop, like the Bee Gees, is not limited to the culture or language of its origin. ABBA and Korea’s K-Pop are two of the most cited examples. Much of Spirits fits that model. “Tragedy” features several ABBA motifs and “Spirits (Having Flown),” for all the emptiness and insincerity of its lyrics, is Brazilian bossa nova filtered through Miami’s Funky Nassau sound. Holden, having accurately parsed what the Bee Gees were doing, and even praised them, proved that he had only raised the Beatles as a straw man with which to batter Spirits. “The global consciousness that the Gibbs conjure,” he wrote, “is far different from that of the Beatles, who embodied a nonbureaucratic world community of hippie individualists. The Bee Gees’ global village would be a junior high of androgynous, conformist goody-goodies: a world with no violence or sex, only puppy love, and every toy in creation. That’s why Spirits Having Flown is a Sunday-school heaven of eternal childhood, stringently regulated by angels.”
Holden’s perceptions only went so far. He also wrote: “From the beginning, the Bee Gees’ mating of pop and R&B was shaky.”{446} That is patently, absurdly untrue: ass backward to the highest degree. The essence of—the predominant aspect of, the best-selling and most widely imitated aesthetic of—the second half of the Bee Gees’ career is their genius merging of pop and R&B.
“We’re trying to avoid disco,” Barry said. “We’re keeping solid rhythms but we’re not saying, ‘Hey, you have to dance to this song.’ We have to convince everybody that we write all kinds of songs. Some call it selling out, but the most critical thing today is adaptability. If you’re adaptable, you stay; if you’re not, you go when the crowd changes its mind.”{447}
Holden went on to say: “This album’s weaknesses are synonymous with the Gibbs’ pseudodeific, megastar self-conception. Most of the songs are sung with perfect pitch, but the trio’s piercing collective falsetto (built around Barry’s lead vocals) is so relentless that the few moments in which the voices drop to their natural register come as a relief. The Four Seasons, alas, and not Smokey Robinson are the prototype for such an unearthly style: shrill, stiff, mechanical yowls that generate tension yet aren’t expressive enough to carry an entire LP.”{448}
There, though overstating his case, Holden has a point.
To the accusations of too much falsetto, Barry said: “Spirits is really a listener’s album—if you can stand the falsettos long enough. You have to listen to it four or five times, if you like it enough to listen to it that many times.”{449}
“Though most people consider Saturday Night Fever a Bee Gees record,” Mark Kernis wrote in the Washington Post: “The band contributed only six tracks—and two of those, ‘Jive Talkin’’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing,’ were previously issued. The fact that the four new songs were the four strongest pieces that the Bee Gees have ever done should not obscure the fact that the band rocketed to fame on the strength of less than one full side of one record. It’s astounding that the critical demolition of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band didn’t demolish their standing the way it seems to have derailed the career of Peter Frampton, who hasn’t done a thing since. So, besides providing a pleasant diversion, Spirits Having Flown shows the Bee Gees’ resilience.”{450}
That resilience seemed to irk critics. They were done with the band, apparently, so what was up with all these millions and millions of people buying Bee Gees records?
The Bee Gees official biography, Bee Gees: The Authorized Biography, as told by the band to David Leaf, came out in March. The Bee Gees wrote the photo captions for the large-scale trade paperback themselves, and many—reflecting their juvenile, inside-the-band humor—border on the bizarre. Robin proves plenty willing to tell bad tales about himself. It’s a curious artifact. The content lies somewhere between blind adoring hype and genuine confession. The Bees Gees come off as both remarkably unguarded and fiercely paranoid about protecting their image. There are a number of wonderful photos, especially those from the early days.
Robin had a deadly near miss that March. “A couple of weeks ago,” he told Stan Soocher of Circus Weekly, “I was out in my 31-foot boat off the coast of Florida. At night, a storm started. I lost my two engines and control of the steering, and was heading for a bridge. I was half a mile from land, the wind was dreadful and the current was intolerable. I hadn’t been swimming for ten years, but I had to jump into the water. The boat was demolished.”{451}
“Love You Inside Out,” the third single, debuted on April 21. It hit #1 on June 9 and the Bee Gees became the first band since the Beatles with six consecutive #1s. Maurice, citing the band’s first version of the song, said: “‘Inside and out, backwards and forwards with my cock hanging out!’ That’s the version we sent to Robert.”{452} The consecutive #1s meant a lot to the band. When asked how the Bee Gees reacted to the unbelievable sales of SNF, Albhy said: “They never cared about numbers. They care about hits—Number Ones. Chart position. That’s their benchmark. They always assumed that if they got the Number Ones, sales would follow. So they were happy, of course, about the sales, but what they tracked was their hits.”
Robert Christgau wrote perceptively about Sprits, shedding new light on its limitations and presenting what would become the canonical critics’ take on the LP. “I admire the perverse riskiness of this music, which neglects disco bounce in favor of demented falsetto abstraction, less love-man than newborn-kitten. And I’m genuinely fond of many small moments of madness here, like the way the three separate multitracked voices echo the phrase ‘living together.’ But obsessive ornamentation can’t transform a curiosity into inhabitable music, and there’s not one song here that equals any on the first side of Saturday Night Fever.”{453}
The songs do suffer from a rococo ornamentation, as if Barry recognized their slightness and tried to compensate by adding more voices, more falsetto, filling every space. It suggests music that was no longer instinctual—however quickly the songs were written—and more engineered. Everyone seems to be playing as hard as they can, reaching for a grand statement with every note. Sprits holds to the usual Bee Gees pattern of three hit singles, one or two interesting non-hits and six tracks of filler. Christgau recognized some of the nuttiness of the filler, but remained unconvinced.
By May, Sprits Having Flown was certified platinum, the Bee Gees made the cover of Rolling Stone yet again and Hugh and Barbara appeared on The Dinah Shore Show, a popular daytime talk show.
The Bee Gees and the band rehearsed for their upcoming tour five to six hours a day throughout May and June. With the album finished, they put their musical energy into rehearsing. They were so devoted to rehearsals that they skipped that year’s Billboard Music Awards; they won eleven awards in absentia. The band conceived a mega-tour, their first in years. Doing Sgt. Pepper’s had prevented them from touring to capitalize on SNF. They were itching to play live and travel properly. In planning their first-class private travel accommodations, Barry said: “The only way to stay straight is to stay above it.” “This is the tour we have dreamed of all our lives,” Maurice said. “And never expected to do.”{454}
The brothers regarded this as their farewell tour. They recognized that disco was fading, and wanted to close out this phase of their career absolutely on top. With any other band, financial motives might have been the driving consideration, but the income from their record sales meant that this tour was as much for fun and posterity as lucre. The Bee Gees wanted the tour to be majestic and memorable. The brothers and the band knew they would not be performing together again any time soon. Barry and Robin had been writing songs for a planned Barbra Streisand album that Barry would produce. Barry also wrote with Albhy for that record and Barry, Robin and Maurice wrote one song together. Additionally, Barry was writing for Andy Gibbs’s next record, which Barry would also produce. Robin and Blue Weaver were going to work on a record for Jimmy Ruffin. Maurice, seemingly, was going to drink.
The band rented a custom fifty-five-seat Boeing 707 for $1 million and had it painted glossy black with the Spirits logo on the tail. During the tour, the jet flew to and from one of five base cities to each show and returned nightly to a base city at each show’s end. Family and friends traveled on the jet, along with Maurice’s wife, Yvonne, and Barry’s wife, Lynda, and their children. Robin was estranged from Molly—who remained in England—and toured without her. A film crew accompanied the tour, taking footage for an upcoming Bee Gees NBC special to be hosted by David Frost.
The Bee Gees traveled with their own stage, sound and lighting rig, carried on seven semi-trucks and followed by two custom buses bearing the crew and those not lucky enough to be on the jet. The stage was a huge disco floor, lit from beneath. At climactic moments in various songs, the floor would light up in patterns of red and yellow squares.
Barry wanted the tour to be as stress free as possible and planned every detail. Security was tight, and the tour was designed so that no one ever needed to leave its protected cocoon. “For all intents and purposes,” Robin said, “this tour is like being in prison. To go out and buy a shirt would require two hours’ planning for logistics and security.”{455} Stigwood had to get a movie theater manager to agree to “cordon” off a balcony so the band could see Alien.
The touring band was Alan Kendall on guitar, Dennis Byron on drums, Blue Weaver on keyboards, Joey Murcia on rhythm guitar and Joe Lala on percussion. “This band was more than just a group of musicians,” Maurice said. “Having a band that knows how we play and sing and write has really been one of the keys to our sound.”{456}
Everyone knew Maurice was not up to playing bass live on stage. He told the press that playing guitar was more exciting. Harold Cowart joined the touring band as the bass player. With Joey Murcia—behind Maurice—covering the rhythm parts and Barry—next to Maurice—working his acoustic, there was little need for another guitar. On videos of the shows, Maurice’s guitar is not easily heard, and the bass is turned way up in the mix.
The six-piece Miami brass session group, the Boonero Horns, came along, as did the RSO vocal trio, the Sweet Inspirations. The Inspirations were accomplished backup singers and had worked with Elvis and Ray Charles.
Barry discussed not taking along an orchestra, as they had routinely done in their earlier years. “Before, we played it safe and strict,” he said. ”We used the orchestra as a cushion. It was beautiful, but we weren’t taxing our abilities.
“When I look back at the days when we toured with 30 pieces, I know we were on display and opposed to communicating with the audience. Going to a bigger band and leaving the orchestra at home was a logical extension. We didn’t want to cling to something that didn’t make us feel comfortable. I think our stage act improved 100 per cent. The orchestra was lovely, but restrictive at times.
“The kids and younger people want to open up at concerts. We’re now more self-contained on stage and I really dig working with our band. Blue Weaver is playing string synthesizer and it fuses the Sixties to the Seventies. If you want to extend the concert experience you have to be visible to your audience. Looking back, the orchestra did colour many of our songs. But at times we might have overused the strings and some of our work became mushy.”{457}
On the road the families would hang out, sightsee and head for the venue in the late afternoon. The backing band and the crew, traveling by bus, got to the gigs around 5:00 p.m. The Bee Gees and their entourage arrived by limousine. The doors opened at seven. The Sweet Inspirations opened for the Bee Gees at eight and usually did around forty-five minutes. When the house went dark again at nine, people started shrieking. The Gibb brothers burst onstage under white lights in their white outfits and the crowd went berserk. Every show opened with “Tragedy,” as fireworks exploded above.
The tour opened in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 28 and closed—where else?—in Miami on October 6. It spanned forty-one shows, including Montreal, Toronto and three sold-out nights in a row at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The tour hit massive arenas—sports stadiums—like Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the Summit in Houston and the Silverdome in Detroit. “I’ve never seen them as nervous as they were before the tour started,” Dick Ashby said. “They’re at the pinnacle of their careers, and people will try to tear them down.” Tickets were going for $700 for scalpers, and in LA at least, Bee Gees merchandise sold at the rate of $3,000 a minute.{458}
The Bee Gees wore their iconic outfits of white satin flared pants and white spangled jackets and scarves. Most nights those jackets were open down to their beltlines. The lights, the clothes, the stage, the postures—Barry with his legs akimbo, braced to send the sound outward and receive the applause coming in; Maurice goofy and self-conscious, always moving around the stage; Robin quite loose, hands on his hips, graceful and dreamily responsive to the rhythm of the music—turned every show into what the Bee Gees intended: a spectacle. A bigger than life, aggressively perfect, show-biz spectacle, half pop-music, half Las Vegas and determined to be the best at both.
The younger fans squealed like they were seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium. An eighteen-year-old Maryland girl said: “I can’t help it, it just comes out. I want them to know I’m their fan. Nothing can top them—not the Beatles, not nobody.”{459} “I couldn’t take it,” Dick Ashby said. “I had to break off two cigarette filters and stick them in my ears.”{460} Which is just what the cops at Shea Stadium had done.
“Tragedy” was one of only two songs from Spirits on the set list. The middle of the show was a medley of “NY Mining Disaster,” “Run To Me,” “Too Much Heaven,” “Holiday,” “I Can’t See Nobody,” “Lonely Days,” “I Started a Joke,” “Massachusetts” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” The show-stopping climax—when the mirrored disco balls and gigantic Bee Gees logo descended—was “Nights on Broadway.” The show closed with “Jive Talkin’.” The band came back out for one encore, “You Should Be Dancin’.” “Dancin’” had an extended percussion break and ended with a bang. Within a minute of that bang, Barry, Maurice and Robin were in their limos, rolling either toward their hotel or the 707.
“Nineteen fifty-five was when we first stepped on stage,” Barry said later. “So we’ve been doing it longer than people think. After we toured America in ’79, the exhaustion of being the Bee Gees set in and we couldn’t see what tomorrow was going to bring.” And yet, despite the length of the tour, the logistics and security and the nightly pressure to be unforgettable, there is not one moment in videos of their performance when anyone on stage appears bored, disengaged or even tired. Some nights some folks might appear totally wasted, but that’s different. What the Bee Gees appear to be, night after night, is present, attentive, fulfilled and happy. They did not regard this tour as a chore. They had a tremendously good time. The sales, the Grammys, the #1s from the new record, the sold-out forty-thousand-seat arenas; this wasn’t validation, this was victory. And it was valedictory—the Bee Gees were graduating, on stage, in front of the world, to whatever was next.
John Travolta showed up in Houston and danced with the band. There were sixty thousand paying fans at Dodger Stadium in LA. Celebrity guests included Harry Wayne Casey of KC and the Sunshine Band, Barbra Streisand, Cary Grant, Karen Carpenter and the Jackson family. At Madison Square Garden the guests included Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley from KISS—who were always interested in spectacle—and Al Pacino. President Jimmy Carter invited the band to the White House prior to the September 24 gig in Washington, DC, to honor the Bee Gees for their work with UNICEF.
Touring is unspeakably dull for those touring, especially those who don’t get onstage. Naturally, there must be distractions. But the security on this tour not only kept outsiders out, it kept inside information in. Few backstage stories of outrageous behavior ever emerged. One good way to quantify drug use on a tour with tight security is to consider the level of denial of drug use. On this tour, that denial was absolute. A tour security guy, an ex-FBI agent, claims there were no drugs at all anywhere at any time: “I checked my sources on these guys. I wasn’t going to risk my rep on three rock stars who are into hard drugs.” Robin said: “There is no Happy Hour on this tour, where everybody throws a TV set out the window.”{461} Indeed, it is hard to throw a TV out of a moving 707.
The band protested mightily about their straightness to People magazine. Barry said that he had tried cocaine on an earlier tour, but “my nose was like a block of concrete for a week.” Robin proclaimed: “If you can’t face reality and be happy with it, what’s the point of living?” Always ready to be on both sides of an argument, Robin added: “But we’re not choirboys, either.” Maurice insisted he was not drinking, and People wrote: “If there is a silver spoon near his face pre-concert, it’s full of honey.”{462}
In October, RSO released Bee Gees Greatest, a double-album compilation of hits from the SNF era forward. Side three offered B-sides and cover versions, including Yvonne Elliman and inexplicably, Vegas crooner Wayne Newton.
Greatest hit #1 on the album charts on January 12, 1980.
The tour ended with two triumphal concerts at the Miami Stadium. The final show took place on October 6.
The Bee Gees aired on NBC during prime time on Wednesday, November 21, 1979, the night before Thanksgiving, one of the most sought-after time slots on network TV.
David Frost wore the interviewer’s uniform, a blue shirt with epaulettes. The Bee Gees sat on what appears to be Barry’s couch—with Barry leaning toward Frost in the middle—and told bits of their life’s story. Their chat is intercut with footage from the tour, and even more interesting footage of the band in their studio, recreating working through a song.
“It’s almost as if the songs are in the air and we hear them,” Barry said, describing their songwriting process. Robin said: “They’re already written, but they’re only written for us and they’re out there.” “We go into the studio,” Maurice said, “and most of the lyrics are written during the laying down of the backtracks.” Every single time Robin or Maurice speak, Barry interrupts. “We have a band of such strong musicians,” Barry said. “It’s hard to remember that they can’t hear the song like we do. They can’t always hear what you’re talking about. That’s the most difficult part.”
During the recreation, the band plays standing near to one another in a cramped room with no separation for the drums and no separation for the singers. Barry runs the session—which is, after all, only a restaging—with an iron hand. That makes the recreation seem all too real. Standing at the mic wearing his guitar, Barry raises a hand and says: “Solo.” He hums the part with perfect pitch as everyone watches, waiting for the next order. The show depicts how the band cut the backing tracks for “Tragedy” before Barry had written any lyrics beyond the one word of the title. Once the tracks were done to his satisfaction, Barry hummed the melody of the vocal. The brief clip showcases their attention to detail and familiarity with Barry’s process. It was a fitting portrait with which to close an era.
“Success like we have now was a distant dream in 1971,” Barry said. “We thought it was all over for us then. Now we can’t really accept what we’ve done and where we are when we read magazines saying, ‘The Bee Gees are hot.’ I would like for the Bee Gees to stop before we wane. I don’t know if it’s easy or accurate to say that in the next two years the Bee Gees will decline or continue at this pace. None of us can say. But all bubbles have a way of bursting or being deflated in the end.”{463}
The Bee Gees would not tour together again for ten years.