Stories Behind the Music: Their Greatest Success Was Their Undoing
Anyone who might read my post probably already reads Steven Smith's blog and has seen this post. But because I enjoyed it so much and because all his music history posts are so good, I decided to reblog it!! The Bee Gees were a great music group! If you haven't discovered Steven Smith, visit him immediately.
If you like music, or the movies, then I guarantee that you will enjoy stepping into my time machine and going back to the 1960's and the 1970's in this post. If you were alive then, it will bring back memories. The Bee Gees had two distinct stages in their musical development. I first heard them in 1967 when they released their first single in the USA. The song was The New York Mining Disaster, 1941 (Have You Seen My Wife, Mr. Jones). The Bee Gees were Australian, with their own series on Australian TV, and many Americans and Canadians thought that first song was really the Beatles. There were some similarities, I guess. But I did not think the styles or voices were that similar. I will let you be the judge.The Bee Gees were, in fact, not named Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. They were the brothers Gibb -- Barry, Robin and Maurice. There was no question about it, these guys had talent and they had a string of hits: To Love Somebody, Massachusetts, I've Got To Get A Message To You, Lonely Days. In this stage of their careers -- as a rock band singing ballads -- their biggest hit came in 1971. How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, a song they wrote for Andy Williams and he chose not to record, dominated the charts for four weeks.
The Bee Gees songs quit selling shortly after that and the boys were involved in family feuds among themselves. They needed a new musical style, something other than ballads. They released a different style song called Jive Talkin' and it ended up being their second #1 song. Don't look now, but the Bee Gees were creating a new style of music that had not been heard before. This was most evident in their next release which you will be hearing shortly. It was, as a song, odd for the time. The brothers were singing with high falsetto voices and it had a funky style and a driving beat. This tune got the attention of the critics but they did not know how to classify it. This song was later described as the first chapter in the musical soundtrack of the late 1970's. See if you can guess where the Bee Gees were going next.
A movie producer named Robert Stigwood was making a movie about young working class people and competitive dancing. He needed a soundtrack. It had to be something different, out of the ordinary. Stigwood, while visiting Bermuda years earlier, had heard a song by the Bee Gees. It was simply called Saturday Night. He wanted the boys to record a longer version of that song for his upcoming film. That driving soundtrack, and a young actor's electrifying performance in the lead role, made that Stigwood movie one of the most popular and memorable movies of all time. And, 25 million copies later, it was apparent that the Bee Gees had written one of the most important soundtracks in all of movie history. If you do not know where we are going from here, then you are hopelessly lost or you are too young to remember. Take it away John.
Disco was born. The Bee Gees had a total of nine #1 singles, most of them disco music. That put them at #4 of all time as far as hit singles, tied with the Supremes and behind the Beatles, Elvis and Michael Jackson. When disco started to fade, and it did not last long and when it faded it faded fast, the Gibb brothers careers began to slide. Their musical demise, as a band, was pretty much simulateous with the demise of disco. They were disco, were instrumental in creating it, and when it died they faded too. Maurice Gibb, sadly, passed away in 2003. I know that the guys, periodically, do reunion concerts.
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Steven L. Smith
Bellingham WA Home Inspections
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