The elephant in the discotheque: the Bee Gees (2014)

Finally, an overview of the Bee Gees career that grasps the scope of their achievements while both understanding their music and remaining clear-eyed about their failures. Critics of the time tore them apart, seldom offering any worthwhile feedback at all, much less serious criticism.

Not a big fan of armchair psychoanalysis normally but everything rings true to me. The notion of the group as something akin to aliens due to their isolated early years on the Isle of Man causes a lot of pieces of the puzzle to fall in place for me. We forget how truly isolated a place like the Isle of Man could be in postwar Britain.

Missing is an appreciation of their outrageously gifted rhythm section, with Blue Weaver on keys, Dennis Byron on drums, and, apparently, Maurice on bass. The bass parts are so insanely in the pocket that it's a little hard for me to accept that it was Maurice, though he played many instruments well. Could it be there was an uncredited studio bassist playing these parts? I've never heard a peep to contrary and have always hoped it was Maurice.

There was talk of their much younger brother Andy joining the group. He had a few hits in the mid to late 70s written by Barry but died of a drug overdose. before anything could come of it. The elder brothers' harmony style was complete and it is a little hard to imagine how he would have fit in.

This is a surprisingly good piece of music writing. I thought it had appeared on HN before but maybe not. A commenter on the page wittily summarizes it as "geniuses with bad taste," but the author is more empathetic than that. He manages to explain the Bee Gees in a way I wouldn't have thought possible. The contradiction he finds in their music—emotional depth plus standoffishness, sadness without warmth—is an insight that's obvious when you hear it, but not before.

In an amusing conceit, he pretty much just skips over their mega period. Fine in my book; the melancholic songs he emphasizes are my favorites too. These songs have a long history of attracting great singers, who could express what was held back in the originals. Two favorites from the early 70s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfbHScyol1k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBCbxLreo1I

For me the performance that best displays what the article is talking about—"There was an emotional depth to their songs that gave them a rare advantage over the Beatles"—is this one, by Phil Seymour (a minor teen idol of the late 70s), when he was dying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh-77186F7E

It's haunting and gets me every time, despite a mediocre arrangement that is oblivious to what it's in the presence of. I believe it is the last recording he made.

I highly recommend the book this is taken from: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music by Bob Stanley.

Bob Stanley was a music journalist who founded the beautiful group St Etienne. There is no one I can think of better qualified to talk about pop and dance music and their effect on the soul and society.

I think the discourse in this article is quite confusing.

The author starts and ends with saying that these are sheltered people who had no idea about what was in, or popular. Yet he describes a band that had been producing top-10 and 20 hits and partying with the Beatles for nearly a decade before their runaway success.

This is great. It's a chapter from Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah, a comprehensive history of pop music that I'm reading right now. Anyone with too many vinyl records needs to get a copy and read it.

"Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."

It turns out that that is hard to do well and requires a certain brilliance and finesse. Nearly everyone in the anglosphere can recognize at least one of their songs even 35-40 years on; Zeppelin doesn't have that kind of claim. Getting to that level requires a certain propensity to hack the human psyche, employing hooks, chord structures, melodies and lyrics that are sure to get attention and remain in memory.

I always felt - and still do - that the BG's were music business puppets and their huge success in the the disco era was part of a media package put together based on Nik Cohen's book about London nightlife 'saturday night fever'. Rewritten as a NY area filmscript about white italians, the soundtrack by the BG's was brilliantly cross marketed to whitewash and commercialize the real underground club dance music of the era.

For another look at the Bee Gees: Winds of Change.

I had a friend who was an all-out Bee Gees fan (he even tried to look like them) who played that song for me and it made me re-consider the rest of their work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haknxM7FGfk

While they're not representative for my taste in music, I share the judgement that They wrote a dozen of the finest songs of the twentieth century.

In my ears, they've earned a place in musical history. For how long will be our grandchildren's decision.

A very good read. Odd that there's no mention of Andy or of ABBA.

Oh, how I hated the Bee Gees back in the day. I was too young, too sheltered and probably too much of a coward to become a punk rocker, but I shared the sentiment.

Why is he saying they defined disco? Disco was a black gay culture and the Bee Gees were a pop band who appropriated and pretty much ruined it.