Rant #3,191: Stayin' Alive

The Bee Gess?

Remember them?

They were the Australian rockers who made a complete change of path in the mid-1970s over to disco with their music on the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.

The brother act—Robin, Maurice and Barry—had already logged numerous rock-oriented hits in the 1960s and 1970s, including “Lonely Days” and “New York Mining Disaster 1941.”

They alienated many of their long-time fans by going disco, but they made more fans by putting out songs like “Night Fever” and “Staying’ Alive,” songs which became cornerstones of the disco craze.

They also became ubiquitous on the Hot 100 chart for writing songs for other artists, everyone from one-hot wonder Samantha Sang to Barbra Streisand and Dolly Parton, and of course, their ill-fated brother Andy Gibb.

But when they tried to go back to their rock roots, the effort pretty much failed, alienating both older fans who had been turned off by their disco hits and newer fans who only knew them as a disco act.

They had a few big records into the 1990s—“One” was one of them—but their popularity had waned as the years went on.

Today, Barry Gibb is the only one still standing, as twins Robin and Maurice have both passed on.

Why am I writing about all of this?

In the little time I have to relax—down to next to nothing nowadays—I like to digitize my records, a process which allows me to put analog music into the MP3 format and place them on a thumb drive and play them in the car.

I was doodling around my record collection a few weeks back, and I just came upon my Bee Gees album collection, which is substantial.

I was always a fan of theirs, but like many of their fans who were into their music when they were a rock act, I got completely turned off by their disco era music, so among the 20 or so LPs I have of theirs in my collection, no, “Saturday Night Fever” is not among them.

I had almost forgotten that I had so many of their records—I also have a handful of 45s, too—and I decided to start to digitize them in between everything else I have to do.

I have thus digitized seven of their LPs, from their first American album—aptly named “1st,”—and some of their later collections, including “E·S·P”—an album that was a worldwide hit but got little airplay in the U.S.

And I even digitized one of the multitude of “Greatest Hits” albums that they have put out, plus the album that pushed them closed to a disco sound without going whole hog into it, “Main Course,” featuring “Jive Talking’” and “Nights On Broadway,” the latter of which people forget got a lot of airplay on some of the top rock stations around at the time.

But I am most interested in those early LPs, like “Horizontal,” “Idea” and their aforementioned first LP, because that is where it all started for them in the U.S. and when I first became so interested in their music.

Those early albums—where some people thought they were the Beatles in disguise—are interesting collections, with one or two legitimate hits on each one bookended by a lot of psychedelic meanderings, some good, some sounding like vanity projects.

But I have to say that they sounded like no other band back then, with the three brothers’ voices being very distinctive, including that falsetto sound that no other act had (except Frankie Valli with the Four Seasons).

And listening to these LPs more than 50 years after the fact, you could just tell that they were milking that unique sound for all that it was worth, and they were doing it quite successfully.

I have to say that it adds to the pleasure I am getting in rediscovering these albums that these LPs that I have are in fine shape, with minimal nicks and pops and very little scratching. if any at all.

As a child, Barry Gibb was something of a child prodigy with music and the Bee Gees—originally named after Barry Gibb himself, not “Brothers Gibb” as it was later worked out to stand for—were huge hits in their native Australia at an early age.

They actually put out two LPs prior to having product in America, so even though their first American LP came out in 1967, they had been recording for many years prior to that.

I think the Bee Gees are something of musical chameleons, shifting their shape and their sound to fit into whatever music was popular at the time: first psychedelic rock, then 1970s pop, then disco, and finally back to rock and then to pretty much soft pop.

But they became one of the rock era’s top acts, and even if you dismiss the disco era, they have a fine cadre of songs that I am just rediscovering.

Just something to do when I have the time to relax, which is in between most of my time, where I am busy as can be.