by Hector Cook
The original source of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ can be traced to a few lines of the lyric scrawled on Robin Gibb’s Concorde ticket. “The subject matter of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ is actually quite a serious one,” he said. “It’s about survival in the streets of New York, and the lyrics actually say that.”
“People crying out for help. Desperate songs. Those are the ones that become giants,” Barry explained. “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’s keen observation would ring true for Gloria Gaynor, whose number one smash ‘I Will Survive’ spent 15 weeks in the UK charts, three weeks longer than ‘Stayin’ Alive’ did.
“It became such a phenomenon, the whole Saturday Night Fever thing,” Robin added, “that very few people realise it’s to do with anything but dance. The lyrics don’t talk about dance at all. The lyrics very obviously state the scenario of survival in the city, and it’s not about disco dancing at all.”
Whether or not it mentions dancing, the opening of the film with the image of John Travolta strutting down the street to ‘Stayin’ Alive’ remains one of the most perfect and enduring marriages of film and music. Yet it almost didn’t happen.
Just a few weeks before filming was due to begin, the director whom Stigwood had hired, John Avildsen, decided that he didn’t want to use The Bee Gees’ music in his film. With the success of his earlier work, Rocky, the director had become imperious in his demands.
Kevin McCormick brought Stigwood the news. Stigwood called Avildsen and McCormick to a meeting in his apartment. “There’s good news and bad news,” he told Avildsen. “The good news is that you’ve been nominated for an Academy Award [for Rocky]. The bad news is that you’re fired.”
John Badham was rapidly hired as Avildsen’s replacement. “I checked that he worked fast,” Stigwood explained. “He didn’t mess around and could keep to time so I called him and arranged for him to fly to New York. I said, ‘I think it’s a bit long, John. On the plane read Wexler’s screenplay and tell me where you think the cuts should be,’ which he did … He met me in New York, and he was 100 per cent on time so I hired him then.” The shooting began, with The Bee Gees’ music very strongly in the foreground. Judging from the public’s reaction, it was the right decision.
‘Stayin’ Alive’ was issued as the second single, close to the release date of the movie. The amazingly steady rhythm from the drum loop made it perfect for John Travolta’s walk down the streets of Bay Ridge in the opening sequence, and yet some feel that it is actually quite hard to dance to this rhythm. This is somewhat ironic for a song that epitomises the disco era.
The B-side was indirectly from the movie. Yvonne Elliman’s version of ‘If I Can’t Have You’ appears both in the movie and on the album, but The Bee Gees’ version appeared only on this single until the Greatest album in 1979. This sounds more like a demo, with piano and a really high falsetto by Barry.
Yvonne’s hit version of the song is really not that different from The Bee Gees’ original recording and she was quite naturally thrilled by the outcome. “The Bee Gees are phenomenal songwriters and performers,” she enthused in an impromptu tribute. “They are not motivated by money. One of the things I admire most about Barry, Robin and Maurice is their genuine love for music.”
‘More Than A Woman’ was originally written and recorded as a demo for the group Tavares to record for the soundtrack and they went on to have a hit single with it. Like Yvonne Elliman, Tavares were grateful not only for the song but also for the friendship which developed as a result. A spokesman for the group said, “There are two primary areas of appreciation that we have for The Bee Gees. The first lies in their character as people. They are gentlemen of the first order and, in our opinion, they are the most creative and innovative musicians, writers and singers that we know.”
The Bee Gees’ own version of ‘More Than A Woman’ featured both on the album and in the film, and also found its way onto the B-side of ‘Night Fever’, which followed ‘Stayin’ Alive’ to become the third Bee Gees’ single from the album. It would be reasonable to conclude that the brothers had spent as much time recording ‘More Than A Woman’ as their single releases, but this was actually far from being the case.
“We overdubbed on it because they wanted it on the album, which was probably worth a lot of money, because every song was another piece of the royalty,” Albhy Galuten explained. “The person who made the most money in the shortest time, for the least amount of significant work,” he continued, referring to David Shire, “was the guy who scored the film. They had a side of an album, because they wanted to make a double album, [and] had a side empty so they had him write filler, stuff like ‘Night On Disco Mountain’. Can you imagine how much money he made, for going in one day and scoring that?”
Rick Dees, at various times in his career a writer of novelty songs, a DJ and a television chat show host, has had years to contemplate just how much money the album made. He wrote and recorded a novelty song called ‘Disco Duck’ and put it out on a small record label, Fretone Records. “Then we sold the master tape to Robert Stigwood through his representative, Al Coury, for $3,500. Three thousand five hundred dollars,” he emphasised.
The song topped the American charts for nearly a month, beating out established artists such as Paul McCartney and Chicago. “To ride that wave was an amazing experience … Can you imagine the angst of having one of your masterpieces at number four, and you look, and something called ‘Disco Duck’ was at number one?” Dees said.
His penny a copy royalty on the song added another $40,000 to his original fee of $3,500. Next RSO asked him if he would mind if they used ‘Disco Duck’ in the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. The young man was ecstatic. His agent negotiated the deal, and ‘Disco Duck’ can be heard in the background of John Travolta’s dance class in the film. For Dees, there was one small problem, which he learned only through bitter experience. “Negotiating a deal that you’re in the soundtrack is not the same as that you’re going to be on the soundtrack album. It would have been easy to say, ‘Just make sure you put it on the album.’ The Stigwood organisation would have said, ‘No problem!’ Lo and behold, the Saturday Night Fever album comes out. I run out to get the album. It’s got The Bee Gees, KC & The Sunshine Band, The Tramps [but] nowhere, Rick Dees.”
Royalties for a song’s inclusion on an album at that time would have been approximately 10 cents an album. The album’s sales topped 25 million. “Now we’re talking about a loss of $2.5 million,” Dees said. “So the ‘Duck’ became an albatross, hanging around my neck.”
Two more tracks were written during the recording sessions, but not destined for the Fever soundtrack. The first, ‘Warm Ride’, “was the only song from France we didn’t want,” said Barry. “We thought it [wasn’t] a hit, thought it was a bit too sexual, thought it was a bit too hot under the collar, and we didn’t make anything of it. We cut it as a demo and left it. Roger Daltrey’s … producer rang us up and asked if there was a song for Roger … We had the song ‘Warm Ride’ because it’s right down Roger’s alley. It’s the same chords he likes to use, it’s the kind of thing he might turn into a hit. We didn’t know, we didn’t think it was a hit, and we said, ‘We’ve got this one song — everything else has gone into the film, and we’re not writing right now.’ We sent him ‘Warm Ride’, and Roger didn’t want to do it — they turned it down.”
“Roger Daltrey … didn’t like it,” Albhy recalled. “You can see why. Barry is brilliant, but he doesn’t understand rock’n’roll. It’s not his genre. The idea of somebody like Roger Daltrey doing a song called ‘Warm Ride’ — I mean it’s not rock’n’roll sensuality, it’s an Australian pop star’s opinion of w
hat rock’n’roll sensuality would be like.” Eventually, the song would be released as a single, firstly by Rare Earth, then by Graham Bonnet, and it was also included on Andy Gibb’s third album, although Albhy said, “I don’t know why that got on there.”
The remaining song from the Chateau sessions was ‘Our Love (Don’t Throw It All Away)’. Written by Barry with Blue Weaver, the song would later become a hit single for Andy Gibb.
“That was me playing around again,” Blue said, “and Barry said, ‘Let’s try to write something.’ It wasn’t done for [Saturday Night Fever] — it was just something that we did … When Andy actually went to record it, Barry listened to it again, and thought, ‘Oh, it’s not finished,’ so Barry wrote the whole of the middle eight.”
Released in the USA in October and two months later in the UK, no one could have predicted the success of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, least of all The Bee Gees and their personal manager. Dick Ashby recalled, “We had no idea Saturday Night Fever was any big deal until album sales passed two million. When we saw the film the first time, the initial reaction, especially from some of the wives, was, ‘What awful language!’ You know, swear words.”
Although Robin maintains, “Total word of mouth was all Saturday Night Fever was about. There was no money for actual promotion so they couldn’t hype it. It was one of the few films in history that was as big as it was that actually did it on word of mouth.”
Al Coury of RSO claimed that the company concentrated a promotional drive on the film right up until its actual release. “Then we converted the campaign to selling the soundtracks and piggybacked onto the success of the film,” Coury explained. “The music that [The Bee Gees] produced for Saturday Night Fever and that success and its relationship to the success of that film just speaks for itself. They created history when they wrote those songs and performed them for the film.
“We sold 750,000 copies of the album in four days between Christmas and New Years. We knew we had the makings of a major hit album if we promoted it as an album.”
Barry laughed, “We thought we’d been big before. We didn’t realise that you could reach this stage!”
David English says he will certainly never forget his involvement in the album’s promotion. “We were in Paris and we were at the very top of the Hotel Intercontinental, well up into the sky, and we all got out of the window onto the balcony and walked round the ledge. We went past the room next to us and there was a couple in there actually making love! His young lady was sitting on top of him and the bloke looked up and saw the three Bee Gees walk past the window … and then they walked back again. The next day we were on the plane to London and this couple were actually on the plane, and as we walked by Barry said, “Hello darling, very nice to see you with your clothes on!”
Blue Weaver revealed that, in the studio at any rate, production was less of a priority than on their previous two albums. “We didn’t take as much trouble with that even as we did with Main Course, and nowhere near as long as Children Of The World, and it just sort of happened so quickly; nobody knew it was going to evolve into such a monster. I mean, it was huge!”
“As far as I know, it’s still the best selling soundtrack,” Maurice said recently, “and that was an incredible thing for me because I used to love Sound Of Music and that was number one for years. I never thought we’d knock Rogers and Hammerstein off.
“We got inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame, and above our picture was Rogers and Hammerstein. I can’t believe that we’re with these people or even classed in the same class. That was an amazing thing for me,” he marvelled.
Whilst no one was prepared for the smash hit that Fever became, Barry said that it hadn’t come as a complete shock. “We always had an idea that if we kept doing what we were doing long enough, someone might listen and something special might happen to us,” he explained.
* * *
The phenomenon that was Saturday Night Fever brought about an astonishing change to the personal lives of The Bee Gees and their families. “It’s starting to feel very much like 1967 and ’68,” Barry said. “It gets so everybody’s running your life, or trying to, and you can’t breathe. Ask our wives. If any body knows, they do. You have to protect yoursel for else you end up like distant friends, passing in the corridor between appointments.”
He admitted, “Success hits you in a way that you never expect. No one can prepare you for it. You think everybody around you has changed; they think you have. They think they ought to listen to you, and you sit there scratching your head, thinking, ‘Well, what if I don’t say anything?’ Eventually you feel you are a commodity instead of the person.”
Robin celebrated the group’s new found success in his own way. According to Barry, Robin has an “idiosyncrasy” — whenever anything good happens, he likes to lie back in his bath and savour the moment. The Bee Gee with a constant eye on the charts, Robin would find plenty to celebrate that year.
All three of The Bee Gees’ singles had become chart toppers in the United States. ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ was the initial release in October, which remained in the charts for an unprecedented 26 weeks, reaching the top by Christmas Eve. It was joined in the States in December by ‘Stayin’ Alive’ although British fans would have to wait until after the New Year for its release on seven-inch format. By the time ‘Night Fever’ completed the trio in February, ‘Stayin’ Alive’ had taken over the peak position, where it remained for four weeks until it was displaced by youngest brother Andy’s ‘(Love Is) Thicker Than Water’. ‘Night Fever’ regained the pinnacle for the elder Gibbs two weeks later with ‘Stayin’ Alive’ at number two, and the Barry and Robin Gibb composition, ‘Emotion’ by Samantha Sang at number three. On March 4, those five songs comprised half of the American Top 10. Referring back to Robin’s idiosyncrasy, Barry quipped, “That week, Robin was clean as a whistle.” ‘Night Fever’ held the top spot for the next eight weeks, before being replaced by Yvonne Elliman’s rendition of The Bee Gees’ ‘If I Can’t Have You’ in mid-May.
Criteria Studios would also claim a share of the Gibbs’ achievements too. Although technically entitled to do so, they were stretching the point a little as not all five songs had been recorded there. Only the remixing and overdubs on the Fever songs were done at Criteria.
In Britain, ‘Night Fever’ also achieved the top spot, while ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ reached the fourth and third position respectively.
When ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ entered the British charts, it was a sweet victory for The Bee Gees. “You have no idea what a thrill it is to have a Top Five single in England,” Barry exclaimed. “With all the new wave and punk rock out, I would have thought something like ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ wouldn’t have a chance. We always kept going forward and we’re getting stronger every day.”
In Chile, Portugal, Italy and Australia, The Bee Gees’ version of ‘More Than A Woman’ would also be released as a single, giving them another Australian Top 40 hit.
For Maurice, their success could be measured by the impact it would have on the brothers’ children. “It ended up providing security for our kids. When they were first born, that was always our main goal, to make sure they’d have nothing to want for in life if anything ever happened to us. We’re not that materialistic. Sure, I have a house [in Miami Beach] and in England, where most people who have supposedly earned as much as us have four or five houses. We’re very sensible, we don’t flaunt it, but we do make sure it works for us and that it’s there for the kids.”
After the completion of the Saturday Night Fever tracks and mixing the live album, Barry and Lynda Gibb had rented out their house in the Isle of Man to the estate agent who had sold it to them in the first place and had moved to Miami Beach. It was a way of trying to bring some stability and permanence into their lives, making their home base near the recording studio. Within months, Barry was urging the whole family to move there. Lynda’s parents, George and May Gray
, were soon Miami-bound and installed in Barry and Lynda’s new home.
By this time, Andy and his wife Kim were already in Miami, and Barbara, Hugh and Beri were persuaded to leave Australia and settle nearby. In early August, Maurice and Yvonne arrived in Miami to live, with Yvonne’s parents and brother Herbie joining them.
The only hold-outs were Robin and Molly, still staunchly determined that Britain was the best place to raise their two children, in spite of the punitive tax rate in Britain at the time.
“Taxes for people under a high earning bracket pay 83 per cent tax,” Barry explained in qualifying his decision to become a tax exile. “If you have shares in a company or dividends coming in, that is taxed at 98 per cent.”
“Lots of rock stars complain about the tax situation, but you can still get things done. It’s my home and where my family is. I have a good accountant, and I don’t pay that much tax in England,” Robin countered. “The average fool does. I’m waiting to see what happens in the next elections. If the Conservatives get in, I’m sure they will reduce the maximum tax to 50 per cent.”
In early 1977, Robin and Molly had moved to a larger house, complete with swimming pool and tennis court, near their former home in Virginia Water, Surrey. “Molly wants to stay at home and won’t travel around, so there’s some tension,” he admitted. “But she’s a human being too. I don’t own her. She wants the kids to grow up in one place. As kids, we never lived in one place for more than two years. As a result, we didn’t really have a childhood. We don’t want our families to grow up like that.”
“I don’t think America is the best country to raise children in. I don’t like the whole commercial aspect of life out there,” Molly added. “Besides, I prefer to live in England and so does Robin. He’s happy working in the States, but I think he keeps his sanity by coming back [to England] where he can relax.”
“I fish in the river, play tennis. I spend lots of time with my wife and kids. A quite sane life,” Robin explained. “You see, we never had this as kids. We were always too busy working, singing on the road. We had to make our own lives stable. In the early days, we practically had to work to live. Our family didn’t have much money so I think they had to make it on us … My father was 41 when we moved from Manchester to Australia. We left nothing behind, except Manchester, and I wouldn’t want to die there. I suppose I’ve got to look back fondly on my childhood. I’ve got no other life.”
