The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees
Page 83
But Molly remained resolute. There would be no reconciliation.
* * *
As if Robin’s personal problems weren’t enough, The Bee Gees suddenly found themselves at loggerheads with Robert Stigwood. The ugly and — as it turned out — largely unnecessary confrontation was fought out in public in an unseemly manner and resulted in claims and counter claims running into hundreds of millions of dollars. The spark that lit this particular inferno was RSO’s claim that Barry could not undertake the Barbra Streisand project without the company’s direct consent. The dictatorial tone did not sit well with the brothers. On October 2, after more than 13 years under contract to Stigwood, The Bee Gees sued for release from all their ties with Stigwood, charging that he had controlled virtually every aspect of their professional lives leading to a conflict of interests as their personal manager as well as head of their record company and music publishing company, he had deliberately mismanaged the group to his own advantage and had withheld millions of dollars in royalties.
The Bee Gees announced they were suing Stigwood individually, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, the Robert Stigwood Group of Companies and RSO Records and seeking termination of their recording contract with RSO Records. The Bee Gees were seeking $75 million from Stigwood, $75 million from the PolyGram Group (which owned half of the Stigwood Group Companies), $50 million in punitive damages, millions more in interest and back royalties, the return of all The Bee Gees’ master recordings and copyrights, and the cancellation of all their “many and tangled contracts” with Stigwood.
Robert responded by issuing the following statement: “I am angry, dismayed, revolted. I will fight this attack on my integrity. I have instructed counsel to see that the truth is told and that those responsible for this travesty are made to account for their misconduct.” He remained sequestered in his Bermuda home.
The allegations rocked the music world. The brothers were depicted as ingrates, biting the hand which had fed them for so many years. Gershon labelled the lawsuit “revolting” and countered, “What you’re dealing with is a bunch of guys who are trying to renegotiate their contracts through the press. The Bee Gees have reached a certain point in their careers, and they’re trying to capitalise on it, and they’re frustrated because, for the last year and a half, Robert has refused to renegotiate. I don’t believe that The Bee Gees believe in this lawsuit. Barry Gibb looked me in the eye and said, ‘We have to start with a high number, Freddie, so we can renegotiate down to a new deal.’ I know that Robin and Maurice told Robert Stigwood that they’d never read or seen these papers.”
Gershon further declared that Stigwood had never discouraged the Gibbs from working on outside projects, and indeed, had been instrumental in negotiating the deal for Barry’s collaboration with Barbra Streisand.
Robert Stigwood remained in Bermuda, but Freddie Gershon insisted that he would not go down without a fight. “Robert has a Victorian sense of morality,” he explained. “He will see to it that this goes on and on until it’s proven publicly and clearly that he has done no wrong.”
RSO Records president Al Coury also leapt to Robert’s defence, outraged at what he saw as “a betrayal of Stigwood, in light of the relationship he has had with the group for the past 20 years.”
It wasn’t just blind devotion to his leader. Coury had felt in the past that Stigwood’s generosity to the group had compromised his position as head of the company. Coury had even threatened to resign over what he felt were unreasonable demands made by The Bee Gees relating to songs on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Due to Stigwood’s friendship with the boys, he had insisted that the record company spend far beyond what might be considered the normal budget for marketing, such as deluxe advertising campaigns, lavish album packaging and extraordinary special promotions for The Bee Gees’ product, to the detriment of the company.
“The group has made more than $56 million over the last five years while the record company has made less than half that amount,” Coury added. “If you took the cumulative profits of our company from its inception, I could show you that The Bee Gees have earned more than twice as much money as the entire record company. I can’t possibly pay them any more money. If I gave them any more money, I’d put my company out of business.”
On October 27, Robert Stigwood struck back, filing a $310 million suit against The Bee Gees in the New York Supreme Court. In it, he claimed that the Gibb brothers had libelled him. He also accused them of extortion and breach of contract, stating that he had “transformed the Gibbs from penniless youths into multi-millionaires.” An RSO spokesman stated, “Relations between us and The Bee Gees are best described as frozen.”
* * *
In Miami, Yvonne gave birth to a daughter on July 2, 1980, with Maurice again by her side. The new arrival was named Samantha Amanda, and the entire family was delighted. Maurice revealed that four-year-old Adam had taken a proprietary interest in his little sister, saying, “He thinks it’s his baby!”
Meanwhile, Barry applied to the Miami Beach zoning officials for permission to put up a nine foot high fence around his property following a spate of intrusions into his family’s privacy.
In September, Maurice became the first — and to date only — traveller to be put off a Concorde flight. After the rigorous “drying-out” programme at Pinecrest Hospital, and commenting, “The strongest drink I touch now is a Pepsi, but I guess I’ll probably have that image of being a lush for quite some time,” he had fallen back off the wagon. Arriving at Heathrow Airport over an hour and a half before the flight was due to depart, he waited in the Concorde departure lounge, where free food and drink are served. Yvonne, upset and afraid that he was in no fit condition for the journey, tried to curtail his drinking but eventually gave up the battle. Taking the children with her, she returned to the couple’s Surrey home. Maurice boarded the plane, bound from Heathrow to Washington DC, without her. The supersonic aircraft was ready for take-off, when the captain, judging Maurice “unsuitable for travel,” radioed for steps to be brought to the jet. He was carried off the plane and escorted back to the departure lounge.
After a 90-minute wait in the lounge, he was taken away in a white estate car to a hotel, where the party continued. Maurice was eventually tracked down by a member of The Bee Gees’ crew and duly escorted home.
Later that month, all four Gibb brothers were in Miami for the wedding of Candi Marshall and Karl Richardson.
The transformation of the warehouse had been completed at the start of year, and Middle Ear Recording Studio was ready for business. Tom Kennedy, The Bee Gees’ road manager, now took over the management of the studio. The new studio gave the group the freedom to record on their own terms, without having to work around Criteria’s busy schedule. Although the cost of converting the studio was high, Tom put it into perspective when he pointed out, “I think our last album at Criteria cost $700,000 …”
The group began work on their next album, tentatively titled Sanctuary, with the usual band of Alan Kendall, Blue Weaver and Dennis Bryon. The sessions soon broke down for reasons the Gibbs have never made public, and Dick Ashby informed the three musicians that their services were no longer required. The recording of the album would be completed with session musicians.
“We were there one day and gone the next,” Blue recalled.
“Well, it happened just like that, but we all knew it was coming because we weren’t producing anything,” he acknowledged. “It was stale, nothing was happening, we were in the studio for six months or something … We got complacent — we all just got complacent … We weren’t hungry, the incentive wasn’t there anymore.”
Although Blue admitted, “I think you’re a bit hurt at first that the split is there.” He said that he realised, “It had to happen at some point … I don’t blame them, I blame myself. It was my fault, it wasn’t their fault — I wasn’t putting in as much as I did in the beginning; none of us were, really, if they were completely honest with themselves.
Searching for new ideas for what turned out to be the Living Eyes album, the group turned to the Fairlight synthesizer and the synclavier as a new focus. “Albhy sort of took over the synclavier part and I got into the Fair-light,” Blue explained. “I think we were trying to make computer music rather than make real music … We were spending so much time on technology …”
Albhy Galuten verified the problems that arose from over reliance on computer technology. One of the drummers credited on the LP was Solly Noid. “Seth Synder, an engineer who built studios down there, developed a solenoid drum machine that we had out in the maintenance area. The drums themselves were real, but the trigger to play it, rather than a human, was an electronic impulse.
“What technology has enabled people to do is to infinitely save and try again. There’s no need for this emotional commitment that was required to get things done. We could fix anything, so you could make stuff perfect, and making things perfect doesn’t make it soulful and emotional,” Albhy added.
Blue is philosophical about the end of the Bee Gees’ band. “I think it had run its course, I don’t think I was particularly good for The Bee Gees during that period — I wasn’t coming up with anything new … I don’t think Albhy was a particularly good influence at that time … I’m not putting the blame on Albhy …”
Albhy agreed with Blue’s perspective on the times. The Living Eyes album is not one he looks back on with great affection. “There was a tremendous fear … that we had fallen into a rut, and I felt strongly on Living Eyes that it was time to change. When we started working on [it] and it was not being fun … I remember sitting around with my friends at the time … and saying, ‘It’s just not working and I think that I’m going to leave.’
“The problem was we had a formula that worked, but the formula was not the reason for success, the formula was the means.”
Blue’s own thoughts echoed Albhy’s. “I most probably should have gone off and done something else, but just being lazy, just going along day to day with what we were doing … I came back to England,” he recalled, “and most probably that gave them the breathing space to sit down and say, ‘We’re going nowhere — what are we gonna do? Okay, well, we’ve gotta do something as radical as what we did in 1975 …’
“That whole process of the Living Eyes album … if you consider what had just been done, myself and Robin had done Jimmy Ruffin, and we were really hyped up on that, they’d done Barbra Streisand … The process of making a new album after Spirits Having Flown was very difficult.
“If you think of all the things that they’d done, how can you top that, how can you actually make things better? We’d done everything that you could possibly do at that stage,” Blue said, “and everything reached such highs that it was hard to go from there.”
* * *
On January 10, 1981, Barry and Lynda’s third son, Travis Ryan, was born nearly two months prematurely, weighing four pounds and five ounces. His anxious parents waited as he spent the first seven weeks of his life in an incubator.
Finally, the day came when they were allowed to take their youngest son home, but the struggle wasn’t over. Within days, little Travis had contracted pneumonia and returned to Variety Children’s Hospital in South Miami.
“Our ordeal started all over again,” Barry said. “Pneumonia is bad enough for anybody, but for a premature baby, it’s usually fatal. It was an experience Lynda and I just don’t want to go through again — but it hasn’t put us off having more children.”
After Travis had recovered, Barry, Robin and Maurice paid a surprise visit to the hospital, with photographer Bob Sherman in tow, to spend an hour and a half talking to the 20 young people in the adolescent psychiatric unit and signing autographs.
Nearly a week after the visit, the Miami Herald reported that the visit had produced a “miracle cure” in an 11-year-old girl who had been virtually crippled by a brain inflammation. “The prognosis for her was very bad,” declared the hospital publicist, “but now the doctors say the possibilities for her recovery are limitless.”
Barry was once again touted for a starring role in a film, this time, A Face In The Crowd, the story of a pop star who finds success but loses everyone important to him as it all goes to his head.
On February 25, the twenty-third annual Grammy Awards were held in New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, hosted by Paul Simon. Barry and Robin were the only composers not to perform their nominated song, ‘Woman In Love’, in the Best Song category. The track didn’t win, but Barbra Streisand and Barry did collect the award for Best Pop Performance by a duo or group for ‘Guilty’.
In May, ‘Woman In Love’ was the winner in the Best Song Musically or Lyrically category at the twenty-sixth annual Ivor Novello Awards in Britain.
Whether or not there was any connection to the litigation involving The Bee Gees and Robert Stigwood, it was announced that RSO Records had fired about 80 per cent of its employees, reducing its American staff from about 60 to 12.
Al Coury admitted, “The chances of us having another Saturday Night Fever or Bee Gees aren’t good these days so we have to approach things differently than we did five years ago, or even 20 minutes ago. It didn’t make sense to have a big field staff pushing just a few records.”
After similar cutbacks the previous year, Casablanca, Phonogram/Mercury and Polydor Records had all been absorbed by PolyGram Records, which also distributed RSO Records, leading to speculation that Robert Stigwood was also planning to sell out to the parent company.
Coury explained, “Because we’re owned by one person, we’ve always had the ability to expand or contract to meet conditions.” He added that he was encouraged by Robert Stigwood’s plans to settle his differences with The Bee Gees, re-sign Eric Clapton to the company and to bring out more soundtracks.
“If he decides he wants to get out of the record industry, he could very easily sell the company to PolyGram,” he added. “But there’s been every indication that he plans on staying in this business.”
That month saw the settlement out of court of the lawsuits between Robert Stigwood and The Bee Gees. Apart from the escalating costs of the legal battle, the brothers were anxious to pursue a settlement with Stigwood rather than continue the fight. Sidelining their American attorneys, they re-engaged Michael Eaton, who had represented them as their solicitor in the early Seventies, and who had only recently returned to private practice after a period of work “in house” for Dick James Music. An RSO press release declared, “The Bee Gees deeply regret the distress caused by allegations made ostensibly in their name. The Bee Gees and Robert Stigwood … are delighted to continue their immensely successful long-term association.”
A Bee Gees’ spokesman told reporters, “Things will open up down the line, but for now, the press release is all we have to say.”
“The status quo remained,” Freddie Gershon gloated. “If you’ve been in the business long enough, you know that all artists go through periods of temporary insanity.
“The Bee Gees started investigating the facts, and I think they realised [that] it wasn’t worth it to go through several years of litigation, only to have a judge or jury tell them the same thing they found out for themselves: that Robert Stigwood has always treated them fairly and correctly. I believe they were embarrassed to find that out, and they dropped the suit and went away with their tails between their legs.”
His remarks did little to soothe matters, and in response The Bee Gees took out full page advertisements in both Rolling Stone and Variety, with the following declaration:
A STATEMENT FROM THE BEE GEES TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Up to this point in time we had intended there to be no further press statement regarding the recent settlement between the Robert Stigwood Or
ganisation and The Bee Gees, apart from the single statement from both parties that was agreed and issued on 8th May 1981. However, it has now become necessary, in response to a recent interview given by Mr Freddie Gershon, the President of RSO, Inc., to Rolling Stone published in the June 25th edition to set the record straight once and for all.
First and foremost, The Bee Gees have never ‘apologised’ to Robert Stigwood or RSO; this has never been the case, nor will it ever be the case, no matter what any other press article may claim.
Secondly, it should be said that, as well as those connected with RSO, The Bee Gees themselves also have personal opinions about the situation which arose and its outcome.
The Bee Gees have never revealed these personal opinions and this will hopefully continue to be the case.
We believe the venting of personal feelings in music trade magazines is a highly negative vocation and it displays an extreme disrespect for the very thing and the very reason we are all doing what we do, namely — the music.
We will now set before you — for the entertainment industry and the general public to digest — the actual terms of the recent settlement.
Recording
The Bee Gees will deliver to RSO the album currently being recorded by them and one more album. (These will constitute the seventh and eighth albums which were already required under the existing Agreements the terms of which were originally agreed in 1975.) The Bee Gees’ remuneration in respect of these last two albums has been improved; the advances have been greatly increased to what are now extremely substantial sums, the US royalty rate marginally improved (it was already considerable) and the rest of the world royalty substantially improved. In addition, the royalty rates on all product recorded prior to the commencement of the current Agreements have been very substantially improved.
There is no other recording obligation on the part of The Bee Gees to RSO.
The revised terms were agreed by the respective advisers of RSO and The Bee Gees, having regard to prevailing market conditions. An increase in the royalty rate had never (notwithstanding speculation to the contrary) been for The Bee Gees a material consideration in the litigation.