When asked about their success, Barry said: “Firstly, I think we give the public melodies. And secondly we don’t attempt to preach at anyone. There are so many groups which try to change the world. We are simply a pop group which writes all its own songs. We write songs about people and situations—we tell stories.”{90} “We always try to put ourselves into our records,” Robin said. “We’ve never tried to write anything that wasn’t us. What we are doing is sort of writing down people’s thoughts; nobody has ever thought of writing down things exactly the way people think.”{91}
Now that they were #1, the Bee Gees got the full star treatment from the press. Barry was asked about the band’s stage presentation and style. “We’d like to bring back some of the glamour that’s gone out of pop. I think that the visual impression given by a group on stage is perhaps more important in some ways than the sound they are laying down. The glamour started to go out of pop when groups started wearing jeans and any old clothes on stage. Pop groups are there to entertain. We have to go on stage and project something that’s entertaining visually and musically to earn our wages. It’s not enough to go on stage and play the music. A lot of groups talk to each other, have private jokes on stage—that sort of thing. But once you start cutting the audience out, they’ll cut you out, too. We spend a long time before a gig deciding what to wear on stage because we are concerned to give a good show for an audience who’ve paid and so that we can go back there again.”{92}
Others disagreed. “Well, they’re in their own little fantasy world,” Keith Richards said. “You only have to read what they talk about in interviews . . . how many suits they’ve got and that kind of crap. It’s all kid stuff, isn’t it?”{93}
Barry, hardly past his twenty-first birthday, already sounded like a fifty-year-old record executive. He carefully parsed out pop, and did not fall prey to the conceit that the advent of rock and roll meant that all pop music was countercultural. He describes his work as entertainment, not self-expression. Barry avoided a precious trope of the day, that the artist and audience formed a commune, with the artist representing all present. Barry regards the audience as a separate beast, gazing at him hungrily, waiting to be fed. He didn’t think it was “enough to go on stage and play the music.” But that was the current vogue; rock bands were moving away from being consciously entertaining in favor of “authenticity.” Barry was too vested in old-school showbiz for any of that nonsense. Who he was and what he did remained forever distinct.
At times, Robin and Maurice registered the unspoken psychic connection that only twins possess.
“When Robin was late for a press conference,” Maurice said, “I said, ‘There is something wrong. Something has happened to Robin.’ And Barry said, ‘What do you mean?’ And then we found out. We watched the news, saw the train disaster and I went, ‘Robin was on it!’ We went to Hither Green Hospital and there was Robin—his [girlfriend Molly Hullis] was in having x-rays—sitting there going, ‘I didn’t think I was going to see you guys again.’ He pulled six people out of a carriage and he said, ‘I never knew I had that much strength.’ He laid them on the lawn, and they were all dead. I knew he had been through a strenuous thing—my own arms were aching.”{94}
Robin and Molly were on a packed Sunday night train on November 5, 1967, returning from Molly’s parents’ house near Hastings to London Charing Cross. At the Hither Green maintenance station, the train derailed; eleven of twelve coaches went off the tracks and four landed on their sides. Forty people died and another seventy-eight were injured. It was an epoch-making accident in England, one remembered with horror for generations. A broken rail at a track joint was later found to be the cause. “We were approaching Lewisham at about 90 mph (the train was actually going about 60 mph) when I heard a clattering,” Robin told the Daily Mail, “as though a stone was being thrown at us. What I didn’t realise was the engine had become uncoupled. Then the carriage rolled over and big stretches of railway line came crashing in straight past my face.”{95}
Molly and Robin clung to each other as their coach tumbled over and over until it came to rest a thousand yards from the tracks. “When the train stopped there was a hissing sound, then the gut-wrenching screams. They pulled 24 people from the second class carriage with railway lines through their bodies. Some were unconscious, some had no legs. I was lifting badly injured people about three times my weight out of the compartments.”{96}
Robin later claimed that “Massachusetts” had saved their lives, because it enabled him to buy first-class tickets. Most of the dead rode the second-class cars, which lacked a central corridor to absorb the shock of the coaches’ rolling. Robin heroically pulled the living from the wrecked cars and helped move the dead. “People had to be amputated on the railway line and I was talking to them as they were being injected. All I wanted to do was escape. It was like Dante’s Inferno. At the time you can’t feel fear or anger, you can only deal with one emotion at a time. Survival took over, eating up my energy. I was covered in blood, had glass in my eyes and mouth. But when I got to the hospital, it was like a scene from World War One. I felt so guilty being there I jumped in a car and went home. Later I got delayed shock, didn’t sleep for a long, long time afterwards.”
Neither he nor Molly was hurt. Both credit the incident with bringing them closer together, and making their marriage a certainty.
“For ages, I didn’t talk about the crash,” Robin said. “Then I went through a guilt trip of feeling people were hurt, so why wasn’t I? I’ve travelled in trains since but I don’t like it, always keep listening for a change in the sounds. For a while I felt fragile and vulnerable; everything seemed paper-thin.”{97}
Robin wrote “Really and Sincerely” the day after the Hither Green crash and recorded it the day after that. Over a mournful accordion, Robin sings from the perspective of what seems to be the recently dead or recently rejected. It’s a melancholy cry from the heart, and a perfect example of how all the Bee Gees—but Robin foremost—transferred real experiences into lyrics of vague or opaque meaning, but of great emotional power. The song never cites the crash, or fear or its effects on Robin. “It doesn’t mention anything about the train crash,” Robin said, “but it does reflect the mood I was in.” Robin’s mood, if the song is any judge, was elegiac; it sounds like his hymn for the dead of the crash.
Barry, talking about Robin, and fears of traveling, said, “We cannot sleep in planes. Robin is as nervous as a kitten. I know that you can say there is more chance of a crash on the roads, but it can happen in the air, too. Or on a train like Robin in the Hither Green tragedy. He could well have been killed.”{98}
On November 17, the band switched on the Christmas lights on Carnaby Street. On November 19, the Bee Gees mounted what would become their prototypical stage show for the coming years. “We’re all excited about the Saville show,” Barry said. “It’s really going to be something that people have never seen before.” “We’re having a thirty-piece orchestra,” Maurice said. “And a hundred extras to enact scenes from mythological and historical events.”{99} The show featured “World,” their next single, and the first from their upcoming LP.
Back in October, England’s Home Office told Vince and Colin that, as Australians, their visa time in England was up and they had to go home. “It’s no use getting dragged about it,” Colin said. “We never discuss it among ourselves. There’s no point. We’d sooner wait and see what happens. It’s unfair though. We are making money for Britain and as a child I made three films here on which I paid tax. But now I can’t live here. If we weren’t in the public eye, no one would have noticed how long we stayed.”{100} November 30 was their deadline. “This has been as far as the Prime Minister,” Stigwood said, “and Home Office still says they must leave the country for six months on November 30. At the moment our legal representatives are presenting the Home Office with evidence of the group’s foreign currency earning power—Atlantic Records are furnishing them with their royalty earnings to date. It seem
s ridiculous to force them to leave when they are bringing so much money into the country.”{101}
The Bee Gees planned to use temporary replacements. “The problem will not be finding good musicians,” Colin said, “but finding two guys who will harmonize personally within the group.” “Six months’ holiday,” Maurice said. “Lucky swine!”{102} During the publicity over this dispute, Maurice took his driving test. The tester said, “You’re one of the Bee Gees, aren’t you—the ones getting deported?” Maurice said: “I was about to say this applied to only two of the members, when this bloke says: ‘Then why the hell are you taking your test?’ That got me. My blood really boiled, and I thought, ‘Right, mate.’ I gave it to him at 80. We were going along like there was no tomorrow. When we got out, he said, ‘Mr. Gibb, I’m happy to say you’ve failed.’”{103}
Stigwood and the Bee Gees fan club staged a series of rallies and publicity stunts in support of Colin and Vince. Fans blocked the entrances to government buildings and rained abuse on officials. Stigwood kept up the pressure by proving to the Home Office how much tax revenue the Bee Gees were producing and how much would be lost if they took a six-month hiatus. Stigwood’s cross-promotional strategy of low-end public pressure and high-end private negotiation proved successful. The Home Office amnestied Vince and Colin and gave them unlimited-time work permits.
“World,” the lead-in single for Horizontal, was released in mid-November. It’s generic psychedelia, a Magical Mystery Tour rip, with a ringing, sad piano and wavering organ/mellotron that evokes a Theramin. The drums, though playing forward, are produced to mimic the backward-Ringo on various Beatle tracks. Barry whisper-sings of his memories and aspirations. The big revelation is that “the world is round.” For a band trying to avoid being compared to the Beatles, “World” was not the best career move. The New Musical Express liked it, though: “It seems a little early for the Bee Gees to release another single, but that won’t prevent it from being another big ’un. It’s another hauntingly simple tune like ‘Massachusetts’ and registers as quickly—maybe because it immediately reminds you of something else. And it’s encased in a gorgeous backing of shimmering strings. But this time, between each of the stanzas, there’s a contrasting instrumental passage of twangs and other raucous sounds. The combined effect is quite stunning! It’s melodic, delightfully harmonized and incredibly well produced. I can’t get the tune out of my mind!”{104}
It’s hard to say what the reviewer was actually listening to, because “World” could not be less like “Massachusetts.” It has no hook, no singable chorus, no air of evocation. The lyrics suggest Barry reaching for profundity and not quite grasping it. “I think ‘World’ is certainly a deeper number than ‘Massachusetts,’” Barry said. “‘World’ means a lot and I don’t think that many people have caught on to all the implications of the song yet. We were making the point that we thought people were taking flower power far too seriously. No matter which way you look at things, flower power doesn’t change it.
“Somewhere in the world, every day, people are fighting—somewhere every day it rains!” Barry said, paraphrasing the lyric. “There were only a minority of people in the midst of the whole flower thing who really loved their neighbors. That’s why it’s died out—because there is still a majority of people who are fighting all over the world. Let’s face it; few people were true to the origins of flower power, nobody really thought about it. Anyway, why do you need LSD if you’re truly peaceful and love everybody? Why do you need it to make creative music? You don’t if you’re using your imagination properly. And not if you have faith in what you’re doing. ‘To Love Somebody’ flopped—but we didn’t start flapping about it—we went on and we came up with ‘Massachusetts.’ We knew ‘To Love Somebody’ was a good record—so it wasn’t as though we lost faith in ourselves. And then we did ‘World’—you know you’ve got to keep going. We’re halfway through our third album at the moment and we’ve still got about another dozen songs to do. We’re writing more songs in the studio all the time. We hope to be able to continue doing what we’re doing now and being successful. If we drop, it won’t stop us trying and trying.”{105}
“World” stayed on the charts for sixteen weeks, topping out at #9.
The day after Christmas, the Bee Gees appeared on Top of the Pops once more, and closed out the year by returning to Germany’s Beat-Club. Barry and Robin were knackered. Constant performing, traveling, recording, writing and the wages of fame—celebrated company, sleepless nights, various indulgences, fans and press everywhere—had taken their toll. In the world of music, “nervous exhaustion” is usually a euphemism for “too drugged out or drunk to work.” For once, this was not the case. One measure of the stress they were under is that Barry admitted he felt worn out. Robin was a sensitive creature at the best of times. Barry was an iron man. If Barry needed a lie-down, then their lives were stressful.
They flew to Australia for a break and to visit Stigwood’s family, but quickly turned around and left. “We should have gone on from Sydney to Melbourne, but the pressure was too great and we decided to fly back to Britain,” Barry said. Stigwood had arranged for press and fans to show up everywhere, and the boys couldn’t take it. “We didn’t know, but our manager Robert Stigwood only booked us as far as Istanbul. He wanted us to rest there for a day. As it happened, we couldn’t have gone any further anyway. We went to hospital from the airport for a check-up, and they let us go to a hotel. We stayed in the hotel for a couple of days resting and then flew to London.”{106}
Horizontal came out on January 1.
“We did a lot of the production on this album ourselves,” Barry said. “Far more so than on the first album. There are a lot of numbers on the first album that we wouldn’t do now, so I suppose the second album is a progression. We try to progress naturally without going out of our way to do ridiculous things for the sake of different sounds.”{107} “On the new album, there is more of the group and less orchestrated things than on our first album.” Robin said. “There’s none of that seven hundred piece business—just a mere string quartet, occasionally.” “It’s the same kind of things as we’ve been doing all along.” Barry insisted. “We’ve not changed that much since the first album! We’ll still keep on doing the same type of music—and we hope eventually it’ll be recognized here—but it’s not lots of word messages, not like Dylan or somebody like that. People find it more fun to live in fantasy.” “I mean look at most people,” Robin said. “They wake up in the morning and they say, ‘Today I’m going to face the world,’ and by the afternoon they’re ready to commit suicide! They hate reality.” Maurice, who seemed to be rooting hard against reality, said, “If you’re not in reality, then you don’t have to face your trivialities.”{108}
The reality was that critics were unimpressed with the record. Robin’s description is an exercise in denial of reality—the album is drenched in strings, to its detriment. “To comprehend the Bee Gees is to comprehend much that is banal, without grace, and trite,” wrote Jim Miller in Rolling Stone, overstating the case but encapsulating US critical opinion. “Hell-bent on sounding pretty, defiantly reactionary and out no doubt for the bread [money] and popular air-play, the Bee Gees have their game down very well.”{109}
Critics often painted the Bee Gees as false and mercenary even though their early albums were desperately earnest. The boys wanted to write hits, but so did everybody else with a record deal. The press party line became that the Bee Gees somehow operated on a lower level of authenticity than other bands with their sales. It’s the single most unfair aspect of how critics viewed them, and that view has unfairly endured. It shows, too, how little attention their strongest critics paid to their music; not to their clothes or image or haircuts or presentation, but to their music.
Horizontal set patterns that would endure: a Bee Gees album will have at least three great pop songs—a couple of hits and at least one sadly overlooked gem—and the rest will be filler. Some of the filler will be orn
ate and strained, some overly simple. The hits will have hooks; the filler meanders. “Lemons Never Forget,” “Day Time Girl” and “Earnest of Being George” are Beatles-esque, with a heavy drum sound and quavery vocals. “George,” as close to rocking as the Bee Gees ever got, is a mélange of “Hey Bulldog” and “Eleanor Rigby,” with fantastic, backward-Ringo-like, heavily treated drums. “Massachusetts,” “Really and Sincerely” and “And the Sun Will Shine” leap out from the rest. “Really” is a Robin opus: tortured, beautifully realized and stunning. “Massachusetts,” like “Words,” is pure pop, beautifully arranged, unforgettable and free of decoration. Robin’s “And the Sun Will Shine” furthers a recurring pattern. Every Bee Gees record will showcase one of Robin’s over-the-top orchestral confessionals of pure crazy emotion, a commitment to anguish and sincerity that only an eighteen-year-old genius could produce. Otherwise, the songs with hooks are irresistible; the songs without are hard to sit through. Horizontal went to #12 on the US charts and #16 in the UK.
As the saying goes, you get twenty-five years to make your first album, and a year to make your second. In the Bee Gees case it was barely twenty—for Barry—and a little less than six months. To create even two great tracks on a second major-label album is a worthy accomplishment. “I’ve been listening to our album, and listening to other albums to compare it,” Vince said. “I find that on most albums three, maybe four, tracks are good and the rest are pretty well rubbish. There are only about two tracks on our album I don’t like.” Here, Vince demonstrates prudent denial of his own reality. “You try to give people quality all the time and you benefit from it in the long run. If people like you and go out and buy your singles, you should not put out rubbish on an LP.”{110}
The Bee Gees Page 6
