odessa
The late Sixties were the worst time to be a pop star.
—Robin Gibb{127}
In late September, “I Gotta Get a Message” peaked at #8 on the US charts and held that spot until October 19. Robin had written most of it; the song sprang from a lover’s quarrel with Molly. Robin, longing to speak to her, wrote of his yearning from the next room. Barry honed the song with an eye toward offering it to Percy (“When a Man Loves a Woman”) Sledge. As with “To Love Somebody,” Barry’s instincts were spot on; Percy’s version, recorded years later, is definitive.{128}
Robin sang lead, a fact not unnoticed by Robin, Barry or Stigwood. Tensions were building. Who was the boss, who was the star, whose ideas would dominate and who got to sing lead?
“One of the other things was the difficulty over composer’s credits for songs,” Barry told Australia’s Go-Set magazine. “One of us would write a song which would go down on the record with B., R. and M. Gibb credited; that’s okay, the same as when Paul McCartney writes a song and John Lennon automatically gets a credit. The problem comes when the song becomes a hit, then that person who actually composed it realizes that, not only is he missing all the prestige of having individually written a hit song, but he’s also missing two-thirds of the royalties as well.”{129} And usually, it was Barry who wrote most of the songs.
Work began on Odessa in late July 1968. Cream’s Wheels of Fire came out in July and lit up the charts. Wheels was a double album. The Beatles’ upcoming White Album, which would be released in November, was a double album. The Who’s Tommy was going to be a double album. Stigwood urged the Bee Gees to make a double album. Worse still, he requested one with a concept.
“Odessa was an attempt to do a rock opera,” Barry said. “It turned itself into a bit of a mish mash, but our intentions were honourable. We wanted to do something that could be put on stage. There was supposed to be a thematic thing, but it kind of wandered off into the distance.”{130}
Odessa’s concept wasn’t the only thing wandering off into the distance. After the cancelled tour, Vince spent a week playing at Atlantic Studios in New York. When he got back to the UK, he was ready to leave the band. There are few songs not written by a Gibb in the Bees Gees’ discography, but Vince had a track on Idea, the rock and rolling, early Stones-ish “Such a Shame.” Vince sang lead—an even more rare occurrence in the Bee Gees canon—and the song features an uncharacteristic blues-harp break. It doesn’t sound like anything else on the record. “Shame” appeared on the UK release of Idea, but was omitted from the US edition in favor of “I Started a Joke.” Vince couldn’t argue with the commerce of that decision from the Bee Gees’ vantage, but the omission cost him a lot of money, and it rankled.
“He’d have to be mad,” Stigwood said, meaning “insane,” “to walk out on a successful venture like this.”{131}
“I have never really felt 100 per cent a Bee Gee,” Vince said. “Because the talent that I have doesn’t come up to the standard of the Gibb brothers’ talent and I don’t think I am adding as much as they are. I realise that my ideas don’t augment their ideas.”{132}
Vince worried that he wasn’t getting enough solo guitar breaks and that his chops might be slipping. He wanted to play more. That not unreasonable desire foreshadowed similar desires from everyone else in the band.
“Vince felt stifled because the rest of us are only interested in playing commercial numbers,” Barry told the press. “It’s no good having somebody in the group who’s not really with you.”{133}
Vince had his complaints: “The first three albums were really rushed,” he said. “We never spent much time on arrangements or perfecting sounds. The boys would come to the studio and work up a song with Barry’s guitar and the three voices, while Colin and I played chess outside. Then we’d all record the basic tracks. Bill Shepherd would take away acetate and write the string parts. Occasionally Stiggy (Robert Stigwood) would come in and say: ‘More strings here,’ but generally he let us do our thing.”{134}
Vince’s leaving worried Colin. “I think Maurice felt it as much as I did,” Colin said. “But I don’t think I’m any more on my own now Vince has gone. Possibly if we went on tour I would feel more of an outsider. None of us see each other much and I see Maurice more than the others. It’s a job and you’re with each other enough when you’re working. To be together all the time could be bad for a group.” Colin was not going anywhere, if he could help it. “I think visually the drummer is important in a group. Vince’s leaving did more damage than people think and the Bee Gees couldn’t stand another person leaving. It wouldn’t be possible for any of us to leave now without breaking the group up.”{135}
As feelings worsened between the brothers in the studio, Barry gave an interview in early September that fanned the flames. “Sure, I’m leaving the Bee Gees,” he insisted. “I’m going into films. But it will be at least two years before it happens. I had film offers about four weeks back when we came home from America,” he said. “I can’t be specific but they were strong, attractive offers. I don’t want to do it now, but today is the right time to think about it.”{136}
This was not what the two not-so-movie-star-looking brothers wanted to hear—that their fearless leader intended to abandon them for Hollywood. Barry made it clear that only a legal quibble, not band or family loyalty, stood in his way.
“I have to fulfill contracts for the next two years,” he said. “So the Bee Gees won’t be splitting for at least two years. I wanted to move into films before I got too old to make pop records. And, let’s face it, that can happen.”{137} I’d like to do whatever I’m capable of doing, writing or acting.”{138} Then, in case Barry hadn’t been a big enough dick about it already, he told the New Musical Express: “I shall honour all contracts, but will not sign any more as a member of the Bee Gees.”{139}
To underscore his independence, Barry produced a single for new Stigwood signees, the Marbles. The Gibbs wrote “Only One Woman,” which reached #5 in the UK. It was the Marbles’ only hit.
To stop the band from communicating through the press, Stigwood weighed in, cool and businesslike: “I already have commitments for the group running well into 1970,” he said. “We are hoping Barry can be persuaded to change his mind.”{140} When asked how his brothers might feel about him bolting, Barry said: “They know that no group lasts forever. Can you see us like we are now when we are all thirty? I could not leave pop music altogether. I love making records; I love making music; I love writing songs. It’s like the sex force. I like every part of the pop business—though I’m sick and tired of backbiters.”{141} The backbiters in this case were likely the Marbles, whom Barry had found insufficiently grateful for his efforts and their #5. Apparently the Marbles talked smack about Barry to the English music press. They never charted again.
Someone inside the studio at this time said: “There was intense rivalry and in-fighting—major ego-clashes which were fed, used and manipulated.”{142}
Barry made things worse: “I want to get out of the pop business because it’s too petty,” he claimed. “There’s too many little people trying to talk big! A film star is more solid. Pop singers get no respect. Their lives are filled with drugs, bawdiness and no religious beliefs. They don’t know anything about the rest of the world, just their own narrow little lives. The men behind the desks in the film business are more realistic.”{143}
In the meantime, the band was groping through Odessa and running off to play concerts here and there. Robin and Molly grew ever closer to marriage and Barry ever nearer to divorcing Maureen. He and Lynda were living together.
In the studio, the arguments boiled down to who could impose his will on the others. If Odessa ever had a concept, it got lost in the logistics of whose song would get worked on and who would sing what. Vince claimed that Stigwood believed that “Barry’s voice worked better on the hits.”{144} But Robin sang lead on “Message,” which had staying power in the charts. Seeking some kind
of order, Stigwood appointed Barry as “coordinator.” That pissed off Robin and Maurice all the more. Barry had always been their boss—they’d looked up to him and followed him. Now, in their view, they were grown men and wanted equality. Barry behaved as if nothing had changed. The twins became resentful.
As they bickered and created and played live, sang and played and feuded with no escape from each other, Colin ran the brothers down: “Robin is temperamental and highly strung. He won’t take criticism. Maurice is a different character—a sort of romantic figure. Barry is easy going and not as single-minded as Maurice or Robin. He changes his thinking to the situation. As brothers they are alike in a different way, a vague sort of way. I’m not like any of them. I’m tighter with money than them, in that I worry about the future. The brothers mostly live for the day.”{145}
As always, the guy with no piece of the songwriting or publishing has to be tighter with money and can’t “live for the day.” “I am closer to Maurice,” Vince said. “Maurice takes interest in the interests I have apart from the group. He’ll come over and we’ll wash my car together, which I cannot imagine Robin or Barry doing.”{146}
Barry washing anybody’s car, including his own, is not an image that comes easily to mind. Vince was closer to Maurice because Maurice had chosen to become the middle brother—the conciliator communicating both ways in every struggle: between Barry and Robin, between Robin and Vince, between Vince and Barry. Maurice would end up stuck in that role the rest of his life. It did him little good.
“Maurice learned to play chess,” Colin said. “Barry would get as far as the pawns and give up and sit down to write a song. Maurice will listen to me if I have musical interests that are not à la Bee Gee.” Colin claimed to be the source on Odessa of a discernable country music influence and of an imitation of the Band’s first album—the Americana-rootsy Music from Big Pink. “It was my idea that we do that sort of thing,” Colin said. “Maurice listens to what I have to say. Although within the group the okay has to come from Barry.”{147}
Maurice and Lulu became more serious. Lulu’s friend Joanne Nuffield got engaged to Colin. Lulu came down to the studio at their invitation; Maurice was hanging out. “As soon as I saw him I realised how much I’d missed him,” Lulu wrote. “The chemistry was still there, only stronger.”{148}
At times, Maurice had difficulty with Lulu’s fame. Her fans would besiege her for autographs, then dutifully ask Maurice for his, saying: “Yours, too, Barry.”{149} Their romance was a natural for the tabloids. Stories appeared about them daily. The photographers that swarmed Lulu would often yell at Maurice to “get out of the way!” Maurice proposed in October. Lulu wanted a long engagement. Both their schedules were so crazed that neither had time for a wedding, or to be together if they were married. “I really wanted to make it official,” Lulu wrote. “I had remained a virgin, despite all the obstacles, temptations and some marathon kissing sessions. The sixties were nearly over. I was nineteen, going on twenty. Talk about now or never.”{150}
Lulu’s knowing innocence underscores how incredibly young they both were. Maurice was only nineteen. No wonder his and Robin’s battles with Barry felt like the end of the world. They were shedding a family model and hierarchy that hadn’t changed since they were five. Finding a path to adulthood meant cutting the cord. Barry, naturally, resisted any reshaping of the dynamic.
Stigwood played the father figure in this archetypal drama. Stigwood, unlike Hugh, had power to share and blessings to bestow or withhold. Like the potentate he was, Stigwood made everyone vie for his good graces. The brothers were young enough to fall into that game without realizing they were. “He is a Svengali,” Komlosy said. “He dominates you. He dominates your mind. He imposes his will. He is like a father, and the children are all jealous of the father’s attention. They all respect and admire him.”{151}
Stigwood said of the in-studio feud, as if he wasn’t stirring the pot daily: “It was three brothers fighting, and when brothers fight that is really terrible.”{152} Despite the battling, there was no letup in their schedule. The boys played concerts in Germany and returned to Beat-Club.
Lulu wouldn’t live with Maurice until they were married. Robin and Molly had lived together since shortly after the train crash. Barry thought marriage was bad for a pop star’s image and commercial prospects. He had kept his marriage to Maureen secret. He feared young fans would turn against him if they thought he wasn’t somehow available. He had not lived with Maureen since shortly after he arrived in England. Barry was now always with Lynda and slowly laying the groundwork—or getting up the nerve—to divorce Maureen. Barry had the gall to tell the papers that Maurice and Lulu were too young to wed. Lulu, whose relationship with her brother was mutually supportive, was surprised by Barry’s sniping. Maurice, as he had learned to do, ignored it.
In early December, Odessa was finally done. “By the end we weren’t on speaking terms,” Barry said. “We’d go into the studio one at a time. But at least we finished it.{153} “[On ‘Never Say Never’] I wanted a line to go ‘I declared war on Spain,’” Robin said, demonstrating that, as usual, in-band arguments made little sense to outsiders. When Robin and his demands were involved, they befuddled insiders, too. “Instead Barry wanted something so normal it was ridiculous. He said my words were unromantic. But what could be more normal than a man in love wanting to declare war on anything that was to him unlovely?”{154}
“Odessa marked the period when we were breaking up,” Barry said. “We weren’t talking to each other, so we weren’t in the studio together half the time, with some of us cutting parts of it in New York while others were in London. We weren’t as friendly toward each other. So the record took three or four months—a long time.”{155} “We never got to the end of Odessa. I was the last person in the studio with Mike Wade mixing ‘Lamplight’ and I left before we’d finished. I thought, ‘What’s the point of this? There’s no one else there.’”{156}
For once, the Bee Gees were ahead of the Beatles. Barry’s description of their process sounds like what the Beatles went through on the White Album: everyone in different rooms working on his own songs; everyone playing and recording his parts by himself; everyone doing his best to avoid everyone else and everyone aware and regretful but too resentful to offer a truce. The Bee Gees were ahead of the Beatles, too, in that Odessa, like the White Album, was a widely ranging, eclectic mix of ideas and songs that defied any single group identity.
Molly and Robin married on December 4. Both wanted a private wedding, but the press found out and a mob scene ensued. Robin stridently proclaimed his lack of religion; they married at the registry office in London’s Caxton Hall. A scrum of photographers and fans awaited the emerging couple. Robin blamed Stigwood. He claimed that most of the guests at his reception were journalists. While Robin and Molly were honeymooning, Maurice and Lulu announced their engagement on Lulu’s television special. Robin felt upstaged.
“Robin has an incredible persecution complex,” Stigwood said. “He tends to think the whole world is against him. He has no confidence and can be hurt by the pettiest of remarks, which is silly since every artist must expect a few knocks. Robin, though, gets unbelievably upset. For example, if a journalist with whom he is friendly turns round and says something bad about his performance, Robin takes it as a personal grudge against him.”{157}
Robin’s—mostly Robin’s—composition “I Started a Joke” came out on December 21. It went to #6 in the US and was the second hit in a row on which Robin sang lead. Robin argued that the first single from Odessa should feature him as well. “Joke” is pure Robin; maudlin, self-indulgent, adolescent, and yet, moving. A perceptive critic wrote of Bob Dylan that he did not use words to make meaning, but instead used words to escape meaning. Robin’s lyrics, like those of “Message” or “Joke,” make little narrative sense. The Bee Gees don’t use words to make meaning; they use words to make feelings. Robin and Barry wrote, with little self-analysis, lyrics that stir em
otion.
Robin was quoted on that issue in the New York Times: “While other guys, like Ray Davies of the Kinks, were writing about social problems, we were writing about emotions. They were something boys didn’t write about then because it was seen as a bit soft. But people love songs that melt your heart.”{158}
“Joke” was the last single from Idea, a frustrating, revealing LP forgotten in the uproar over Odessa. Idea suggests the variety of styles the band would showcase on Odessa, but sounds like outtakes of notions even more grandiose than those on the later album. Idea opens with the now usual caterwauling over strings from Barry in “Let There Be Love.” Maurice and Barry harmonize on “Kitty Can,” the band’s first blatant cop of Simon and Garfunkel. Three full-on warbling tracks by Robin follow—“Indian Gin and Whiskey Dry” suggests new motifs and directions in Robin’s songwriting. “In the Summer of His Years” and “Down to Earth” are the usual Robin with orchestration. “Down to Earth” might be Robin’s version of a protest song, but the lyrics, even for him, are too opaque to tell. Side one ends with Vince’s “Such a Shame,” which, like “Joke” and “Message,” has nothing in common with the rest of the record. Barry sings lead on four of the six tracks on side two. “Idea” shows that the Bee Gees, at this stage, still had no instinctive grasp of beat or rhythm, which makes their later dance music all the more surprising. Their attempts to rock always fall short, though Vince gets in a few Yardbirds-style guitar licks. The final cut, “Swan Song,” shows that Robin could write and sing yearning, but Barry had, for the moment, lost the knack. The band sounds worn out and reaching for ideas. The twin hit singles buoyed Idea and it sold a million copies worldwide.
The Bee Gees Page 8
