After another drunken row in late 1972, Lulu left the marriage. She and Maurice announced their split in ’73. The announcement cited an amicable, mutual parting and provoked a firestorm of press and photographers lurking in the bushes outside Lulu’s house. A few days later, Maurice contradicted the statement and told the press the separation was due to Lulu’s career, that he loved her, missed her and wanted to be with her again. Lulu, enraged that Maurice had broken their privacy agreement, issued her own statement that closed with: “Typical of Maurice is his reported remark that if we met now we would go out and get a drink.”{234}
Then, the unthinkable happened: Atlantic refused to accept or release A Kick in the Head Is Worth Eight in the Pants.{235} Between 1967 and 1972, the Bee Gees sold 25 million records. Now their label was telling them their new album wasn’t worth releasing. “Part of the problem,” Maurice said, “was that our manager, Robert Stigwood, had become so involved with movies and stage shows like Jesus Christ Superstar, that he’s taken his eye off us, and we were kind of drifting.”{236}
Ahmet Ertegun, the co-founder and co-head of Atlantic Records with Jerry Wexler, made a fateful recommendation. Ertegun is rightly worshipped for his musical and business instincts, for his ear, and his understanding of how to put the necessary elements together to make—not necessarily hits, though Ahmet always liked hits—but the best possible music. Ahmet suggested to Stigwood that Atlantic house producer Arif Mardin work with the Bee Gees. Actually, it was not a suggestion.
“When we discovered,” Ertegun said of Mardin, “that we had great arranging talent in-house, myself and Jerry Wexler availed ourselves of his services.”{237} “In the old days,” Mardin said, “someone like Phil Spector had a certain sound, and different artists that he used would be featured within that soundscape, and they were great. I’d usually go with featuring the artists, build the arrangements around the artist. I didn’t want to bring the artist into a preset situation. I guess that’s why I was able to work with various artists of different styles.”{238}
Mardin, over his forty years at Atlantic, produced Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson, Bette Midler, Dusty Springfield, Laura Nyro, the Average White Band, Hall and Oates, Chaka Kahn, the Young Rascals, Carly Simon, John Prine, Doug Sahm, David Bowie, Culture Club, Ringo, Barbra Streisand and Roberta Flack and is credited with the success of Norah Jones’s multi-platinum Come Away with Me. He worked with jazz artists Freddie Hubbard and Mose Allison, among many others. As a producer, Mardin found jazz limiting. All the producer does, he said, “is turn up the mic when there’s a good solo.”{239} Arif understood every kind of music and performer. His heart, like that of Atlantic’s, belonged to R&B, a term coined by Jerry Wexler. In the 1950s, black music was classified under “race records,” and Wexler was determined to create a less racist term.
The relationship between musician and producer is delicate and fraught. Phil Spector and Motown’s Barry Gordy invented their own universes that performers had to fit within. Other producers so understood the essence of the musicians in their care that their collaborations lifted both to new heights: George Martin and the Beatles; Jimmy Miller and the Rolling Stones; Brian Eno and the Talking Heads; Pete Anderson and Dwight Yoakam; Brian Eno and David Bowie; Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello; Elvis Costello and the Specials; Chris Thomas and the Pretenders; Billy Sherrill and Tammy Wynette; Willie Mitchell and Al Green; Ray Manzarek and X; Theo Macero and Miles Davis. Arif Mardin and the Bee Gees would prove a similarly magical pairing, even if it took a while for the magic to happen.
“Our studio tactics had become lazy,” Barry said. “We had to own up and Jerry Wexler recommended Arif.”{240}
Arif took the band back to London and IBC studios, where they’d done all of their early work. Their first effort, 1974’s Mr. Natural, showed progress, and proved a transition, but the material is not entirely new. Some of the songs were reworked demos from 1968. “Down the Road” is an almost-traditional blues shuffle; “Dogs,” made as the hit single, builds like classic Atlantic soul, with a lagging soul beat, blues guitar intro, “Spanish Harlem” vocals and Young Rascals’ piano motif. Robin demonstrates the band’s future ability to sing R&B. His vocals on “Dogs” align with the drums—as R&B vocals must—as in few other Bee Gees songs. Mr. Natural has a lot of soul, with Barry doing his best Maurice impression. At this point, there’s little point in asking why Maurice didn’t get to sing lead on songs that suited him perfectly. Despite sincere attempts to create a new sound, and heartfelt material, Mr. Natural proved a commercial failure. “When we did Mr. Natural we didn’t have a positive direction,” Maurice said. “We were thrashing about.”{241}
On the night of April 28, 1974, the Bee Gees were not in the Royal Albert Hall. They were at a grubby, second-rate supper club—Batley’s Variety in Leeds—on a tiny stage. They sang while around them the working-class mums and dads of England’s north tried to enjoy the band and the full-course meal they had to order to get into the show. Batley’s was the only gig the band could get. “We ended up in—have you ever heard of Batley’s the variety club in England?” Barry said. “It was a little club up north, and if you ended up working there it can be safely said that you’re not required anywhere else. In those days that was the place not to work in and we ended up working there. I remember us talking about it backstage at that place and I said, ‘If this is the bottom, there’s no further we can fall. Something’s gotta happen for the positive.’ It was positive thinking that got us back to where we are now, refusing to accept anything negative. It was a frightening time.”{242}
The Bee Gees had always been a singles band. When they had hit singles, they sold out shows. When they didn’t, their audience went elsewhere. It wasn’t only having to play miserable dives that unnerved the brothers. It was the thought that all their work had generated so little long-lasting audience loyalty.
One good thing came of the humiliating tour. After the April 28 show, Maurice met Yvonne Spencely, the manager of the steak restaurant attached to Batley’s. He fell instantly in love; Maurice said it was her smile. “There was a pure innocence about her that I loved,” Maurice said. “I suppose you could call it love at first sight. I was quite thrilled. It changed my life as quickly as that.”{243} Part of his immediate attraction might have stemmed from Yvonne being the spitting image, the young twin, of Maurice’s mom, Barbara Gibb.
Despite Maurice’s proclamations that he would never marry again, he rapidly finalized his divorce with Lulu—both had been too busy to bother with it. He married Yvonne in Sussex on October 17, 1975. Yvonne was pregnant with their first child, Adam, when they married. They had a daughter, Samantha, and were together for the rest of Maurice’s life.
After their week at Batley’s, things got worse. Sparse attendance at the Golden Garter in Wythenshaw and the Fiesta Club in Sheffield led to the cancellation of a week at the other Batley’s club, in Liverpool. They could not sell out the least desirable venues in England. The Bee Gees’ nadir was a grim spectacle.
“We’d lost the will to write great songs,” Barry said. “We had the talent, but the inspiration was gone. We decided right then we were going to [start writing again] and, honestly, it took us five years to get to know one another again. Those five years were hell. There is nothing worse on this earth than being in the pop wilderness. It’s like being in exile. The other artists treat you like crap. They say, ‘Hey, I didn’t know you were still together.’ You realize they haven’t thought of you for years. It’s all ego. This whole business is ego.”{244}
In December of 1974, multi-instrumentalist keyboardist Blue Weaver joined the band. “The Bee Gees’ drummer then was Dennis Bryon,” Blue said. “He rang me up to ask if I’d be interested. They’d realised they had to change direction and were trying to inject some fresh ideas. In December 1974, I had a meeting with them where they lived, for tax reasons, on the Isle of Man. I agreed to start work at Criteria Studios in Miami on January 2. [Criteria] had been recommended to them by E
ric Clapton . . . We all moved into the house at 461 on Golden Beach and started writing. Basically we’d lie all day on the beach, work over at the studio in the evening, and late into the night.”{245}
The band felt comfortable at Criteria, where Clapton had recorded 461 Ocean Boulevard and Layla and Other Love Songs. Criteria would become their home for decades, and Miami would become home to Barry and Maurice. “Ahmet [Ertegun] was so quick to turn off to us,” Robin said. “We thought, Fuck it. They aren’t even going to give us a chance. They were burying us. Only Arif, of all the Atlantic people, kept faith in us.”{246}
“The brief, from the start, was to find a new direction.” Blue said. “But the first songs we worked on were in the same old Bee Gees ballad style, and when Stigwood heard the tapes, he wasn’t impressed.” “One of the first four songs we came up with and played to Arif was ‘Wind of Change,’” Barry said. “He took those songs to Atlantic, and they didn’t like them.”{247} “I got the feeling,” Stigwood said, “they weren’t listening to what was happening in the industry anymore. So I flew down and had a confrontation with them.”{248} “We were devastated,” Maurice, said, after Stigwood vented his displeasure, “but Stigwood sat on Golden Beach with us and apologised for having been so distant from us, and said, ‘I’m determined to get involved again.’”{249}
When they arrived in Miami the following year, Mardin said, “We started to record and some of the songs were still in their old ballad style. But the Bee Gees were listening to American groups, especially R&B groups, and since my background was R&B, I was well suited for the affair.”{250} “Arif was incredible to work with,” Robin said. “Especially with Maurice. He changed our style of recording. We would start with one instrument and build up from there, as opposed to all playing at once. It is a clearer process.”{251}
“The drink and drugs didn’t stop when we went to Miami,” Maurice said, “but we were determined to change.”{252} “It was more about getting back into the music we were always into,” said Barry, “which was R&B. When we arrived in Florida, the place teemed with it. Here was a new culture to absorb, to base our music on. That’s basically what we’ve done all our lives. Everything sprang from our deep love of R&B—Al Green, Otis Redding, the Stylistics. So we went to work with Arif and he said, ‘I’m going away for a week and I want you to write while I’m away.’ During that week we wrote ‘Jive Talkin’,’ ‘Nights on Broadway,’ ‘Edge of the Universe.’ All those songs we wrote in one week, simply because we knew that this was it. If this album doesn’t work, it’s the finish for our recording career.”{253} Their career was certainly on the line, that much is true. But, if their love of R&B was so deeply rooted, why did it take Arif Mardin to get them to play it? The Bee Gees had twelve years in which to make R&B records and never did. Mardin saw their potential for funk music and explained to them how to embrace it. Afterward, Barry characteristically took all the credit.
“They started writing different songs,” Arif said, “like ‘Jive Talkin’,’ and we had a fantastic rapport. We spent fifteen or eighteen hours in the studio every day for two months and it became like something out of a movie, with everybody being incredibly creative and dynamic. We would try many things, like synthesizers, and probably because of my background with Aretha Franklin and all the R&B greats, I said, ‘Hey Barry, why don’t you sing a high note here?’ He said, ‘Okay, let me try it.’”{254}
“I asked Barry to take his vocal up one octave,” Mardin told an interviewer. “The poor man said, ‘If I take it up one octave, I’m going to shout, and it’s going to be terrible.’ He softened it up a little bit, and that was the first falsetto, which he sang on ‘Nights on Broadway.’”{255}
“It all happened in the course of a day’s work. So when people say, ‘How did you bring it about?’ I must say we all did it together. It shouldn’t sound like the Glenn Miller Story, or something where someone discovers a new sound overnight. The Bee Gees have always had an unmistakable sound. It’s their collective singing and beautiful vibrato and their unique solo vocal strengths. There was a happy marriage of their sound and the orchestral strings punctuated by a strong beat, which is part of my style.”{256}
“He hears everything and immediately knows what’s right or wrong with the voices, the instrumentation and the tempo,” Maurice said. “He showed me riffs for my bass I never dreamed of.”{257}
“I didn’t say ‘Hey, sing falsetto, I’d like to invent this sound for you.’” Mardin said. “But there was a melody in one of the songs—it might have been ‘Jive Talkin’’—and Barry said ‘Let me sing it in a soft voice.’ He sang it in that voice and the brothers and everyone were saying ‘That’s great, that’s great, keep that.’”{258} “It was a revelation,” Arif continued. “We had already heard ‘Nights on Broadway,’ so I could see the new direction. But when Barry walked in with ‘Jive Talkin’,’ it proved we were on the right track. Those were some of my most memorable sessions; some of the touchiest, at least in the beginning, but also the most rewarding.”{259}
“It’s a matter of arriving at now,” Barry said. “We had always done things out of time. All our lives. When we were kids, we had a sound similar to the Beatles’, melodic, with harmonies. So they came along first and it was their story. We worked in nightclubs when we should have played to kids. We’ve always done things strangely. At last, we are now doing things for now in a whole sphere of now.{260} We were getting into something we didn’t fully understand. It was a certain experimentation which was based on black groups, based on R&B groups. Mr. Natural was whiter. With Main Course we started to turn black . . . or blacker. A healthy shade of brown.”{261}
The music may have been turning brown, but the boys and their cultural references remained whiter than white.
“We were calling it ‘Jive Talkin’,” Maurice said. “But, being British, we thought jive was a dance, so the opening line was ‘Jive Talkin’, you dance with your eyes . . .’ It was Arif who said to us, ‘Don’t you guys know what jive talk is?’ He explained that it was black slang for bullshitting, so we changed the lyric to ‘Jive Talkin’, you’re telling me lies.’”{262}
“Arif showed us the right track,” Maurice said. “This was the track leading to R&B and hits, and that was the track leading to lush ballads, and he shoved us off that track and right up this one.”{263}
“I played a synth bass line on [‘Jive Talkin’],” said Blue, “which was unusual at the time and gave it a distinctive sound, but that happened by accident. Usually Maurice would play bass guitar, but he was away from the studio that night, so I found a bass sound on the ARP 2600 and laid down a guide bass line for him. It sounded pretty good. When Maurice came back, we let him hear it and suggested he re-record the bass line on his bass guitar.”{264} “I really liked the synth bass lines,” Maurice said. “I overdubbed certain sections to add bass extra emphasis.”{265}
Even Ahmet Ertegun did not understand what the Bee Gees and Mardin had wrought. “We were over the moon about ‘Jive Talkin’,” Maurice said. “But when we played it to people at the record company, they didn’t want it. They said it wasn’t a good single because it was so different to what we’d done before. Yet they were the very ones who’d told us we had to change. Stigwood was fighting with them, telling them they were mad and it was a guaranteed Number 1 single, and we were getting secret phone calls from the record company asking us if we could talk Stigwood out of [releasing it]. Robert came up with a way round it, which was that he sent out some unmarked cassettes to DJs and critics. They wouldn’t know who it was, so they’d only come back to us if they liked the music. Then, having said they liked it before they discovered it was The Bee Gees, it was hard for them not to play it.”{266}
That story has been told so many times in so many different ways it might well be true. And if not, it’s such a perfect record business legend that it has more resonance than any fact. Stigwood had records and cassettes made of “Jive Talkin’” with blank white labels and sent
them around. Rolling Stone reported that only 20 percent of English DJs could identify the unlabeled test pressing as a Bee Gees record.{267} Further proof of Stigwood’s marketing savvy is that the RSO pre-release press statement said right up front that RSO knew that most people wanted nothing to do with the Bee Gees: “If you’ve never liked the Bee Gees before, and there seems to be some who now have a mental block when it comes to their records, please give this single a chance. It is totally unlike anything they have recorded in their entire career. That’s a bold statement but it’s not wrong. Produced by Arif Mardin, this is actually almost unrecognizable as the Gibb brothers and is an extremely funky piece of music . . . If you don’t like the Bee Gees (or rather if you haven’t in the past liked the Bee Gees) please pretend it’s not them.”{268}
Main Course was released in the US in August 1975. The album made it to #14 US. “Jive Talkin’” was the first US single and was released in July. “Nights on Broadway” came out in September and spent sixteen weeks on the charts, reaching #7, and “Fanny (Be Tender with My Love)” followed in January of 1976 and peaked at #12, though it quickly dropped away.
“Main Course,” wrote one reviewer, “is the best sounding Bee Gees album ever, represents a last ditch effort to reestablish the group’s mass popularity in front of their upcoming US tour. My guess is that it should succeed, due to Arif Mardin’s spectacular production, which presents the Bee Gees in blackface on the album’s four genuinely exciting cuts. ‘Nights on Broadway’ and especially ‘Fanny (Be Tender with My Love)’ boast spacious disco arrangements against which the Bee Gees overdub skillful imitations of black falsetto. ‘Jive Talkin’’ approximates the synthesized propulsion of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition,’ while the song itself offers an inept lyric parody of black street argot. In ‘Wind of Change,’ also synthesized Stevie Wonder style, the Gibb brothers dare to pretend to speak for New York black experience. While I find the idea of such pretension offensively co-optive, musically the group carries them off with remarkable flair. For all their professionalism, the Bee Gees have never been anything but imitators, their albums dependent on sound rather than substance. In this respect, Main Course is no different from its predecessors.”{269}
The Bee Gees Page 13
