The Bee Gees

by David N. Meyer

  Regarding the sequence of events, Robin and Barry disagree with Stigwood’s chronology, the timeline in their autobiography and each other. Robin insisted that the five songs—“How Deep Is Your Love,” “If I Can’t Have You,” “More Than a Woman,” “Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive”—were written before Stigwood told them about the movie. Barry characterized that as “quite incorrect.” Since they disagree, no printed account or interview since agrees, either. Accounts also differ as to Stigwood’s influence on the songwriting. “Robert would tell them what the scene was about and what tempo and rhythm to use,” Al Coury said, “and the boys would write it in the way he wanted.”{336} So, in the Bee Gees’ version, they dictate terms to Stigwood, threatening to withhold their songs; in Coury’s version, Stigwood dictates to them . . .

  Melody Maker captured their gestalt in an interview from December 1976: “Barry Gibb, the best looking of the three, with his coiffured hair and neatly trimmed beard, is a natural leader, holding down most of the conversation. Maurice, who is balding slightly, is perhaps more open and honest, but is held down by Barry. Robin, of the buck teeth, fly-away hair and intense falsetto voice, limits himself to rather cynical quips, most of which include rather bad language. They all tend to talk at once, frequently contradicting each other and indulging in arguments over small ­details.”{337}

  “To be able to watch the creative process when I was with Robert in France was a thrill,” Freddie Gerson remembered. “The Chateau was a cold, depressing place. [The Gibbs] were more than a little cranky. When Robert explained this plot about some Italian kids in Bay Ridge, I never thought it would come together. But as Robert played tapes of just vocals and acoustic guitar, it was clear something very special was happening. They were all hits.”{338}

  The songs cut at Hérouville were “roughs,” guide tracks for the final versions to be recorded at Criteria. There, extra instrumentation would be layered on, the vocals sung line by line as Barry wanted and new parts overdubbed. Stigwood’s description of the film and demand for soundtrack material changed the vibe at the château. The band worked with renewed purpose. The sessions caught fire.

  Albhy described the setup for “Night Fever”: “The group had the hook line and rhythm—they usually pat their legs to set up a song’s rhythm when they first sing it—and parts of the verses. They wrote the song in the castle stairway, which had natural echo. They had the emotion, same as on the record. We put down drums and acoustic guitar first so the feel was locked in. The piano part was put on before the bass, then the heavy guitar parts. Next came the vocals. A lot of the words are left out at first. Only the chorus and key words are locked in, and the rest is scat vocals because they find nice holes rhythmically to put words in that way. So they end up putting different lyrics in unusual places.”{339}

  “You’re using the tape machine like a composer,” Richardson said. “You start with no preconceived ideas, and when you keep working, it becomes unique.”{340}

  “It’s easy to find something that works,” Albhy said. “But it’s hard to find something that really helps. On ‘Night Fever’ the sound of the verses is heavy guitar playing, long chords, and on top a harpsichord, one electric guitar playing octaves, triangle and lead guitar with muted strings through a wah-wah. It’s mathematical, calculated—but the mathematics is in retrospect. You try to communicate with people’s hearts.”{341}

  On “Night Fever,” “Maurice was playing bass with his pick,” Richardson said. “Dennis Bryon was playing drums; Blue Weaver keyboards; Alan Kendall rhythm guitar; and Barry was playing rhythm and singing the pilot vocal. The drums were the only thing retained [at Criteria] from this live track—it was a complete take, not comped—and all the other parts were overdubbed, like the keyboard part that was carefully crafted. Many parts weren’t there from the start.

  “[But] ‘Night Fever’ [on the record] is the rough mix. We mixed that song in 10 minutes. We had overdubbed all these synthesizer pads, extra guitar notes, little percussion instruments and so on, and we kept mixing it again and again and again, and finally we played the rough mix and everybody said it felt better. We had a demo of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ from France, with the brothers singing, Blue playing keyboards and Mo playing bass, and right up until the final mix we would play that rough mix from France to use as a guide, because feel was everything to us.”{342}

  Barry remembers Stigwood’s instructions about “Stayin’ Alive”: “Give me eight minutes—eight minutes, three moods. I want frenzy at the beginning. Then I want some passion. And then I want some w-i-i-i-ld frenzy!”{343}

  “Stayin’ Alive” is among the band’s most enduring songs and by far the best cut on SNF. It has enthralled and irritated millions through the years. Its lyric: “We should try to understand / The New York Times’ effect on man” ranks high among the band’s most gnomic, and proves a strong contender for the band’s second most misunderstood. The first most misunderstood being “Let’s do it in your butt” from “You Should Be Dancing” (the actual lyric seems to be “What you doin’ in the back?” though some also advocate “What you doin’ in your bed in the back?”). “Stayin’ Alive” is the Bee Gees’ best-known song, an irresistible dance track and a watershed in recorded music history.

  That watershed is a powerful secret at the beating heart of “Stayin’ Alive.” The song marks the first appearance of what would become a staple of modern recording: the drum loop.

  The drum loop is called a loop because that’s what it was: a circle, a sacred hoop, an actual loop of recording tape containing one sound—the sound of one drumbeat—cycling through the recording heads of the master recorder over and over. As with many industry-changing inventions, the drum loop came about as a simple, functional solution to an immediate problem. The immediate problem was that the drummer wasn’t around.

  The Bee Gees got things done. They had to record the song. Dennis’s father suffered a health crisis and Dennis went to England to be with him. “‘Stayin’ Alive’ didn’t sound steady enough,” Richardson said. The boys wrote “Night Fever” thinking it would be the lead song of the film and the first single. “Everybody was happy with the way ‘Night Fever’ turned out,” Richardson said. “It had spark and it sounded wonderful.”{344}

  But Stigwood and the film’s producers thought “Night Fever” was too mellow and not strong enough to be the lead single, which—since the album was coming out in advance of the movie—would also be the lead promotional piece for the film. The band turned their attention back to “Stayin’ Alive.” With Dennis gone, Barry wondered if the percussion sounds built into the studio’s Hammond organ could provide a stronger, livelier beat. No one had ever attempted to use the built-in Hammond rhythm tracks like that before. Albhy and Karl thought it might work if the tracks were carefully “augmented by Barry’s own rhythm guitar.”{345}

  “We were able to get a 4/4 beat out of the Hammond, but when Barry played along to it we didn’t like the result,” says Richardson. “Albhy and I came up with the idea of finding two bars [of actual drums] that really felt good, and making an eternal tape loop.”{346} Richardson’s first idea was to record “two bars of the four-track drums from ‘Night Fever,’” rerecord them over and over and over, and put all those rerecords together to make a new, separate drum track that was as long as the song itself. But, as Karl, Albhy and Barry listened to the song repeatedly to find the best single beat to rerecord, Richardson or Galuten or both decided to copy one bar for a loop.

  “Back then, drum machines were really primitive,” Albhy said. “I had a brainstorm and told Karl we should take a bar from ‘Night Fever,’ which we had already recorded, and make a drum loop.” Barry, Karl and Albhy went back and listened to “Night Fever” for another marathon session, searching for the drumbeat best suited to “Stayin’ Alive.” “To make the loop, we copied the drums onto one quarter-inch tape,” Albhy said. “We had nothing to do [at Hérouville]. There was no TV, there was nothing. We got up in the
morning and hung out in the studio all day long. The idea of spending an hour trying to make a drum loop was . . . why not? We had nothing but time.”{347}

  Karl: “The tape was over 20 feet long and ran all around the control room—I gaffered some empty tape-box hubs to the tops of mic stands and ran the tape between the four-track machine and a 24-track deck, using the tape guides from a two-track deck for the tension. Because it was 4/4 time—just hi-hats and straight snare—it sounded steady as a rock.”{348} “Karl took a boom microphone stand, with the boom horizontal, parallel to the ground,” Albhy said. “He threaded the loop into the tape machine and the loop was too long for the supply and takeup reels, so Karl taped them down so they wouldn’t spin. He set the microphone boom stand a few feet from the tape recorder and ran the tape over the horizontal part of the boom stand and down across a seven inch reel. We pressed play and the drum loop played.”{349}

  “As we started to lay tracks down to it,” Albhy said, “we found that it felt really great—insistent but not machinelike. It had a human feel. By the time we had overdubbed all the parts to the songs and Dennis came back, there was no way we could get rid of the loop. Everybody knows that it’s more about feel than accuracy in drum tracks. I wish now I knew which bar it was. That’s a great sounding bar.”{350}

  “The loop was so popular because it has a feel,” Albhy said. “Live drummers sometimes slow down or speed up, but the feel inside the bar can be amazing. The feel changes based on the dynamic. It’s not like sampling where you have an individual drum. We thought that this bar would be replaced by real drums later. Because it had never been done before, we didn’t know—nobody knew at the time—that a good-feeling bar repeating incessantly has an unbelievable feel. ‘Stayin’ Alive’ has an insistent rhythm unlike anything you heard before.

  “Because of the drum loop, it was the first song where we overdubbed instruments one at a time,” Albhy continued. “We’d fixed things, we’d rerecorded things, but [this was the first time] that we recorded one instrument at a time.”{351}

  Maurice had to be taught the “Stayin’ Alive” bass line, someone hanging around the sessions asserts. “Maurice was not a session musician. Generally, pitch is not a problem if you’re playing electric bass. But meter was critical. Maurice was shown the bass part, and played along with it. Karl and Albhy marked the notes that were out of time, early or late, and Maurice would take another pass at it. Karl would punch in and out (meaning stopping and restarting the tape) for each note that was funny. Albhy and Karl fixed all notes until the bass part was completely right.”

  “The ‘You Should Be Dancing’ bass line is very much a Maurice bass line,” the studio source goes on. “Whereas the ‘Stayin’ Alive’ bass line is a healthy bass line. ‘Stayin’ Alive’ was one of those rooted bass lines. Barry was playing guitar and Robin and Maurice were out in the studio working on the song. The keyboard part was all Blue Weaver. Blue was independent. He did not like to take direction and he was a creative musician.”

  So, there it is . . . the recurring motif, stated as baldly as possible. Maurice could not come up with a bass part complex enough for the material, and had trouble learning the bass parts he had to be taught. Unsurprisingly, nobody fought the dissemination of this idea with greater tenacity than Maurice. In 1979 he told Rolling Stone: “I’d like to clear this point up. I know there are rumors that Barry does more on our records than Robin and I. I don’t know how that rot got started, but I hate and resent it. It’s a load of shit. People get that impression because Barry’s out front a lot and gets quite a bit of attention for his work with Karl and Albhy on other people’s songs, and for his work with [brother] Andy. But as far as our records are concerned, we all contribute equally and all produce equally.”{352}

  Only, they didn’t. They hadn’t contributed or produced equally since they reunited after the post-Odessa breakup, and seldom before that. When the brothers got back together there was no doubt who was in charge, and one glance at the band playing live or in their music videos only confirms it. Barry ran the show. That dynamic was a harsh toke for Maurice, no doubt—and worse for Robin—but the hard truth, nonetheless. Neither Robin nor Barry ever made any strong assertions in support of Maurice’s claims.

  “I wouldn’t call [Maurice] a nonentity,” the studio guest said. “But he was more of a social entity than a musical entity.”

  The infinite universe of music nerds on YouTube helps back up the assertions about the difference between Maurice’s “You Should Be Dancing” bass line and the bass on “Stayin’ Alive.” Plenty of players have posted videos of themselves playing the bass line along with the song. Hearing the bass separate from the mix is revealing. The bass on “You Should Be Dancing” has a programmatic feel. It’s a relatively simple, easily memorized piece played over and over with no variation. The bass walks the 1-2-3-4 beat, comps during the bridge and tosses in a little riff under the lyric “You should be dancing.” It’s funky enough, if unrelated to any other instrument except the drums.

  The bass in “Stayin’ Alive” is aggressively syncopated and showcases a sophisticated compositional sensibility. In the early verses the bass stays simple, keeping out of the way, providing a steady bottom. As the song progresses, the bass intertwines with the equally complex guitar, suggesting that the same person wrote for both instruments with their interplay foremost in mind. The bass comps during the chorus, leaving plenty of room for the vocals. A close listen to the bass line, even as played by amateurs in their bedrooms, strongly suggests that the same musician could not have conceived the two parts.

  “That steady, steady [drum] track gave us the groove we wanted, and we then overdubbed everybody to it,” Richardson said. “The guys did their vocals, Alan played the guitar riff, Blue played electric piano and an ARP string synth and when Dennis returned he overdubbed the toms, crash and hi-hat. He loved it. A case of a lot less work. On the record sleeve, the drummer on ‘Stayin’ Alive’ was listed as Bernard Lupé; a sort of French version of the famous session drummer Bernard Purdie. We received an unbelievable amount of calls looking for this steady drummer named Bernard Lupé. You know, ‘This guy’s a rock! I’ve never heard anyone so steady in my life!’”{353}

  “The loop crossed the boundary, giving us music that was in time with a good feel,” Albhy said. “If I had been working for a technology company then and knew what I was doing, I would have tried to patent the idea. Nonetheless, it changed a lot of things. That first loop was a watershed even in our life and times.”{354}

  That loop—the infectious, driving pulse of the song—had “quite a career in its own right,” Karl said. The loop ended up as the drumbeat for “More Than a Woman,” and for Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” which Barry would write and ­produce.

  “We knew we had a smash track,” Karl said. “John G. Avildsen—the director of Saturday Night Fever—envisioned setting one of Travolta’s dance numbers to ‘Stayin’ Alive.’” He asked Stigwood if the Bee Gees could provide a slower tempo bridge section so Travolta and partner Karen Lynn Gorny could go all slow-mo as they fell in love on the dance floor. Once that heart-stopping moment had been established, the dance beat would return, and the two would celebrate their love with even more ecstatic disco-ing. Travolta didn’t like the idea; he’d been rehearsing to “You Should Be Dancing” for two months for his big solo number and to the more recent rough of “More Than a Woman” for the pas-de-deux.

  “Robert wanted a scene that was eight minutes long,” Barry said, “Where Travolta was dancing with this girl. It would have a nice dance tempo, a romantic interlude and all hell breaking loose at the end. I said, ‘Robert, that’s crazy. We want to put this song out as a single, and we don’t think the rhythm should break. It should go from beginning to end with the same rhythm, and get stronger all the way. To go into a lilting ballad just doesn’t make sense.’”{355}

  “They did write a bridge,” Karl Richardson said, “and there is a version of ‘Stayi
n’ Alive’ where the song changes key and turns into a slow ballad for 16 or 32 bars. Then there’s a big drum break and everything reverts to normal. After the bridge had been recorded and I’d spliced it into the track, Albhy and I stared at each other and said ‘We just ruined a hit record.’ We turned to Barry and said ‘We can’t use this. We’ve screwed up a number one record,’ and Barry said ‘Yeah, we have.’ So, we put the tape back together without the new bridge and called Stigwood to say ‘This is bogus. We’re not doing it.’ And that’s when Stigwood fired the director.”{356}

  Poor John Avildsen. For all his experience, he did not recognize nor sufficiently kowtow to his most crucial constituency—Stigwood and Travolta. He also apparently didn’t understand how to shoot dance sequences, or at least not to Travolta’s specifications. Travolta called Stigwood in tears and told him he was leaving the picture. This was not movie-star grandstanding because, at the time, Travolta was not a movie star. SNF was his breakout opportunity, so Travolta had little leverage. His strong reaction was heartfelt passion from an actor who knew that the one moment that could change his career forever was being compromised. Coincidentally, Travolta also knew that the film itself was being undermined. This was a rare intersection of artist’s vanity and practical vision. In the movies, there is no more powerful moral force.

  Travolta’s complaint was that Avildsen refused to shoot Travolta’s big dance number from the floor up, so that all of Travolta’s body—from his head to his toes—could be seen in the frame. Travolta wanted to be seen dancing. He didn’t want edits going back and forth from his upper body to his feet; he wanted no suggestion that some stunt dancer was making moves for him. Travolta asked for an old-fashioned movie-musical straight-on wide shot capturing all the dancers in their disco lines, with Travolta front and center. However commonsensical the idea, Avildsen wouldn’t do it.