In the spring of 1977, Frampton hosted Martin and the Gibbs in Nassau to work out arrangements and rehearse. Barry told Rolling Stone how much he was looking forward to working with Martin and that singing the Beatles would be a joy. Barry recounts back when the band was first signed by Stigwood, and Stigwood showed up with the brand new Sgt. Pepper’s album. “Nobody could believe it,” Barry said. “It frightened us to death.” Maurice said: “It was incredible. [Stigwood] put it on the stereo and we went: ‘Jesus!’”{383}
Martin assembled an all-star session band. They would work at Cherokee Studios in LA and the Record Plant in New York. Martin had the musicians listen to the originals and copy them note for note.{384} The band improvised new arrangements and Martin wrote the charts for those. He recorded and produced the tracks. He brought in the Bee Gees, Frampton, Sandy Farina and others to lay down vocals. Dee Anthony said: “The songs aren’t going to be changed that radically. They’re basically being done the way the Beatles would probably do them today.” In attempting to describe music he had not yet heard, Frampton said: “And as the film goes along they get progressively funkier. ‘The Long and Winding Road’ was going to be a kind of disco ballad, but George Martin pulled the reins on that one.”{385} Martin pulled in the reins because Dee Anthony bested Stigwood in a squabble over who would get to sing “Long and Winding Road.” Frampton won out, and Martin’s arrangement mirrors the original. Barry said, of singing with Frampton: “We were wary of each other. [Frampton] was a little worried about singing with us because we’d sung together all our lives. He didn’t know how he fitted in. A lot of our sessions were done separately.”{386} Even on songs in which the four harmonized, the Bee Gees cut their tracks without Frampton and Frampton cut his without them. Martin’s soundtrack took over a year.
On October 17, 1977, filming began. The Bee Gees were in for some unpleasant surprises. No one had told them that movie making operated on the opposite schedule of rock and roll. The Gibbs had to get up early and be at their most creative during daylight hours. They were perplexed that, in the words of Michael Schultz, “movie making was done in pieces, not in chunks like a concert. The whole idea of performing in an acting scene was new to them.”{387}
About having to share screen space with Frampton, Barry said: “It was a battle all the way for us. Robert had verbally promised us the starring roles, and this red-hot young man named Peter Frampton came along and Robert wanted him to play Billy Shears. The film didn’t work for the Bee Gees. It worked for Peter but—and I think you’d have to be blind not to see it—the Bee Gees had no place in the story. We tried to point that out along the way. I just wish they’d given people a chance to act.”{388} The Bee Gees’ official biography has Maurice recalling that the roles weren’t particularly “demanding.”{389} After the filming, Maurice had a slightly different take on the experience: “It was ridiculous,” he said. “I walked on to the set at 7 am. The crew was in their trailers and I shouted: ‘Has anyone got any cocaine?’ Loads of the stuff landed at my feet.”{390} Schultz said, of all the amateurs in the film: “They had to learn not to move around so much.”{391}
The great rock critic Lester Bangs once wrote of an album: “It’s stupid with none of the virtues of stupidity.” The same can be said of Sgt. Pepper’s. It’s not so bad that it’s good, nor some camp horror peppered amusingly with bad taste, like, say, Xanadu. There’s no point in attempting to recount the so-called plot. The songs tumble after one another with minimal exposition. The story line makes almost no sense, and the cameos are unbearable. Steve Martin makes his film debut as a homicidal MD, singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and portraying the song’s title character. Martin does the shoulder-raising, grimacing, overanimated shtick he later duplicated in Little Shop of Horrors and most of his other pictures. He leads some extensive robotic choreography featuring hot nurses. Martin’s talk-singing is no worse than George Burns’s, who looks like a rotting animatronic of himself—with a toupee made of polyurethane—and staggers through “I’m Fixing a Hole,” among other numbers.
The huge set that Stigwood had rebuilt is presented as the town of Heartland, and it’s here that the original Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band performed. Frampton plays the ingénue rock-star-in-making Billy Shears. With his suspenders, open-to-the-waist shirts and perfect curls, Frampton—blank, waxen and scared shitless—looks like a rent-a-boy from Studio 54. His facial expression of confused terror never once changes in the entire picture. Billy Shears, beguiled from his small-town love, Strawberry Fields, gets spirited off on a bus full of groupies to an unintentionally hilarious depiction of Los Angeles rock decadence. The character actor Donald Pleasance, apparently determined that no one would ever recognize him in this disaster, plays a parody of a rock manager–mogul in silk pants, silk shirt and silk cowboy hats, speaking in an unintelligible Germanic Texas twang. Stigwood and Anthony must have enjoyed his performance enormously.
The Bees Gees portray Billy’s band, and when Frampton lip-synchs unconvincingly next to them, Barry’s look of impatient contempt is one for the ages. In the Bee Gees’ musical numbers, poor Maurice gets stuck on drums, Barry has to hold a bass and Robin a guitar. Barry stands right in front of Maurice’s drum kit, so Maurice ends up with less screen time than anyone. Maurice was given the drums because Barry thought Robin would be “too stiff” and because Maurice was used to keeping time. Maurice tried to copy Bernard Purdie, who played drums on the soundtrack. Maurice later claimed that Purdie told him he never missed a beat on camera. It’s hard to see how Purdie would know, since Barry almost always obscures Maurice’s hands. The volume and shine of Robin’s and Barry’s hair defies human anatomy, but there it is, in every shot.
A diabolical team of Alice Cooper, Steve Martin and Aerosmith (!) plans to unleash a cult of zombified teens on the world, thus destroying love and perpetuating a value system based only on money—this is the “message” of the picture. Aerosmith’s guitarist Joe Perry spoke of the band’s concern about the script and its potential for brand damage: “Doing Sgt. Pepper’s was hard work—12 hours a day for three days. It gave us some insight into why not to be an actor, but it was all right. Nobody was pulling any star trips, Frampton or the Bee Gees, or anything like that. But, ah, there was a few things they wanted us to do . . . One thing was, [Aerosmith lead singer] Steven [Tyler] was gonna get killed by Frampton. Frampton was gonna kill Steven. And we’re sayin’, ‘There’s no way that Steven is gonna get offed by Frampton. No way. It’s gotta be an accident.’ So they switched it and we’re killin’ the Bee Gees, and Strawberry Fields pushes Steven off the stage and kills him. So it wasn’t Frampton that got him.” Joe said: “We were gonna mess up their hair instead of beating them, and totally fuck ’em up!”{392}
Billy Shears foils their foul plot at the cost of Strawberry Fields’s life. Perry: “We killed Strawberry, so it was real cool.”{393} Before she dies, Strawberry bumps Steven Tyler off his towering band riser, killing him and thwarting the Future Villains, as Aerosmith is called.
“They picked the right band for the Future Villain Band,” Perry said. “There you have the Bee Gees smiling with their nice teeth and all that shit, and then you got the close-ups of me and Steven, and Steven’s fried and we’re both fuckin’ . . . out there. My skin is all white ’cause it was last winter and we had been in Boston, and there’s my face up there in close-up with my fuckin’ crooked teeth and my crooked nose. We didn’t think the movie was gonna bomb as bad as it did, but I don’t think we suffered too badly for it as far as our image goes.”{394}
One big reason they didn’t is because no one remembers that Aerosmith was in the movie. Perry speaks the truth about his close-ups. He and Tyler look pasty, sleepless and wasted. They appear descended from a different show business universe than the Bee Gees, who, with Frampton, sneak up on Aerosmith for their climactic battle wearing head-to-toe satin outfits. Barry’s is scarlet, Robin’s orange and Maurice’s purple. Frampton’s features a bare mid
riff.
The final indignity of the film is reserved for Beatles and Rolling Stones sideman-singer-organist Billy Preston. First appearing as a wind vane, Preston springs to life after Strawberry’s funeral. Using his magical powers, which appear to be vested in his jive, cartoonish dancing, golden knee-high satin boots and billed cap, Preston, singing “Get Back,” zaps a magic soulful lightning bolt into Strawberry, bringing her back from the dead. Further funky lightning leads to the mind-blowing finale.
Though the film’s song list isn’t worth citing and neither is every plot incident, the finale begs to be explicated in detail. In keeping with their unhinged notions of when to cut costs and when to spend like drunken sailors—the film’s final budget is estimated at $18 million (1977) dollars!—Anthony and Stigwood decided to invite pretty much everyone in showbiz to participate in the film’s final scene. They sent the following engraved invitation out by the hundreds:
Robert Stigwood & Dee Anthony Cordially Invite
[x]
to Join
[immense Sgt. Pepper’s logo]
In a day of musical celebration and to take part in
“The Grand Finale Sequence” of the film.
We will be honored by your presence at Heartland, U.S.A.
In Los Angeles between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.
on Friday, December 16th
And at the Gala Dinner that evening
at a location to be announced.
Included with acceptance was first-class airfare to LA from wherever, and four-star accommodations, limos, champagne and the finest cuisine upon arrival. On the big day, seventy-five luminaries of various lumens gathered on a sound stage to sing “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Michael Schultz figured out each person’s place on a set of eight-tiered bleachers and arranged the groupings. His taste is reflected in the fact that front and center, above the Bee Gees and Frampton, stands Broadway star and difficult personality Carol Channing—someone few Bee Gees fans were likely to recognize or celebrate. Schultz explained the minimal choreography. George Martin ran the assembled through the lyrics and gave them the key changes. When Schultz said “Action,” Martin directed the singing.
The guest list has to be seen in its entirety to get a proper sense of the deranged juxtaposition of entertainment-arena types and modalities: disc jockeys, harmonica players, Broadway stalwarts, actors, rockers, percussionists, soul singers, country music performers, session musicians, blues legends, guitar heroes, Las Vegas comedians and Dr. John.
Keith Carradine wears a billowing white pirate’s blouse; Carol Channing—for whom the lip-synching is clearly a trial—sports her trademark platinum wig; next to her, Tina Turner wears her long golden wig; future Bruce Springsteen guitarist Nils Lofgren looks appropriately puzzled, albino bluesman Johnny Winters might be asleep on his feet and Mark Lindsay, late of Paul Revere and the Raiders, appears profoundly grateful to be included. Everyone seems either high, stoned, drunk, wasted, indifferent, baffled, overly sincere, weirdly poised and alert, or some combination thereof.
The list of performers includes Adrian Gurvitz, Al Stewart, Alan O’Day, Alan White, Anita Pointer, Barbara Dickson, Barry Humphries, the Bee Gees, Billy Harper, Bobby Womack, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Johnston, Carol Channing, Charlotte, Sharon and Ula, Chita Rivera, Connie Stevens, Cousin Bruce Morrow, Curtis Mayfield, D. C. LaRue, Danielle Rowe, Del Shannon, Diane Vincent, Donovan, Dr. John, Eddie Harris, Elvin Bishop, Etta James, Frankie Valli, George Benson, Geraldine Granger, Gray Wright, Grover Washington Jr., Gwen Verdon, Hank Williams Jr., Heart, Helen Reddy, Jack Bruce, Jackie Lomax, Jim Dandy, Jo Leb, Joe Lala, Joe Simon, John Mayall, John Stewart, Johnny Winters, Johnny Rivers, José Feliciano, Keith Allison, Keith Carradine, Lee Oskar, Lenny White, Leif Garrett, Marcy Levy, Margaret Whiting, Mark Lindsay, Minnie Ripperton, Monti Rock III, Nils Lofgren, Nona Hendryx, Peter Allen, Peter Frampton, Peter Noone, Randy Edelman, Rick Derringer, Robert Palmer, Robert Stigwood, Sarah Dash, Seals and Crofts, Sha Na Na, Steven Bishop, the Paley Brothers, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, Wolfman Jack and Yvonne Elliman.
The idea behind this spectacle was to create a living tableau of the famous and noteworthy to echo the tableau vivant of cardboard cutouts on the original Sgt. Pepper’s cover. It didn’t quite work out. It plays as one more random element thrown into the mix. That one song—and the night that followed—provides a paradigm of late 1970s self-indulgence. “The revelry that night spilled over into three adjacent sound stages with strolling violinists, a disco dance floor, lavishly catered dinner and a garden room with private tents for each of the stars. The party continued well into the wee hours of the next morning.”{395}
Meanwhile, across town, Martin was still recording. Of working with Barry, Martin showed his usual insight. “Barry Gibb was a great stickler for being dead in tune,” Martin said. “I actually found myself telling him that by being so exactly in tune he was tending to spoil the nice parts of the double-tracking. He was so accurate it sounded almost like a single track.”{396} Martin compared the Bee Gees’ “irreverent sense of humor” to the Beatles’ and said: “When it came to harmony singing, they were incredibly facile. When we came to ‘Because,’ from the Abbey Road album, I decided that the backdrop should be the authentic Abbey Road sound; that is, the choral structure of the voices, the electric harpsichord which I played on the original album, and the generally thin backing. So I again laid down the electric harpsichord track myself, and gave the Bee Gees the notes of all the complicated harmonies. There were three tracks, each bearing three voices, and the way the lines moved was quite complex, but they got them almost as easily as the Beatles had done. That was surprising. A group of professional singers would have had more difficulty with it, but the Bee Gees had an innate sense of where it should go.”{397}
“My main criticism of Sgt. Pepper,” Barry said, “is that the music shouldn’t have flowed consistently through the film, and they should have used only Sgt. Pepper music. It seemed like the idea was to shove as many Beatles songs in there as was humanly possible. I don’t think George [Martin] should have produced Sgt. Pepper again. George was religious with the original arrangements; he didn’t want to change them. What the people were looking for was something totally new.” Barry described how completely Martin controlled the vocal sessions. “We could have gone crazy on a lot of those tracks,” he said. “We wanted to use falsettos and so on, and to some extent he let us do that. But not all the way. [Martin’s] got real tight lines the way he wants to go, and he made that clear to everyone when we were doing it.”{398}
The Bee Gees weren’t the only cannibals on the project. Martin seems to have been determined to cannibalize his own work, and to ensure that nobody else got a bite. His overproduced, antiseptic, soulless arrangements overpower every vocal track save one—Robin’s heartbreaking, dirgelike rendition of McCartney’s “Oh! Darling.” Robin finds tragic emotion in the song and connects to it as no one else connects to any song in the film. Even so, it takes all the power of Robin’s soaring voice in top form to make a dent in the bombastic backing track. Robin’s effortless range fights the accompaniment to a draw.
Elsewhere, Martin’s arrangements are mixed so loudly, and mixed to sound so separate from the vocals, that the music and voices never merge into a musical whole. The numbers with weaker or more by-the-numbers vocal performances—the rest of the album, really—stand no chance against the fortress of music Martin erected. His arrangements are corny, with giant plucked bass notes, lush strings and overemphasized pauses. The musical arrangements were completed before the vocals were recorded, and the singers understood they could only belt away and hope for the best. Martin focuses an aural spotlight on his own work, and makes certain that nobody would prefer this record to any of the originals.
On December 14, 1977, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was released and everything changed. Just like that, Peter Frampton was no longer the best-selling musician on the planet, and Stigwood’s Beatles’ m
ovie was no longer foremost on the Bee Gees’ agenda. The Bee Gees sat back and watched the world come to them. The filming went on through January 1978, but the Gibbs were becoming increasingly detached.
SNF’s sales kept going up and up. The Bee Gees held off on touring. Robin was deeply enmeshed in his amphetamine addiction, gacking himself daily and scarfing barbiturates to sleep. Maurice drank every waking moment. The band was on top of the world, and it must have been baffling. In the first year of SNF’s success, there was little backlash to either disco or the album’s ubiquity on the charts. That reaction would come further down the road. What the first six months brought was pure validation, the kind of validation the brothers had yearned for since they regrouped. The kind of validation that might fulfill even their sense of being underappreciated outsiders. America loved them; England loved them; Japan loved them; the whole world loved them and the whole world proved it with their wallets. Nobody in the history of recorded music had ever been loved as much as the world loved the Bee Gees.
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