“We’re trying to avoid disco,” Barry said. “We’re keeping solid rhythms but we’re not saying, ‘Hey, you have to dance to this song.’ We have to convince everybody that we write all kinds of songs. Some call it selling out, but the most critical thing today is adaptability. If you’re adaptable, you stay; if you’re not, you go when the crowd changes its mind.”{447}
Holden went on to say: “This album’s weaknesses are synonymous with the Gibbs’ pseudodeific, megastar self-conception. Most of the songs are sung with perfect pitch, but the trio’s piercing collective falsetto (built around Barry’s lead vocals) is so relentless that the few moments in which the voices drop to their natural register come as a relief. The Four Seasons, alas, and not Smokey Robinson are the prototype for such an unearthly style: shrill, stiff, mechanical yowls that generate tension yet aren’t expressive enough to carry an entire LP.”{448}
There, though overstating his case, Holden has a point.
To the accusations of too much falsetto, Barry said: “Spirits is really a listener’s album—if you can stand the falsettos long enough. You have to listen to it four or five times, if you like it enough to listen to it that many times.”{449}
“Though most people consider Saturday Night Fever a Bee Gees record,” Mark Kernis wrote in the Washington Post: “The band contributed only six tracks—and two of those, ‘Jive Talkin’’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing,’ were previously issued. The fact that the four new songs were the four strongest pieces that the Bee Gees have ever done should not obscure the fact that the band rocketed to fame on the strength of less than one full side of one record. It’s astounding that the critical demolition of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band didn’t demolish their standing the way it seems to have derailed the career of Peter Frampton, who hasn’t done a thing since. So, besides providing a pleasant diversion, Spirits Having Flown shows the Bee Gees’ resilience.”{450}
That resilience seemed to irk critics. They were done with the band, apparently, so what was up with all these millions and millions of people buying Bee Gees records?
The Bee Gees official biography, Bee Gees: The Authorized Biography, as told by the band to David Leaf, came out in March. The Bee Gees wrote the photo captions for the large-scale trade paperback themselves, and many—reflecting their juvenile, inside-the-band humor—border on the bizarre. Robin proves plenty willing to tell bad tales about himself. It’s a curious artifact. The content lies somewhere between blind adoring hype and genuine confession. The Bees Gees come off as both remarkably unguarded and fiercely paranoid about protecting their image. There are a number of wonderful photos, especially those from the early days.
Robin had a deadly near miss that March. “A couple of weeks ago,” he told Stan Soocher of Circus Weekly, “I was out in my 31-foot boat off the coast of Florida. At night, a storm started. I lost my two engines and control of the steering, and was heading for a bridge. I was half a mile from land, the wind was dreadful and the current was intolerable. I hadn’t been swimming for ten years, but I had to jump into the water. The boat was demolished.”{451}
“Love You Inside Out,” the third single, debuted on April 21. It hit #1 on June 9 and the Bee Gees became the first band since the Beatles with six consecutive #1s. Maurice, citing the band’s first version of the song, said: “‘Inside and out, backwards and forwards with my cock hanging out!’ That’s the version we sent to Robert.”{452} The consecutive #1s meant a lot to the band. When asked how the Bee Gees reacted to the unbelievable sales of SNF, Albhy said: “They never cared about numbers. They care about hits—Number Ones. Chart position. That’s their benchmark. They always assumed that if they got the Number Ones, sales would follow. So they were happy, of course, about the sales, but what they tracked was their hits.”
Robert Christgau wrote perceptively about Sprits, shedding new light on its limitations and presenting what would become the canonical critics’ take on the LP. “I admire the perverse riskiness of this music, which neglects disco bounce in favor of demented falsetto abstraction, less love-man than newborn-kitten. And I’m genuinely fond of many small moments of madness here, like the way the three separate multitracked voices echo the phrase ‘living together.’ But obsessive ornamentation can’t transform a curiosity into inhabitable music, and there’s not one song here that equals any on the first side of Saturday Night Fever.”{453}
The songs do suffer from a rococo ornamentation, as if Barry recognized their slightness and tried to compensate by adding more voices, more falsetto, filling every space. It suggests music that was no longer instinctual—however quickly the songs were written—and more engineered. Everyone seems to be playing as hard as they can, reaching for a grand statement with every note. Sprits holds to the usual Bee Gees pattern of three hit singles, one or two interesting non-hits and six tracks of filler. Christgau recognized some of the nuttiness of the filler, but remained unconvinced.
By May, Sprits Having Flown was certified platinum, the Bee Gees made the cover of Rolling Stone yet again and Hugh and Barbara appeared on The Dinah Shore Show, a popular daytime talk show.
The Bee Gees and the band rehearsed for their upcoming tour five to six hours a day throughout May and June. With the album finished, they put their musical energy into rehearsing. They were so devoted to rehearsals that they skipped that year’s Billboard Music Awards; they won eleven awards in absentia. The band conceived a mega-tour, their first in years. Doing Sgt. Pepper’s had prevented them from touring to capitalize on SNF. They were itching to play live and travel properly. In planning their first-class private travel accommodations, Barry said: “The only way to stay straight is to stay above it.” “This is the tour we have dreamed of all our lives,” Maurice said. “And never expected to do.”{454}
The brothers regarded this as their farewell tour. They recognized that disco was fading, and wanted to close out this phase of their career absolutely on top. With any other band, financial motives might have been the driving consideration, but the income from their record sales meant that this tour was as much for fun and posterity as lucre. The Bee Gees wanted the tour to be majestic and memorable. The brothers and the band knew they would not be performing together again any time soon. Barry and Robin had been writing songs for a planned Barbra Streisand album that Barry would produce. Barry also wrote with Albhy for that record and Barry, Robin and Maurice wrote one song together. Additionally, Barry was writing for Andy Gibbs’s next record, which Barry would also produce. Robin and Blue Weaver were going to work on a record for Jimmy Ruffin. Maurice, seemingly, was going to drink.
The band rented a custom fifty-five-seat Boeing 707 for $1 million and had it painted glossy black with the Spirits logo on the tail. During the tour, the jet flew to and from one of five base cities to each show and returned nightly to a base city at each show’s end. Family and friends traveled on the jet, along with Maurice’s wife, Yvonne, and Barry’s wife, Lynda, and their children. Robin was estranged from Molly—who remained in England—and toured without her. A film crew accompanied the tour, taking footage for an upcoming Bee Gees NBC special to be hosted by David Frost.
The Bee Gees traveled with their own stage, sound and lighting rig, carried on seven semi-trucks and followed by two custom buses bearing the crew and those not lucky enough to be on the jet. The stage was a huge disco floor, lit from beneath. At climactic moments in various songs, the floor would light up in patterns of red and yellow squares.
Barry wanted the tour to be as stress free as possible and planned every detail. Security was tight, and the tour was designed so that no one ever needed to leave its protected cocoon. “For all intents and purposes,” Robin said, “this tour is like being in prison. To go out and buy a shirt would require two hours’ planning for logistics and security.”{455} Stigwood had to get a movie theater manager to agree to “cordon” off a balcony so the band could see Alien.
The touring band was Alan Kendall on guitar, Dennis Byron on drums, Blue Weave
r on keyboards, Joey Murcia on rhythm guitar and Joe Lala on percussion. “This band was more than just a group of musicians,” Maurice said. “Having a band that knows how we play and sing and write has really been one of the keys to our sound.”{456}
Everyone knew Maurice was not up to playing bass live on stage. He told the press that playing guitar was more exciting. Harold Cowart joined the touring band as the bass player. With Joey Murcia—behind Maurice—covering the rhythm parts and Barry—next to Maurice—working his acoustic, there was little need for another guitar. On videos of the shows, Maurice’s guitar is not easily heard, and the bass is turned way up in the mix.
The six-piece Miami brass session group, the Boonero Horns, came along, as did the RSO vocal trio, the Sweet Inspirations. The Inspirations were accomplished backup singers and had worked with Elvis and Ray Charles.
Barry discussed not taking along an orchestra, as they had routinely done in their earlier years. “Before, we played it safe and strict,” he said. ”We used the orchestra as a cushion. It was beautiful, but we weren’t taxing our abilities.
“When I look back at the days when we toured with 30 pieces, I know we were on display and opposed to communicating with the audience. Going to a bigger band and leaving the orchestra at home was a logical extension. We didn’t want to cling to something that didn’t make us feel comfortable. I think our stage act improved 100 per cent. The orchestra was lovely, but restrictive at times.
“The kids and younger people want to open up at concerts. We’re now more self-contained on stage and I really dig working with our band. Blue Weaver is playing string synthesizer and it fuses the Sixties to the Seventies. If you want to extend the concert experience you have to be visible to your audience. Looking back, the orchestra did colour many of our songs. But at times we might have overused the strings and some of our work became mushy.”{457}
On the road the families would hang out, sightsee and head for the venue in the late afternoon. The backing band and the crew, traveling by bus, got to the gigs around 5:00 p.m. The Bee Gees and their entourage arrived by limousine. The doors opened at seven. The Sweet Inspirations opened for the Bee Gees at eight and usually did around forty-five minutes. When the house went dark again at nine, people started shrieking. The Gibb brothers burst onstage under white lights in their white outfits and the crowd went berserk. Every show opened with “Tragedy,” as fireworks exploded above.
The tour opened in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 28 and closed—where else?—in Miami on October 6. It spanned forty-one shows, including Montreal, Toronto and three sold-out nights in a row at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The tour hit massive arenas—sports stadiums—like Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the Summit in Houston and the Silverdome in Detroit. “I’ve never seen them as nervous as they were before the tour started,” Dick Ashby said. “They’re at the pinnacle of their careers, and people will try to tear them down.” Tickets were going for $700 for scalpers, and in LA at least, Bee Gees merchandise sold at the rate of $3,000 a minute.{458}
The Bee Gees wore their iconic outfits of white satin flared pants and white spangled jackets and scarves. Most nights those jackets were open down to their beltlines. The lights, the clothes, the stage, the postures—Barry with his legs akimbo, braced to send the sound outward and receive the applause coming in; Maurice goofy and self-conscious, always moving around the stage; Robin quite loose, hands on his hips, graceful and dreamily responsive to the rhythm of the music—turned every show into what the Bee Gees intended: a spectacle. A bigger than life, aggressively perfect, show-biz spectacle, half pop-music, half Las Vegas and determined to be the best at both.
The younger fans squealed like they were seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium. An eighteen-year-old Maryland girl said: “I can’t help it, it just comes out. I want them to know I’m their fan. Nothing can top them—not the Beatles, not nobody.”{459} “I couldn’t take it,” Dick Ashby said. “I had to break off two cigarette filters and stick them in my ears.”{460} Which is just what the cops at Shea Stadium had done.
“Tragedy” was one of only two songs from Spirits on the set list. The middle of the show was a medley of “NY Mining Disaster,” “Run To Me,” “Too Much Heaven,” “Holiday,” “I Can’t See Nobody,” “Lonely Days,” “I Started a Joke,” “Massachusetts” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” The show-stopping climax—when the mirrored disco balls and gigantic Bee Gees logo descended—was “Nights on Broadway.” The show closed with “Jive Talkin’.” The band came back out for one encore, “You Should Be Dancin’.” “Dancin’” had an extended percussion break and ended with a bang. Within a minute of that bang, Barry, Maurice and Robin were in their limos, rolling either toward their hotel or the 707.
“Nineteen fifty-five was when we first stepped on stage,” Barry said later. “So we’ve been doing it longer than people think. After we toured America in ’79, the exhaustion of being the Bee Gees set in and we couldn’t see what tomorrow was going to bring.” And yet, despite the length of the tour, the logistics and security and the nightly pressure to be unforgettable, there is not one moment in videos of their performance when anyone on stage appears bored, disengaged or even tired. Some nights some folks might appear totally wasted, but that’s different. What the Bee Gees appear to be, night after night, is present, attentive, fulfilled and happy. They did not regard this tour as a chore. They had a tremendously good time. The sales, the Grammys, the #1s from the new record, the sold-out forty-thousand-seat arenas; this wasn’t validation, this was victory. And it was valedictory—the Bee Gees were graduating, on stage, in front of the world, to whatever was next.
John Travolta showed up in Houston and danced with the band. There were sixty thousand paying fans at Dodger Stadium in LA. Celebrity guests included Harry Wayne Casey of KC and the Sunshine Band, Barbra Streisand, Cary Grant, Karen Carpenter and the Jackson family. At Madison Square Garden the guests included Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley from KISS—who were always interested in spectacle—and Al Pacino. President Jimmy Carter invited the band to the White House prior to the September 24 gig in Washington, DC, to honor the Bee Gees for their work with UNICEF.
Touring is unspeakably dull for those touring, especially those who don’t get onstage. Naturally, there must be distractions. But the security on this tour not only kept outsiders out, it kept inside information in. Few backstage stories of outrageous behavior ever emerged. One good way to quantify drug use on a tour with tight security is to consider the level of denial of drug use. On this tour, that denial was absolute. A tour security guy, an ex-FBI agent, claims there were no drugs at all anywhere at any time: “I checked my sources on these guys. I wasn’t going to risk my rep on three rock stars who are into hard drugs.” Robin said: “There is no Happy Hour on this tour, where everybody throws a TV set out the window.”{461} Indeed, it is hard to throw a TV out of a moving 707.
The band protested mightily about their straightness to People magazine. Barry said that he had tried cocaine on an earlier tour, but “my nose was like a block of concrete for a week.” Robin proclaimed: “If you can’t face reality and be happy with it, what’s the point of living?” Always ready to be on both sides of an argument, Robin added: “But we’re not choirboys, either.” Maurice insisted he was not drinking, and People wrote: “If there is a silver spoon near his face pre-concert, it’s full of honey.”{462}
In October, RSO released Bee Gees Greatest, a double-album compilation of hits from the SNF era forward. Side three offered B-sides and cover versions, including Yvonne Elliman and inexplicably, Vegas crooner Wayne Newton.
Greatest hit #1 on the album charts on January 12, 1980.
The tour ended with two triumphal concerts at the Miami Stadium. The final show took place on October 6.
The Bee Gees aired on NBC during prime time on Wednesday, November 21, 1979, the night before Thanksgiving, one of the most sought-after time slots on network TV.
David Frost wore the interviewer’s uniform, a blue shirt with epaulettes. The Bee Gees sat on what appears to be Barry’s couch—with Barry leaning toward Frost in the middle—and told bits of their life’s story. Their chat is intercut with footage from the tour, and even more interesting footage of the band in their studio, recreating working through a song.
“It’s almost as if the songs are in the air and we hear them,” Barry said, describing their songwriting process. Robin said: “They’re already written, but they’re only written for us and they’re out there.” “We go into the studio,” Maurice said, “and most of the lyrics are written during the laying down of the backtracks.” Every single time Robin or Maurice speak, Barry interrupts. “We have a band of such strong musicians,” Barry said. “It’s hard to remember that they can’t hear the song like we do. They can’t always hear what you’re talking about. That’s the most difficult part.”
During the recreation, the band plays standing near to one another in a cramped room with no separation for the drums and no separation for the singers. Barry runs the session—which is, after all, only a restaging—with an iron hand. That makes the recreation seem all too real. Standing at the mic wearing his guitar, Barry raises a hand and says: “Solo.” He hums the part with perfect pitch as everyone watches, waiting for the next order. The show depicts how the band cut the backing tracks for “Tragedy” before Barry had written any lyrics beyond the one word of the title. Once the tracks were done to his satisfaction, Barry hummed the melody of the vocal. The brief clip showcases their attention to detail and familiarity with Barry’s process. It was a fitting portrait with which to close an era.
“Success like we have now was a distant dream in 1971,” Barry said. “We thought it was all over for us then. Now we can’t really accept what we’ve done and where we are when we read magazines saying, ‘The Bee Gees are hot.’ I would like for the Bee Gees to stop before we wane. I don’t know if it’s easy or accurate to say that in the next two years the Bee Gees will decline or continue at this pace. None of us can say. But all bubbles have a way of bursting or being deflated in the end.”{463}
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