The Bee Gees` Barry Gibb is a man who`s quite comfortable with the idea of ghosts. Nearly 30 years ago, as a child growing up in Manchester, England, Gibb was walking near a church graveyard when he saw a little girl in a white dress come out of a garden gate on one side of the street and disappear through a solid wall on the other side of the street. For Gibb, the memory remains vivid to this day.
”It gave me sort of a fright,” he admits, ”but it triggered an interest in the paranormal and supernatural that has remained with me ever since. Interestingly enough, I have since learned that most encounters (with
`ghosts`) are like that-they aren`t with apparitions that you can see through, but with people that look very, very solid and lifelike, just like that little girl.”
Still, there`s one spectre that fills the singer and songwriter with fear and loathing. It`s the ghost of a guy in a white suit, dragging his gold chains behind him-the spirit of disco, if you will. And the worst thing about it, according to Barry Gibb and his brothers Robin and Maurice, is that the darn thing just won`t go away.
Ten years have passed since disco music took America by storm and
”Saturday Night Fever,” the soundtrack album for the popular disco film starring John Travolta, took the Bee Gees to the top of the pop charts-where they stayed for 24 weeks.
Three of the six Bee Gees songs on the record, ”Stayin` Alive,” ”How Deep Is Your Love” and ”Night Fever,” became No. 1 hit singles in the United States. The album went on to sell a staggering 30 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling album of all time until Michael Jackson`s ”Thriller”; in all, their ”Fever” contributions brought the brothers five Grammy Awards. (The trio also contributed half an album`s worth of old, previously unrecorded songs to the soundtrack for the much less successful 1983 sequel, ”Staying Alive,” though they later complained that their music had suffered from poor editing in the film.)
The Gibbs are sick, sick, sick of hearing about all of this. The sibling trio has just released a new record, ”ESP”-their first studio album since 1981`s ”Living Eyes”-and these days, even the word ”disco” makes Robin and Maurice simultaneously cringe and bristle. Barry, slightly more diplomatic, notes that ”some very special records came out of that `70s disco period”
(he wouldn`t even be surprised if a disco nostalgia boom sweeps the country in another decade or so) before acknowledging that yes, he`s fed up with the way the name Bee Gees still seems to be synonomous with the now-scorned
”Saturday Night Fever” era.
In pop music, with very few exceptions, there`s nothing deader than yesterday`s big trend. And the Bee Gees, pop music veterans who first made the pop charts 20 years ago with ”New York Mining Disaster 1941,” now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of being saddled with a decade-old disco image at a time when they are trying to be perceived as fresh and contemporary. With ”ESP” (the title refers to music`s magical powers of communication), the trio returned to pre-”Fever” producer Arif Mardin and the sophisticated, blue-eyed soul/rhythm & blues sound that established them as a multimillion-selling pop act long before the dawn of disco. The album is currently a hit in Great Britain and throughout Europe, but in America, the brothers contend, the ghost of ”Fever`s” white-suited hero, Tony Manero, and ”the stain of that era” (as Robin puts it) still haunts them.
”America, and particularly American radio programmers, has chosen to believe that we`re a disco group and shouldn`t be allowed to have a hit record,” maintains Barry. ”People in the industry would like to chalk us off as opposed to giving us another shot, and that`s crazy.
”Actually, I think it`s too bad that American radio has to have a period of music that it`s ashamed of. We`re certainly not ashamed of it. I think radio should openly support any musical period in the U.S. that was healthy, and disco certainly was healthy. It did a lot for the business, and it`s a shame that America feels a prejudice toward it now.”
”In the rest of the world, people have already forgotten about `Fever,`
” says Robin. ”Our album`s going through the roof in England. It`s only in this country where people continue to associate us with disco music. I don`t know why. I think we should be respected for the success of `Fever,`
absolutely, but it wasn`t even our project to begin with. We were making a studio album in France when somebody called us up and asked us if we could contribute some songs for a little film in Hollywood. So we did. We didn`t even really know that the title of the film was `Saturday Night Fever` until about a month later, when someone called to ask if they could change the title of one of the songs we gave them, called `Night Fever,` to `Saturday Night Fever.` That was the end of our connection with the film.
”When we did those songs, we thought of them as blue-eyed soul,” adds Robin. ”We didn`t know anything about discos, except that in Europe the word was short for discotheque. We certainly never frequented the places.”
The Bee Gees return to the pop recording arena after a series of other projects that found group members writing songs and producing records for other artists in an effort to put ”Fever,” if not behind them, then at least in some sort of career perspective. It wasn`t, the Gibbs hasten to explain, that they were tired of being the Bee Gees; it was the overexposure (not to mention the fact that, in a Bee Gees/”Fever” hype backlash, some disco-weary radio stations gleefully scheduled ”Bee Gee-free weekends”) that caused them to retreat from center stage.
”We were scared stiff that we would have to live under that shadow forever; we had to walk away from it,” says Robin, who recorded a solo album that was a success in Europe but never was released in the United States
(due, he says, to problems with his former record company). Barry, who released a modestly successful solo album, ”Now Voyager,” produced an album for Barbra Streisand and dueted with the singer on ”Guilty” and ”What Kind of Fool,” both of which became Top 10 singles in 1980-1981. The three brothers also collaborated on songs that became hits for such middle-of-the-road types as Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick and Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.
”We always had wanted to work with those people, and when they became interested in working with us, we jumped at the chance,” says Barry. ”It gave us a chance to stretch our music and write for different people in different styles. Now we know how many different ways we can write.”
Members of the Miami-based trio, who began harmonizing as children, are also expanding their boundaries, individually and collectively, with forays into film production and a new record company.
”It`s all a little bit sketchy right now,” says Barry, ”but Maurice has a television company he just formed in England, and I`m coproducing a film called `Hawk,` starring Timothy Dalton, which started shooting a few weeks ago and is due out next summer. It`s about two young men, an American and an Englishman, who are dying of leukemia. They meet in a hospital and decide to break out and do everything in life that they can before they die. It`s a tremendous comedy.”
The proposed new record company, a joint Bee Gees project, is scheduled to get off the ground in a year or so. ”It`s possible that we might record for the label, but we`re more excited about developing new talent,” says Barry. ”We have experience with writing songs and producing records and we know the record business, and it`s a shame that we aren`t using our experience to help young artists, probably in the rhythm and blues field. I think that the most popular music in the world today is black music, and that`s the music we like the best, so that`s probably the direction we`ll go in.”
Meanwhile, the brothers are finalizing plans for a tour, their first in six years, which will begin in Europe in the spring of 1988. ”Of course we want to perform in America, and if our record takes off here and people see the Bee Gees in a new light, that will be terrific,” says Barry. ”But we`re already a success in Europe and the rest of the world, so that`s definitely where we`ll start out.”
Whether or not the trio manages to ditch its disco image in the U.S., Barry feels that it was the right time to release ”ESP.”
”In some ways, I think that you stumble into most things,” he says.
”Sometimes you stumble into wonderful things, and sometimes you stumble into failures. But I also believe, as with other paranormal things, that some things are meant to be. There is some sort of fate connected to everything. When you shouldn`t be doing something, there are all sorts of obstacles there to stop you, and maybe you should pay attention to that.
”But when things just fall into place on their own, that`s the time to go ahead. Then, it`s not stumbling, it`s something else that was already ordained. It felt right to release this album. The Bee Gees have had many hits, and we`re perfectly capable of going on and making many more.”
