![]() ![]() … The world was waiting for a new band to appear and take our place.”īecause the brothers produced their own material, it was suggested maybe they needed an outside set of ears - specifically, those belonging to Arif Mardin, who had worked with everyone from the Young Rascals to Aretha Franklin. “Our songs were starting to sound too much like each other. “In the mid-1970s, we didn’t surprise anyone anymore,” Barry said. I felt like a prisoner, like I was in a whirlpool.”) Ballads like “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” suggested they still had a knack for going for the jugular, but midway through the decade, the Bee Gees seemed a little passé, their ornate pop aesthetic starting to sound stale. “Everyone has a point in his life when everything about them gets confusing. (“I just could not take the Bee Gees any more,” Robin later said. The group kept going strong through the early 1970s, although Robin left for a time to pursue a solo career. These were gifts the Gibb brothers had from the start - they knew how to synthesize a universal sentiment into a musical grandeur that felt epic. ![]() A song like “To Love Somebody” was full of orchestral touches, heartfelt lyrics and a killer chorus about a man hopelessly besotted by his true love. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - the trio had moved back to the U.K., fully awash in the blissed-out melodies of the Summer of Love. ![]() By the time of 1967’s Bee Gees’ 1st - which came out just a few months after Sgt. Just a few years later, they were churning out singles that echoed the influences of their homeland, paying homage to a rising new band called the Beatles with their psychedelic-tinged pop songs. The group consisted of three brothers - older sibling Barry Gibb and twins Maurice and Robin - who were born in England before the family eventually moved to Australia in the late 1950s. The Bee Gees had hits before the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack - tons of ‘em. Even if disco eventually faded away - it didn’t, but you know how some people think - “Stayin’ Alive” isn’t going anywhere. A mixture of funk, pop, R&B and, oh yeah, disco, “Stayin’ Alive” struts with the energy of an underdog story, which is precisely the movie it was yoked to - not that the Bee Gees knew that when they wrote it. It’s a song about survival sung by a man in a falsetto. It’s a song that reeks of dancefloor sweat but also came to symbolize the late 1970s and a specific kind of edgy New York attitude. More than 40 years after it first conquered radio, “Stayin’ Alive” remains a monster - or, according to some, a punchline tied to a dated fad. Chalk it up to the occupational hazards that come with capturing the zeitgeist by writing an anthem that ends up taking on a life of its own - one far removed from the humble origins that inspired it in the first place. Depending on when you spoke to them, the Bee Gees might have told you that they hated disco, Saturday Night Fever and/or “Stayin’ Alive,” three cultural totems that were awfully important to their career. ![]()
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