Bee Gees

I remember discovering a copy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in my parents' pile of old LPs when I was about eight or nine, one of the many copies that was bought and played on a compulsory basis in 1977 and neglected after the widely-reported "death" of disco. At this point, well-worn copies of the Fever soundtrack are much rarer than near mint ones.

The sleeve caught my attention well before the music. The clothes enthralled me to the point where they were more like alien curios than the outdated styles of 20 years prior. And at the center of this sartorial archaeology stood the Bee Gees, looking like intergalactic deities guarding the secret of their powerful, unearthly falsetto harmonies as Travolta strains to touch his idols like the hand of Adam reaching out to God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Holy, thy name is Gibb.




It's a rare Bee Gees hit from this era that doesn't rely on a Barry Gibb lead vocal. The group's calling card, "Stayin' Alive," is synonymous with disco itself despite being a poor representation of the aims of the vast majority of disco songs. In a genre primarily used to score continuous stretches of two very popular and spontaneous forms of cardiovascular exercise, "Alive" is a sideways commentary about dancing while enduring unemployment, urban decay, and other ungroovy things.. Though I'm still confused about the meaning of lyrics like "We can try/to understand/the New York Times' affect on man," I do know that they are deeper than required for a goddamn club song. Of the Fever hits, "You Should Be Dancing" does the best job of equating dancing and sex, but the Bee Gees never seemed to embrace gitter-ball hedonism like the true progenitors of the disco scene. Would you get excited about dancing to a song called "Tragedy"?








The brothers Gibb were probably one of the first groups to apply real pop songcraft to the extended-play dance workout and reap the spoils accordingly. But the flip side of re-defining disco was having that privilege wrested away from them almost immediately and being forever equated with cheesy outfits, dancing hopelessly flailing coke fiends, and vacuous narcissists. That's why "How Deep Is Your Love" has always stood out to me as a respite from the emotional thunder, a low-key R&B number comparable to the Bee Gees' earlier, more sentimental pop hits like "I Started A Joke." The Gibbs nearly had the memory of their early career entirely wiped out by their later success, but songs like "How Deep Is Your Love" remind us that they always knew what they were doing, even when things got out of control.