Bee Gees

In a career now in its fourth decade, the Bee Gees have sold over 120 million albums worldwide. At several points throughout their career, Barry, Maurice, and Robin Gibb have borne commercial dry spells, and critics have chronically dismissed them. However, with the passage of time, the Bee Gees legacy is less defined by the phenomenal disco crossover success of their Saturday Night Fever era than by their enduring pop appeal and the modern standards they created ("To Love Somebody," "Words," "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"). If anything, the Bee Gees’ versatility and undiminished knack for creating hits have earned the group a belated if sometimes grudging critical respect.

The three Gibb brothers (Barry and fraternal twins Robin and Maurice), sons of English bandleader Hugh Gibb, started performing in 1955. They moved with their parents to Brisbane in 1958 and worked talent shows and other amateur outlets, singing sets of Everly Brothers songs and an occasional Barry Gibb composition, by this time calling themselves the Bee Gees. They signed with Australia’s Festival Records in 1962 and released a dozen singles and two albums in the next five years. Then as now, close high harmonies were the Bee Gees’ trademark, and the Gibbs wrote their own material.

They hosted a weekly Australian TV show, but their records went unnoticed until 1967, when “Spicks and Specks” hit #1 after the Bee Gees had relocated to En¬gland. There they expanded to a quintet with drummer Colin Peterson and Vince Melouney (both Australians) and found themselves a new manager, Robert Stigwood, then employed by the Beatles’ NEMS Enterprises. Their first Northern Hemisphere single, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” was a hit in both the U.K. and the U.S. (#14, 1967), and was followed by a string of equally popular ballads: “To Love Somebody” (#17, 1967), “Holiday” (#16, 1967), “Massachusetts” (#11, 1967), “Words” (#15, 1968), “I’ve Got to Get a Message to You” (#8, 1968), and “I Started a Joke” (#6, 1969). Their clean-cut neo-Edwardian image and English-accented three-part harmonies were a variation on the Beatles’ approach, although the Bee Gees leaned toward ornate orchestration and sentimentality as opposed to American-style straight-ahead rock.

Cracks in their facade began to show in 1969, when the nonfamily members left the group and reports of excessive lifestyles and fighting among the brothers surfaced. From mid-1969 to late 1970 Robin tried a solo career and had a #2 U.K. hit, “Saved by the Bell.” Meanwhile, Barry and Maurice (then married to singer Lulu) recorded Cucumber Castle as a duo and cut some singles individually. The trio reunited for two more hit ballads - the gold “Lonely Days” (#3, 1970) and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” (#1, 1971) - before bottoming out with a string of flops between 1971 and 1975. Stigwood effected a turnabout by recruiting producer Arif Mardin, who steered them to the funk-plus-falsetto combination that brought them their third round of hits. Main Course (#14, 1976), including “Jive Talkin’” (#1, 1975) and “Nights on Broadway” (#7, 1975), caught disco on the upswing and gave the Bee Gees their first platinum album.

In 1976 Stigwood’s RSO label broke away from its parent company, Atlantic, rendering Mardin unavailable to the Bee Gees. Engineer Karl Richardson and arranger Albhy Galuten took over as producers, and the group continued to record with Miami rhythm sections for hits such as “You Should Be Dancing” (#1, 1976) and a ballad, “Love So Right” (#3, 1976), which recalled the Philly-Motown influence. By this point, the brothers had relocated to Miami. Stigwood, meanwhile, had produced the film versions of Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy, and asked the Bee Gees for four or five songs he could use in the soundtrack of a John Travolta vehicle about the mid-1970s Brooklyn disco scene, Saturday Night Fever. The soundtrack album, a virtual best-of-disco, included Bee Gees chart-toppers “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” and “How Deep Is Your Love,” hit #1, stayed on the album chart for over two years, and eventually sold 30 million copies worldwide. Barry, with Galutan and Richardson, also wrote and produced hits for Yvonne Elliman, Samantha Sang, Tavares, Frankie Valli, and younger brother Andy Gibb [see entry] as well as the title tune for the film version of the Broadway hit Grease.

In 1978, with Saturday Night Fever still high on the charts, the Bee Gees started Music for UNICEF, donating the royalties from a new song and recruiting other hitmakers to do the same. They also appeared in Stigwood’s movie fiasco Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and continued to record. After Saturday Night Fever, even the platinum Spirits Having Flown (#1, 1979) with three #1 hits - “Too Much Heaven,” “Tragedy,” and “Love You Inside Out” - seemed anticlimactic. As of 1979, the Bee Gees had made five platinum albums and more than 20 hit singles.

Along with such phenomenal commercial success came a critical backlash. While the intense antidisco sentiment certainly played a role, the fact that one literally could not turn on a radio without hearing a Bee Gees track did not help. Their career then entered another dry season. In October 1980 the Bee Gees filed a $200 million suit against Stigwood, claiming mismanagement. Meanwhile, Barry produced and sang duets with Barbra Streisand on Guilty (1980). The lawsuit was settled out of court, with mutual public apologies, in May 1981. Living Eyes (#41, 1981) was the Bee Gees’ last album for RSO. They composed the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever’s dismal sequel, Stayin’ Alive; the soundtrack went to #6 and platinum and included “Woman in You” (#24, 1983). Barry also wrote and produced an album for Dionne Warwick, Heartbreaker. With his brothers he cowrote Diana Ross’ “Chain Reaction” and the Kenny Rogers–Dolly Parton hit “Islands in the Stream.”

In 1987 the Brothers Gibb again joined forces and refired their singing career with E-S-P, which included “You Win Again” (#75, 1987). While these records appeared commercial disappointments in comparison to previous chart showings, in fact this was the case only in the U.S. E-S-P went to #1 in Germany and the Top 5 in the U.K. Thus began another phase of the Bee Gees’ history, in which their singles and albums would top the charts practically everywhere but the U.S.

In March 1988, their younger brother Andy Gibb died of myocarditis, a heart condition, at age 30. He had a long history of addiction to drugs and alcohol, and his surviving brothers were devastated by the loss. They retired for a time, and Maurice suffered a brief relapse of his alcoholism. They returned with One (German Top 5, U.K. Top 30) featuring the trio’s highest-charting single of the ’80s in its title track (#7, 1989), followed by High Civilization (1991), which did not even chart in the U.S. but hit #2 in Germany and the U.K. Top 30.

In 1997 the Bee Gees were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They also released Still Waters (#11, 1997), which produced the minor hits “Alone” (#28, 1997) and “Still Waters (Run Deep)” (#57, 1997). A live album, One Night Only (#72, 1998), was the soundtrack to a live concert, which was filmed. Tomorrow the World and This Is Where I Came In (#33, 2001) followed. The group has twice received Britain’s Ivor Novello Trust for Outstanding Contribution to British Music (1988, 1997) and the BRIT Award (1997), all in recognition of their outstanding contribution to British music. In 1994 they were inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. The Bee Gees continued to tour occasionally until January 2003, when Maurice Gibb died of cardiac arrest while receiving treatment for an intestinal blockage.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)