The Bee Gees Are Earthly Angels

I started a joke
Which started the whole world crying
But I didn’t see
That the joke was on me

— the Bee Gees, 1968

Ahh, yes, Saturday Night Fever. I remember it well.” Bee Gee Robin Gibb lifts a goblet of Perrier into the fiery sunset on Biscayne Bay. “We thought up the name,” he boasts, swaying in time with the yachts tied up at the edge of his patio as he sits in the glass-enclosed living room of his rented Miami home.

“Robert Stickweed, er Stigwood, rang us up and said, ‘Look, I need some music for this film I’m making with John Revolting and Olivia Neutron Bomb and — oh, no, that was Grease, wasn’t it? Okay, no harm done; I mean Saturday Night Fever with no Olivia. So anyway, Robert said, ‘I haven’t got any music!’

” ‘Hmm,’ I replied. ‘That’s a nice place to start.’ “

Gibb doubles over in nasal cackling, greatly pleased with his impersonation of a pompous, disdainful rock superstar. Gibb can afford a few guffaws at his own empire’s expense. He and fellow Bee Gees Barry and Maurice Gibb, working with the octopuslike entertainment network that is the Robert Stigwood Organisation, have risen, fallen and risen again over the course of their twelve-year partnership. And now, the trio is one of the wealthiest, most successful and certainly most pervasive musical forces in what group leader Barry solemnly calls “the pop wilderness.”

The Bee Gees first attracted national attention in the late Sixties with their mordant, adenoidal hymns to mining disasters, hapless lovers, self-delusion and broken hearts. They have released more than thirty runaway hit singles, their output since 1975 consisting mostly of the buoyant, uptempo toe-tappers that helped spawn the billion-dollar disco industry. “Tragedy,” the second Number One hit from the Bee Gees’ Spirits Having Flown LP (their twenty-first U.S. album), is the British group’s fifth chart-topper in a row, the longest such string since the Supremes had five in 1964-65 and the Beatles notched a streak of six in 1965-66. And when the Bee Gees themselves aren’t ruling the nation’s airwaves or commanding its cash registers, Barry Gibb and the Bee Gees’ producers, Karl Richardson and Albhy Galuten, are doing as much for such singers as Frankie Valli, Samantha Sang and especially baby brother Andy Gibb, all of whom have had Number One singles.

Whether it be through the Saturday Night Fever or Grease soundtracks, their own albums or those of their beneficiaries, the Bee Gees’ slick, bleating harmonies and rug-cutting rhythms have become an unignorable presence in our culture. All of which seems of only passing interest to Robin Gibb, 29, as he sips the wine brought to him by a sylphidine, red-headed secretary named Liz and surveys the golden sea lapping at the estates of his millionaire neighbors. Contrary to widespread assumptions, the Gibbs are not constantly obsessed with disco hooks, megadollar record sales and platinum certification. While a winning lyric and catchy commercial melody are never far from Robin’s mind, his interests are truly manifold. Attired in crisp aqua slacks, pure white patent-leather slip-on loafers and matching cotton sweater, he is a tanned picture of near-angelic deportment as he warms to his favorite topic—pornography.

“To me, Saturday Night Fever sounds like some sleazy little porno film showing on the corner, second billed to a film called Suspender Belts or something,” he says, going on to recount that the Bee Gees were holed up in Château D’Hérouville Studios outside Paris in 1977, mixing Here at Last…Bee Gees…Live and writing songs for a studio LP when Stigwood phoned with his immortal soundtrack assignment. As Robin tells it, the group had at that point already recorded “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” “How Deep Is Your Love” and “More Than a Woman,” a revelation that contradicts the legend of the one-week marathon writing session that neatly filled Stigwood’s tall order. Robin has been known before to get chronologies muddled, however, and Barry later disputes his younger brother’s recollections with the calm assurance that he is “quite incorrect.” But it’s all neither here nor there as far as Robin’s concerned, since his most vivid memories of the famed interlude in France are slightly off beat.

“You know, years ago there were so many pornographic films made at the Château,” he says intently. “The staircase where we wrote ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ all those songs, was the same staircase where there’ve been six classic lesbian porno scenes filmed. I was watching a movie one day called Kinky Women of Bourbon Street, and all of a sudden there’s this château, and I said, ‘It’s the Château!’ These girls, these dodgy birds, are having a scene on the staircase that leads from the front door up to the studio. There were dildos hangin’ off the stairs and everything. I thought, ‘Gawd, we wrote “Night Fever” there!’ “

For the record, this unsettling discovery in no way precipitated Robin’s studio hobby of scribbling highly imaginative, smutty line drawings. That was honed long ago and currently runs to grotesque, elflike creatures who scurry about with enormous genitals and ravenous stares.

Somehow, the conversation segues into an appraisal of the recent Grammy Awards show, and Robin rolls his eyes as he reflects on John Denver’s stiff-hipped rendition of one of the winning songs.

“When he started singing the nominations, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he’s not gonna start singing “Stayin’ Alive”!’ He was all right singing the ballads, but Denver didn’t exactly have the same moves as John Revolting, did he? But he did go for two hours without saying, ‘Far-out.’ “