The Bee Gees: They Make You Feel Like Dancing

The beat that hustles John Travolta down that Bay Ridge block is provided by the Bee Gees, who are most anxious to inform you that they are not, thanks very much, "a disco group." A conglomerate would be more like it.

With a powerhouse bass line that pushes and pulses, they have one of the biggest-grossing albums in history (partly because the Saturday Night Fever sound track is two records and costs twice as much as a single-unit album . . . but let the accountants quibble). Night Fever is the No. 1 single, and Stayin' Alive, which occupied that slot for four weeks, is now nestled comfortably under it in the No. 2 position.

Four weeks ago, an incredible half of the Top Ten hits belonged to the Bee Gees. No one has crowded so much competition off the charts since the Beatles, who once had five records in the Top Ten, but, as Robin Gibb hastens to point out, "they hadn't written all of them." The Brothers Gibb (whence Bee Gees), three sassy-smart lads from Down Under, have clearly scaled to the Very Top. The boys netted between $12 million and $15 million last year. High on the perks of stardom (big houses behind high iron gates, lots of jewelry), the boys keep one another in line with some good brotherly barbs. Barry describes Robin's heavy gold rings with sardonic pleasure as "symbols of his immense wealth." When another outlandish income statement arrives, Maurice is likely to ask, "Does that mean I can keep me car?"

Not so very long ago, the barbs were considerably more lethal, and the careers of the brothers far dodgier. Born in Manchester, England, to Barbara (a former nightclub singer) and Hugh Gibb (leader of a 13-piece dance band on a ferryboat), the brothers started singing in public in 1955 due to technical difficulties. Barry, then nine, and the twins Robin and Maurice, three years younger, would show up at local Manchester movie palaces and come out between shows as the Rattlesnakes, dancing and moving their lips to pop records piped in from backstage. One day the record broke just as they were about to do a Tommy Steele ditty, and the Rattlesnakes were on their own. "We had a natural harmony," Barry remembers, "and we got through it."

Shortly afterward the Gibbs moved to Australia, eventually settling in a resort town called Surfers Paradise, where the boys--now known as the BGs--played some local clubs. The brothers' persistence landed them a record contract in Sydney, where, says Barry, "we proceeded to have about 14 flops in a row." Adds Maurice: "For that you get a chocolate record--and it melts." Undismayed, they announced that they wanted to go to England and elbow into the pop explosion. Dad at first opposed the plan and threatened to have his sons' passports canceled, then abruptly changed course and put them on the boat back to England in 1967.

The Bee Gees started peddling their demos in the crowded, demanding London scene. They received scant interest until they got a call from a Mr. Stickweed, who turned out to be Robert Stigwood, the pop music nabob. An audition was arranged. Stigwood arrived, late and hung over, and kept his head buried in his arms as the boys gave him their version of Puff (The Magic Dragon). "We started to worry we were making his hangover even worse," Maurice remembers. Finally Stigwood cut them off, mumbled something that sounded complimentary and signed them to a five-year contract. Says Robin: "We realized Bob didn't really care what we sounded like. It was our songs he wanted."

Under Stigwood, the group had nine hefty hits, mostly deep-pile ballads that were like carpeting for the ears. "We would write rock songs--good ones--and they'd say, 'That's nice, where's the ballads?' " Robin remembers. "That was all they wanted." The boys were also suffering from the aftershocks of sudden success. They drank to excess, indulged in lots of speed, lived crazy and spent big. "There was a time," recalls Barry, "when I could walk out the front door and every car to the end of the street was mine, from the white Rolls at the front door to the Alpha at the corner." Maurice, who had five Rolls-Royces and six Aston Martins, practiced his own kind of inventory control by periodically pickling himself and trashing one of the cars. Says he: "I was getting to be a real alky."

The group buckled under the pressure, broke up for a year and a half, from 1969 to late 1970. "Dad came to me," says Robin, "asked me to make it up. I told him, 'Go 'way, Dad, or I'll put a pair of cement shoes on you.' Then he tried to make me a ward of the court." It was the brotherly bond that finally forced a reconciliation. "If we hadn't been related," Robin speculates, "we would probably never have gotten back together."

The boys cooled off and cleaned up their act. Their sound gradually became more sinuous than in years past, bouncier and less simplistic. Barry and Maurice moved to Miami, where the recording-studio conditions are ideal and the living is easy. Their experience in the Stigwood-produced Saturday Night Fever worked out well enough for the Bee Gees to enlist in another Stigwood enterprise, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which will appear this summer. They show up in this one singing 30 old Beatles songs and co-starring with Peter Frampton. "The whole focus of the movie is on Peter," reports Robin with some dissatisfaction. "We're always running around saving him from something."

To redress such imbalances in the future, the boys have, like Travolta, established their own production company, and are planning a long concert tour and a new album for this summer. Robin may even move over from England (maybe to Miami, "or maybe Long Island"), depending on the tax situation at home and whether living Stateside continues to keep everyone relaxed. But the hot frenzy of fresh success is stirring some familiar memories. "It's starting to feel very much like 1967 and '68," Barry says. "It gets so everybody's running your life, or trying to, and you can't breathe. Ask our wives. If anybody knows, they do. You have to protect yourself. Or else you end up like distant friends, passing in the corridor between appointments."

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