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J well, you can tell by the way I use my walk
j music loud
j kicked around
j and now it's all right, it's ok
j' and you may look the other way
j we can try to understand
j the "New York times" ' effect on man
j' ah, ha, ha, ha
j stayin' alive...
How did you people get back here? Come on. Sorry.
You can't come in here. Get them out.
You can't come in here! This is a private session!
Barry: Thank you very much. Good evening to all of you.
Thank you.
J' I can think of younger days
j when living for my life
j was everything a man could want to do
j I could never see tomorrow
j no one said a word
j about the sorrow
j' hey...
J' how can you mend
j' a broken heart?
J how can you stop the rain from falling down?
J' how can you stop
j' the sun from shining?
J what makes the world go round?
J dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah
j dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah
j dah-dah-dah-dah
j dah-dah-dah
j' please help me mend
j' my broken heart
j and let me live again
j dah-dah dah-dah-dah
j dah-dah-dah-dah
j dah-dah-dah-dah-dah
j dah...
Barry: I am beginning to recognize the fact that nothing is true.
Nothing.
It's all down to perception.
My immediate family's gone.
But that's life.
It's the same thing with every family, that someone will be left in the end.
And this time of life, I have fantastic memories.
But everybody's memory is different.
So they're just my memories, you know?
I know that Maurice and Robin would have had a different kind of memory.
Maurice: I remember Barry saying
that one day we were gonna be really famous.
And we said, "oh, yeah," you know. "Whatever you say."
He's the big brother, you know.
Robin: We saw ourselves as triplets rather than me and Maurice being twins.
And we always had the same goals growing up,
that it became impossible to see each other as normal brothers.
Barry: My ninth Christmas, there was an acoustic guitar at the end of my bed.
Robin and Maurice started to collaborate and pretend to sing with me,
and we started doing gigs as a teenage act.
Robin: We emigrated our whole family from england to Australia.
Barry: All three of us had the same understanding
that we were going to be famous come hell or high water.
J you know I love getting up in the morning
j when the sun first strikes the trees
Barry: Our father had his own band, but it didn't work out,
so he became our manager, and it was a team.
There was us three and dad, and mum, of course.
Maurice: My mother, she was always the person
who kept the calm between dad and us.
Very strong, very loyal.
The Beatles have just arrived for the first time in our country.
Maurice: When the Beatles came on the scene,
it was like, "that's what we've been trying to do."
Robin: They turned pop music into an art form,
singing three-part Harmony like we did.
Barry: So we made up our own minds
that we were going back to be part of the British invasion.
Robin: Making music is what we wanted to do for the rest of our lives,
so we thought, "whatever's going to happen, we will make happen.”
J where is the sun...
Before we left Australia, we did an album called spicks and specks.
And they became our best demos.
Jitlss dead...
Barry: Dad and I did the rounds, met with industry people.
And as we sat in everyone's office, they would say the same thing.
“No, no, I'm sorry, lads, we can't help you."
Maurice: My dad, he was very, "we gotta do this,"
because my dad was really the most ambitious man, I think,
in the gibb clan.
Barry: We loved the Beatles, so dad had sent this stuff to nems,
the Brian Epstein offices.
Announcer: Brian Epstein, the man who built the Beatles into a cult
is now as well known as they are.
Man: I was doing Brian's mail most of the time.
There was a letter by the father of these three handsome, cute guys,
who were very proactive
and who had some success.
They came from Manchester, but they were writing from Australia.
I showed it to him.
Brian said, "yeah, that's very nice."
He said, "well, give it to Robert."
"He's Australian, and he's good at these kind of things."
Somebody sent you a tape of these boys from Australia?
Yes, they did.
Oh.
I heard it, and I was absolutely astounded.
It was the most brilliant Harmony singing and composing I'd ever heard.
J if this should end
j 1 don't mind
j if this should end
I 1 will find
j what shall I do?
Man: At the time, Robert was my manager.
Cream was signed to Robert
on what I thought was an exclusive deal.
I was just surprised that other bands were coming in.
J if this should end...
Robert was so eccentric. I mean, absolutely bonkers.
He was Australian, but he spoke like an english gentleman.
And he would wear these really big flashy ties
and he had a comb-over and it was all just...
Well, who is this guy?
Barry: Whoever this man was, he really believed in us.
He was almost like a parent.
Stigwood: You can't deny talent.
And the talent was so obvious.
Man: Somebody mentioned that the Bee Gees were in town.
They were good friends of mine from Australia.
So I phoned them up.
I said, "is Maurice there, then? Put Maurice on."
And he said,
"we've been signed up by this guy called Robert stigwood.
We're doing this recording. Why don't you come and play guitar?"
Caught a train into London and found ibc studios.
So there they were, there was Barry, Robin and Maurice.
And the drummer, Colin petersen.
That night,
my life changed completely. Completely.
The first evening we were in there, there was a blackout.
While waiting for the power to come back on, we sat on the steps
and Barry was playing his guitar.
It was so echoey. It was a wonderful echo in this place.
There we were in the dark.
The first thought was, "in the event of something happening to me..."
J in the event of something happening to me
and we thought, "what could come from that?"
J there is something I would like you all to see
we made believe we were in a mine.
J' it's just a photograph of someone that I knew
j have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones?
J do you know what it's like on the outside?
J don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide
j Mr. Jones
Robin: Because it was our first single, we wanted a title
that captured the imagination, that got people's attention.
Maurice: And "New York mining disaster” was born.
Barry: We had our first hit record within five months of being in england.
The thrill was that it did the same thing in America.
We thought we might get a hit in england
but never dreamed we'd get a hit in America as well.
So I take them to the United States to make a record deal for them.
I made a decision to place the group with Atlantic.
Otis Redding: J what you want, honey, you've got it...
Barry: He said, "I'm taking you to meet ahmet ertegun
and to get you into the American music scene."
Otis Redding was playing at the Apollo.
Ahmet ertegun and Robert stigwood took me down there to see Otis.
J' hey, hey, hey
and it was amazing.
Soul has always had a special place in Bee Gees music.
Maurice: We've always been influenced by black music.
Smokey Robinson, motown. All that was a big influence on us.
Barry: Robert introduced us, but said,
"I want you to write a song for Otis Redding."
"To love somebody" was born that night.
But unfortunately, Otis never got to record the song.
J there's a light
j' a certain kind of light
j that never shone on me
j' I want my life to be
j' lived with you
man: I mean, I must have always known "to love somebody,"
because that song is just like in the ether.
Those lyrics, "there's a certain kind of light that never shone on me."
I don't know if he's talking about himself,
but at some point, I got obsessed tracking down every cover version,
like Nina Simone, the animals.
Some great singers have sung that song, obviously,
but his vocal when he sings it,
I can still get chills thinking about it.
J baby
j you don't know what it's like
j' baby, you don't know what it's like
j' io love somebody
j the way I love you
j' ahhh, no, no
j you don't know what it's like
man: I just remember this music being on.
And I'm like, "who's this?" And... "Well, it's the Bee Gees."
And I was like, "the Bee Gees?"
It actually blew my mind.
Those early records sound like the Beatles' early records.
J I received an invitation
it's a classic '60s guitar pop sound, but then it had another thing going on.
J come to the united nations
you've got the brothers singing, and when you've got brothers singing,
it's like an instrument that nobody else can buy.
J that was when I was somebody
j' in my own time
you can't go buy that sound in a shop.
You can put a Fender stratocaster through a vox amp
and sound like buddy Holly.
You can't sing like the Bee Gees
because when you've got family members singing together, it's unique.
It's the blend of the tones of each brother.
And Robin had this wonderful tear-jerking voice.
Barry: Robin was a joyous kid.
He took great joy in being on television.
This was the funniest kid you could ever meet.
Maurice: My father called him the nanny goat.
He was always going... "Ewww!"
He'd be rehearsing in the back of the car doing all these faces.
You know, j I love you...
And he'd go, "shut up! Sound like a bloody nanny goat."
J' I started a joke
j which started the whole world crying
Robin was always a bit of a loner.
Robin: I like being spontaneous, I like being funny with people,
but you won't get that right away with me, you see?
Barry: Robin had a wit that no one could compete with.
And he could be very dark, too.
J' 1 looked at the sky...
Maurice: Robin is not a person who would say, “I love my brothers."
Or... "Group hug." You know, none of that stuff.
Robin: I'm basically a very shy person. I'm very hard to get to know.
I have to really know somebody before I reveal myself.
J till I finally died
j which started the whole world living
j oh, oh...
Maurice: You know, that's the voice,
that's the voice that reaches your heart.
Barry: We did a show at the saville theatre.
Paul McCartney was there with Jane Asher.
Because Robert had said, "will you come and see the boys?"
When you think that, five months before all this was going on,
I was in pitt street buying up the Beatles fan club book.
And now here I am partying with these guys.
We felt like we'd arrived.
Now I'm living out in highgate, outside London.
Barry's got a place in eaton square.
Robin's got a house in St. George's hill. Beautiful area.
Barry: And mum and dad had their own place,
and, of course, Andy lived with them.
He was just like us.
And he was always tagging along,
hoping that one day he would do this, too, he would like to sing.
Maurice: There was a lot of hits in that short time.
After all the work we had done through clubs and everything,
I felt grown up, you know, and so we made the most of it.
Host 1: A very talented group of men, the Bee Gees!
Host 2: Once again the fabulous Bee Gees!
Here they are and get involved with the Bee Gees!
J' I am man and you are woman
j who needs marriage? We are humans all
by then we were flying, you know?
Just the most amazing experience.
J then it would please you if I should call
j doesn't matter wnat your name is
j' 1 can do a million things to you
as a pop group, this was the biggest moment of our lives.
Never expected. Hoped for, but never really expected.
J' no, no, no
j no, no
then came "Massachusetts."
Robin said, "I've got this idea for a song."
He sang the melody, and I just remember our jaws dropping.
J' feel I'm going back to massachusetfts
j; Something's telling me
j' I must go home
j' and the lights all went out
j in Massachusetts
j' the day I left her
j standing on her own
man: For me, they connected from very early on.
“Massachusetts” was probably the first song, I think, that really resonates.
There is a... gospel quality to it.
There's a folk quality to it.
I didn't know where the hell Massachusetts was.
But I found myself singing that and translating it to where I was from.
Robert goes, ""Massachusetts' has just gone to number one!"
We went, "what?"
To have a number one in england,
you have no idea how much we dreamed of this back in Australia.
J and Massachusetts
j' is one place I have seen
host: "Massachuseftts™ from the Bee Gees.
Woman: I met the Bee Gees at top of the pops, I was young.
Was I 167 maybe I was even 17.
Announcer: Top pop girl in America. Top pop girl in britain.
I'ne one and only Lulu!
J some people live within the world
j and some people live without it
j some people gotta whisper their love
j' and some, they gofta shout it
the Bee Gees were always in the studio.
They were always recording.
They would literally go into the studio and start writing.
I had never known anything like that before.
We don't usually write our lyrics till the day we sing them.
We usually write our lyrics in the studio itself.
That seems to work through thick and thin.
It always works for us.
Maurice: It's very hard to describe how we write.
But the only way I can describe how we work at it
is by becoming one mind.
Barry: Maurice had unique insight into the way Robin and I thought.
He would just be fiddling around on the piano.
He'd suddenly play something, we'll go... "What was that?"
He was trying to please us,
in the way that we would all try to please each other.
And that sometimes was the birth of a song.
We'll wake each other's little instincts up and the melodies come.
It's wonderful when you hear it taking shape.
Then it all blossoms.
- The third verse is four bars. - It's rolling, fellas.
They'd say, "ok, we're ready to roll.”
They'd play the song. I'd work the chords out.
Colin would figure out what he's gonna do on the drums.
They'd say, "right, here we go. Bang, bang, bang." Down it went.
And that spontaneity came out in the songs.
Barry: In those days, you knocked an album out in three weeks.
I think we had three albums out in one year.
J' but that was when I got an idea
j came like a gun and shot in my ear
j don't you think it's time you got up and stood alone?
Melouney: When we went to Europe,
there'd always be a big bunch of kids outside waiting for us to arrive.
It was a frightening time because they crawled all over the Mercedes.
They were on the roof, they were over the window. It was crazy.
"Hey, guys, you think we're famous?" "Could be."
Announcer: The Bee Gees! The most exciting sound in the world.
J now I've found
j that the world
j is round...
If you've never been famous,
the first time it happens is a very difficult thing to handle.
You don't know how to behave. You don't know how to experience it.
And that affected all of us in its own way.
Maurice: I had six rolls-royces before I was 21.
I don't know where they are now.
But that's how crazy it was.
Barry: We were all very selfish at that point.
The testosterone kicked in, and the competition of life began.
J' 1 told him I'm in no hurry
j but if I broke her heart
j then won't you tell her I'm sorry?
Melouney: There was always a conflict between Barry and Robin.
They both had fantastic voices
and Robin wanted to sing a song and Barry wanted to sing it.
J' 1 just gotla get a message to you
j hold on
Barry: Both of us wanted to be individual performers.
We all wanted individual recognition.
And therein lies the issue.
J hold on
we're speaking to you from a club in...
In Hamburg, and I'm Barry gibb of the Bee Gees.
Robin here. We've heard rumors that the group is splitting up.
Would you like to verify those rumors?
If I was to say that was true, I would be the premier of Russia.
- I don't know. - Thank you very much, Mr. petersen.
- How about you, Mr. melouney? - No, I don't think it is.
No, no, no.
Gallagher: I always say that making music with your family
is equally the greatest strength and the greatest weakness
you could ever have in a musical partnership.
To get to the top or near the top, you've gotta be incredibly driven.
And what drives you is your ego.
It can be tricky to stay there.
J' I am the searcher of my fortunes
j' 1 got my right hand on the wheel
Barry: The three of us stopped looking inwards to each other
and all started looking outwards to what we could be individually.
"To hell with what my brothers think.” and each one of us was thinking that.
J don't wanna live
j' inside myself
Gallagher: Travel the world when you're young with a family member
gives you a certain sense of who you are and where you've come from.
So, you kind of walk that tightrope.
We'd been together all our lives, don't forget.
We'd been together since Robin and I were five, singing professionally.
That's a lot of years.
Robin: We'd been kids living together with each other
right up until the time we arrived and even after we arrived in england.
J don't wanna live inside myself
Barry: Robin was the first to say, "I'm quitting the group.”
I stopped really knowing Robin and his personal life once we became famous.
And the same with no.
Our three lives were three different lives.
We were no longer living the same life.
Brothers... in general, it's a very complicated thing.
Emotions are heightened and there's things that go back to childhood
about, you know, if one kid got more attention than the other,
and all these things play out in front of just a small group of friends,
but when you magnify that with the whole world,
it changes the game a little bit.
Robin, that's a good picture. That's you, Barry, Colin, Vince.
- That's correct. - Do you miss them?
Well, it's not really a matter of missing them, really.
I still see them on and off so that's the way things go.
I'll show you the studio, anyway.
Barry: It was really me and Robin that were in conflict.
And I think Maurice was in the middle.
Story of my life, really.
Barry would call and say, "tell Robin if he wants to do that..."
Robin would go, "let Barry know I'll be over..."
I said, "Robin, you call Barry." "Barry, you call Robin."
And they both said, "no, we won't."
And for 18 months, they never did.
Barry: We had this fascination with calling the newspapers up.
You'd call nme or you'd call disc or music echo and say,
"Robin said this about me and I want to correct the record," and all that.
Robin: It was a whole strange episode of our lives.
But a lot of things had gone down at that time
and we needed time apart to think about them.
Announcer: At caxton hall, vip transport
for very important pop star Barry gibb.
He's getting married to 20-year-old former miss Edinburgh, Linda gray.
Their world was crazy at that time.
At one time, there were three brothers, and then all of the sudden,
there were three wives.
Maurice gibb and Lulu became mister and missus
at St. James parish church at gerrards cross in buckinghamshire.
Lulu: You think, by marrying someone that you absolutely adore,
you think that'll solve all your problems. But, really...
At caxton hall, Robin gibb of the Bee Gees marries Molly hullis.
Robin: Molly was my first real love, the first serious one,
but it was a very traumatic time for me.
I went with my manager. He said, "Robin, I'm going to send you to New Zealand."
He says, "you're doing the redwood park festival."
So I went there, and it was advertised that the Bee Gees were coming,
not just Robin gibb, you see.
Robin: All right, ok.
Man: How did you feel last night?
Robin: Um... I have an obligation to my audience not to look scared.
I can't say I really felt scared.
I was terrified.
J how far am I able fo...
Barry: All three of us became isolated.
And all three of us did things to each other
that I think we're all sorry for.
We loved each other.
There was an enormous amount of love between us.
Growing up, we did everything together.
We often thought we were triplets, because we all had the same love.
We had the same sense of humor, the love of the same kind of music.
Barry: Just typical kids, you know,
but the one thing that no one else was doing
was we were singing in Harmony,
and beyond anything else, that's all we cared about.
We fell in love with the mills brothers.
They all did something unique in their own way.
At the same time, Robin and I did two different leads
and Maurice would always know where to put that other melody,
to make a three-part Harmony.
They mirrored what we wanted to be.
Host: Do you find you miss Robin and Maurice, musically?
Yeah. Not musically, I miss them both as brothers.
Jonas: And something about entering the world from the same place,
I think, has an effect on your ability to sing together,
your creative awareness and your artistic voice.
Host: Could we see the Bee Gees back together again?
Um, that's a very strong point, that it could be.
I can't say definite, but I'd like to see the Bee Gees again.
Reporter: Mr. Epstein has been unwell now for some months.
He's been in the habit of taking tablets to help him sleep at night.
He was found in his second-floor bedroom
just after two o'clock this afternoon by his housekeeper.
Brown: When Brian died and we restructured nems,
Robert asked to become a more important senior executive for the Beatles.
And that wasn't acceptable to them,
so he then left the company
and took with him Eric Clapton and Bee Gees
so he could start off on his own.
Barry: We were an asset.
We were one of those people Robert needed as an element of going public.
At the launching of the company, we were starting to communicate again.
And once we came back together again, we wrote "lonely days,"
which reflected the idea that we'd been broken up.
We'd always been boys growing up together,
and I think we came back together as men.
We respected each other's opinions, which we didn't before that.
If anything, that was the good thing about the break-up.
J' I can think of younger days...
Barry: I'd already started a first verse and chorus.
I knew what "how can you mend a broken heart" was.
But Robin walks in.
I said, "I'm just working on this song. Do you wanna do it with me?"
And he went, "yeah, of course.”
J I could never see tomorrow...
We'd been apart for two years.
If we hadn't been brothers, we wouldn't have lasted half an hour.
It just wouldn't have happened.
J hey
j' how can you mend
j' a broken heart...
Things started to just improve over time.
J how can you stop the rain from falling down?
We became the Bee Gees again.
J' how can you stop
j' the sun from shining?
J what makes the world go round?
Barry: We came back together and made two number-one records in America.
So we were on a bit of a high.
But we were not really that good
when it came to just doing anything without a pill.
You know, or without a drink.
It was destroying us.
J' my broken heart
that became, that became the battle.
The fight to survive being a pop group.
J dah-dah-dah-dah
j dah-dah-dah-dah-dah
j dah
Thank you very, very much on behalf of my brothers,
Robin,
and Maurice.
And this beautiful orchestra.
Our lead guitarist, Alan Kendall.
Man: Robert stigwood said, "the Bee Gees are gonna go on a tour
and want a guitar player that can play bass as well," because in those days,
Maurice played bass but he would go on piano sometimes.
And so I called him and I said, "well, I can't play bass."
And he said, "just say you can play bass."
So I said, "ok, I can play bass."
I'll be honest, I was very much into the lifestyle.
I just loved being on the road, I loved playing music, chasing women.
Maurice is so funny cos he was good at magic tricks.
And he liked to drink a little, as I did.
Robin I never really knew.
I mean, I'd converse with him, but not as much as the others.
And I would bump into him every now and then
wandering the corridors of the hotel,
and there's Barry with his glamorous wife
smoking a bone, you know.
My early days with the Bee Gees were, for me, thrilling.
Even though I can understand why it wasn't for them,
cos they weren't necessarily selling out.
Barry: When we were broken up, the world changed radically, quickly.
And that was the beginning of the period when there was no interest in us at all.
Remember, we were on tour.
They'd try to keep Robin from looking out into the audience,
in case it was only half full.
When we got back home, I'd tend to do more drinking.
I'd go to the pubs, the police knew my car.
I was becoming the town drunk.
I had about two grand in the bank
and lived next door to a fish-and-chip shop.
Barry: So, by "74, we didn't think there was gonna be much of a future.
When you become famous, you think everyone loves you
and they're gonna love you forever. That is not true.
Maurice: All of a sudden, we had to work the clubs of the north of england
to pay the tax man, so we had the sheffield fiesta,
the golden garter in Manchester, batley variety club...
Great clubs of our time.
Kendall: The batley thing, it's where all the has-beens went to play.
Not saying that they were has-beens,
but it was like, "god, not batley," you know.
J Sunday morning...
Woman: I was a waitress at the batley variety club.
I really wasn't a fan of the Bee Gees.
The only thing I knew about them was,
you know, Maurice was going through a divorce with Lulu.
Maurice: Yvonne came in and I saw her eyes.
I don't know about the rest of her, I just saw her eyes.
And I said, "I'm gonna marry her."
And I knew I was gonna marry her.
Yvonne: He was so cute. His personality was amazing.
Robin: Maurice had this childlike quality,
which is something very special in men.
Yvonne: He loved dressing up in police uniforms.
Wherever we went on tour, they'd give him a hat, give him a badge.
- Is that his wallet? - It's a badge.
- Whoa! What was that? - I'm not showing you now.
People loved him. He had the best smile ever.
I remember him teaching me the show-biz smile,
and he said, "the trick is, you don't move your eyes...
And you just go like this.”
And I'll be honest with you,
I think Maurice was the glue that held it all together.
Oh, I'm Mr. fix-it.
There's some discrepancy between Barry and Robin,
or we're gonna make a decision about something,
"what does Maurice think?"
But most of the time, I'm like my mum. I'm the peacemaker.
Yvonne: If they'd not been brothers, they would not be together.
No doubt in my mind.
Man: I met the Gibbs when they were on a bit of a downturn in their career.
Robert stigwood made me, unaccountably, the head of his record label.
I was only 21 years old.
I believe it was because I was the only guy in the room that I got the job.
It was odd to me. I thought,
if they can write those songs, how come they can't be consistent?
If you can write "how can you mend a broken heart" and "to love somebody,"
where does that talent go?
There was two albums in a row that were dismal.
Ahmet ertegun said to Robert, "maybe their time is gone."
Cos Atlantic were paying for these recordings.
And Robert wouldn't hear of it, of course.
He would never let the Bee Gees go.
There was this thing about stigwood.
Stigwood and his loyalties.
I had a kind of deep-seated resentment about the fact that,
you know, they were still his favorite.
I had come out of a long period of addiction and alcoholism,
and I went into the sort of recovery period.
All these musical ambitions came to the surface.
So I went to Miami to record.
Barry: We had a conversation with Eric about making the comeback.
Eric said, "I've just made this album called 461 ocean boulevard in Miami.
Why don't you make an album in America instead of making an album in england
and maybe a change of environment will do something for you?"
The studio there was unbelievable.
And I think that's what the suggestion was about, really.
I thought those guys were actually an R&B band
that hadn't really worked that out yet.
I thought, man, this would be so good
if they could pick up on what's going on in America.
Kendall: I do know that they had to change something.
That's when the whole idea of actually being more of a band together
rather than musicians and orchestras and all that stuff.
Man: Alan Kendall, who was a friend of mine, he said,
"the Bee Gees are looking for a drummer. Are you interested?"
And I went, "uh, yes. I think I'm interested. Yeah, I am interested."
Barry: We needed to get more energized
and don't rely so much on the ballads that we had been doing.
We wanted to be a band so bad. And that was basically the birth of it.
Bryon: We had a great bass player, Maurice.
We had a great guitar player, Alan.
So really, the only thing we needed was a keyboard player.
And I thought, blue.
Dennis called and said, "I'm putting a band together with the Bee Gees.
I've spoken to Barry and everybody's in agreement. Are you interested?"
I said, "no, no. I'm having great fun. I'm in a rock-and-roll band."
Queen was our support act.
I'm touring America and living the rock-and-roll life.
J you don't get me, I'm part of the union
j you don't get me, I'm part of the union...
Bryon: We'd grown up together playing in bands in Cardiff.
I said, "we've known each other for a long time, right?"
He said, "Dan, don't do this to me."
And I said, "I am doing it to you."
And after you've met Barry, if you don't wanna do it, I'll leave you alone."
Barry: Maurice and I had moved to the Isle of Man, where we were born.
Blue was the guy who was gonna come to the Isle of Man
and audition for us on piano.
J if I were you and you were me...
Weaver: We were staying in Barry's house and Linda and then Maurice came over.
And hughie, the father.
Instantly, you feel comfortable with them.
They started talking about synthesizers and moogs, and blue had them all.
It was the Sunday evening I was leaving and hughie said,
"hey, we haven't heard you play," you know.
But my piano was so bad
that he played something and it just sounded awful.
It was just, like, totally embarrassing.
I said, "sounds fine to me, man, let's do it," you know?
Barry offered him the job.
Weaver: I'd always loved the music,
but the first time you ever hear the Bee Gees,
just when they're in a room like this, you know, it's just magic.
I think that's what won me over with them.
I said, "yes," and January the 1st we left.
J doo-doo-doo doo-aoo-doo
j doo-Dee-doo-dah-day
Man: Miami is a gateway city.
But in those days, it was kind of sleepy,
you know, a little off the beaten path.
But in the winter, that was the place to be.
So Atlantic records would always book their acts
down in criteria.
J when the lights shine...
I was about the number-three engineer at the studio.
I worked my way up, and I was at that point in my career
where I was ready for anything.
J get on up
j look around
j can't you feel the wind of change?
When we got to Miami, all of the sudden sunshine and, oh...
You know, this is paradise.
We'd come from england, and so there was nothing sleepy about America.
Put them in the same house I'd rented for Eric Clapton, 461 ocean boulevard.
Weaver: The first thing all of us did
was take pictures against that palm tree,
doing the Eric Clapton pose.
J we need a god down here...
Weaver: Being in that house together, you know, we were creative.
And we were a family, I mean, I felt like that.
Kendall: It did make us close.
I mean, you had to be, and we'd all watch TV at night.
The chemistry, it was very exciting.
Weaver: In the morning, you went to breakfast, had a cup of tea.
It was all very relaxed.
J taste the air
j can't you see the wind of change?
It was strange considering the amount of pressure
that was really on the Bee Gees at that time.
They were about to drop us.
We had to adopt a new sound, we had to adopt a new attitude.
So the next step was, we brought arif mardin in to produce them.
Aretha Franklin: J day dreamin' and I'm thinking of you...
Barry: We'd often worked with other people, but they weren't producers,
and this man was a literal producer.
Oakes: They expressed how much they wanted to do American R&B kind of stuff,
and arif was top of the heap for that.
Maurice: Arif was so instrumental in producing black artists,
and we wanted that input.
J it turns me rignt on when I hear him say...
Robin: We actually did an album with arif before that, but arif said,
"we've gotta go more into R&B."
And we started working together right here in Miami down at criteria.
Well, I was in studio b, and arif says to me,
"Karl, have I got a group for you."
And, of course, everybody knew the Bee Gees.
It was a surprise, out of nowhere. I was excited.
You know, they sing like angels, and they were as excited as I was.
And arif was right in there with them.
Robin: He said, "look, if you're ever going to break open brand new,
you've gotta start now.
Shock the pants off these people who don't believe in you."
Maurice: Robert came and saw us when we were making the album.
Sat down with us on the beach and said, "right, we're gonna start from scratch.
This is gonna be it. Let's make it big."
Man: If you said to me, or anyone,
“just go and write a hit song right now,"
they would be able to craft something good,
but it would probably be missing this magic that,
if you work in music long enough you understand is running everything.
Like surfers with waves.
Surfers don't make the waves, fishermen don't make the fish.
Songwriters don't really write songs, you receive songs.
Barry: Driving backwards and forwards to criteria,
this clickety-click thing was going on on this bridge
every time we crossed over it, and in my head it sounded like...
And it was gone.
And eventually, I started singing to it in my head.
J' just your jive talkin...
Kendall: I remember going in the studio.
Barry said, "can you do chicken pickin'?"
I didn't really know what it was.
So I played this one note and muted it, thought it sounded like a chicken.
J tak-it-ta-ka, tak-it-ta-ka...
And mixed with Barry's rhythm guitar, it really worked, you know.
J' it's just your jive talkin'
j' you're tellin" me lies, yeah
j jive talkin'
j you wear a disguise
j jive talkin'
j so misunderstood, yeah
j jive talkin'
j' you're really no good
at that time, only a handful of R&B artists were using synthesizers
so we went into this field, uh...
Pioneering in a way.
Music is this huge energy flying around everywhere,
and if you're lucky, you get little slices of it that turn into songs.
- There is a sort of... - Like a radio transmitter.
It's exactly like that.
As if somebody's written the songs in the air
and they're giving them to us.
J' leaving me looking like a dumbstruck fool
j' with all your jive talkin'
j you're tellin me lies...
Robin: Robert pressed for "jive talkin™ to come out as the first single,
because it was something totally unexpected from us.
Oakes: We sent the record out but without naming the Bee Gees on it
because by then, their stock had fallen so low with radio stations in America.
And within hours of the record landing at all the radio stations,
they were calling and saying, "who is this? This is amazing."
Time, weather, and...
Kasem: The British group who move into number one this week
hit number one exactly four years ago to the week.
I'he brand-new number-one song in the usa,
the Bee Gees and "jive talkin"
Maurice: When "jive talkin™ came out, everybody went, "who?
The Bee Gees? 'Broken heart' Bee Gees? Are you kidding?"
Richardson: Something different was happening, and the brothers felt it too.
Miami, Miami beach, that whole vibe turned them on.
Barry: I just fell in love with the atmosphere here.
It reminded me so much of growing up in Australia.
Man: I'hat's great.
Barry: And from "jive talkin™ onwards, we kicked it up.
Richardson: The songwriting was just very unique, nothing like it.
They would write on the spot, and they would bounce off each other.
Engineer: You let us know when you're ready.
Richardson: “Nights on Broadway" was one of those.
The guys had been to New York and they'd go,
"we gotta write a New York kind of song."
Engineer: Here we go. Take ten.
Richardson: They just did it naturally in the studio, and everybody chipped in.
Barry: Three, four...
J well, here we are
j in a room full of...
Barry: Ahmet ertegun came to Miami.
He was there when we were cutting "nights on Broadway."
At the time, it was "lights on Broadway."
J blamin' it all
j on the lights on Broadway
and ahmet went, "no."
He says, "you know, you've got to get more adult about the songs."
And so "lights on Broadway" became "nights on Broadway."
J well, I had to follow you
j' though you did not want me to
j that won't stop my loving you
j' 1 can't stay away
j blamin' it all
j on the nights on Broadway
j' singing them love songs
j' singing them straight to the heart songs
Maurice: We were completing "nights on Broadway."
We'd just done most of the vocal tracks.
Usually at the end you have some adlibs or some kind of thing
to take us away from the original melody and have some fun.
Richardson: Arif suggested to the band,
"we really need some kind of background parts
that come in and express the meaning of the song."
Barry: He was looking for one of us to scream, in tune, if possible.
I said, "I'll give it a shot.”
Are we almost ready? Well, let's do it.
So he went out then, he did the "blamin" it all's.
J biamin' it all
j' blame it on the nights on Broadway
everybody in the control room woke up,
and it was like, "oh, this is a new sound."
J blamin' it all on the nights on Broadway
j' blame it on the nights on Broadway
Barry: I was thinking, "my god, where is this coming from? I can do this."
My whole life I didn't know I could do this.
Everybody's giving me credit.
No, he was singing it. I said, "keep on doing it."
J' blame it on the nights on Broadway
j' yeah, yeah
j' singing them straight to the heart songs
j blamin' it all...
Arif brought it out of us, all that. We weren't the first to sing falsetto.
We loved the stylistics. We loved the spinners, the delfonics.
They were all falsetto lead singers.
J' if I had money I'd go out
j' buy you pearls
j' dress you like a queen
Riley: Something to be said about all music
is that it doesn't happen in a vacuum.
The falsetto is very much a black tradition.
But they've translated it into this interesting interpretation of soul.
But I guess, more importantly for me, it's emotional.
Because we were so excited about this, we started writing songs for this voice.
Richardson: It created another dimension of sound.
That's what we thought, emotionally.
It became another icon of the Gibbs.
Everybody knew when you heard that falsetto, that's the Bee Gees.
J ooh, be tender with my love
j' you know how easy it is to hurt me
Maurice: When we sing songs like...
J' you know how easy it is to hurt me
it's Barry and Robin singing in unison,
but they mesh together so well that it sounds like one voice,
but it's a different voice from them separately.
J with my love
j' you know how easy it is to hurt me
j yeah-eah
j' Fanny, be tender...
Riley: It's delivered with such delicacy
and the message in the lyrics
was what guys should say,
didn't say, couldn't say, for whatever reasons.
It's the kind of music you might have bought and given to your girlfriend.
But that's what was special about them.
J ahh
j ahh-ah-ah
j' Fanny, be tender with my love
Barry: Main course became a turning point for us.
Dennis bryon on drums and blue Weaver and Alan Kendall.
That became our band.
J with my love
j' cos it's all that I've got
j' and my love won't desert me
j be Fender, tender...
In many ways they were chameleons of pop.
Clapton: The way they changed
and the groove they got into there was so profound.
If that was something that was initiated by me,
I can't think of any... it's one of the great things I've done in my life.
I'll take full credit.
Barry: We were getting ready to record the next album,
and we get this phone call that arif can't be involved in this album.
Robert chose to take the organization away from Atlantic records
and go private.
Atlantic, who were not happy about that,
said, "you're not using arif anymore, he's a house producer.”
I said, "what about the next album?” you know.
I said, "who do you think can continue where you left off?"
Richardson: I got a call from Barry and he said,
“I want my studio time back to work with you."
And I'm in the control room.
I said to Dennis the drummer,
“that pattern you're playing right now is just a little too busy."
He said, "well, what do you mean?"
I said, "I can't get into specifics about the note values."
I didn't have a technical term for the open and closed hi-hat
or any of that stuff.
So apparently, I needed a communicator.
Man: I was working as an independent producer on some pub band in London.
Karl called and he said, "what are you doing?"
I said, "I finished the mix. I'm on a plane tomorrow."
Richardson: Albhy went to berklee school of music in new england
and he was one of my best friends.
He says, "I'll be on the next flight to Florida."
J' baby, you turn me on...
Galuten: I got off the plane, I went straight to the studio.
I walked in, they were working on "you should be dancing."
They came in the control room and Barry said, "what did you think?"
And I said, "well, I just got in, but sounds awfully good."
We seemed to hit it off, so I came back the next day.
We have to remember at the time, albhy was a hippie.
I mean, he was just different.
J 1 get lifted up...
Albhy used to hang around the studio, and I got on really well with him.
I found out he played on "I shot the sheriff" with Eric.
Albhy had an inroad into technology and he had a great ear.
Everybody just seemed to be, I think, relieved
to have another ear in the control room to hear what they were doing as a whole.
In the beginning when I came, the three brothers were clearly a unit.
Each knew the way their brother sang and would be on the same mic,
and they would lean in or lean out or complement each other's voices,
so it was in perfect synchrony.
J' how a love so rignt
j ooh
j' can turn out to be so wrong...
Barry: We found another sound, we found a new sound.
I came up with a lot of new ideas to suit the falsetto.
Everybody was saying the same thing. "Do that falsetto again."
That was fine for me, I was having a ball.
Man: A lot of new music has been coming out of Miami lately.
Enough so that we've even heard mentioned the term "Miami sound.”
J my baby moves at midnight
j goes right on till the dawn
Riley: This is actually a really important period
for musicianship and production and songwriting
that targets the dance floor.
It's a different emotional energy,
which is about, "can you make the body move?
Can you make the body happy?"
J' you should be dancing, yeah
j' dancing, yeah
man: And certain songs sounded like the human embodiment of a brass section.
- The same way a horn just punches? - Man: Yeah.
That's what Barry's voice reminds me of.
J gives me power
j goes right down to my blood
I was always into arrangement of instruments.
“You should be dancing,” their voices together sound like trumpets to me.
J' you should be dancing, yeah
I am not high, for the record. I just wanna...
It was a discovery, and we discovered a new audience.
Man: At the clubs, "you should be dancing" exploded.
Not just, "oh, well, I heard that record and I really liked it."
It was three times a night at any club that you went to.
There was a whole industry that was built around this clubbing thing.
Billboard started a chart that was dance music chart.
This billion-dollar industry was being built way before the Bee Gees.
A lot of people don't realize disco started
in the gay and the black community.
People don't understand what it was like back then for gay people.
There was a law in New York that did not allow people of the same sex
to dance together in a place that had a liquor license.
And then the law changed and that allowed me to open my club.
A new era of dance music started in the gay underground clubs.
J dream world
so, the record industry wants to name it, package it, sell it.
That was the explosion of the disco sound.
J dream world
we're down at criteria sound studios
and currently it's the studio
that's being used by the Bee Gees.
What particular thing about the studio makes it so attractive?
It's cheap? = no.
Cheap it isn't, but...
But the actual atmosphere of the place is very relaxing.
We create better here than anywhere else.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Maurice: America was the ultimate dream.
As three kids, we said, "one day we're gonna have houses in America
all next door to each other with swimming pools."
We thought, "oh, that'll be great.”
It was a huge uprooting.
It's a very large family.
And it just kept getting bigger and bigger over time.
Mum and dad came to Miami as quickly as we did.
I think they were probably the happiest they'd ever been in their lives.
And of course Andy came here with them.
Richardson: Andy was a gift out of left field.
But I never knew he existed
until one day, he shows up fresh from Australia.
Barry: Andy was a great kid.
He could do anything he set his mind to.
Barry was Andy's idol.
- They were almost like twins. - Barry: We were very much alike.
We looked alike, we had the same birthmarks.
I would say we were as much like twins as Maurice and Robin.
Maurice: Main course, and children of the world which followed,
were triple platinum.
I think he really wanted to be a part of that.
They suggested that I go to Australia, as my brothers first did in 1958,
when I was only five months old,
and start working there and get some records released.
Linda: Andy was very young then. He had his little band.
Barry: It was a process of building him up, getting him to play live,
and getting him to be an artist.
Andy: I was there for two years.
A phone call came from my brother Barry and said, "I wanna produce you."
And I think it was two weeks I was in the studio
to do a new album in Miami.
I didn't think I was ready.
The first few times in front of a real professional studio microphone,
Andy was, like, petrified.
But, you know, Barry was there
and guided him through and helped him with lyrics.
He was very receptive to new ideas.
And it didn't take him long, you know, to find, like, another groove.
J' for so long
j you and me been finding each other for so long...
Galuten: The Bee Gees' point of view was about having hit records
and being on the radio, and so,
the greatest gift that you could give to your younger brother
would be to give him that success, to write songs with him,
to teach him to be a star.
Jil..il..
J' 1 just wanna be your everything...
Barry: Then suddenly, out of nowhere,
Andy had about three number ones in a row.
Oakes: He was a teen idol.
There wasn't talk about him becoming a bee gee.
Robin saw he had a younger audience. It was smart to keep him on his own.
J oh, baby
ji...
J if I stay here without you, darling, I would die
Barry: All of the sudden, he was the big thing.
There was a period when we lived in the shadow of Andy's band.
J' io be your everything
Richardson: After children of the world album,
the next project we were booked to record in France,
cos of the Elton John album honky chateau. It sounded great.
J bye-bye, chateau, I must leave you
j though it breaks my heart
Robert sent us there. I think it was some kind of tax thing.
Richardson: We thought, "if this studio sounds that good,
yeah, let's go off to France, why not?"
It wasn't the honky chateau that Elton John had used.
A chateau sounds absolutely gorgeous, doesn't it?
Beautiful building.
Great grounds and gardens and ponds and fountains.
No, it's nothing like that.
It was a half-built castle. No central heating, nothing.
And it was a dump.
Yvonne: We seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.
Not a happy place to be.
It was kind of decrepit. I think it'd been used to make porn movies.
This was not right.
But because there was a contract, we just decided to plough on through.
Barry: We were going there to mix a live album called here at last... live.
But also we were getting songs ready for our new studio album,
which would be the follow-up to children of the world.
And we got a call from Robert stigwood.
A friend of mine, Nik cohn, wrote this piece for New York magazine,
"tribal rites of the new Saturday night."
Disco was really under way, in Manhattan, anyway.
But Nik cohn's point was that,
rather than just being underground gay clubs,
straight couples are doing the hustle on Saturday night in the suburbs.
I got Robert to buy the film rights to a magazine article,
in which there was no story.
But it caught Robert's attention because he saw
that that's a lead role for an actor, if it was a movie.
He announced at the Beverly Hills hotel at breakfast,
“I'm signing John Travolta to a three-picture deal.”
People thought he was mad.
He was a TV actor. No one gets a million dollars for three pictures.
Turned out to be the bargain of the century because he got him for grease
and the movie we don't talk about, moment by moment.
But two out of three's not bad.
I was still running rso records, so my job was to do the soundtrack.
And my brief was, "put all your favorite disco tracks.
Everyone will play it at a party and will never stop dancing."
These were comparatively easy,
but we needed the Bee Gees to write their few songs.
Barry: A phone call came from Robert saying, "I wanna make this film."
He said, "but I'm gonna need two or three songs."
It wasn't the idea that they would do the soundtrack.
We knew they were busy, but, "have you got some songs?" Robert said.
And they said, "yeah, sure.”
Barry: Robert said, “I'm sending you a script."
But we decided not to read the script.
Robin: We weren't writing the fever music.
We were writing our new album and just having fun doing it.
They had a couple of tunes, or titles. We thought, "let's leave it with them."
What we ended up doing was the demos of these songs.
And I was really surprised
that it was only a few weeks later we got the songs.
We got a cassette, and to this day, it's amazing.
J on the waves of the air...
J you're in my life
it was just one after the other. "Stayin' alive," "more than a woman."
"How deep is your love," "if I can't have you," "night fever."
On one cassette. I thought, "yes, we've got a soundtrack."
Kendall: You know, you listen to that tape,
whoever was playing, there would have been hits.
The songs are so good, you think, "shit," you know? "That's so cool.”
Barry: We had the demos,
and then we went into the process of making real records.
Barry, Karl and I lived in that control room, I don't know, 16 hours a day.
Yeah, that was the only thing to do.
We recorded "night fever" first.
We actually had that in the can.
Barry: Robert called and said, "I need a title for the film."
"What I've got at the moment,” I said, "is two titles:
Stayin' alive and night fever," and he said, "night fever."
He said, "sounds ok, but it sounds a bit too pornographic.
It needs to be called Saturday night,” he said.
So it turned into Saturday night fever.
J' night fever, night fever
j we know how fo do it
oakes: We were editing fever on the lot at Paramount.
I was deluged by Paramount people saying,
"how's your little disco movie coming along?"
So that was a bit patronizing.
But the inspiring thing was that stigwood during post-production said,
"why wait for the release of the film? Let's put out a single now."
Then he started with the heads of Paramount. "How many theatres?"
They told him something like 200.
He said, "I'm releasing the record in every city.
Why can't it be in every single city?"
So they made a deal whereby if the record got to the top 20,
they would increase the number of screens.
If it got top ten, they'd go more.
He said, "I need the first record to be number one."
Weaver: Stigwood phoned up and said to Barry,
"il need the best love song you've ever written for the movie."
So we went into a room in the chateau.
Chopin had stayed there, so every time I looked at this piano,
I envisaged chopin sitting down and playing.
I sat down at the piano and thought of his prelude in e flat,
and I knew Barry could sing in e flat.
When we were working like that, I had a cassette player.
Barry: I think I wanna end there.
And I'm sure it happened at that point, through the stained-glass window,
came a beam of sunlight, you know?
J' your eyes in the morning sun...
Barry: J I know your eyes in the morning sun
j I feel you touch me in the pouring rain...
Barry: And that's a memory, that will last me all my life.
Never forget it.
Weaver: All the feelings, all the emotions are still there.
When you talk about it, it all comes back.
I have a...
My heart is in that song.
J' I know your eyes in the morning sun
j I feel you touch me in the pouring rain
j and the moment that you wander far from me
j' I want to feel you in my arms again
j and you come to me on a summer breeze
j keep me warm in your love then you softly leave
j and it's me you need to show
j how deep is your love?
J' 1 really need to learn
j cos we're living in a world of fools
j' breaking us down
j when they all should let us be
j we belong to you and me
Weaver: Everything came together.
But sadly, Dennis had had some bad news.
Bryon: My mother was in hospital. She had Alzheimer's.
So, you know... I told Barry what was going on.
He said, "get dick to book you a flight now."
He had to fly back to the uk, and we had no drummer.
We thought, well, we've got to carry on writing
and getting these tracks together.
Galuten: When I was at berklee, I had studied things
where they were moving tapes around
and make sort of these interesting Sonic loops.
And when Dennis was not there,
I said, "well, why don't we just take a bar out of 'night fever'?
It's a slower tempo, we'll slow it down a little bit and make a loop out of it."
We found a bar that we thought had a nice feel to it.
We copied it over to a half-inch four-track
and spliced the tape into a loop.
Galuten: I was pretty good at imagining what you might be able to do,
but Karl was able to make it happen.
Richardson: It was just necessity being the mother of invention.
Galuten: No one had taken a drum beat before and created a two-bar phrase.
We were breaking new ground.
Man: Perfect.
Galuten: This is the first time we had ever
taken the song and built it piece by piece from the ground up,
and we started with this drum loop.
And then we did a bass line.
Then a guitar part.
Never again would we rely as much on the liveness.
We would always know that we could construct the song
and put the pieces together based on the original vision of the song
and how we imagined it.
I got back to the sessions and there was just a buzz.
When we did it, we thought, "we're just doing this temporarily.
When Dennis comes back, we'll replace it with real drums."
But what happened is, the feel was so amazing, we couldn't get rid of it.
He played it for me, and I could tell, from the first listen,
I said, "man, that is amazing.”
When you listen to the drum track on "stayin' alive," like, by itself,
it's really this super rugged, like, tough thing.
It's like...
It's not pretty or pop like you remember, it's pretty tough.
Barry: "Stayin' alive” was the influence that New York gave to us.
And the energy level at that point, in the late '70s, was really that.
You know, survival, it's survival.
Man: This is "77, everybody know the time is hard.
You know, if I was out there myself, I would have got what I wanted, too.
- Reporter: You were not a looter? - No, I wasn't. Unfortunate.
Reporter: Do you feel threatened by the .44 caliber killer?
Woman: Yes, I do.
I don't feel free to walk the streets or go out at all.
Robin: Very few people realize it's to do with anything but dance.
The lyrics don't talk about dance at all.
And the lyrics very obviously state the scenario of survival.
J whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother
j' you're stayin' alive, stayin' alive
j feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin'
j and we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive
j' ah, ha, ha, ha
j' stayin' alive, stayin' alive...
Timberlake: If you think about... "Ah, ha, ha, ha..."
I mean, that could very easily have just been a horn line.
Instead, their voices are so sick,
they're like, "nah, we're gonna sing it."
J oh, when you walk
Riley: The general fever at the time
was you must see this film.
The songs precipitated the interest.
It was this cultural phenomenon.
In the first week of release,
they were having to hire extra staff in some cinemas
to stop them dancing in the aisles.
J girl, I've known you very well, seen you growin"...
Other movies were being put back or taken out of other screens
to make room for fever.
It was really quite a phenomenon.
John took me aside at one point and said, "what do you think?
You think maybe an academy award nomination?"
I'm thinking, "Jesus Christ.
I mean, this is ridiculous. It's a dance movie."
He had the last laugh.
Host: And John Travolta in Saturday night fever.
Oakes: The fever thing happened, that's when everything exploded.
Other record companies were printing it.
Our record company couldn't keep up the pace.
We didn't know what was going on because this was just a soundtrack.
Could I ask what Saturday night fever has grossed thus far?
Around 110 million.
At the moment, in America.
- Host: In America? - In America, yeah.
Host: And the album?
The album, I think, is nearing 18 million double albums worldwide.
But that would be the record breaker of all time.
Yes, it's already the biggest-grossing album
in the history of music.
Host: The statistics are just incredible.
Four singles from Saturday night fever
have hit number one
since the album was released.
More than from any other new album in history.
That's just a few of the statistics
that lead to gold records like this.
And so it's my privilege to say,
ladies and gentlemen, will you welcome the Bee Gees?
Has it changed your lives, the enormous success of it?
Yes, I can safely say it's changed our lives.
The Bee Gees I think were stunned by the success.
Barry: We were aware we were creating a specific sound,
but we didn't know what it was gonna do.
Oakes: It did end up with them having half the top ten with these songs.
It was extraordinary,
the same domination the Beatles had in the '60s in America.
They were just everywhere.
- Friends don't treat us the same way. - From a distance, you know.
I was speaking to one of my friends as he was cleaning my shoes.
I said, "listen..."
Kendall: Stigwood said, "let's give the band half a point or a quarter."
No, it's not a percentage. That's a tiny amount of money.
But when you sell as many copies as Saturday night fever sold,
it turns out to be big money.
Host: What are you doing with these millions of dollars?
What are you doing with your millions of dollars?
= oh, now! -
it is the biggest night of the year for people in the recording industry.
The grammy awards.
And the winner is Saturday night fever.
Oakes: For a soundtrack to win best album was amazing.
It went on to be one of the best-selling albums in history.
Barry: We didn't know that we were defining the culture.
We were just still Barry, Maurice and Robin,
wondering what the hell's going on.
Reporter: The "fever" has been contagious.
Discos, the places in which to dance away the night
and the morning hours, are thriving.
What the “fever” has done is made
just about anything related to disco profitable.
Where there's money to be made, disco is the business.
Barry: We didn't categorize our songs as disco.
But then we weren't thinking that way at all.
We were just thinking about writing songs
based on this discovery of this falsetto voice
and how well that seemed to work.
Oakes: What the Bee Gees brought,
I've always felt they brought melody to disco.
Most disco at that point was melody-free, you know.
This was a different take on disco.
It was completely for the broadest possible audience.
- You got the lyrics? - Yes, right here.
- Ok, let's go. - Straight in.
One, two, three, four...
Right, that's it.
Hey, guys. Just too slow.
It would be nice to find a bigger sound for that solo.
- The way we'd rehearsed it last night. - All right.
Yeah, just like that, yeah.
Beautiful. Bring that sound in. That's great.
- Yeah. - Let's try it again.
Ok. One, two, three, four...
J tragedy
j when the feeling"s gone and you can't go on
j' it's tragedy
j when the morning cries and you don't know why
j it's hard to bear
j' with no one beside you
j' you're going nowhere
j ahh
when we brought out spirits having flown,
it did phenomenally well.
At the same time, fever was still in the top ten.
You know, we could have left it another year,
and it still probably would have been a little too soon
with what was going on with fever.
Good morning, everybody. Charley steiner, 99x.
As is per usual for Monday, a very busy day coming into town.
Steiner: I'm working at a top 40 station in New York, a big one.
Wxlo, but it was known as 99x.
And I was the morning news guy.
Most radio stations had a very small playlist.
And the Bee Gees probably had the top four, top five hits any given week.
Thirteen cfrw/, music of the Bee Gees and "tragedy."
Doing one more with the Bee Gees.
All the gibb brothers together, the Bee Gees.
"You should be dancing,” you should be shakin' that thing one time.
And for those of us at the radio station,
we're... we're gonna take hostages.
And if you haven't had enough Bee Gees music yet, well, we've got more.
Guess you could kind of call it "over-gibbing."
Steiner: And then Andy gibb, too.
He was like the caboose on this musical train.
It was like waves in the sea.
J nobody gets too much heaven no more
host: You're right on the top of the world.
What is it that drives you back on the road?
When we make records and we're in the studio,
we never really see who buys those records.
Getting on the road means that to us.
It means that we come face to face with people
to whom our records mean a lot.
Well, to be sure, doing a tour is an enormous amount of work.
The only thing that I notice that's not right
is it doesn't actually say the Bee Gees, and the Bee Gees name should be...
It should be, "Bee Gees: Spirits having flown."
Oakes: The "79 tour was a complete sell-out.
Weaver: The Bee Gees hadn't toured since 1976.
And that tour was a promotion for the spirits having flown album.
But it was celebrating Saturday night fever as well.
Girl 1: Twenty-five thousand people are supposed to be here.
- Girl 2: It's gonna be great. - Man: You don't mind the rain?
Both: No, not at all.
We've been here since nine this morning.
They're worth waiting in the rain for.
I mean, it was huge.
Dodger stadium, places like that. We used to dream of this.
Having people in the audience like Barbra Streisand,
watching your show and loving it.
I mean, these are fantasies.
You're in a goldfish bowl on tour.
You don't see much of what's going on out there.
The most important thing is, what are we gonna do after the show?
What do you wanna do?
Announcer: It's here, the disco-body shaper,
the brand-new exerciser sensation that's sweeping the country.
Send for yours today.
Buy it today, be a disco star tonignt.
Let's disco to burger king.
It all goes back to one thing,
and the same thing that's happening now: Greed.
Greed is the thing that happens in people
that really ruins a lot of shit.
J went to a party the other night...
In the beginning, you would buy a disco-bannered record,
and it would be a great song, no matter which one you picked out.
J movin' my feet to the disco beat...
But then some executive in diapers
decided, "let's put disco on all these records we wanna sell,"
and it wasn't good music anymore, it was garbage.
J look aft me
j I'm the disco duck!
J oh, let's go, mamma...
That was, I think, the straw that broke the camel's back.
J' disco, disco duck
disco as a purely musical form is, you know, dead.
I hated it. Couldn't think of anything redeeming.
It was old people's music.
It was a very easy thing to get involved with for commercial reasons.
J everybody's doin' the disco, disco duck...
Man: I'd like to show you how we destroy the disco records.
Thisis howl do it.
- Gotta get worked up a little bit. - Psyched up.
Yeah. And then I just...
Oh, that felt good.
Our next guest tonight is Steve dahl.
He is a disc jockey for station wlup-fm out in Chicago, Illinois,
and he hates disco music.
Steve dahl was kind of hard to avoid in Chicago.
Steve dahl's on the radio saying, "disco sucks, disco sucks."
I was 14.
I listened to the loop,
the radio station that this kind of centered around.
He brings helium to the studio,
inhales it and imitates the Bee Gees on the air
and then breaks up their records.
J how deep is your love
§ how deep is your love
j' 1 really need to know
you know, when you do all those things, like put out garbage,
you know, have radio feeling ostracized,
and a lot of straight people feeling threatened,
it creates a real poison.
Hello again, everybody.
Harry caray and Jimmy piersall from comiskey park,
where we're gonna have a wild night tonight.
A twi-night doubleheader.
Lawrence: I was an Usher at comiskey park.
That was my first job.
Look at that crowd out there.
Reporter: Fifty thousand people, the largest crowd of the season,
showed up at Chicago's comiskey park.
Many had come for disco demolition night, a promotional gimmick.
Fifteen thousand others had to be turned away.
Steve dahl says, "we're gonna let everybody in the white sox park
for 98 cents if you bring a disco record.
And we're gonna blow those records up in the middle of center field."
We're letting people in.
I pointed out to my chief Usher,
“that record, that record, that record, that record, that record,
that record... Those aren't disco records.
Those are just, those are R&B records.”
And the thing that I noticed more than anything
was just mostly black records.
Maurice: At the same time all this stuff is going on in Chicago,
we were playing the stadiums.
It was an amazing tour.
We were sort of like in our own little world.
Not thinking about the outside world.
Caray: He struck him out and the ball game is over.
Announcer: Ok, let's Usher Steve dahl to the explosives
with a loud "disco sucks' chant!
Disco sucks!
= disco sucks!
Disco sucks!
Barry: Ladies and gentlemen, our brother Andy!
J my baby moves at midnight
j goes right on till the dawn
j my woman takes me higher
j my woman keeps me warm
j what you doin' on your back?
J' yeah, yeah
j what you doin' on your back?
J' ahh, you should be dancing, yeah
j' dancing, yeah
come on!
Maurice: Andy joined us on stage for "you should be dancing,"
and it was the four of us together, and Andy joined my mic.
So we were singing around the one mic.
And he kept looking over and stood back and goes,
“can you believe this shit?"
Nobody could believe what was going on.
And to see the four of us on stage, when I saw Barry and Robin
and I saw Andy in front of me I thought, "this is how it's gotta be."
J yeah
How about the Bee Gees?
Well, listen, we took all the disco records that you brought tonight,
we got 'em in a giant box.
And we're gonna blow 'em up real gooa!
One, two, three...
Boom!
I'ney blew up real good!
Lawrence: They tell you as an Usher, "every now and then,
you're gonna get a drunk person storming the field.
Try to grab them, hold on to them,” or whatever.
But everybody ran on the field.
When I got older, I recognized that...
This was actually the end of an era.
It was a book burning.
It was a racist, homophobic book burning.
And the Bee Gees got caught up in that,
because they were part of that culture that was lifting a lot of people up.
Barry: Thank you, we love youl! And we'll see you again. Bye-bye.
Reporter: Nearly 7,000 spectators held their very own demolition.
Game two of the doubleheader was canceled last night.
That game will be forfeit.
The anti-disco movement was almost anti-Bee Gees at that point.
Reporter: Ironically, the soundtrack to "Saturday night fever,"
the album that made them superstars, also branded them as a disco group.
Because you can dance to it doesn't necessarily make it a disco song.
You can dance to lots of songs.
Host: You really don't wanna be labeled "disco" at all, do you?
Because our music is a variety of different kinds of music.
It shouldn't be called just that.
Some people hated disco.
Hated it.
Maurice: We had FBI and secret service round the airplane
every time we landed in a certain place because of the bomb threats.
It was scary stuff.
We were perplexed.
Cos I got that vibe from them, "why are people doing this?"
Reporter: The Bee Gees claim some radio stations around the country
are refusing to play their new single.
The Bee Gees are not allowed to have a hit
because they had success with Saturday night fever. That is crap.
Galuten: Radio is very difficult to get back once you lose them.
Back then, if you weren't on the radio, there was nothing.
Let's all grow up, we're just a pop group, we're not a political force.
We're just making music, but I don't think there's any reason to chalk us off
because we existed in the "70s and would like to exist in the '80s.
Does anybody mind if we exist in the '80s, thank you?
It was so overwhelming and...
The whole dynamic changed.
Yvonne: They were just crazy days.
I preferred Maurice as Maurice,
not being a bee gee, if that makes sense to you.
I preferred him as Maurice, not being a bee gee.
Dwina: Suddenly they realized that they were in a different position.
Robin went through a kind of a...
It wasn't a breakdown, but it was just something where
he felt very shy of being in public and doing things for a while.
Robin: The backlash was a very frightening experience.
When things get to that point, you're out of control of the whole thing.
We thought the Bee Gees better go on the back burner
until this dies down or something, you know.
We couldn't do anything as the Bee Gees at all.
Well, backlash I'm really good on.
Uh...
Any band... that is successful
is going to have... Some form of resistance.
That's just the law of nature.
When they get so successful,
sometimes the only interesting thing to say about them
is, "oh, I don't like them.
Everyone else likes 'how deep is your love.'
you know, it's stupid.”
For bands of my generation,
you understand about the ups and downs, you can see it.
Like, where are the pitfalls'? What is the shit you're gonna take?
When might this happen? When might that happen?
For those people that were on the first wave
of sort of global pop superstardom, if you want to call it that,
it was new to them, like, "why does everyone suddenly hate our band?
We sold eight billion records last year. What's the deal?"
So it's confusing.
It was not just the Bee Gees, but the idea of dance.
In that period, it was no longer acceptable
for this kind of music to carry the weight, to carry the industry.
Everybody was at that point in their lives where they...
They began to look for other things to do.
And Andy was having problems, too.
Maurice: I saw him in Malibu,
and he'd been involved with a lot of people who were doing drugs.
And he was doing drugs, he was doing cocaine.
I talked to him outside on the balcony,
saying, "this is really a nice house, Andy,
it's a nice car out there, that Porsche, really nice.
You're not gonna keep all this, you know."
He said, "what do you mean?"
I said, "you do what you're doing, this stuff will vanish.
All this stuff will go. Your career will go out the window, everything."
And he said, "I know, I know what I have to do."
There was a lot of chaos that I didn't witness, but I was aware of it.
We were scattered all over the place for a little while.
Robin was either in New York and Maurice was in england.
I was alone at the time and I got a phone call from Barbra.
She'd asked me about writing songs for her.
And that terrified me.
I don't know if I can do this, you know?
So I called my brothers, and I said, "this is what we gotta do.
And let's do it."
And that's how the guilty album came about.
We really could not get on the radio.
So the whole idea was to write for other people.
Let's be songwriters.
Let's try and graduate from being a group that's probably...
Beginning to fade, you know?
Let's see if we can dance around that.
Barry: [ Life is a moment in space
j when the dream is gone
j' it's a lonelier place
Richardson: It was more about outlets for writing.
Writing songs that aren't Bee Gees songs.
They have an attitude somewhere else.
Streisand: J I stumble and fall
j but! Give you it all
j 1am a woman in love
j' and I'd do anything
j' to get you into my world...
Host: Now, Robin, you and Barry co-wrote "woman in love,"
which became the international smash.
Was it difficult taking the woman's perspective?
Oh, no.
It's our way of doing things.
We will assume that role within the song to write the song.
After the Barbra Streisand album, managers would call up all the time.
"Gee, can I get together with you guys? Will you make my record?"
You know, established artists.
J oh, oh
j why do you have to be a heartbreaker
j when I was being what you want me to be?
J get in the middle of a chain reaction
j you get a medal when you're lost in action...
It was just as important for us to have an artist singing our songs
and being on the radio as it was for ourselves.
J islands in the stream
j that is what we are
j no one in between
j how can we be wrong?
J' sail away with me...
Maurice: When you write a song with someone in mind that you really love,
and then that person ends up singing it, there's no reward like it.
J immortality
j oh, baby
j there is a vision and a fire in me
j oh
Barry: We wrote so many different types of songs.
And that created that new determination...
For us to become the Bee Gees again.
J when a lonely heart breaks
j it's the one that forsakes
j it's the dream that we stole
Barry: I think over time, we became more and more unified.
By "85, we really got it together as a group.
We became a real band, again.
J' for you it's goodbye
j for me its to cry
j for whom the bell tolls
we never really had a category.
We just had different periods.
And we managed to fit into different eras.
And we saw a lot of people who were the champions of their era come and go.
We didn't always connect but we stayed around.
We managed to defy the criticism, most of the time.
J it's the one that forsakes
j it's the dream that we stole
and I just hope and pray that the music lasts, you know.
Because I begin to recognize that there's not as much time in front of me
as there is behind me.
Hi, Australia. This is Andy gibb here in Miami.
And I'd like to wish all you kids...
One more time.
Hi, Australia. This is Andy gibb here in Miami.
And I'd like to wish all the kids and all my friends in Australia
a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.
J' ahh, ahh...
Barry was first. In fact, Robin's half an hour older than I am.
And we're twins. And that's how we basically met.
- Robert stigwood, this is for you. - You gotta watch the thing.
Oh, the reaction? All right, ok.
Oh, yeah, that's right. Sorry, do it again. Ok.
Robert stigwood, this is for you.
Announcer: Ladies and gentiemen, an Oscar nominee
for "Saturday night fever,” John Travolta!
Tonight, the recording academy is celebrating
three brothers who changed my life and the world of music forever.
And though brothers Robin and Maurice are sadly gone,
we are thrilled to be joined by a brother like no other,
one of the most successful singer-songwriters of our times,
my friend, Barry gibb.
J hmm...
J' feel I'm going back to massachusetfts
j something's telling me I must go home
Gallagher: They're a brilliant chapter in the book of music.
Some people are a footnote.
Some people take up... The Beatles and Dylan take up huge...
But the Bee Gees are there.
J' the day I left her standing
j on her own
Timberlake: You go back and look at their body of work
and it's some of the best songs ever written.
J' talk about the life in Massachusetts...
There's nothing else to say about the Bee Gees except
they were fucking awesome.
J speak about the people I have seen
j' and the lights all went down
j in Massachusetts
j and Massachusetts
j' is one place I have seen
j and Massachusetts
j' is one place I have seen
Barry: When I think about it now,
I think about how it all sort of started.
We just had this dream.
And we thought, well, "what do we want to be famous for?"
It turns out it was the songwriting.
And I think everything we set out to do, we did, against all odds.
I can't honestly come to terms with the fact
that they're not here anymore.
Never been able to do that.
I'm always reliving it.
It's always, "what would Robin think or what would Maurice think?"
And Andy. It never goes away.
And what I wanted to say earlier
is that I'd rather have them all back here and no hits at all.
J' if ever you've got rain in your heart
j someone has hurt you and torn you apart
j am I unwise to open up your eyes to love me?
J' and when you've got nothing to lose
j' nothing to pay for and nothing to choose
j am I unwise to open up your eyes to love me?
J' run to me whenever you're lonely
j run to me if you need a shoulder
j' now and then, you need someone older
j' so, darling
j you run to me
J well, you can tell by the way I use my walk
j I'm a woman's man, no time to talk
j music loud and women warm
j' I've been kicked around since I was born
j and now it's all right, it's ok
j' and you may look the other way
j we can try to understand
j the "New York times" ' effect on man
j whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother
j you're stayin' alive stayin' alive
j feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin'
j and we're stayin' alive stayin' alive
j' ah, ha, ha, ha
j stayin' alive, stayin' alive
j' ah, ha, ha, ha
j stayin' alive...
J' as you walk
j' life goin' nowhere
j somebody help me
j somebody help me, yeah
j' life goin' nowhere
j somebody help me
j' I'm stayin' alive...
J' life goin' nowhere
j somebody help me
j somebody help me, yeah
j somebody
j' life goin' nowhere
j somebody help me
j' I'm stayin' alive...
Barry: One, two, three, four...
J! Green fields
j where we used fo wander
j' purple valleys
j' near my home
j we would play there
j' beneath the sky
j' and then I kissed you
j' butterfly
j' young girl
j you came restless
j and you left me
j' here to cry
j my big tears
j' in red pastures
j' for I loved you
j' butterfly
j' butterfly, yeah
j' I dream about you
j' lonely without you, butterfly
j' butterfly, yeah
j' each night I'm sleeping
j' your face comes creeping, butterfly
j! Green fields
j where we used fo wander
j' purple valleys
j' near my home
j we would play there
j' beneath the sky
j' for I loved you
j' butterfly
j butterfly, yeah
j' I dream about you
j' lonely without you
j' butterfly
j' butterfly, yeah
j' each night I'm sleeping
j' your face comes creeping, butterfly
j' butterfly...
J smile an everlasting smile
j' a smile can bring you near to me
j don't ever let me find you down
j' cos that would bring a tear to me
j' talk in everlasting words
j and dedicate them all fo me
j and I will give you all my life
j I'm here if you should call to me
j you think that I don't even mean
j' a single word I say
j' it's only words
j and words are all I have
j' to take your heart away
j' it's only words
j and words are all I have
j' to take your heart
j away
Subtitles: Iyuno media group