Friday, January 29, 2016

Bee Gees : working with the best


(By JOHN DUPONT,  October 6, 2005)

PRAIRIEVILLE -- Local musician and producer Harold Cowart has thought about Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb a lot lately.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the 1980 Grammy-winning album, "Guilty." The record was the first by Streisand and Bee Gee Gibb.
Cowart spends most of his time these days operating his own local production company, Bluff Road Studio.
He worked with an array of artists, including John Fred and the Playboys, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Al Hirt, Olivia Newton-John, Frankie Valli and Brook Benton.
He fondly remembers the sessions working on "Guilty," which included three hit singles -- "What Kind of Fool", "I Am a Woman in Love" and the title cut.
"I knew we were cutting hits when we did the album," Cowart said. "It's Barbra Streisand we're talking about, so I knew it was good stuff."
Cowart worked directly with Streisand, who had taken note of his Louisiana accent upon meeting him.
"The first thing she asked was 'Where the hell are you from?' " he said. "But she was just the sweetest lady -- a real perfectionist -- but very easy to work with.
Streisand stayed at the studio an extra two weeks honing her vocals on the title song, something many artists would not do, he said.
Aside from Streisand, Cowart attributed much of the five-time platinum album's success to Gibb's songwriting talents.
"He was one of the greatest songwriters ever," he said. He and Gibb would talk idly, "and next day he'd have a great song."
Cowart met Andy Gibb during a session at Atlantic Records, and later worked with his brothers -- Barry, Robin and Maurice -- the Bee Gees.
His work with the Gibbs included a Grammy-winning album for Andy Gibb "Shadow Dancing" and two No. 1 singles.
"When Barry Gibb asked me to work with them, his brother Andy told him, 'You bloody stole my man,' " Cowart said.
Cowart performed on the soundtrack for "Grease" before Barry Gibb summoned him to work on "Guilty."
He toured with the Bee Gees in the late 1970s on the heels of the Australian trio's chart-topping "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack. He later worked with the trio on their 1979 album "Spirits Having Flown".
Cowart also spent time at the Gibbs' Miami mansion, where on one occasion the group decided they wanted a taste of Louisiana.
Cowart had several hundred pounds of hot boiled crawfish flown to Miami, but Gibb's wife did not know how to serve the crustaceans.
"Barry's wife, Linda, had the table set with china, crystal and elegant silverware, but I saw it and told her that just wouldn't work," Cowart said. "So I asked if they had any newspaper, and she just poured the crawfish all over that elegant table."
His experiences with Gibb and Streisand marked a high point in Cowart's music career, which began when he took an interest in music legend Ray Charles.
Cowart, 61, grew up in Baton Rouge during the pioneering days of rock-'n'-roll, but he considered rhythm and blues his real love.
He was a fan of artists such as Fats Domino, Little Richard, The Platters, The Flamingos, The Coasters and Ivory Joe Hunter.
"I didn't really like rock-'n'-roll that much -- I was more into the funky music," Cowart said. "But then I love all good music. I even enjoy Beethoven."
As a teenager, he performed with Lenny Capello and The Dots, who recorded "Get Lost You Shiny Bag of Bones" at Cosmo Matassa's studio in New Orleans.
He graduated in 1969 from LSU with a degree in band, orchestra and vocal supervision. He never considered dropping out of college, despite the urge to get more time on stage.
Cowart's mother was a guidance counselor and his sister is principal at Sherwood Middle School.
"I came from a family of educators, and I promised my mother I'd get a college degree," he said. "I'm glad I did, because when they put some Barbra Streisand music in front of you, it's best to remember you have at least 50 others who want your job."
Cowart graduated during a transitional period in pop music. Groups such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones remained hot acts on the charts, but American groups regained traction at the dawn of the British invasion.
Just before he received his degree, he performed bass on "Judy in Disguise with Glasses" by John Fred and the Playboys, which vaulted to No. 1 in 1968.
"Deejays weren't crazy about that song," Cowart said. "But a week later they called us and said we have a No. 1 hit."
Cowart, toting his Fender precision bass, landed work at Atlantic Records, where he played with Benton on "Rainy Night in Georgia," a No. 1 hit in 1969.
As with "Judy in Disguise", Cowart never envisioned "Rainy Night" topping the charts.
"We were just kids, and we didn't understand everything we were doing," he said. "We weren't paid much, but it was a big thrill to be in a New York city cab and hear a song and knowing we played in it."
Atlantic moved Cowart and his rhythm section, "Cold Grits," to Criteria Recording Studio in Miami, Fla.
He recorded and toured with the Bee Gees several years, and worked with Jay Ferguson on the 1978 hit single "Thunder Island" and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton on the 1983 smash "Islands in the Streams."
As his performing career wound down, Cowart set up his recording studio behind his home in Prairieville.
He had Deep South Recording Studios in Baton Rouge earlier in his career, and had once promised he'd never own another studio.
"I then figured 'Why not?," Cowart said. "I've got everything I want."
He has recorded artists such as Joe Stampley, Van Broussard and George Freeman, a country artist who last week recorded his first album in 24 years.
Cowart began sharing his knowledge with younger artists. He took Geismar resident Larry Lang under his wing to teach him the fine points of music engineering.
Lang, a hip-hop artist who performs under the name "Lieutenant," said Cowart's versatility with genres as diverse as country and hip-hop make the learning experience invaluable.
"It's a melting pot," Lang said. "There's so much talent here and such a large variety that you never see the same type of performer back to back."
The variety of artists in Louisiana has helped contribute to the success of Bluff Road Studios, Cowart said.
"You've got a ton of talent here, and nobody here knows it," he said. "The Rolling Stones knew it, Paul McCartney knew it, and the Bee Gees knew it.
"When I was around them, they'd ask if we had any of that Louisiana music," Cowart said. "You've got the some of the best music in the world right here in Louisiana."


 http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.nl/

Thursday, January 21, 2016

The Elephant in the Living Room Spencer Gibb tiptoes atop 54 Seconds

(l-r) Drummer Jeff Botta; keyboard player Stewart Cochran with Spencer Gibb; Cochran, Gibb, and Rachel Loy. The whole of 54 Seconds may be greater than the sum of its parts, but the parts are quite prolific too.
(l-r) Drummer Jeff Botta; keyboard player Stewart Cochran with Spencer Gibb; Cochran, Gibb, and Rachel Loy. The whole of 54 Seconds may be greater than the sum of its parts, but the parts are quite prolific too.
Photo by Todd V. Wolfson
 
 
"The elephant in the living room" is one of Spencer Gibb's favorite phrases. He uses it liberally and applies it to numerous situations. It's also an apt metaphor for his life as the son of the Bee Gees' Robin Gibb.

Growing up famous comes with no guarantees, much less an instruction booklet. There's only so much DNA will do for you in a world littered with the unrealized talents of famous progeny. For Gibb, the path is no less hard, but at least he gets knowledgeable parental advice.
That's good, because as founder and creative force behind 54 Seconds, he needs it. 54 Seconds play quality pop-rock, but they've been the "next big thing" so many times, the phrase is meaningless.
Yet 54 Seconds is bouncing back, this time with their third LP, Postcards From California. The new disc delivers an unexpected punch of beautifully crafted old-school pop with modern trappings, bolstered by the talents of its individual components and a willingness to deviate from form for art's sake. Being the NBT sucks when the buzz goes bust.

The Next Next Big Thing

It's Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, and Gibb is transfixed by the flat-screen television mounted on the kitchen wall in the Hyde Park home he shares with his girlfriend, Heather.
"Incredible," he marvels. "They're 20 million years old, the only species on the planet that hasn't evolved."
It's hard not to comment on the allegory of sharks and 54 Seconds' standing as an up-and-coming band. Even the name came from a remark uttered by an English suit as he dismissed the unnamed fledgling band's demos.
"I don't like any of your fucking songs," sneers Gibb, recalling the trans-Atlantic conversation and the exec's West London accent with Python-esque accuracy. "The first song you sent me, I kinda like that, but the chorus comes in at a minute and 10 seconds. I'll tell ya, Spencer, a perfect pop-song chorus has gotta come in at 54, 55 seconds at the most."
Gibb laughs at the story. He started 54 Seconds with drummer J.J. Johnson not long after moving to Austin in 1998 from Miami. The relocation was as much escape as remedy.
"If there's anything I can say about living in Miami and doing drugs, it's that I learned to play guitar," he deadpans.
Such was his year strung out on heroin. It was balanced by his relationship with veteran New York guitarist Sturgis Nikides, who pooh-poohs the idea that he "formally taught Spen anything."
"He had real stick-to-itiveness," relates the former John Cale sideman. "I didn't want him to use his dad as his ticket."
Instead, Gibb's passage to Central Texas came courtesy of his subconscious. "I dreamed I packed all my stuff in a truck and moved to Austin. So I did. I ended my relationship and my band, packed my futon, four-track, and a couple of guitars. I got rid of everything else."
Arriving in Austin in 1997, he immediately fell in with the Steamboat stable, including Will Sexton and Johnny Goudie. Gibb rented space at the Austin Rehearsal Complex, and 54 Seconds played their first South by Southwest showcase the following year, their first buzz-band experience.
"We had all this buzz and all this press," Gibb motions. "We went to all these major labels and said, 'We've sold 5,000 copies of the record.' They'd say, 'My God, where? That's incredible.' We'd say, 'On the Internet.' They'd say, 'Oh, we don't count that.' We had receipts and statements to prove it, and they just overlooked it, trying to ignore the elephant in the living room.
"Then the elephant in the living room became Steve Jobs."
54 Seconds took that licking and kept on ticking. Keyboardists came (Stewart Cochran), and drummers went (J.J. Johnson, Brannen Temple), and when Rachel Loy graduated from the Berklee College of Music, her bass playing had the groove Gibb wanted (See "Texas Platters," Aug. 3).
"My melancholy, Stewart's eccentricity, and Rachel's pop sense is a nice balance," he smiles.

Staying Alive

The real elephant in Gibb's life is that he's the son of a Bee Gee. You wouldn't know it to look around his office, "where I spend all day e-mailing and harassing people," with his guitar collection hanging on the wall. Only a framed cover of Sesame Street Fever hints at the pop-royalty bloodline.
"I realized there was something different [about my family] when other kids' moms started hitting on my dad, and I started getting beaten up," he shrugs. "When somebody starts punching you in the face and singing 'Staying Alive,' you realize there's a problem."
Born in London in the early Seventies and raised in New York, Gibb's childhood was rich with musical iconography. The Bee Gees are among the most fantastically successful songwriters and recording artists of all time.
Robin Gibb was one of the fraternal twins in the three-man Bee Gees; Maurice, once married to pop singer Lulu, died in 2003. Spencer's mother, Molly, worked as the personal assistant to the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, until his death, at which point she became Robert Stigwood's assistant. Stigwood, the British entertainment Svengali, who managed the careers of Cream and Eric Clapton and later produced Saturday Night Fever and Grease, is Spencer's godfather. His father's youngest brother, Andy, was a pop superstar before his drug-fueled death in 1988 at age 30.
Now 34, Spencer Gibb is more than a little circumspect about how such a pop-music legacy weighs on 54 Seconds.
"You've got three camps when it comes to being famous," he explains. "One, people who don't know or care at all. Two, people that do know and expect you to sound like your father and are disappointed when you don't. Three, people who don't want you to sound like your father but look for the similarities. 'Aha! I heard vibrato!'"
In retrospect, maybe the elephant's not so big. Maybe it's a midget pachyderm easily prodded into a storage closet.

Word of Mouth

What makes Postcards From California work is the traditional definition of luck: preparation meets opportunity. Postcards is the culmination of everything Spencer Gibb brings to the table in meeting the band's realized potential. Stewart Cochran, who's played with Gibb in 54 Seconds the longest, hopes that doesn't mean another stint as an Austin buzz band.
"Label interest doesn't mean anything," he snorts. "Pin your hopes on it, and you'll get your heart broken. I gave up dreams of being a rock star. Now I just want to be a musician."
The self-taught Gibb and classically schooled Cochran held differing opinions about many aspects of Postcards' rec-ording process, including the running order of the songs.
"Sometimes," laughs Loy, "my input was to say, 'This is too long and boring! Bring it back to the catchy part, stuff you sink your teeth into.'"
Drummer Jeff Botta, who's done time playing with Gary P. Nunn, agrees: "This isn't your run of the mill rock band. It's one with good textures on their sonic palette."
Yet even in the age of iPod Shuffles, the sequence of songs was an issue.
"I assembled a running order," says Gibb, "and went to everyone and asked them to send their order. We tried them all, and it still wasn't working for me. Something was missing. So I called the one guy that would throw the pop it needed into the mix. I asked him to listen to it -- the one guy I knew would really listen -- and get back to me with a running order.
"So he called back and gave me his order. It was only one or two songs different from what we already had. That was my father."
For 54 Seconds, the feedback counted. Post-cards From California opens with gorgeous harmonies that carry its introspective melancholy. It sends notice that pop can be just as substantial as rock without compromising integrity. It could even be enough to scare off an elephant.
"People are tired of being force-fed bad art, but they don't know where to find great art or good art or, for that matter, just okay art. I'll settle for okay art," Gibb half-jokes. "For so long, 54 Seconds has been a real word-of-mouth band. It's time to move it to the next level."

 http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.nl/

Monday, January 11, 2016

Bee Gees influence on David Bowie`s Space Oddity !


Released on the Philips label 45 years ago ,July 11, 1969, it was described by Melody Maker’s Chris Welch as a “Bee Geeian piece of music and poetry,” while Disc And Music Echo’s Penny Valentine noted how “Mr. Bowie sounds like the Bee Gees on their best record – New York Mining Disaster”. Like "New York Mining Disaster 1941", "Space Oddity" is about a trapped man who is doomed to die, and the song is similarly structured as a series of statements addressed to another person. "Space Oddity was a Bee Gees type song," Bowie’s colleague John "Hutch" Hutchinson has said. "David knew it, and he said so at the time, the way he sang it, it’s a Bee Gees thing." As Marc Bolan explained: "I remember David playing me 'Space Oddity' in his room and I loved it and he said he needed a sound like the Bee Gees, who were very big then". Here`s the original video of " Space Oddity"

R.I.P David Bowie


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Bee Gees: Spencer Gibb talks about his godfather Robert Stigwood



Robert Stigwood grew up in Port Pirie and went on to manage some of the biggest names in music at the time – the Bee Gees, Eric Clapton and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
891's Spence Denny spoke to Spencer Gibb (son of Robin) who pays tribute to Stigwood, his godfather who died on Tuesday.
Spencer tells Spence about the influence the South Australian had on his life




https://soundcloud.com/891-abc-adelaide/spencer-gibb



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Bee Gees: Cheap Fakes land the real deal with producer John Merchant (2014)

 ja



 11
JOHN Merchant was writing for a magazine when he went out on a story that changed his life.
He visited the Bee Gees at their studio in South Beach, Miami, realised that was where he wanted to be, and started as an intern, progressing to assistant sound engineer, engineer and producer.
During the past 25 years, he has worked on more than 30 major label releases with the Bee Gees, not counting others with Barry Gibb.
His list of notable clients also includes Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Cliff Richard, Paul Anka, Celine Dion, Michael Buble, Ronan Keating, Lenny Kravitz, Toni Braxton, and R Kelly.
And, if all goes well, the Cheap Fakes.
Nashville-based Mr Merchant has been holed up at Barbara and Allan Pease's Heliport Sudios at Buderim since just after Christmas, working with the six-piece reggae-ska-funk fusion outfit on its third album - and loving it.
"Some things are intangible," he said. "There are some studios that are incredibly good technically, but are very cold.
"Technically, everything here is cool, but the atmosphere is incredibly warm and inviting."
The Queensland-based Cheap Fakes scored the Grammy-nominated engineer and producer by cheek.
Frontman Hayden Andrews heard Mr Merchant speak at a guest lecture in Brisbane last February, introduced himself and asked if he would be interested in listening to some of the band's music.
"Usually, when you get these, they're terrible," Mr Merchant said. "I took them home and listened to them and they were great."
The two began corresponding. Mr Merchant offered some advice, and Mr Andrews suggested he might like to produce the band's next album.
"Stuff like this only happens when you ask and you put yourself out there," Mr Andrews said. 

MERCHANT'S FAVOURITES
The Bee Gees - "It was the first big project I had a chance to work on fresh out of school. It was cool."
Michael Jackson - "I was setting up a vocal for him and he started singing Man in the Mirror. It was like he was singing it to me."
Barbra Streisand - "She was wonderful - very bright, very motivated. She wanted it to be not great but spectacular."
Lenny Kravitz - "He's very bright and very charming and he has this gift where you're talking with him and you feel like you've been friends forever."

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Bee Gees: Barry Gibb about passing of Robert Stigwood

Barry Gibb issued the following statement:

 "Robert Stigwood was an enigma. A victorian figure cast into the sixties to work with Brian Epstein and The Beatles. He hitch hiked from Adelaide to London with a powerful vision to rule the entertainment world. 
He was almost aristocratic in nature, the mixture of talent and insight from the moment you met him was omnipresent.
 He signed us as his group at a moment in time when groups were no longer being signed.
 The odds against us having success was very high but Robert took an act of faith and against the advice of others, became our manager. 

He also became a member of our family and all the success we had was because of Robert Stigwood. On behalf of Linda and our family we wish you god speed. 
Every time the first of May comes around I will think of you and I will miss your phone call. 
We shared so many wonderful moments.

 I will never forget you my dear friend." 

Barry Gibb



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Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Message Spencer Gibb about passing Robert Stigwood

I would like to share the sad news with you all, that my godfather, and the longtime manager of my family, Robert Stigwood, has passed away.
A creative genius with a very quick and dry wit, Robert was the driving force behind The Bee Gees career, as well as having discovered Cream, and subsequently managing Eric Clapton.

 He was also of course, the creator of the movies Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and many Broadway musicals with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. RSO Records pretty much defined the late 70’s.
 Of course, his biography is very extensive and can easily be found online…..I would like to thank Robert for his kindness to me over the years as well as his mentorship to my family. “Stiggy", you will be missed.

Spencer Gibb 



 http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.nl/

Monday, January 4, 2016

Bee Gees : Robert Stigwood passed away

I am saddened to hear of Robert Stigwood's passing. 
He was the man who gave the Bee Gees the break they needed for success and international stardom. It was his efforts and the efforts of his colleague Brian Epstein, that allowed the Bee Gees and the Beatles to reach audiences the world over and to touch millions of hearts with their talent. 

 Rest In Peace Robert... 

 Robin John Gibb


 http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.nl/