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Why the Bee Gees Sound So Good
The Bee Gees, who have done it all before, have done again. Their latest album, “Spirits Having Flown,” sounds immediately like a Greatest‐Hits collection even though the material is brand new. The four most obvious blockbuster cuts — only two of them are top‐10 so far, but then only two have been individually, released — are very much in the mode of the group's four “Saturday Night Fever” singles, yet surprising for their variety, too. How does a group with no propensity for touring and little distinct personality manage to dominate the airwaves so tirelessly? What makes the Bee Gees’ formula so durable and yet so new?
And why is their sound so catchy, so simple and yet virtually inimitable? If you've ever heard a successful Bee Gees copy on the radio, it's either a genuine Bee Gees cut you haven't heard before, or else the copying has been done by the three Gibb brothers themselves, on tracks they have written or produced or sung backup for other performers. Hit singles like Frankie Valli's “Grease,” Samantha Sang's “Emotion,” Yvonne Elliman's “If I Can't Have You” or Andy Gibb's “Shadow Dancing” are the true measure of this group's spectacularly saleable’ versatility. The streamlined, slightly bouncier Kiddie Bee Gee sound devised for their brother Andy, designed to highlight his slightly wispier voice and also to please his younger and bubblier fans, is a remarkable testament to the group's craftsmanship. And before they are artists or charttoppers or anything else, the Bee Gees craftsmen.
“Main Course,” the first of their disco albums (it was released in 1975), is in many ways still the best. Launching a whole new stage of their thenmoribund career with the help of producer Arif Mardin (all subsequent records have been produced by the Gibbs, Karl Richardson and Albhy Galatea), they began to master dance rhythms and team them with the sweet, high, billowing harmonies that had .0filways been their trademark. Everything on “Main Course” was punchy; not even the slow songs sounded slow. Their singing style began to incorporate falsetto singing as a playful accompaniment to Robin Gibb's deeper, more quavery lead vocals, or falsetto harmonies to cap off melodies that spiraled ever upwards. Barry Gibb, who seems to have emerged as the group's disco mastermind since then, contributed much of the falsetto singing and an insinuating whisper. “Jive Talkin',” which featured that whisper, was the first single to make the world mindful of the group's stunning transformation; later, half the album's other songs followed “Jive Talkin’” up the charts. “Main Course” is still amazing for its prescience, as a harbinger of the Bee Gees' Golden Age.
Since then, the group has primarily been involved in a polishing process, creating ever more seamless music that is this era's equivalent of mid‐60's Motown. Whatever final form a Bee Gees track takes, its orderliness is a signal quality. Even when a melody wanders and soars, it always comes home so dependably that the songs seem to adhere to their own laws of geometry. It's no accident that the group dance number set to “Night Fever,” in the film “Saturday Night Fever,” is choreographed with fierce, almost military precison, or that the dancers seem to be reveling in the very rigidity of the song.
The connection with any kind of black music may at first seem minimal; indeed, when the Bee Gees affect any kind of soul delivery (like their god‐awful Earth, Wind and Fire imitation on “Boogie Child”) or toss around a street vocabulary (“whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother....” from the otherwise unassailable “Stayin' Alive”), they sound ridiculous. Nevertheless, their new “Search, Find” is a song that could easily have been sung — and danced to, with the 1960's strict soul choreography — by the Temptations of yesteryear. If Motown was the slick, sophisticated crossover music of those days, party music that black and white audiences were equally at home with, the Bee Gees sound is that and something more: They're also the one group to have successfully suspended themselves halfway between disco and, rock. With “Saturday Night Fever,” which may have done even more for them than it did for John Travolta, they also cornered a portion of the pop‐hating movie audience. Theirs is not a crossover, it's a conquest.
Like the Motown groups, the Bee Gees stake everything on glittering urbanity. Formerly specializing in plaintive ballads, they now allow emotion, only the most stylized expression. The singer of “Tragedy,” the first hardcore dance hit from the new album (“Search, Find” is sure to be the second), makes the picture sound pretty grim: “Tragedy/When the feeling's gone and you can't go on it's tragedy/ When the morning cries and you don't know why/It's hard to bear/With no one beside you you're going nowhere.” (© Brothers Gibb B.V.)
Still, this is the happiest song you've heard in a dog's age, and the lyrics are so emphatically contradicted by the music that they become perversely upbeat. Give the Bee Gees the most unlikely subject and they'll still manage to strike a pose, freeze it, and then describe it gaily from a million miles away. On their “Children of the World” album, for instance, they concocted a refrain about riding the subway.
This kind of posturing has its disadvantages, though. Falsetto singing is an apt musical counterpart to those patently fake sentiments expressed in the lyrics, and so the group is more and more often relying on falsetto for lead as well as backing vocals, not only in up‐tempo songs but also in ballads; the slow and fairly sober “Reaching Out” on the new album is a ballad with a falsetto lead. This kind of delivery lends itself to the objection most often voiced by the group's detractors, the Alvin and the Chipmunks complaint — that is, the notion that a grown man singing a song of woe at the top of his register sounds, at best, a bit peculiar. But “Reaching Out,” like most Bee Gees songs, is lilting and clever enough to ingratiate itself no matter what, just as “Living Together,” with its curious rhythmic skip, is both hummable and likely to cause a few broken ankles on the dance floor. At this point, the Bee Gees have their art down to a science, and their precision is so powerful that it takes everything else.
‘The group has been creating ever more seamless music that is this era's equivalent of mid‐60's Motown.’
“Spirits Having Flown” is astonishingly precise, tailor‐made to match the format of earlier successes. The automatic hits exactly parallel those of “Saturday Night Fever”: two fast dance songs to follow up “Stayin' Alive” and “Night Fever” (“Tragedy” and “Search, Find”), one slower, more romantic dance number like “More Than A Woman” (“Love You Inside Out”), and one top‐10 ballad à la “How Deep Is Your Love” (“Too Much Heaven”). There's even a soft, thoughtful concluding cut — the very Stevie Wonderish “Until” — to match the title cut on “Children of the World.”
The remaining material — which includes two songs that feature Herbie Mann on flute, and some arresting contributions from the Boneroo Horns — is a little less formulaic and perhaps a bit less successful. Much as the group might wish sometimes to broaden what it does, its present style lends itself to dense, rigorous intensification, not to expansion. The trick is to stay within its bounds and match or better past feats without repeating them. To a remarkable degree, the Bee Gees continue to pull that off without a hitch.
BEE GEES: Spirits Having Flown.
