STAYIN' ALIVE
The Bee Gees succeeded in the world of pop music in spite of themselves
The Story of the Bee Gees: Children of the World Bob Stanley Pegasus
Barry Gibb, the eldest of the brothers who would become the Bee Gees, was born in 1946. Twins Robin and Maurice followed three years later. This was on the Isle of Man, but toddlers are toddlers everywhere, and when his siblings arrived, big brother did what so many others have before and since: “He asked his mum to take the babies back,” Bob Stanley writes in his definitive group biography, The Story of the Bee Gees: Children of the World.
It's a good thing newborns come with a no-return policy. The brothers became one of the most successful musical groups of all time, as well as one of the most accident-prone, self-sabotaging and misunderstood.
From the Isle of Man, the boys' parents — Hugh, a bandleader, and Barbara, a “canary,” as female singers for dance bands were known in the 1940s — shepherded them to Manchester before, in 1958, they set sail for Australia. By then, not only had Barry forgiven his two brothers for spoiling his life, but the three had formed an airtight team. Their musical career was already on its way: Though kids were forbidden on the deck of the ocean liner after 9 p.m., Hugh would find the trio in their pyjamas, singing Everly Brothers tunes to fellow passengers.
They got serious in Australia and signed with a label that issued an album in 1965. It was titled The Bee Gee's Sing and Play 14 Barry Gibb Songs (no, that's not a typo). But the happening scene was in England, so, in 1967, back the brothers went. Less than a week after their arrival in London, they were out one day when, according to their mother, a geezer named “Stickweed” called.
Stickweed was Robert Stigwood, a brash impresario with his fingers in various pies — music, theatre, film. He had partnered with Beatles manager Brian Epstein in hopes of taking over Epstein's most successful group one day, a dream stymied by the fact that the members couldn't stand him.
Stigwood suited the Gibb brothers just fine, however, and to call what happened next “a meteoric rise” would be insulting to meteors. The Bee Gees had pitched up in England at the beginning of the year and by October saw their single Massachusetts reach No. 1 on the U.K. music charts.
In the bulk of the book, Stanley seems to look on with bemused joy as the Bee Gees often succeed despite themselves. During the next decade they went “from third-rate variety club act to multinational operatives,” criss-crossing America in a private jet and racking up six consecutive No. 1 singles, something only the Beatles had done before.
And all this despite having close brushes with death. (Barry was scalded so badly as a child that doctors thought he might not live; Robin and his wife survived both a train wreck in which 53 people died, and an avalanche.) Their looks were lampooned, especially in their disco phase; they looked toothy and insincere in photos, and the chest hair and medallions didn't help. They had the usual drug problems, and they quarrelled and broke up and reunited.
At the height of their success, “they were all just kids,” Stanley writes; “none of them had really grown up.” They never lost “the feeling of being ridiculed, that sense of underlying disrespect” triggered by things like Bee Gee-free weekends on American radio in 1979 and the appearance in 1981 of a satirical group called the Hee Bee Gee Bees, whose Meaningless Songs (In Very High Voices) mimicked its target's trademark falsetto.
How did they become so big? It's partly luck: Massachusetts came out just as audiences began to favour the ballads of Petula Clark and Engelbert Humperdinck over the psychedelic offerings of Cream, The Who and The Kinks. And their songs were adaptable; in the '90s a number of bands scored hits by covering songs like Stayin' Alive and More Than a Woman. And they had determination: “We're durable, persistent little buggers,” Robin said.
Stanley is the author of Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music From Bill Haley to Beyoncé, as well as Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop Music — two soaring, symphonic books. Why, then, would he take on a group that was, in his words, “both inside and outside of pop”? This book, like the others, is both a love letter and a detailed account of the musicians' daily lives. But why devote 400 pages to a group that shouldn't have succeeded but did?
The answer is that long before The Story of the Bee Gees ends, the brothers have stopped being a single pop band and become a mirror of all the musical acts covered by Stanley in his two earlier books: loved and hated, obscure and celebrated, so addled by drink or drugs they can't perform and as disciplined as paratroopers, savaging and embracing one another in equal measure, mocked and praised by the press, shaped by both luck and a deathless work ethic. By the end, the brothers become a microcosm of everything that happened in the 20th-century pop world.