Bee Gees
It could be argued that the very thing which assured the Bee Gees’ commercial triumph also guaranteed their exile into the critical wilderness. While the group’s heyday riding the Saturday Night Fever juggernaut is celebrated as kitsch in some circles, for those of us who resisted their utter dominance of popular culture for those few dark years (it coincided with the rise of punk, after all), it’s hard to embrace their disco-era sound now, even with a chuckle of post-modern disdain.
Just how big were the Bee Gees back then? Reportedly between 1977 and 1978, the brothers Gibb were variously responsible for six songs that held the #1 spot on the U.S. charts for 25 of 32 consecutive weeks: “How Deep Is Your Love”, “Staying Alive” and “Night Fever” from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack; Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You” (which they wrote, and which was also on that soundtrack); and younger brother Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want To Be Your Everything” and “Thicker Than Water”. When you begin to factor in the hits they generated for other artists Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Frankie Valli and their own celebrity waterloo (manager Robert Stigwood’s overhyped and cataclysmic attempt to convert the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band into a movie musical), one begins to see the Bee Gees’ collective output as some kind of cultural smog that for a time settled over the world.
(This is what happened.)
So pervasive and divisive is the Bee Gees late-’70s success, it is easy to forget that this period was in fact the group’s comeback. In the late ’60s, the brothers produced three albums of artfully rendered, if at times overly delicate, pop: 1967’s 1st, and 1968’s Horizontal and Idea. Rhino Records kick-started a critical reappraisal in 2006 with admirable double-disc reissues, featuring the remastered original albums in stereo and (often superior) mono mixes, plus outtakes and alternate versions. It was an eye-and-ear-opening experience. The genuinely unsettling psychedelia of “Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You” makes a case that the brothers Gibb at least deserve a mention in surveys of the era’s more ambitious sonic experimentation. “New York Mining Disaster 1941” stands up, and plenty of artists have successfully milked “To Love Somebody” (Janis Joplin’s aside, for me the definitive rendering is James Carr’s). Those early records affirm the Bee Gees were masters of highly dramatic, at times overwrought, odes to heartache, with a kind of anxious reticence about the vagaries of the adult world.
(The Bee Gees’ “Holiday”, 1967.)
Now comes the real test of posterity the Bee Gees’ 1969 double-album, felt-encased opus, Odessa. Rhino has once again done it up right, with a package that recreates the original’s fuzzy scarlet sleeve (which, note to Rhino, is a bugger to get open), a poster, a sticker, a track-by-track analysis by Andrew Sandoval, a full disc each of mono and stereo mixes of the original set’s 17-song tracklist, and a bonus disc bursting with 23 tracks of demos, alternate mixes, outtakes and a promo ad.
Listening to Odessa with fresh ears makes a perhaps unintentional case that the group’s secret weapon was not Barry’s pen or Robin’s fluttering vocal vibrato, but arranger Bill Shepherd. The bonus disc contains an alternate mix of the album’s standout, uncharacteristically bitter song “You’ll Never See My Face Again”, which pushes Shepherd’s string arrangement to the back. But the album version, with the rich, imaginative strings given plenty of room, renders the track in three dimensions. It’s an impact Shepherd bequeaths to the album repeatedly.
That’s not to say the group wasn’t bristling with some fresh ideas, too. There’s a sense they were prepared to try just about anything. “Whisper Whisper” starts off in a manner that betrays more than a little affection for the Beatles’ “She’s A Woman” before slamming on the brakes and, powered by Maurice Gibb’s bass, embarking on a startling funk workout. Between the recording of an acoustic demo for “Lamplight” (included here) and the melodramatic final version, they opted to fly in a head-scratching French-language intro. A Bee-Gees-by-numbers demo titled “Barbara Came To Stay” was refurbished from the ground up as a tribute to Thomas Edison (titled “Edison” on the final album). “First Of May”, the album’s toweringly sad, big single, conveys a weariness that belies a worldview more challenged and defeated than what you’d expect from men in their 20s.
There are some carbuncles bulging out of Odessa. Two attempts at something like country rock “Marley Purt Drive” and “Give Your Best” explain why, when they later resettled into an American musical enclave, it was Miami’s Criteria Studios and not Bradley’s Barn in Nashville. A trio of instrumental orchestral pieces “The British Opera”, “Seven Seas Symphony” and “With All Nations (International Anthem)” give off the whiff of a desire to pad out Odessa into its original double-album span.
But given the ambition evident in Odessa, and given the fact that it proved to be the undoing of the brothers’ partnership for a time (Robin split but returned for 1971’s Trafalgar and the chart-topping “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart”), what’s missing in the retelling of this tale is the players’ own reflections. What was behind the audacity of this album? Maurice is gone (he passed away in 2003), and the other two evidently weren’t moved to contribute any attributed thoughts to Sandoval’s liner notes.
Forty years on, this reissue doesn’t clear the decks of the Bee Gees’ later leisure-suited, falsettoed, discofied crimes. But it turns out that, for fans of ambitious, elegantly crafted pop, Odessa is a nice place to visit. Or revisit.
“Odessa (City On The Black Sea)”