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3 I Feel As Good As If I Were Dead

THE BEE GEES

As the mammoth, five-author, bone-dry ‘biography’ published in 2000 attests, the Bee Gees’ story is much bigger than a short chapter in this book can or should even try to cover. In any case, the most revealing account of their career – for its vivacity and, for that matter, its semi-official status – remains The Legend, David English and Alex Brychta’s comic-strip version of the group’s story up to 1979, in which the Gibb brothers are depicted as animals: Barry as a lion, Robin a red setter and Maurice an (‘eager’) beaver. English, the president of their 1970s label, RSO, was close to the Gibbs both professionally and personally.

There is no doubt, however, that the Bee Gees’ story is integral to the development of Australian pop and rock music. Even if it is accepted that the Bee Gees were not really an Australian group (‘British, of course,’ decrees English rock historian Vernon Joynson, a little too gleefully¹), their impact on the Australian scene was multifaceted and emphatic, as was its effect on them. The Bee Gees’ Australian period encompassed their most formative years; Australia allowed the brothers contact with the mainstream media, more time in small but functional studios than they would otherwise have enjoyed, and access to a range of artists through whom they developed their writing, performing and production skills. Such a wealth of experience would not have been readily available to them if they had continued to live in Manchester, let alone on the Isle of Man, where they were born. That the Gibbs recognised this is born out by the fact that in the early 70s they arranged for their younger brother Andy to work for an extended time on the Australian pop/tour circuit. They seem to have wanted him to replicate their own experience, probably as a prelude to his induction into the Bee Gees, though Andy’s successful solo career in the late 70s and his death a decade later ensured this did not take place.

For the Gibbs, Australia was a proving ground. Barry Gibb said as much in 1969:

The nine years’ struggle was the best thing that could happen to us. Our success now is probably due to the experience we gained throughout that period. If we had’ve had success in Australia right from the beginning we probably would not have developed our song-writing ability, and have just rested on our laurels.²

It should also be borne in mind that the Bee Gees who had their first international hits in the late 60s – the band which included guitarist Vince Melouney and drummer Colin Peterson – were two-fifths Australian born, and every band member had spent most of his life in Australia. Peterson was a sufficiently integral member of the group that his presence as a Bee Gee no doubt kept the band intact after the temporary departure of Robin Gibb in 1969, and his later sacking probably precipitated, or perhaps merely confirmed, the demise of the original group.

By the late 1950s the Gibb family were Brisbaneites (they apparently lived in Cribb Island, or in Redcliffe, or both of these lower-class suburbs) when the brothers’ performing career began in earnest. Initially, Barry was the most comfortable and accomplished performer, and the only songwriter. By the late 60s Robin’s songs would come to equal, and sometimes surpass, Barry’s in quality; he also developed a distinctive, tremulous singing style (within the family it was jokingly referred to as ‘the quavering Arab’).³ Maurice was always a minor force as a songwriter, providing additional material for albums and complementary instrumentation and arrangement, such as the crucial piano riff for ‘Spicks and Specks’, their first big Australian hit.

Part of the Bee Gees’ official story is that Australia did not recognise them until it was too late – that is, until they had decided to return to the UK in 1967. Erroneous claims abound on the sleeve notes of reissues, such as a mid-70s Pickwick cash-in collection of the group’s early 60s material, whose notes assert that ‘I Was a Lover, a Leader of Men’ was a number one hit in Australia in 1965, and in quickie bios, for example that ‘when the Bee Gees left Australia, they’d already gotten three of their songs on the Australian charts in the number one position’.⁴ Tony Brady, a Festival Records employee in the 1960s, opines in the first episode of the series Long Way to the Top that Barry Gibb’s music was ‘so far ahead’ of local artists.⁵ But this is hindsight talking, and he’s wrong (at least, the recorded output does not support his statement). Australians, like mass consumers everywhere, have never lacked a desire to purchase music of remarkably low quality, but nonetheless the story of the Bee Gees being underappreciated in Australia in the 60s glosses over the inferior and derivative nature of much of their early work. Which is to say: the early Bee Gees weren’t a success and didn’t deserve to be. The novelty factor of a weird-looking, fraternal folk-pop threesome who wrote (most of) their own songs – and, in fact, songs for a considerable number of other artists – may have been compelling when it came to filling up the schedules of television and live variety shows, but there are simply very few songs from the Bee Gees’ early years that shine forth as original or interesting. This is true even within the often unexciting framework of early 60s pop music. ‘It is no wonder that the Bee Gees never had a vast send-up [sic] when they left Australia’, wrote ‘Irene’ in a letter to Go-Set magazine:

Before they left, their music was mediocre to say the least, except their last record ‘Spicks and Specks’ . . . How are newspapers supposed to acclaim a pathetic group? . . . Although the Bee Gees are now an excellent group, they should realize their position when they left us.⁶

The group’s migration history is relatively well known. The Gibb family had lived both on the Isle of Man and in Manchester in the 1940s and 50s and by the time they relocated to Queensland in the late 1950s, the brothers had already made tentative forays into the field of public performance. Some sources, including the group’s own lighthearted comic-strip story, suggest the family’s relocation was due in part to the desire to avoid reform school punishment for Maurice and Robin, who habitually committed ‘Grand Arson’ in Manchester.⁷ Curious connections extend across the group’s early days: they travelled to Australia on the same ship as Red Symons, later Skyhooks’ lead guitarist,⁸ and they knew Lobby Loyde and Billy Thorpe as teenagers in Brisbane. Loyde and Thorpe were not just friends, but also competitors, as Loyde told the authors of Wild About You:

We were all buddies when we were young. It was the eternal talent quest thing. Every time you’d walk in, if Gibby and the two little dribblers were there, you were just wasting your time because you knew they’d take [the prize] away. Even if they were rotten, they’d still get the vote, because Barry was about four foot tall and they [Robin and Maurice] were about two foot tall, and they used to get up there and sing harmonies and it’d be all over for everyone else. And if they didn’t win, Thorpe did. So if those two started, you wouldn’t have a shot!⁹

The number of ‘BGs’ in their life at this time is also peculiar – and was clearly impossible to resist when it came to choosing a name. Local impresario Bill Good had organised a racing meeting at Brisbane’s Redcliffe Speedway and invited the Gibbs to perform, presumably during a break in the main event; disc jockey Bill Gates was driving in a stock car race and was impressed enough to offer his services as manager. Legend has it that the group’s remarkably hokey name emerged from a combination of these two and Barry Gibb, although Glenn A. Baker has countered this with his own claim that the group was already known, very ungrammatically, as the Brother Gibbs.¹⁰ English and Brychta’s suggestion that Gates ‘tried to encourage sister Leslie to join the group as singer’ renders Baker’s assertion problematic.¹¹

Gates had a radio show, Midday Platter Chatter, and in the innocently nepotistic spirit of the times, would play Bee Gees songs on his program. The group soon anchored a variety show on local Brisbane television on Friday nights. A new management team – the Jacobsen brothers – tried to get Festival interested, and Jacobsen ‘sacrificed’ one of his recording acts, Judy Cannon, for the sake of the Gibbs (Cannon was leaving the country anyway).

The Bee Gees grew up in public, and were both outgoing and impulsive. Jacobsen later recalled that mainstream television producers saw them as ‘cheeky little bastards, young upstarts. It was almost impossible to get Bandstand to take them.’¹² They nevertheless had a profile: Jacobsen persuaded Lee Gordon to let them support Chubby Checker.¹³ The group’s (or more accurately, at this early stage, Barry’s) songwriting ability was notable from an early age, even if at this point it manifested itself most notably as a simple capacity for high output, and a ballad by the 17-year-old Barry, ‘They’ll Never Know’, was covered by Wayne Newton. Baker states that over sixty Gibb songs were recorded by Australian artists in the 60s. In an era before it was de rigueur for groups to generate most or all of their own material, this ability to write was very important; the contents of the group’s first album was very clearly spelt out in its title: The Bee Gees Sing and Play 14 Barry Gibb Songs.

Soon they were being extensively recorded by yet another mentor, Ossie Byrne, in his St Clair Recording Studio, located behind a butcher’s in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville.¹⁴ It is important to note that the Bee Gees might well have been unable to find and utilise a studio in the way they did Byrne’s had they been living anywhere but in Sydney (where the family had moved in early 1963 with the boys’ career in mind). The Bee Gees became a group who could work up their releases, as well as backing tracks for songs intended for others, on tape – as opposed to bringing fully realised songs to the studio. The Gibbs would later joke that their popularity with Byrne was primarily due to a sexual attraction they held for him, though there is no evidence for this, any more than there is regarding their relationship with their manager of the 60s and 70s, Robert Stigwood.

The group was plainly highly regarded in the pop industry at the time, as is evidenced by the strong support that Fred Marks of Festival Records gave them¹⁵ and by their ongoing relationship with songwriter/entrepreneur Nat Kipner, who co-wrote songs with Maurice and other group members and whose son Steve was also involved in some of their projects. Nat Kipner issued Bee Gees records on his Everybody’s label, which was tied to the well-known gossip/glossy magazine (Lilian Roxon was perhaps its most notable contributor); this later morphed into the Spin label and booking agency, secretly co-owned and operated by Clive Packer (so secret even Packer’s wife was unaware of the connection).¹⁶ The Packers are a powerful media and, more recently, gambling family; Clive was the patriarch Frank’s ‘outsider’ son. Kipner arranged distribution for Spin with Festival, and this company retained rights to the Spin label and held an extended contract for Bee Gees recordings following their international success, a contract that continued into the 70s. Kipner also produced the hit ‘Spicks and Specks’.¹⁷

Other musical Bee Gee friends of the early-to-mid 60s included Trevor Gordon (a former schoolfriend and TV show host in Brisbane), Colin Stead, Lori Balmer, Ronnie Burns and Cheryl Grey, née Sang. A decade later, after she had reputedly sustained a singing career for some years in Yugoslavia, Stigwood and Barry Gibb renamed the Melbourne-born Cheryl as Samantha Sang (the ‘Samantha’ came from one of Gibb’s cats), and the Gibbs wrote and produced the international hit ‘Emotion’ for her.¹⁸

The Bee Gees’ abilities as producers and writers were developed in their Hurstville days. Their song ‘Coalman,’ which was a hit for Ronnie Burns,¹⁹ is a good example of the ‘three I’s’ approach of most of their Australian pop material. It is simultaneously idiotic, infectious and inspired, and its jolly, working-class tone owes much to ditties like ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ (which the Gibbs had recorded for Jacobsen and Joye in 1958)²⁰ and the George Formby-esque forays of Herman’s Hermits. It is also patronising in the way only a bunch of aspirationals like the Gibbs could be: of course, the Gibb boys yearned for stardom, but their family’s move to Australia from England in the 50s is indicative of that immigrant ‘improvement’ spirit. ‘Coalman’ is also lyrically so simplistic that it must surely have been written in minutes, without pause to think of the possible subtexts to a song about a boy who tells his romantic troubles to a young coalman who ‘takes my hand’ and ‘understands’. Of course, this is also an indication of a historical period which was not so much innocent as adept at compartmentalisation and denial: only a few listeners are likely to imagine that the singer was enjoying the coalman’s soothing touch and empathy in itself, and they weren’t going to discuss this openly. But even if one can explain away the gay interpretation – or rather, the way its possibilities were ignored in the 1960s – while acknowledging and enjoying, even admiring, its existence, that still leaves the song’s perverse assertion that the ‘coalman’ is a ‘soul man’. If we assume the coal man is white (the undoubtedly white Burns in fact applied burnt cork to his face for promotional photos), then the melting-pot of ridiculous stereotypes – the simple, working-class, dirty but caring labourer with the heart of an African-American (or Aboriginal?) man – is complete.

What were the Bee Gees saying about the boy in the song’s relationship with the coalman? They weren’t saying anything, of course. They were merely running together every rhyme for ‘coalman’ (a reasonably rare profession in itself in Australia in the 60s, incidentally) they could think of, fitting the words to a catchy tune, and giving Ronnie Burns a hit single. Like many of their songs from their Australian period, the result was childlike and flippant, the product of three outsider siblings with a knack for attention-getting, whose life experience derived in large part from listening to other people’s music. David N. Meyer, author of a 2013 history of the group, observes insightfully that the Gibbs ‘grew up as performers with no real sense of themselves’. Even truer is this critique: ‘The Bee Gees would forever suffer from not being able to tell their best material from their worst.’²¹

The Bee Gees released ‘Spicks and Specks’ – a classic pop song of the once-heard-never-forgotten variety, based on Maurice’s bold and resonant keyboard riff played on the St Clair pianola²² – on Barry’s birthday, 1 September, 1966. They performed the song that night at a Sydney Town Hall show at which they shared the bill with a panoply of talents including Vince Melouney. Dinah Lee,²³ who was also performing that night, was offered ‘Spicks and Specks’ by the Gibbs, who were not yet convinced of its value.²⁴ Quite different from the rich, dramatic ballads they would begin to produce in London only six months later, ‘Spicks and Specks’ is charged and rollicking; it was accompanied by a film clip of the group mugging and clowning around a Cessna. The origins of the song’s title are very obscure, though one suggestion at the time was that it had originally been intended as the name for a pop group.²⁵ If this was so, it offers further evidence of cognitive disconnect (‘spick’ is, or was, a charged racial epithet).

The Gibbs had already decided to leave Australia and return to Britain at the time ‘Spicks and Specks’ was released. There are a number of possible reasons for this decision, not all of them commercial. It has been suggested that the boys’ Murry Wilson-esque father, Hugh Gibb, was worried that Barry would be conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War, which Australia had entered in 1965 in support of US involvement.²⁶ The relocation to Britain may have been intended to be temporary; Barry reputedly bid farewell to his friend Colin Stead, Baker later reported, with the words, ‘I’ll see you in 12 months’.²⁷ Other sources also suggest that they did not intend to return to Britain permanently;²⁸ in keeping with the group’s approach to recording, they were probably playing it by ear. There was nothing promising on the horizon, and while ‘Spicks and Specks’ might arguably have been seen as a song with which to conquer the world (it was a hit in some European countries, but was essentially a parting gift for Australia), the Bee Gees’ future was unknowable.

Soon after their arrival, the Gibbs were lucky enough to make a connection in London with Robert Stigwood, a fellow Australian who was at that stage in controversial negotiations to take over the running of Brian Epstein’s NEMS organisation. The Bee Gees were able to sign with Polydor internationally as a result of Stigwood’s intervention, while remaining on the Spin label in Australia. Someone talked them out of jumping on the temporarily popular bandwagon of ‘world’ bands and renaming themselves Rupert’s World (it may have been Stigwood, wanting to avoid confusion with a rockier group from Sydney, Lloyd’s World, which he was briefly interested in; Johnny Young, of whom more anon, had previously named his group Danny’s World).

The Bee Gees’ third album was entitled Bee Gees 1st. It was an instant hit. The sleevenotes to the album accidentally mentioned that they had spent some time in Australia but firmly ignored the existence of the band’s previous LPs: this was a rebirth. Lillian Roxon neither praised nor derided the group when she described them in her 1969 Rock Encyclopedia as sounding “more like the Beatles than the Beatles ever did.”²⁹ Bee Gees 1st contains some brilliant songs, most notably the superb evergreen ‘To Love Somebody’, the propulsive ‘Red Chair Fade Away’, the plaintive ‘Holiday’, and the completely bizarre, heavy, Gregorian chant-infused ‘Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You’. This last song, as well as the one that follows it on the album, ‘Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy of Arts’, were singles for Johnny Young; the first of them – released in the UK as ‘Every Christian’ and credited to ‘Johnnie Young’ – was notoriously one of those songs that might have been a hit in Britain if pirate radio hadn’t been scuttled.

Most important for Bee Gees’ future career was the hit single ‘New York Mining Disaster, 1941’, reportedly inspired by their visit to the Welsh mining village of Aberfan in the company of Ossie Byrne, who remained their producer for Bee Gees First. Aberfan had been the scene of a tragic accident the previous year, when a coal tip collapsed onto houses and a school, killing 116 children and 28 adults:³⁰ certainly, the switching of the date to exactly a quarter century earlier, as well as the relocation to a setting as different from regional Wales as possible without being wilfully obscure, supports this idea. Yet perhaps another story about the song’s origins – that the group were inspired by the claustrophobic feelings induced by a power outage in a demo studio in London – is more in keeping with their common state of detachment from the real world.³¹ In late 1967, Robin and his wife Molly were in a serious rail accident, and bravely assisted in rescuing other passengers from the wreckage.³² This brush with real tragedy – many of the passengers Robin pulled from the wreckage were dead – inspired him to write the ballad ‘Really and Sincerely’ the following day.

The Bee Gees were still an Australian group, and they hung out with other young Australian men in London in their early days there, as the provenance of the Johnny Young single suggests. Former Aztecs guitarist Vince Melouney – who had played on a few of the Bee Gees’ Sydney recordings on a freelance basis – benefited financially from this cameraderie: having relocated to England at the end of 1966, he first found a job with Simca Motors; then, he told Lee Dillow in 1971, the Easybeats ‘introduced me around to quite a few people, one of whom was Long John Baldry. He had a band together and the guitar player was leaving and I was going to take his place . . . That all fell through, of course . . . Right after the Baldry thing [the Gibbs] arrived in town – I rang them up to say hello and that’s how it started. We did a session that night and from that time I was in the band.’³³

Melouney has the distinction of being the only Bee Gee not named Gibb to have a song recorded and released by the band (‘Such a Shame’, on Idea). Additionally, his playing was singled out on occasion – for instance, for its ‘slightly subdued Hendrix style’.³⁴ Despite this success and the financial reward, he was frustrated by the incessant touring and the restrictions placed on him by the Gibbs. His account to Dillow of the Bee Gees’ activities in the late 60s is telling:

We never really got to see or do much. I mean we were there and it was like working all the time. Doing concerts to incredible crowds of people. Quite a bit of television as well. Ed Sullivan, Hollywood Palace, that sort of thing . . . All of a sudden I had a Bentley and so much money. Wow. So much money. I just don’t know what happened. From there on in I forgot about everything. Money became the ruler of my life. It was really a sad scene.

The whole thing was really getting me down . . . I was seeing people like Clapton and Beck, people I really respected. I just wasn’t doing anything like this. With the Bee Gees I was playing G major chords and G minor chords – in the key of C all the time. I wasn’t allowed any solos. I wasn’t allowed anything bigger than a 100 watt Marshall and if I played it any louder than the two setting there was trouble. There were so many restrictions . . .³⁵

Even though Melouney had been permitted a song on Idea, he could have little doubt that the Bee Gees were a Gibb vehicle. He left in November 1968 and formed a new band, Fanny Adams, which is discussed in a later chapter:

I told the guys I wanted to leave and they said cool.

I really wanted to write songs and no matter how many I wrote, whether they were good, bad or otherwise, I just couldn’t do a thing with them. I couldn’t play them with the band, I couldn’t record them myself, I couldn’t even give them to other people so I just became completely stationary . . .³⁶

The Bee Gees’ balladry was the antithesis of much of the heavy rock of the late 60s, but while the Gibbs insisted on Melouney restraining himself when he was playing in the band, they were nonetheless enthusiastic about such groups. When they arrived on a visit to Australia at Christmas 1967, Barry enthused about ‘the’ Cream as ‘fantastic! They are the greatest group that ever has been or will be! . . . They just turn the audience on with their tremendous music.’ Some would have noted that this group shared a manager in Stigwood with the Bee Gees themselves; Robin Gibb – slightly more left-of-centre musically, yet affectedly reserved – chipped in: ‘I detest the guitar smashing antics of some groups . . .’³⁷ Shortly afterwards, these two brothers would, it was reported, ‘collapse in Turkey . . . due to strain of Australian fans following them around.³⁸

There is surely no mystery to the temporary demise of the Bee Gees in the late 60s. They had extraordinary success around the world in a short period of time at a very young age – the twins, in fact, were still in their late teens. For the ludicrous reason that every other band was inflicting overextended would-be meisterwerks on their audiences, the Bee Gees were told by their management that their next album would be a double. They rose to the challenge with the exceptional Odessa, but it caused problems within the group politically, particularly as Robin was starting to challenge Barry as a songwriter. Barry Gibb and Colin Peterson returned to Australia in January 1969 to holiday, and announced that ‘Odessa’ would be their next single. Aside from claiming that he was about to star in a Western, ‘which I have always wanted to do’ (but he did not: his film roles to date have been Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and his own execrable 1984 ‘video album’ Now Voyager), Barry announced that Peterson was like a ‘fourth’ brother.³⁹ Soon afterwards, in a dispute over whether a Robin song (‘Lamplight’) or a Barry song (‘First of May’) would be the next Bee Gees single, Robin left the group. Barry and Maurice – and Peterson – began work on the album Cucumber Castle and its associated TV special; during that time Peterson was sacked from the band (he would later work in the Australian music industry).⁴⁰ The dispute between Barry and Robin persisted; Barry claimed that Robin and Molly were accusing him of ‘foul things, well below the belt, you couldn’t print them.’⁴¹ In an unusual one-off, the oldest Gibb sibling, sister Lesley, sat in for Robin in a television appearance.

There is no definite point at which the Bee Gees ceased to regard themselves – or even ceased being – Australians; Barry visited in 1969 and 1970 and undertook low-key media commitments.⁴² The group reformed without Melouney or Peterson after a lengthy break in late 1970; they would produce some of their best work in the early 70s, including Maurice’s remarkable Moog experiment, ‘Sweet Song of Summer,’ and the almost-perfect album Trafalgar.

They toured Australia in 1972.⁴³ The country had changed, and this was the time when Australians seem to have felt ready to acknowledge the problematic status of the relationship between the group and their adopted country. Alistair Jones damned them in Planet:

The brothers Gibb descend like some jet-setting relative you’ve always secretly resented but like being seen with; the way Princess Margaret can look when placed against her stolid sister, or with her dull nephews and nieces.

It’s not all that difficult to believe that they were once our very own; the haircuts have turned into coiffures, the jewels are gaudy and showy, and the colours too co-ordinated; the style is that tasteless swank of the nouveau [sic] riches – crystal palaces, gold fleur de lis [sic] and the cleaning lady on Wednesdays.

The music is a commercial success but it’s as bland as American food.⁴⁴

By the time the group achieved its biggest and most lasting success in the late 70s, in association with the disco era, there was little discussion of their Australian legacy. What’s more, the humour and quirky melodrama that had made their music interesting in the 60s and early 70s was far more muted. After 1975 the Gibbs were based in Miami.