Some have you may have noticed that I haven’t posted in awhile.
Why? Well, it’s finally Spring here on the New Hampshire Seacoast, and the world is waking from its slumber. The flowers are blooming, the trees are greening, and the ecstasy of the season is in full swing. After a long, gray winter, it’s time to return to the trails, the beaches, and the lively streets of our towns; it’s time for outdoor music, festivals, and fairs. The hills are alive, fecund and green, beckoning us to explore them.
Which is exactly what I would like to be doing - however, I’ve been working every fucking day and I’m left only to imagine how nice things must be outside the dungeon of a bar in which I spend most of my time. I know what’s just beyond the dusty, shuttered windows of this port-city dive: the birds are chirping, the green buds of the maple trees are dancing in the breeze. Pink petals fall upon a mirrored pond, and a pair of bumblebees totter along the sunny shore. In the distance, a church bell chimes. The warmth of the sun is, for the first time in months, breaking through - washing over the skin of young lovers strolling through the park.
I ponder all of this sadly, leaning against the old mahogany bar and musing: days like this are fleeting. As fleeting as the pale, pink cherry blossoms stuck to the beer-soaked dumpster out back. But I suppose it’s just as well, for if Spring were forever, would we celebrate its jubilation with records as lush and radiant as Bee Gees’ 1st?
If you have ear(s), the Bee Gees will be immediately familiar from their era-defining worldwide smash hit (and staple of global consciousness), “Stayin’ Alive,” from 1977. This track, which helped anchor the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack at the No. 1 Billboard spot for eighteen weeks, is one of the most recognizable songs from the disco era and is is something of the Bee Gees’ touchstone for American audiences. Disco as a movement was - as we’ll see over and over with other eras of music - spearheaded by Black and Latino artists and was hugely popular in LGBTQ communities. Meanwhile, both the Saturday Night Fever film and its soundtrack are widely credited with popularizing disco among heterosexual White people and wresting its creative energy away from the very communities that innovated it in the first place. If this sounds similar to the historical outline of blues, hip-hop, rock n’ roll, and country music, then perhaps you have been picking up on a big pattern.
That being said, by the time Saturday Night Fever came out, the Bee Gees had already been working within the music industry for over a decade. Their turn to disco probably could have been predicted, as their trajectory followed the course of trends ranging from British Beat (Spicks and Specks), arty baroque pop (Odessa), country rock (Cucumber Castle), and soft rock (Mr. Natural) before finally moving onto the hard stuff a few years before “Stayin’ Alive” came and shook the world. Bee Gees’ 1st - which is, naturally, their third album - finds them right in the middle of the swingin’ Sixties, just a few weeks behind Sgt. Pepper and fully committed to the kind of expansive, psychedelic pop that was so in vogue during the Summer of Love.
The culture machine moved especially quickly in the mid-sixties, and between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper there was a huge revolution in thought among the bands that made up the British Invasion. Thanks to Beatles and to a variety of other factors - Phil Spector, American pop, fashion trends, San Francisco, LSD, etc. - a lot of English rock bands were following the Fab Four down the psychedelic rabbit hole. Some, like the Rolling Stones and the Pretty Things, completely abandoned their American R&B roots in favor of densely-textured psych excursions. Others, like the Kinks, used the new freedom of expression to sort of ironically explore styles that were popular in prewar England and repurpose them for modern ears. Still more, like the Hollies and the Zombies, just doubled down on what they did best while taking advantage of more fashionable arrangements and recording techniques. But a lot of these bands had already exhausted their US popularity, and many of their post-1965 triumphs essentially went unheard in North America for a long, long time.
The Bee Gees, fashion savvy as they were, captured all of these things that were going on and got ‘em on wax just as Sgt. Pepper was blowing minds all over the world. This album turns up all the time in dollar bins and at yard sales, which tells us that it sold like crazy in the US. And while yeah, it’s definitely in the LSD-era Beatles mold -songs like “In My Own Time” could have been slipped onto Revolver and passed off as the real deal - what’s really interesting about this record is how completely it captures all the poppy elements of the British psychedelia, almost acting like a primer for a whole scene that never really got its due on our side of the Atlantic.
Opener “Turn of the Century” plays like a mash-up of “Eleanor Rigby” and music-hall Kinks, complete with Victorian-era yearnings and concert orchestra horns. “Holiday” anticipates the Zombies’ Oddysey and Oracle, right down to the melancholic, lilting vocals. “Red Chair Fade Away” sounds as much like a Magical Mystery Tour outtake as much as “In My Own Time” sounds like a Revolver one, while shades of Moody Blues color “Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You.” “Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy Of Arts” could have been Jeff Lynne throwaway, and R&B workout “To Love Somebody” has proven worthy of interpretation by artists as wide-ranging as Nina Simone and Narvel Felts.
But this is still, first and foremost, a Bee Gees record. Fans of 1969s’ fantastic Odessa will recognize that album’s narrative elements on “New York Mining Disaster, 1941,” and the vocal blends between the Gibb brothers are as unmistakable here as they were during their disco period ten years later. They were incredible singers and great songwriters, and sustain these songs even though they epitomize the kind of bombastic, ornate, baroque schlock that we associate with the Summer of Love. It’s not a miracle that it sounds as timeless as it does. It might not be definitive as, say, the Kinks’ work from the same period; but it’s joyous stuff, and it’s aged much better than a lot of stuff that came out in the thick of the flower-power era.