Here’s a conversation I had with my dentist last time I got my teeth cleaned:
Dentist: Do you know what Saturday Night Fever is?
Kristen: Yes.
Dentist: Really? I’m surprised someone your age would know that!
Kristen: [At a loss] Well, my parents had the record when I was a kid.
[Satisfied with this explanation, dentist proceeds to begin a long and not all that interesting story about seeing a really bad production of the Saturday Night Fever musical.]
This conversation raises a number of questions: Do I look so young as to not know what Saturday Night Fever is? (No.) Do today’s youth not know what Saturday Night Fever is? (Possibly, but I hope not.) Is there any good way to explain to your dentist that you love the Bee Gees? (Not in under 25 words and with one of those wands blasting air at your teeth.)
The problem with being a Bee Gees fan is that expressing a love for the Bee Gees is synonymous with expressing a love for disco. That’s because the Bee Gees are synonymous with disco. Saturday Night Fever and “Stayin’ Alive” are two things that almost everybody associates with them — along with leisure suits, medallions, and long, flowing hair. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the Bee Gees had a long, varied career dating back to 1966. During this time they experimented with a many different styles and produced some amazing songs that would be unrecognizable by most people as belonging to the Bee Gees. So when I say I love the Bee Gees, I want to express that I love them in a grand, sweeping, pop aficionado sense — not just a disco sense.
That being said, the disco era is an integral part of the Bee Gees’ career, and their songs on Saturday Night Fever are excellent. It can be hard to appreciate a song like “Stayin’ Alive” because it’s so ubiquitous that even when you listen to it, you don’t really hear it. But every once in a while, you catch it just right, and the brilliance comes into focus: the unforgettable hook, the funky guitar, the swooping disco strings, Barry’s falsetto joined in harmony by his brothers. My husband and I saw the music video on MTV Classic recently, and we were transfixed, both by the song itself and the undeniably striking image of the brothers Gibb. Josh must have repeated the sentence, “His hair is like a long, flowing mane,” about three times during the course of it all.
“How Deep is Your Love” might be even better, though less overtly disco. The piano and the more sparing use of falsetto give it warm tone, and I love the way that Barry’s voice gets a little low on the verse, before moving up to a falsetto on just the last word or two. The chorus — particularly the lines “’Cause we’re living in a world of fools/breaking us down/when they all should let us be” — has the kind of yearning melody that makes you feel like your heart will burst out of your chest. It’s one of my top five BeeGees songs.
The rest of the Bee Gees’ tracks on the Saturday Night Fever album are great as well — though a couple are re-releases, and pretty much all of them are better heard in other contexts. There’s also a bunch of other stuff on there, including some disco standards and what looks to be obvious filler. But to be honest, I couldn’t really get up the momentum to listen to a seven-minute song called “Calypso Breakdown.” So I wouldn’t necessarily advise listening to the whole album unless you really do love disco.
If there’s a conclusion here, it’s that I love the Bee Gees’ disco years, but I don’t only love their disco years. I’d originally envisioned this post as a guide to some highlights of the Bee Gee’s catalog, beyond the well-known disco hits, but it’s already gotten too long. So instead, I’ll plan to do a handful of Bee Gees posts over the next month or so, delving into some of my favorite songs and albums. Keep your mind open and prepare to have your mental model of the Bee Gees shattered.