There were two Bee Gees, of course. First, there was the popular late-60s beat combo, who made a few waves in Australia before returning to England, where the three Gibb brothers-- Barry, Maurice, and Robin-- had lived before moving down under as kids. They enjoyed hit singles like "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and "To Love Somebody" and at least one great album, Odessa. Many of those early songs endured, but the Bee Gees were no longer household names by the time they teamed up with Atlantic Records house producer Arif Mardin to record an album called Main Course, the group's 11th, in 1975. That changed quickly.
They cut Main Course in Miami, everyone involved was listening to Philly soul, and Mardin encouraged Barry Gibb to try singing some tunes in falsetto. You know what happened next: Singles "Jive Talkin'" and "Nights on Broadway" hit #1 and #7 in the U.S., respectively. Ten months later, journalist Nik Cohn would write a New York magazine cover piece called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" (a story later revealed to be completely fabricated) about a young, working-class Italian-American kid finding some kind of existential meaning in the new dance clubs that were popping up everywhere. The article led to a movie-- the soundtrack of which Bee Gees dominated-- and disco was on its way to taking over popular culture in the U.S. at the tail end of the 1970s.
To a lot of people at the time, the Bee Gees were disco. They were the sun around which the rest of the not-so-brief fad revolved, the form's most important auteurs, the gold standard. This may come as news to younger music obsessives for whom disco was the underground movement that birthed Italo and house and techno and brought us Larry Levan and Arthur Russell. In this century, disco has undergone an interesting critical rehabilitation, with early figures like, say, the Loft's David Mancuso and the Gallery's Nicky Siano being celebrated for their contributions to underground dance music while the pop stuff has, for the most part, been pushed aside.
This shift in emphasis was necessary. Disco needed to be understood in terms of its roots among marginalized subcultures (gay, black, Latino) and reclaimed by the people who made it happen in the first place, away from the glare of the media. Not to mention, the narrative of those years, as told in books like Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and Turn the Beat Around, is fascinating. Still, you can't help but feel that something important is being overlooked: Just how phenomenal some of this stuff was as pop, especially the Greatest of the Bee Gees.
Here, on an expanded version of a 2xCD compilation that first appeared in 1979 and covered just five years, are 20 or so arguments. Some of them-- "Jive Talkin'", "Stayin' Alive", "You Should Be Dancing", "Night Fever", "More Than a Woman", "Nights on Broadway", "Love You Inside Out", "How Deep Is Your Love"-- are unassailable. The Gibb brothers were on a dazzling songwriting roll during these years, penning Top 10s for themselves and others almost at will, and they also had a firm grasp on the possibilities of disco as a sonic phenomenon. They understood that it was a culture of records and not bands, so they strove to make the records perfect, polishing the mechanized beat to a blinding sheen. The liner notes to this reissue give this credit: "Recorded on MCI's JH-556 Console and JH-16 24 Tape Recorders." Sound mattered then, as it does now-- the mastering on this reissue is excellent.
Beyond the overly familiar hits are a number of other good-to-great songs. "Too Much Heaven" from 1978 is a ballad with a winding structure Burt Bacharach would admire, though its extra saccharine cast puts it far below "More Than a Woman" and "How Deep Is Your Love" as far as Bee Gees slow-dance numbers. "You Stepped Into My Life" has a tougher, more funk-influenced beat that serves as an interesting contrast to Barry's falsetto, showing a possible road not taken had the ultra-smooth sound not panned out. "Wind of Change", from Main Course, with Ray Baretto on congas and Barry belting out the melody in his natural range, transposes the meatier Philly soul aesthetic without the refinement of later hits. "Rest Your Love On Me" is a welcome change-up-- a straight country ballad complete with pedal steel, hearkening back to the early Bee Gees' interest in rootsy forms, but doing do now with bright, twinkly production. There are four or five duds among the originals here, but that's still a good ratio for a half-decade.
The extras are disappointing. The seven-minute 12" remix of "Stayin' Alive" rules, with subtle edits, a bit more percussion, and a nice inversion of the horns stretching it out to a length that doesn't overstay its welcome. But the newly commissioned remixes are not just mostly dull but also weirdly dated, sounding very late 1990s. The Jason Bentley/Philip Steir remix of "You Should Be Dancing" turns it into a generic club fodder, the "Count Da Money" remix of "If I Can't Have You" by Julien and Raphael Aletti and the Supreme Beings of Leisure remix of "How Deep Is Your Love" are sterile neo-trip-hop seemingly designed for a Gap store soundsystem. The outside package doesn't mention the Teddybears remix of "Stayin' Alive" that closes the set, suggesting that was added later by someone who thought Greatest needed at least one remix that didn't adhere to a ten-year-old formula. While it's nothing amazing, its gritty, rockified neo-Justice squelch is worth a few plays at least.
Weak remixes and a few duff songs aside, Greatest is the definitive statement of the Bee Gees peerless pop-disco prowess during the second phase of their career. The albums, especially Main Course, are worth tracking down; but Greatest is a convincing demonstration of why the Bee Gees mattered.
