Popular music in the ’70s had many dividing lines, but none was bigger than disco.
Bee Gees played an undeniable role in this shift, notably with their involvement with the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. Starring John Travolta as Tony Manero, the film was a critical and commercial success, grossing more than $20 million within the first few weeks of its release on Dec. 16, 1977.
Saturday Night Fever may not have invented disco, but it brought it to the forefront of pop culture in a way that was “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” as the Library of Congress noted in 2010 when the movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Bee Gees would became unshakably tied to the project, even though they never intended to be at the helm of the disco movement or even involved in the film.
In fact, their music had been more rooted in traditional pop, rock, country and R&B than dance-floor music. It hadn’t always been easy. Bee Gees had split up and reconvened by the time Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood approached them, reaching both the top and the bottom of the charts. They were currently back on top thanks to hit songs like “Jive Talkin'” and “You Should Be Dancing.”
There was something particularly compelling about Bee Gees to Stigwood, who had been managing the group since 1967. “I loved their composing,” Stigwood told Rolling Stone in 1977. “I also loved their harmony singing. It was unique, the sound they made. I suppose it was a sound only brothers could make.”
Watch Bee Gees’ Video for ‘Jive Talkin”
Stigwood offered little detail about the new project when he called. “We were recording our new album in the north of France,” Robin Gibb would later recall, “and we’d written about and recorded about four or five songs for the new album when Stigwood rang from L.A. and said, ‘We’re putting together this little film, low budget, called Tribal Rites of a Saturday Night. Would you have any songs on hand?’ And we said, ‘Look, we can’t, we haven’t any time to sit down and write for a film.’ We didn’t know what it was about.”
“Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” was the title of a 1976 New York magazine story about the disco scene written by British journalist Nik Cohn. The article turned out to be mostly fictional but served as source material for Saturday Night Fever. Meanwhile, the production of the film had already started.
“The Bee Gees weren’t even involved in the movie in the beginning,” Travolta told Vanity Fair in 2007. “I was dancing to Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs.” He was also grooving to Bee Gees’ aptly titled “You Should Be Dancing,” a 1976 No. 1 that Travolta insisted be kept in the movie even though it was not written for it. The Gibb brothers were unaware of any of that. They only knew that Stigwood was looking for songs and that he had faith in the group.
“No one has ever talked to us about our songwriting. That’s always amazed me,” Robin Gibb told Rolling Stone in 1977. “I don’t think people even realize that we write our own songs. It doesn’t bother, me, but you know that Playboy poll? It has a songwriting section, and this year we’re not even in it. … It’s just that they don’t know their business. They don’t make it their business to know how many records the Bee Gees have written. I call it just musical ignorance!”
Watch John Travolta Dance to Bee Gees in ‘Saturday Night Fever’
