Barry Gibb, the eldest of the brothers who would become the Bee Gees, was born in 1946, followed three years later by twins Robin and Maurice. This was on the Isle of Man, but toddlers are toddlers everywhere, and when his siblings arrived, big brother did what so many others have before and since: “He asked his mum to take the babies back,” Bob Stanley writes in his definitive group biography, “The Story of the Bee Gees: Children of the World.”
It’s a good thing newborns come with a no-return policy. Together, the brothers became one of the most successful musical groups of all time as well as one of the most accident-prone, self-sabotaging and misunderstood.
The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb has written more hit songs than almost anyone
From the Isle of Man, the boys’ parents — Hugh, a bandleader, and Barbara, a “canary,” as female singers for dance bands were known in the 1940s — shepherded them to Manchester before, in 1958, they set sail for Australia. By then, not only had Barry forgiven his two brothers for spoiling his life, but the three had also formed an airtight team. Their long and storied musical career was already on its way: Though kids were forbidden on the deck of the ocean liner after 9 p.m., Hugh would find the three youngsters in their pajamas, singing Everly Brothers tunes to a crowd of fellow passengers. (At the time, the youngest Gibb, Andy, a future hitmaker on his own but never a member of the group proper, was a newborn.)
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The trio got serious in the Land Down Under and even signed with a label that issued an album in 1965 with the snappy title of “The Bee Gee’s Sing and Play 14 Barry Gibb Songs.” (Yes, the band’s name is spelled “Bee Gee’s” on the album’s cover.) But the happening scene was in England — the Beatles had recorded “Rubber Soul” that same year — so in 1967, back the brothers went. Less than a week after their arrival in London, the boys were out one day when, according to their mother, a geezer named “Stickweed” called.
Stickweed turned out to be Robert Stigwood, a brash and uncompromising impresario with his fingers in various pies — music, theater, film — who had partnered with Beatles manager Brian Epstein in hopes of taking over Epstein’s most successful group one day, a dream stymied by the fact that the lads from Liverpool couldn’t stand him.
Stigwood suited the Gibb brothers just fine, however, and to call what happened next “a meteoric rise” would be insulting to meteors. The Bee Gees had pitched up in England at the beginning of the year and by October saw their single “Massachusetts” reach the No. 1 spot on the U.K. music charts.
Bob Stanley. (Alasdair McLellan)
In the bulk of the book, Stanley seems to look on with bemused joy as the Bee Gees often succeed despite themselves. During the next decade, they went “from third-rate variety club act to multinational operatives,” crisscrossing America in a private jet and racking up six consecutive No. 1 singles, something only the Beatles had done before. And all of this despite having close brushes with death. (Barry was scalded so badly as a child that doctors thought he might not live; Robin and his wife survived both a train wreck in which around 50 people died and an avalanche.) Their looks were lampooned, especially in their disco phase; they appeared toothy and insincere in photos, and the chest hair and medallions didn’t help. They had the usual drug problems, and they quarreled and broke up and reunited. Their lyrics were often obscure: At one point, Barry said: “Don’t look for meaning in the lyrics. There isn’t any.”
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At the height of their success, “they were all just kids,” Stanley writes; “none of them had really grown up.” They never lost “the feeling of being ridiculed, that sense of underlying disrespect” triggered by things such as Bee Gee-free weekends on American radio in 1979 and the appearance in the early 1980s of a satirical group called the Hee Bee Gee Bees, whose “Meaningless Songs (In Very High Voices)” mimicked their target’s trademark falsetto. Did the brothers even know what they were doing? Not always, Stanley says: “The Bee Gees’ inability to understand their own mystique, or even what made their music special, was sometimes breathtaking.”
How did they become so big? Partly thanks to luck: “Massachusetts” was released just as audiences began to favor the ballads of Petula Clark and Engelbert Humperdinck over the psychedelic offerings of Cream, the Who and the Kinks. And their songs were eminently adaptable; in the ’90s, a number of bands scored hits by covering songs such as “Stayin’ Alive” and “More Than a Woman.” As with success in any field, of course, determination meant more than just about anything else: “We’re durable, persistent little buggers,” Robin said.
Stanley is the author of “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music From Bill Haley to Beyoncé” and “Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music,” two soaring, symphonic books that leave readers all but levitating, certain in the knowledge that they now know everything about the music most people listen to. Why, then, would he take on a group that was, in his words, “both inside and outside of pop”? This book, like the others, is both a fanboy’s love letter and a detailed, what-did-they-take-with-their-tea account of the musicians’ daily lives, but why devote 400 pages to a single group that shouldn’t have succeeded but did, beyond their and everyone else’s expectations?
The answer is that, long before “The Story of the Bee Gees” ends, the brothers have stopped being a single pop band and become a mirror of all the musical acts covered by Stanley in his two earlier books: loved and hated, obscure and celebrated, so addled by drink or drugs they can’t perform and as disciplined as paratroopers, savaging and embracing one another in equal measure, mocked and praised by the press, shaped by both luck and a deathless work ethic. By the end, the brothers become a microcosm of everything that happened in the 20th-century pop world.
If a space alien popped through Stanley’s office ceiling to ask him who was the best of that world, I’m thinking he might say, “Alexa, play the Beatles.” Who wouldn’t? But if his visitor asked to hear something by a more representative group, I’d be surprised if he didn’t cue up the brothers Gibb.
