Puberty for most people is a cut-and-dry affair. Your voice drops and bar the occasional embarrassing squeaky crack-up, your new dulcet timbre is established. From then on, like a club who have recently hired Steve Bruce as manager, the only way is lower. However, for the Bee Gees, their disco trousers seemed to well and truly ram their scrotums firmly back into their groins and their vocals regressed to the screech of excitable school children. That is not to besmirch their mirrorball period, I’m no humbug, but it does dominate their legacy and relegates much of their early masterpieces to the realm of the unexplored ‘early stuff’ relics.
And that, dear friends, is a sorry loss to your record collection. The contrast in their work is remarkable. The Bee Gees remain one of the few bands that you can identify from a few bars by the age of eight. However, if you play someone ‘I Started a Joke’ who hasn’t heard it before, then they’ll likely say, ‘This is great, who is it?’ Or perhaps they’ll hazard a guess at the Flying Burrito Brothers, but the heartfelt paeon seems incongruous with the bulk of the Bee Gees back catalogue that we have come to know and occasionally love at weddings and such like.
So, we are setting about righting this wrong by offering up the Bee Gees gems that forgo the glam of the dancefloor. These classics are post-pubescent pre-regression ditties that display the depth of their songwriting. Talk show host Clive Anderson made the mistake of saying he preferred this period which caused them to strut off stage in a fit of hair-billowing rage, so I wouldn’t want to fall foul of that. It’s just that if disco perhaps isn’t for you then you should write off the wailing brothers entirely.
The five best lesser-known early Bee Gees songs:
‘To Love Somebody’
Nina Simone chose to not only tackle this track on her covers album in 1969 but she also chose to use it as the titular effort. With Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and The Byrds also featuring, Simone didn’t pick anything short of soaring masterpieces to match her considerable performative talents. Thus, it says a lot that the opus of ‘To Love Somebody’ is the gilded gem that she gleams up the most.
Since its release in 1967, the track is perhaps the most symbolic representation of the Bee Gees disco BC years. Championed by none other than Nick Cave as one of the greatest love songs of all time, the track is a dictionary definition of musical duende. And for those unaware of that Spanish word, Frederico Garcia Lorca described it as exalted emotion unearthed from within, “a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained. The roots that cling to the mire from which comes the very substance of art.” That might sound grandiose, but as the song asserts, what is there to be grandiose about if not love?
‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’
It should be noted that the Bee Gees have written some huge hits for their fellow stars. That is a sign of how they can tap into the oeuvre of their peers and happily piece together their own version of it. The boys might have wrapped up recording on their album Bee Gees’ 1st in late April, only a few weeks on from the release of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but they have captured the sound of that incoming zeitgeist perfectly with ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’.
Beginning in minor tones, the track quickly builds towards a strange swirl of instrumentation. As Maurice Gibb explains: “There’s a lot of weird sounds on this song like the Jew’s harp, the string quartet, and of course the special way that Barry plays that guitar chord.” The result is something that captivates you with melon-twisting musical contours.
‘I Started a Joke’
Sometimes instrumentation sounds so easy to get right. The rumbling bass that gets the ball rolling on this 1968 hit is like the sumptuous feeling of flopping onto the bed after a hard day. Then comes the sweet bird song of a softly strummed guitar and a string of notes that seem to hang on spider silk. It’s the consummate ‘ditty’ from the get-go soon followed by the melancholic prowess of the lyricism.
Suddenly, the seamless musicology is bolstered by a sense of life-encapsulating depth. A sense of pillow-propped detachment is woven into proceedings inviting the image of a rain-streaked window into the playground of the imagination. Then by the time the orchestra get swinging and the singing hits the awe-inspiring sweet spot, you’re fully swept up by the beauty of the billowing beast.
‘Sound of Love’
These boys can sing. Barry Gibb sends out notes that threaten to blast Sputnik out of orbit as things get moodier than a Scott Walker score on a stormy, coffee-less, Monday morning. Nobody said that the Bee Gees were subtle, but subtlety is wildly overrated when you can rattle the rafters with a production that makes Shakespeare seem tepid.
With Bill Shepherd’s brooding orchestral arrangement bulking this song up like 1970s Arnold Schwarzenegger, there is an unbridled sense of performance to the piece that you just don’t often come across—namely because it takes a hell of a lot of talent to pull it off. Regardless of whether you find the whole thing over the top, there will undoubtedly be a spine-tingling moment where you have to appreciate the sheer bravura and quivering balls that are hitting notes previously untold in pompous pop music.
‘Massachusetts (Live 1971)’My measure of whether someone is too cool for school in the negative sense is whether or not they like the masterpiece ‘Wichita Lineman’ — ‘Massachusetts’ is a similar measuring stick of taste. Surely it is almost impossible to sincerely dismiss a track as rousing and perfectly formed as this? It’s even more apparent in this Live in Melbourne version from 1971 whereby the screaming crowd really call on them to give it some. And boy do they oblige.
This old-timey classic tessellates chords together like a jigsaw fresh out of the box and Maurice’s bass is tonally sublime. As Alex Turner once said, there is something special about siblings harmonising and that mystic aura shines right through this whole composition. As Berry said of its seamless inception: “Everybody wrote it. All three of us were there when the song was born.” That air of artistry colliding shines through like an assegai of speared ether.
