The Bee Gees by David N. Meyer

Author:David N. Meyer [Meyer, David N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bee Gees Biography
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2013-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

spirits having flown

The Bee Gees came away from Sgt. Pepper’s with plenty of plausible deniability. It wasn’t their project; it was Stigwood’s. It wasn’t their record; it was Martin’s. No one told them how crude the film would be; no one explained anything about acting; they had no input into the story; they had to share screen and music space with Frampton. Happily for them, no one cared. Sgt. Pepper’s collected its share of condemnation and sank, never to be seen again, beneath the juggernaut sales of SNF. Ben Fong-Torres wrote in Rolling Stone that RSO expected to “do about $250 million in the US alone in 1978.”{416}

Despite his poor-mouthing over Pepper’s failure, Stigwood took home 45 percent{417} of the gross of Saturday Night Fever, the movie, which did $285 million worldwide. He was in fine shape and, as ever, wanted more. So did the Bee Gees. With a discipline that few bands could have matched, they headed back to their beloved home base, Criteria Studios in Miami. By March of 1978, they were in their usual groove, working from 3:00 p.m. to midnight on a new record. “In this position,” Barry said, referring to the pressure caused by the success of SNF, “we are constantly up against the wall with people saying, ‘Please us!’ It’s an invisible thing, but you can feel that wall behind you, and you can hear the whole industry saying, ‘Give us a surprise, we expect you to outdo yourselves.’”{418}

The pressure was unrelenting in part because they were growing ever more famous, and attention from their fans rose accordingly. Tour boats drove by Barry’s waterfront home in Miami Beach several times a day. “It’s like living in a bloody goldfish bowl,” Barry said. “We’ve asked them if they could please keep the boat at least 200 yards out, but they don’t. The boats come past every hour on a nice day, and the people all have cameras and binoculars. They have a Universal Tours-type bus that comes down our road every hour with loudspeakers. The Miami Herald did us a real nice favor last year: they printed our address, with a picture of the front gates. You can’t stop the press from doing these things. They can say, ‘Oh, who do they think they are? They’ve got everything they want. So let’s play a little game.’ But they oughta try playing that game for a while. Imagine all these people coming past. I’m fortunate to live well, but on the other hand, if you’ve got a family, there’s got to be a little bit of privacy.”{419}

“[Fans] are out here all the time,” said Peter Wagner, one of the Bee Gees’ drivers. “They sit there waiting for them to come out.” “These kids are consumers,” Barry said. “You’ve got to give them equal time. You can’t go through life saying ‘No autographs’—y’know, the Paul Newman syndrome. It’s what you wanted, what you worked for. The other day there were four or five kids standing outside the studio and they had each bought a copy of our new album.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.