Early Bee Gees c/d

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Bee Gees First is like their Rubber Soul. Loads of different ideas going on, from the doom-laden "New York Mining Disaster" to the toytown-psych of "Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy Of Arts", via delights such as Please Read Me, Turn Of The Century & so many others. Their first LP proper, yet they instantly sound like no other band. Or -if you like- all other bands in one.

Horizontal took that sound & refined it, maybe making it a bit more rock along the way, but still so much melody, invention and uniqueness going on. "With The Sun In My Eyes"!! Uh! Unbelievable.

Idea contains my fave BG song ever, "Kilburn Towers". Fairly heavy on the epic ballads which kind of define their pre-disco sound, but none the worse for it.

Odessa: no other LP like it. Indescribable.

Robin's Reign: again, indescribable. Just insane.

Cucumber Castle: retains the aching melodic nous of the first 4 LPs, but without Robin around to contribute the nutty lyrical concepts, it definitely lacks the wonderful indeosyncracies of their catalogue up til this point.

The catalogue tails off after this point, but in all honesty they've never made a bad LP. I love the Bee Gees.

(NB I had the same problem when I started listening to the Beach Boys, having not paid much attention before, so I'm sure this won't be a permanent condition.)

Harvey is my hero.

Their voices are something of an acquired taste, far more so than the Beach Boys. I blame Robin's instantly recognisable plaintive bleating. If you don't like it, it will take some getting round. Or you could just listen to the instrumentals.
But -oh!- "Sitting, filing this berg to the shape of a ship. Sailing my way back to your lips." Robin, we love you. We really really do.

Is this the Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson-directed "Now Voyager"? Now there was an interesting meeting of minds.

If this is not what you're referring to...what *are* you referring to?

"Plaintive bleat": quite. I was going to say: he sounds like a goat, just like that Sea Urchins fellow, but then I didn't.

What?! I only have the first album which I like but the covers of some of the other ones look really cool.

Peter Christopherson (ex-Throbbing Gristle) directed a movie scripted by (and, I believe, starring) Barry Gibb in the early 90s called Now Voyager. I assume it's a remake of the Bette Davis film of the same name, but I have no idea since I've never ever seen it & it never ever gets mentioned in BG circles.

Edit!! Storm Thorgerson (of Hypgnosis) directed it, Pete & Barry co-wrote it. Thanks imdb.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272220/maindetails

Interesting that Baz chose Sleazy to collaborate with. I've often wondered what a Genesis P-Orridge/Robin Gibb collaboration might sound like. They have so much in common after all...

Still have big problems with "Odessa" and "2 Years On" and "Horizontal." Some good, some...I dunno. But I do admire the way the Bee Gees are tackling "history of the British Empire" or whatever it is, without having a clue about any of it (discernible on the records themselves, that is). So I find myself listening to those records too, in spite of myself. I guess the first Bee Gees record is still the best one pre "Mr. Natural." I love 'em, I hate 'em.

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I'm not sure who does the definitive version of Mrs. Gillespie's Refrigerator, but that's a completely essential early track by the Gibbs. Would have fit really well onto First.

their first three albums are wonderful, extraordinary--to be pique i'd say 'better than the beatles.' but they are very, very strange, too strange for me at times. 'kilburn towers' is good-weird, but i'm not sure what i think about such tunes as 'harry braff' (sp?).

shall we talk about the early early bee gees, that is their australian records made before they moved to london? i have a double lp of that stuff. some of it is very good. good singing.

it's extremely inventive music at times (often), but the trouble i have with it (sometimes) is that it doesn't... mean anything. i mean it steadfastly refuses (or fails) to mean much of anything. the lyrics are cod-profound when they're not totally disconnected. or they are little sketches that fail to convince. like 'new york mining disaster 1941.' that said, tell me that that song isn't one of the most beautiful you've ever heard.

early bee gees pox:

- monday's rain
- new york mining disaster 1941
- to love somebody
- world
- massachusetts
- the earnest of being george
- i've gotta get a message to you
- i started a joke
- kilburn towers
- melody fair

if i were to choose an 11th it would be:
- with the sun in my eyes

their first three albums are wonderful, extraordinary--to be pique i'd say 'better than the beatles.' but they are very, very strange, too strange for me at times. 'kilburn towers' is good-weird, but i'm not sure what i think about such tunes as 'harry braff' "

--yeah, "Harry Braff." That's one I actually like a lot, I think it's about a race-car driver. I wish they'd done more like that one.

Speaking of creative misspellings, I was amused to read the recent biography of Big Star--the dude, from England, spells "Sherbert" "Sherbet" all the way thru, as in "Like Flies on." Being from the south, I didn't even know the word didn't have two Rs until I was, like, fourteen years old...

Many years ago I was a simple man,
a simple man, no worries me.
I never lied.
Please read me.

Not much conversation ever came from me.
I never saw reality.
I never tried.
Please read me.

Maybe I've been lying on your couch too long.
I'll stay if you can see me through, explain why.
Please read me. Please read me. Please read me.

(by the way, in case it's not clear, i love this stuff. which is more than i can say for cucumber castle, the only other early bee gees record i've heard, which is a bit hard to take seriously.)

i like the 'martian' characterization, because this really is pop formalism at its most intransigent. that explains why the bee gees were able to make the transition to disco so successfully; it was just another style to them. and i think it makes their latterday soft-rock albums more listenable than most such things by their contemporaries. basically they were interested in weird harmonies and clever melodies, however those things might be packaged.

as for the early london records, they really did take just about every sonic idea evident in 'revolver' and take it to its logical extreme. like some strange riff that would appear and disappear in a beatles song in about half a second would be made the 'hook' of an entire bee gees song. in moments of inspired listening i can trace lots of melodic motifs in those first three lps to little bits of beatles songs. anyway this is not to disparage the bee gees at all; like i wrote above in some ways i favor them over the beatles (mostly because i haven't heard all of their songs 1100 times, though). nor is it to suggest that there would be no bee gees without the beatles, because the stuff they recorded in australia before they heard 'revolver' can be interesting.

but as it turned out .... well i think it's sort of freakish, isn't it? name another band who are so obviously derivative in such a consistently inventive fashion!

(ok to be fair i hear a fair bit of beach boys in there too. for example, the harmonies on 'please read me' are an almost perfect cross of the beach boys' and beatles' vocal harmony sounds.)

i think of the two bands as contemporaries but i guess the hollies had a bunch of their lps out well before 'bee gees first'... so the hollies are really contemporaries of the beatles and not the bee gees. the thing about rock bands of this era, things were changing from month to month. the actual month a particular album came out in a particular country can actually have some significance if you're trying to chart the evolution of the post-beat style.

I guess american parallels would be the Brill Building scene, Van Dyke Parks, Lee Hazelwood, and tons of other writers for hire in NY and Hollywood. But the trend of the artists themselves focusing on songwriting as formalist craft might have been a peculiarly British innovation. Perhaps american bands were more concerned with image, sound and connections to certain musical lineages (blues, jazz, the folk scene, etc). The British bands, not having those direct connections could have felt more freedom to play with pop structures as pure formal experiments.

Oh yeah! Those harmonies! The instrumental break when there's no solo, just the 3 guys going aaaaahhhhh oooohhhweeeoooohh is fantastic. But what's it about?
I've always heard it as a visit to a psychiatrist, the protagonist explaining his life to the doc ("Many years ago I was a simple man...") and asking for an analysis: "Please read me". He himself is in doubt as to whether his treatment is having any effect: "Maybe I've been lying on your couch too long", but is willing to continue the treatment if it will cure him: "I'll stay if you can see me though."
Yep, that's it.

Amateurist asks:
>>shall we talk about the early early bee gees, that is their australian records made before they moved to london? i have a double lp of that stuff. some of it is very good. good singing.

Indeed. You can hear their talent developing, for sure. from the earliest rinky-dink doo-wop of The Three Kisses Of Love (1963) to the proto-protest of "And The Children Laughing" (1966), as with the later lps, it was alomst like they would choose a genre to work in for each side & apply their unique template to each style. Honing their craft, I guess, in the same way as The Beatles did during their Hamburg apprenticeship.

Hollies? I think they were more showbiz, but yeah, around the time of For Certain Beacuse/Evolution/Butterfly they were up there with the best.

TinTin? yeah (though I prefer their first LP), but if were gonna start including production work, we *must* mention their record for Adam Faith "Cowman Milk Your Cow", one of the best records ever made.

Amateurist wrote:
>>name another band who are so obviously derivative in such a consistently inventive fashion!

You appear to have hit the nail on the head!!

Red chair fade away
bring back memories

Think of something nice
Fragrant lemon trees
I can feel the speaking sky
I don't want to know
It's filling up the air
Grandpa's fairy tale
Red chair round the fire
Rainbows all the time
We're all going higher
I can feel the speaking sky
I don't want to know
It's filling up the air
Red chair fade away
Red chair fade away
Red chair fade away
Red chair fade away
Red chair fade away
Bring back memories

Think of something nice
Fragrant lemon trees
I can feel the speaking sky
I don't want to know
It's filling up the air
Red chair fade away....
Red chair fade away....

Great Mellotron in that one...

There is no meaning to these lines

"New York Mining Disaster" and "World" remain great singles anyway. Really great.

I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing,
Oh, if I’d only seen that the joke was on me.

I looked at the skies, running my hands over my eyes,
And I fell out of bed, hurting my head from things that I’d said.

Til I finally died, which started the whole world living,
Oh, if I’d only seen that the joke was on me.

To Whom It May Concern is *really* uneven, but with about five songs to go near the end, it suddenly goes off the rails. Totally great: Bad Bad Dream is like 1/2 Revolution and 1/2 Daytripper. Sweet Song of Summer is like a cousin of something off of Farewell Aldebaran. There's a folksy stoner Ram-like singalong called Road To Alaska. Alive is like Big Star's India (sort of) several years too early. Can't believe I never checked this one out before. Granted, you have to wade through a shitload of (not bad) ballads to get to the strange stuff...

kind of proud of my analysis above. i should write one of them 33 1/3 books about the bee gees debut. someone want to offer me a contract?