"30
Years of 'Fever'"
(MSN, September
2007)
The Bee Gees' Robin Gibb revisits 'Saturday Night Fever' and its disco legacy.
For baby boomers, this year marked the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. For hipsters worldwide, 2007 means it's been three decades since the explosion of punk. But in terms of sheer, mass-market impact, there's an even bigger landmark date approaching: This fall, 30 years will have passed since the release of "Saturday Night Fever."
The film carried John Travolta from Sweathog to movie star, and the fashions depicted took years to recover from. It is the music, however, for which "Saturday Night Fever" will always be remembered, and it is the Bee Gees who stood at the heart of that soundtrack.
The statistics are staggering. With 15 million copies sold in the United States, "Fever" was the biggest-selling album in history until Michael Jackson's epochal 1984 "Thriller" (subsequently overtaken by the steady sales juggernaut of "Eagles Greatest Hits"). "Fever" remained the top-selling soundtrack until "The Bodyguard" snatched that crown in 1992, 15 years after "Fever" broke.
With the film's songs, the Bee Gees were the first group to have three singles in the Top 10 simultaneously ("How Deep Is Your Love," "Stayin' Alive" and "Night Fever") since the Beatles, and were also the first to hold down the chart's two top spots since the Fab Four. They racked up six No. 1 hits in 18 months, and for three weeks in 1978, five records in the Top 10 were written and/or produced by the group.
The release of "Saturday Night Fever" wasn't the birth of disco -- "Disco Lady," "Boogie Fever" and even "Disco Duck" had already been No. 1 singles before the movie, which came out a full two years after "The Hustle" topped the charts. Nor was it the Bee Gees' introduction to a pop audience; in the '60s and early '70s, the three British-born, Australian-based Gibb brothers -- Barry, Robin and Maurice -- had a run of hits including "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," "I Started a Joke" and "Massachusetts," and their 1975 album, "Main Course," introduced the dance rhythms with which they would take over the world.
But "Fever" was that rarest of things -- a truly unprecedented phenomenon, a perfect storm of sound, story and style. On this 30th anniversary, a new reissue of the soundtrack comes out, along with an expanded re-release of the two-disc "Bee Gees Greatest" album, chronicling their '70s smashes. From his home in London, Robin Gibb reflected on "Saturday Night Fever" -- the music, the sensation and the reasons he continues to resist the word "disco."
MSN Music: When you were working on the music for "Saturday Night Fever," did you have any idea what it would turn into?
Robin Gibb: When we were recording "Fever," we were in the middle of France, in the countryside about 40 miles from Paris. We were mixing our live album, and in our time off, we wrote and recorded all the songs that you heard in "Fever": "How Deep Is Your Love," "Stayin' Alive," "Night Fever." They had all been written and recorded when the phone rang and it was [manager] Robert Stigwood saying he was working on this movie, "The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," and could we write some songs for it. We said we haven't got time to make a record, but come listen to these songs we've done. We never saw the film, didn't know what it was about -- we had no idea. Though we did know that John Travolta was rehearsing [his dance routines] for the movie listening to "You Should Be Dancing."
Do you remember a particular moment when you realized what kind of phenomenon it had become?
It was really a low-budget film that Paramount was putting out. John Travolta was new -- he had done "Welcome Back, Kotter," but this was one of the first films he did, so there was really no expectation.
When it came out, I remember being with Robert Stigwood in L.A., and he got this call from the head of Paramount saying that there were lines around the block in New York, in Chicago, in different cities around the country, to see this movie that hadn't had any real promotion or advertising or anything. It was purely through word of mouth, and it was taking off on its own. And I knew then that this was something that captured the imagination of the public.
Was there any way to anticipate how iconic "Fever" would become? Would you have believed that 30 years later, Justin Timberlake would be parodying you on "Saturday Night Live"?
When you're creating a phenomenon, the historical legacy can really only be viewed in the future. Everything has to be right at the right time, everything has to line up -- and that music was just right with that film, all the ducks were in a row. I just think how easily it could have been different music. But you can't know in advance that it's going to have some kind of profound impact.
"By the way, what did you think of Justin's imitation of you in that sketch?"
Well, imitation is the greatest form of flattery -- or of being flattened! No, I take it with good humor, certainly take it as a compliment.
This "Bee Gees Greatest" album doesn't include any of your earlier hits, such as "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" or "To Love Somebody." Do you think that "Fever" is actually the group's best work?
Well, it corresponds to this anniversary, to 30 years of "Fever," and that's what it's celebrating: the event and the phenomenon. Your own favorites aren't always the things people most want to hear. It is what it is, and people love this music. There will always be things that are my favorites -- and "To Love Somebody" definitely is one of them.
If you ask about the best music by the Eagles, most people will say "Hotel California," but if you ask one of the band [members], they'll probably say something different. Or Michael Jackson -- he might like the album before "Thriller" better. But there was a decision from all of us that this collection would concentrate on this decade and not the songs from the '60s.
The press material that went out with the album seems to go to great lengths to avoid using the world "disco." Was that intentional? What are your thoughts about the whole concept of disco?
When we wrote these songs, we never knew the word existed. To us, in Europe since the mid-'60s, "disco" was just short for discotheque, the places that you went to dance. Even the film doesn't talk about disco. But radio started using the word after "Fever," and the people that started to jump on the bandwagon all used it later. And then, it really was attributed to the culture, not the music.
We were writing blue-eyed soul, R&B- influenced grooves. You just happened to be able to dance to it.
The album includes new mixes of some of the hits. Do you keep up with new dance music, and do you hear a Bee Gees influence out there today?
I think the young black groups are very influenced by our harmonies and by the grooves we did on "Fever." Babyface just said that recently. Not a lot of the white groups do the harmonies, but you hear it on black radio.
The kind of grooves that people dance to really doesn't change a lot. I've been to clubs all over the world, and I still hear songs from "Fever." And when they come on, everybody gets up and dances.
