A Radio History of the Bee Gees

In early 1974, I came across a review of “Mr. Natural” by the Bee Gees in the trade publication Broadcasting. “Mr. Natural” was the first collaboration between the Bee Gees and producer Arif Mardin. It was clearly a Bee Gees record, but just R&B-flavored enough to represent a Stylistics departure.

I never heard “Mr. Natural” much on the radio, and as I started to understand more about music and radio programming, not hearing it was how I realized that the Bee Gees’ hit streak had gone cold. Like the Four Seasons, who were headed for their own major comeback, the Bee Gees’ previous hits still got played plenty, and it never occurred to me they had gone anywhere until that moment. But soon they were back anyway.

When “Jive Talkin’” landed in spring/summer 1975, the best of the current Top 40 hits were coming from disco and R&B (“Why Can’t We Be Friends,” “Fight the Power,” “Rockin’ Chair,” “Get Down Tonight.”). Elsewhere, there was much that I found bloodless (“Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” “How Sweet It Is [To Be Loved By You],” “Listen to What the Man Said”) or sappy (“Please Mr. Please,” “Midnight Blue”) or songs that I’d need to be older to appreciate (“I’m Not in Love,” “At Seventeen”). Pop and rock acts venturing into R&B were a category unto themselves. “Fame” by David Bowie was on its way. The song the Bee Gees pushed out of No. 1 was “One of These Nights,” the Eagles’ own tribute to Philly soul.

I was a little surprised initially by the magnitude of the excitement, from radio and non-industry friends alike, for The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, the new HBO documentary. But the Bee Gees’ 1978 Saturday Night Fever hot streak was a great moment in pop history, followed by one of the sharpest career U-turns ever. Of course, it was part of listeners’ lives. When the Bee Gees returned to radio station gold libraries in the mid-‘90s, it was proof that the kids of any era would bring (most) of their favorite acts back in a way that continues with the recent return of the Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls.

Just as Ross On Radio editor Ken Barnes recently took a deeper look at how many careers were really ended by the British Invasion, the group’s career issues are surprisingly more complicated than saying that the Bee Gees were a victim of the “disco backlash” of 1979-81, even if the group seems like exhibit A. The Bee Gees remained more than present as writers/producers/duet partners in the early ‘80s, even as they struggled with their own singles at radio. With the passage of time, it’s clear that some of the group’s own choices, even during the hit streak, figured into their career arc, too. 

Here’s how I remember the rise/fall of the Bee Gees at radio:

1976 – “You Should Be Dancing” was everything an act hopes for during a hot streak — a first single from a new album that continued in the direction of “Jive Talkin’,” but was different enough, and even better. It confirmed the hot streak. It didn’t propel them into radio superstardom yet, partially because of what happened with the follow-ups after “Love So Right.”

1977 – “Boogie Child,” the third single from Children of the World, got out-of-the-box airplay, but fizzled quickly. “Edge of the Universe,” the single from Here at Last … Bee Gees Live, was an album cut from Main Course, but it felt like pre-comeback Bee Gees — a song that most acts wouldn’t even have attempted as a single. It was also mid-chart, and we now know from the HBO special that the act itself was worried about losing altitude. And yet, “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” by Andy Gibb was very present on the radio and essentially a Bee Gees record itself.

Fall ’77-Summer ’78 – The group’s explosive moment coincided with the height of my teenage interest in the Billboard charts. It wasn’t Beatlemania, but an incredible simulation — the closest thing my generation had experienced thus far. There were multiple phenomena happening — the Gibbs’ own recording career and spinoffs, the explosion of disco, the brief Saturday Night Fever/Grease/Andy Gibb dominance of RSO Records. Fever also came along, not coincidentally, just as the singles from Hotel California and Rumours were running their course, freeing Top 40 radio to focus on something new.

“How Deep Is Your Love” wasn’t quite the soft launch that “The Girl Is Mine” was for Thriller a few years later, but the moment when “Stayin’ Alive” and the movie hit, followed by “Night Fever,” was definitely comparable to the excitement when “Billie Jean” dropped, followed in equally short order by “Beat It.” In the HBO documentary, one radio person remembers the group’s ubiquity during this point with bemusement, but at the time, it was going from strength to strength, at least up through Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing.” Why begrudge anybody for making a lot of good records in short order?

Summer ’78-Summer ’79 – When you look back at career arcs, there is always a now-visible moment when things start to wind down, and it usually involves so-so songs that became hits because of an act’s momentum. The spectacular failure of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band, the movie, isn’t even mentioned in the HBO documentary, but suddenly the Bee Gees spinoffs on the radio were Robin Gibb remaking “Oh Darling” and two not-so-interesting Andy Gibb follow-ups to “Shadow Dancing.” We’re gradually waking up from the Fever dream. We were just not fully conscious of having done so yet.

The first thing I heard from the Spirits Having Flown album was the B-side of the first single. WCAO Baltimore briefly promoted the group’s Country excursion, “Rest Your Love on Me,” as “the new Bee Gees record” and I thought, “Well, at least it’s different.” When “Too Much Heaven,” “Tragedy,” and “Love You Inside Out” arrived, it was the first time that the group seemed to be repeating itself. Those songs were still hits, but it was Chic and Donna Summer who were making the best, most genre-bending disco records at disco’s peak moment. 

Fall ’79 — There were no Bee Gees singles in the months immediately after Steve Dahl’s “Disco Demolition.” The disco backlash wouldn’t play out symmetrically. It would punish Chic and mainstream R&B acts more than disco dilettantes, such as Rod Stewart, Wings, and Barbra Streisand. Other things were happening that changed the landscape, including the (relative) superstar disappointments of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and Eagles’ The Long Run, and the arrival of “Rapper’s Delight.” But the Bee Gees’ radio momentum probably would have been okay at this point. Streisand & Summer’s “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” was the sort of pop-disco trifle that has become a target for fans and detractors alike. It still got enough event airplay to rush to No. 1 before immediately disappearing from the radio. 

1980 – In the documentary’s telling, the Bee Gees were stung by the disco backlash and decided to concentrate on writing and producing. They probably would have still had radio hits in 1980. Donna Summer could get played with “The Wanderer,” although it proved not to be a real hit. Chic, on the other hand, was already off the radio and about to be represented by writing/production only.

As for those Bee Gees’ side projects, the year is bookended by another mediocre Andy Gibb record, “Desire,” that fizzled quickly — and a surprisingly good one. The more rocking “Time Is Time” delivered  more initial excitement but isn’t a lasting hit either. Neither was Jimmy Ruffin’s “Hold On to My Love,” but it was still an endorsement of a worthy artist who wasn’t a likely comeback candidate under normal circumstances. Then there was Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love” and the Guilty album. “No More Tears” and Streisand’s own “The Main Event-Fight” were bandwagon-jumping records that didn’t help disco much in the last half of 1979. So there was irony in the Bee Gees giving Streisand her best songs in recent memory and steering mostly away from disco.

1981 – Others among disco’s bandwagon jumpers were plugging right along in 1980-81, particularly Rod Stewart, who lost his rock cred, but not his career. R&B acts were suffering on the charts, unless they were AC-leaning. Top 40 was at its yacht-rock softest. The Bee Gees got fast consideration at radio when they return with the bold, rock-leaning “He’s a Liar,” which radio embraced briefly, before quickly backing away. A more typical midtempo single, “Living Eyes” came and went just as rapidly. Finally, more than two years after the “disco backlash” began, the Bee Gees had a definite image issue at radio.

Pop radio in 1981 was at its softest, most AC-flavored. Another Australian act, Air Supply, was in the middle of a hit streak. It was a hard time for a snarling rock-flavored record (that rock radio would never play). “He’s A Liar” was different and interesting, but it wasn’t an easy crowd pleaser. It also had a shrill, angry chorus at a time when radio was starting to research songs by playing hooks over the phone to listeners. It still would have been a better three minutes on the radio than “Here I Am (Just When I Thought I Was Over You)” by Air Supply.

The Bee Gees were in a trick bag. Their most recent sound had run its course. This was the time in their arc that they usually reinvented themselves, but the following the music wasn’t working this time. In retrospect, what radio wanted from the Bee Gees were ballads along the lines of “Guilty” (or Air Supply and Christopher Cross). And they had no problem delivering those for other people.

1982 – Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” didn’t sound all that different from “Living Eyes.” It would have probably been dismissed as more of the same by the Bee Gees, but it was fresh and different for her after a string of more Manilow-esque ballads. Ironically, Warwick’s own recent Twitter comeback led to her being parodied/saluted on Saturday Night Live on the same night that the HBO documentary premiered.

1983-84 – In a similar way, “Islands in the Stream” was an effective change-up for Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton. So were both the pop side (“This Woman”) and the Country side (“Buried Treasure”) of Rogers’ follow-up single. As for the Bee Gees’ own single, “The Woman in You,” Top 40 again gave it initial attention in a way that suggested the act was not entirely unwelcome at the format. But Top 40 had plenty of other excitement during its comeback spring of 1983. “Woman” took the Bee Gees back to dance— it was from the Fever-sequel Staying Alive. But it was Flashdance that was the big dance movie and soundtrack of the spring and summer.

Then the Bee Gees themselves were out of action until 1987, except for quick airplay for Barry and Robin solo singles in 1984. Their biggest song for another artist, Diana Ross’s “Chain Reaction,” wasn’t the hit here that it was everywhere else in in 1985. That might have been backlash, but Ross had just been upstaged herself by Whitney Houston’s breakthrough. In 1987, “You Win Again” was a hit everywhere else but America. Perhaps that one was artist backlash. Two years later, American radio tried to give them a make-good with “One,” but it wasn’t a hit of the same magnitude. By then, PDs probably felt a little guilty about giving the Bee Gees’ comeback to a Bee Gees homage, “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals.

1995 – The international pop/rap/dance remake of “Stayin’ Alive” by N-Trance reminded everybody how good the original was. It wasn’t an American hit, but in early 1996, the second version of WKTU New York arrived, playing a lot of ‘70s disco, and “Stayin’ Alive” was one of its signature records. That cleared the way for a handful of Bee Gees titles to become staples at AC radio for about a decade (until AC stopped playing the ‘70s) and then at Classic Hits. “Stayin’ Alive,” and to a lesser extent “Night Fever” and “More Than a Woman” are still heard today on Classic Hits radio and some of the new Soft AC outlets, and I would expect the documentary to solidify their place at the format for a while.

There would have likely been Bee Gees burn-out under any circumstances. This artist cycle just happened to play out against the larger disco backlash (which was clearly about more than just music). In 1980, a British single by the “HeeBeeGeeBees” parodied their music as “‘Meaningless Songs’/in very high voices,” and even to a fan, it was a little funny. Then again, what exactly do you want from somebody after three years in which one project was better than the one before, and a half-dozen other careers were boosted? 

It’s hard for an act to stay fresh because Top 40 has been reliably good at destroying any act it overindulges. The eventual return of the Bee Gees (and Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys) proved that it was radio, sometimes more than the audience, that sours on acts after a certain point. Pop radio doesn’t have enough of its own stars right now, or, for that matter, the power to veto them. But if CHR is lucky enough to have another hot cycle going forward, maybe it should nurture its stars a little differently in the future.