Classic Tracks: The Bee Gees ‘Stayin’ Alive’
Producers: The Bee Gees, Albhy Galuten, Karl Richardson • Engineer: Karl Richardson
By Richard Buskin
Disco was an American phenomenon, but its greatest hits were recorded in France by an English band who were trying to play R&B…
Years after the ’70s disco fad and subsequent backlash had subsided, Maurice Gibb told an interviewer that he’d like to dress up the Saturday Night Fever album in a white suit and gold medallion and set the whole thing on fire, such was the stigma that had been attached to him and his brothers Barry and Robin by press and public alike. One minute, they were the purveyors of ‘blue-eyed soul’, melding their pop roots, trademark harmonies and Barry’s newly discovered falsetto with their love of early ’70s Philadelphia funk, crafting heavily rhythmic dance music that was finding its way onto black American radio stations. The next, thanks to a soundtrack album that sold a then-record 25 million copies worldwide and topped the US charts for 24 weeks — where it spawned four number one singles, three of them their own — they were the Kings of Disco and all that encompassed, reaping the rewards and then the brickbats.
Still, as Barry later asserted, it did put food on the table, while the Saturday Night Fever album was a significant moment in the annals of pop culture; a moment when a trio of white Englishmen almost single-handely ignited a widespread mania for the disco music that had previously been the domain of the black and gay sub-cultures in America, and had been superseded by punk in Europe. In addition to the Bee Gees’ recordings of ‘Stayin’ Alive’, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, ‘Night Fever’, ‘More Than A Woman’, ‘Jive Talkin’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing’, the two-LP set contained their compositions being covered by the Tavares (‘More Than A Woman’) and Yvonne Elliman (‘If I Can’t Have You’), alongside lesser material by the likes of Walter Murphy, David Shire, Ralph MacDonald, MFSB, the Trammps, Kool & the Gang, and KC & the Sunshine Band. Yet it is ‘Stayin’ Alive’, which played over the movie’s opening credits while John Travolta’s Tony Manero strutted down the New York streets in his polyester suit, that best evokes the era and its promotion of sex, drugs and breathless boogying as some form of decadent compensation for a humdrum daily existence.