It’s strange.
You could look at my earlier lists of my 140 or so favorite songs, or the one of the albums that meant the most to me and find little or no mention of this group.
But for a couple of years in the late ’60s, they might just have been my favorite band.
The irony of it is that much of the Bee Gees’ popularity comes from their contribution to the disco soundtrack of “Saturday Night Fever,” and I have at least one friend who calls “Stayin’ Alive” the defining song of the 1970s.
Actually, though, the band had three songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts before the movie even came along — “How Can You Men a Broken Heart” in 1970, “Jive Talkin'” in 1975 and “You Should Be Dancing” in 1976. In fact, by the end of the decade, the Bee Gees had an amazing nine No. 1 records.
And by the end of that decade, they were pretty much finished as hitmakers. They only had one more song, “One” in 1989, that even made the top 20 in the United States.
Two of the three brothers in the band died young. Maurice Gibb died at age 53 of a heart attack and Robin at 62 of liver cancer.
But music is a lot like movies and books. The work lives on past the artists who created it. Most of my favorite Bee Gees songs were from long before the peak of their popularity. Songs like “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” “To Love Somebody” and “I Started a Joke” will always be deep in my heart. The only later one that comes close is “How Deep is Your Love” for its poignance around the time my first marriage was starting to die.
The video accompanying this post was from a Las Vegas concert in 1997. I’ve seen so many different concerts in person, but the Bee Gees would be on the short list of groups I missed that I would love to have seen.
I complain about a lot of things in our modern era, but imagine living in a time before recorded music. If you didn’t actually hear someone in person, you would never know what they really sounded like, and even if you did, you could only remember.
So whether it’s vinyl, compact disc or stored on my iPhone, I can and will listen to the Bee Gees for the rest of my days.