Jan 302023
 
tragedy i'm so excited

As a preteen in the late ‘80s, I had a very detailed Saturday T.V. watching routine. At 11:30 p.m., I would tune into Saturday Night Live. Then just around midnight I would switch over to MTV for three hours of the metal show Headbangers Ball. (I was admittedly a bit of a night owl back then.)

Beyond all of the hair and the epic videos, I remember finding the commercials a bit baffling, especially the frequent ads for disco compilations. I felt like this was just bad ad placement. Time has taught me otherwise. There is room in one’s heart for both metal and disco. In fact, just a few short years later, in 1992, I bought a copy of the Bee Gees’ Greatest, a compilation from the band’s disco era.

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Jul 292020
 

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

bee gees covers

Despite the fact that Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb have sold upwards of 120 million records, they can sometimes seem oddly underrated. They aren’t regarded with the reverence afforded to other artists that emerged during roughly the same era, like The Rolling Stones or The Who. They haven’t generated the same level of dramatic intrigue as Elton John or Queen. And discovering their music was never part of some traditional teenage rite of passage like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. But while they don’t seem to receive near the same level of acclaim as the aforementioned artists, their music has remained as utterly ubiquitous as just about all of them. There are few other artists as essential to documenting the sound of an era as The Bee Gees were to the late ’70s.

Throw the Here At Last…Bee Gees… Live album from 1977 on the turntable or queue up the stream. You will be confronted with a veritable assembly line of perfectly constructed, exquisitely performed pop songs. Take a step back and really listen. The outlandish songwriting gift on display is nothing short of mind-blowing, You might think, how is it even possible to have written this many incredible songs? And those are just 20 or so selected tracks Barry, Robin, and Maurice had done up to that point – before Saturday Night Fever! There were dozens more to come.

We were overwhelmed by the number of incredible covers of both Bee Gees classics and deep cuts and their glorious diversity. But we really shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite the band itself not always getting its due, the Bee Gees’ songs remain for everyone and forever.

Hope Silverman

The list begins on Page 2.