The Golden Age of Music

[samhexum]

I was fortunate to be a teenager during music's golden age... the disco era.

 

Donna Summer was, of course, the Queen (I saw her in concert twice... including during the week she had the top 2 songs on the Billboard charts... still (I believe) the only artist since The Beatles to do so).

 

Another highlight of the period was that tired old songs got re-imagined with lively new arrangements that greatly enhanced their quality:

 

BROADWAY STANDARDS:

 

 

 

POP STANDARDS:

 

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by samhexum

[samhexum]

MOVIE THEMES THAT WERE BETTER THAN THE MOVIES THEY CAME FROM:

 

 

 

SONGS WITH DEEP, SOULFUL LYRICS:

 

 

CLASSICAL COMPOSERS:

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by samhexum

[samhexum]

http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01bb0927620b970d-800wi

 

 

I couldn't resist!

[bostonman]

Possibly the best (and I mean that) disco cover of a Broadway song:

 

(I really do think this arrangement is quite clever and well-done. Including the sound effects stolen from the show itself.)

 

[bostonman]

This song was right at the edge of the end of disco (1982), so it squeaks in. I'm also including it because at the time it came out, I was just coming out, and I even remember dancing to this at a few clubs and gay pride celebrations. So it has a lot of emotional resonance for me. I also happen to really like the song.

 

[+ Cash4Trash]

Souvenirs by Voyage is one of the best.

[+ Cash4Trash]

And then again Love & Kisses needs to be remembered as well.

[+ quoththeraven]

I was in college then and as a fan of rock, soul and funk, disco wasn't exactly in my wheelhouse, but looking back I liked enough of it that thinking of myself as a "disco sucks" girl isn't accurate either. I especially liked Donna Summer (except for "Love to Love You," which bored me silly), Vicki Sue Robinson's "Turn the Beat Around," and Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive."

Some enterprising K-pop girl group should cover "Turn the Beat Around." That could be as big a hit as I.O.I's cover of "Whatta Man."

[N13]

If nothing else could have killed disco......look out it's Ethel Merman!!!

[N13]

And as if that wasn't enough.............

 

[samhexum]

I first heard this song when I saw some guy strip to it at the Follies in NYC:

 

 

Kip Noll, Lee Marlin, & Nick Rodgers danced to this in GREASE MONKEYS:

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by samhexum

[OCClient]

....nobody but you.............and me

 

[samhexum]

Urethra Franklin:

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by samhexum

[samhexum]

In June 1979, the Bee Gees were on top of the world. Months before, their “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, featuring songs written and/or performed by the Australian trio, had won a Grammy for album of the year. The year before, it spent 24 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. And now the band was playing 60,000-seat arenas across America.

 

Disco was king, and the Bee Gees — brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, clad in white suits and flashing gold chains — were its ambassadors.

 

At the start of the tour, Maurice got hold of a T-shirt that made everyone backstage laugh. It read: “Shoot the Bee Gees.”

 

Six months later, as the tour was winding down, nobody was laughing. The disco craze that had ruled the late ’70s had come to a screeching halt, and the Bee Gees, lords of the airwaves for two years, found themselves banned from the country’s most influential radio stations.

 

They hadn’t been shot, but they were as good as dead.

 

“Nobody wanted to touch them,” said Simon Spence, whose new book “Staying Alive: The Disco Inferno of the Bee Gees” (Jawbone Press) chronicles the group’s meteoric rise and spectacular fall.

 

“What happened to them was unprecedented in popular music.”

 

The Bee Gees had first come to prominence in 1967 when manager Robert Stigwood, who’d had success overseeing Eric Clapton’s career, positioned the siblings as the next Beatles. With their tight harmonies and telegenic looks, songs such as “To Love Somebody” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” cruised into the top 10.

 

Still, they weren’t exactly winning over America as the Beatles had. Their album sales were faltering by the mid-1970s. But then Stigwood hit upon a bright idea. He had acquired the film rights to a New York Magazine story called “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night,” about working-class kids from Bay Ridge who become stars on the dance floor of 2001 Odyssey, a Brooklyn disco.

 

The movie — “Saturday Night Fever” — was to star John Travolta, a popular TV actor from the sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

 

The Bee Gees, with their exposed hairy chests and high voices, were now the butt of ‘endless comedy sketches.’

 

The Bee Gees were working on a new album at the time, but Stigwood insisted they scrap it to work on the soundtrack. He effectively pillaged five of their new songs, including “Stayin’ Alive” and “More Than a Woman.”

 

The Bee Gees weren’t thrilled. In fact, “They didn’t give the tracks much thought or care or attention,” says Spence.

 

“Saturday Night Fever” opened in theaters Dec. 12, 1977. Between Christmas and New Year’s, 750,000 copies of the soundtrack sold. By January, it was the No. 1 album in America. As a result, by 1978, 200 radio stations in America were devoted to disco.

 

“We all went a bit crazy,” eldest brother Barry Gibb recalled.

 

A backlash was inevitable. Steve Dahl, a Chicago radio shock jock who hated disco, kicked it off with a demolition on July 12, 1978, at Comiskey Park: About 10,000 people showed up at the ballpark, many clutching Bee Gees records — which were tossed into a bonfire.

 

Homophobia fueled much of the hatred. White men between the ages of 18 and 34 who loved rock “felt excluded, even threatened, by the disco scene,” Spence writes. “The phrase ‘disco sucks’ was a clear pejorative term.”

 

In February 1980, Billboard reported that American radio had adopted a “virtual ban” on disco. Barry called it “evil” and “censorship” — but nobody paid much attention. The Bee Gees, with their exposed hairy chests and high voices, were now the butt of “endless comedy sketches,” Spence writes.

 

Barry couldn’t understand what had happened: “It was almost like people were angry with us and it was more interesting to make fun of us than to actually try and understand or appreciate what we had done.”

 

Robin said simply: “The public had OD’d on us.”

 

Maurice, Robin’s twin, took it the hardest. He’d battled drugs and alcohol for years and now upped the intake. Shortly after the tour ended, he checked into a private London clinic for alcohol abuse. His recovery didn’t last long. In 1981 he was thrown off the Concorde for drunk and disorderly behavior.

 

Rumors swirled that the Bee Gees were going to break up.

 

“The exhaustion of being the Bee Gees set in, and we couldn’t see what tomorrow was going to bring,” Barry admitted.

 

But they made another album, “Living Eyes.” Burned by the backlash, they dropped the disco sound. Barry even lowered his falsetto. The record was a bust, overshadowed by tabloid stories about Robin’s tumultuous relationship with his estranged wife. Convinced she was having an affair with her divorce lawyer, Robin broke into his own home to collect evidence. He was arrested.

 

Still, Maurice and Robin wanted to keep the Bee Gees going. Only Barry understood their era was over. He said of “Stayin’ Alive”: “We would like to dress it in a white suit and gold chains and set it on fire.”

 

He persuaded his brothers that they should write songs and produce albums — for other artists. They came up with hits for Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton and others. Their biggest hit was “Heartbreaker,” which Dionne Warwick took to the top of the charts.

 

But its success further depressed Maurice.

 

“I cried my eyes out after we wrote it,” Spence quotes him as saying. “I drove home and thought, ‘We should be doing this one.’ ”

 

Maurice never kicked his addictions. He died in 2003 from ailments brought on by alcoholism. Robin died in 2012 of colon and liver cancer.

 

Barry, now 71, is the only Bee Gee left. Two months ago he performed at the Glastonbury Festival in England.

 

His set list included all the songs from “Saturday Night Fever.” The crowd went wild.

 

During their time apart, Barry co-produced & wrote songs for a movie called HAWKS, starring Anthony Edwards & Timothy Dalton. I saw it in England & loved a couple of the songs.

 

 

 

Edited April 19, 2020 by samhexum

[+ quoththeraven]

The BeeGees music for Saturday Night Fever is classic, but has anyone considered that as white men with lucrative record contracts and a devoted manager they were profiting off co-opting a black genre? From that perspective the sudden collapse of the market onto the BeeGees looks a little bit like economic justice. And their later medical problems are things that happen to a wide variety of people. It's no more or less tragic when it happens to famous people.

 

Personally, I liked the BeeGees' early stuff best. New York Mining Disaster 1941? Words, the melody of which I worked out on the piano? Classic.

[samhexum]

Personally, I liked the BeeGees' early stuff best. New York Mining Disaster 1941? Words, the melody of which I worked out on the piano? Classic.

 

I liked the LIVING EYES album the article mentioned, especially the song PARADISE, which was one of their best. After that, they took off for a few years while they worked with other people, but the albums they recorded after getting back together later were GREAT. Their ESP album may have been their best.

 

 

try tracks 1, 7, 9

 

try tracks 3, 6, 8

Edited April 18, 2020 by samhexum

[bostonman]

The BeeGees music for Saturday Night Fever is classic, but has anyone considered that as white men with lucrative record contracts and a devoted manager they were profiting off co-opting a black genre?

 

Some would say Elvis had already done that. Among others.

[OCClient]

Oooh oooh

I wonder wonder wonder wonder who

Taught her how to talk like that

Oooh oooh..

I wonder wonder wonder wonder who

 

 

[+ quoththeraven]

Some would say Elvis had already done that. Among others.

Exactly, hence the lyrics about Elvis on Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" from Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Even though rock was originated by black artists, it was co-opted and popularized by white artists who could command a larger audience/were more mainstream by the 60s. Even though a black man was the greatest rock/electric guitarist ever (Hendrix, of course), rock has remained more or less exclusively white since then. The other great black guitarists played/play the blues or funk.

[samhexum]

Even though a black man was the greatest rock/electric guitarist ever (Hendrix, of course)

 

Surely you forget... (I know, I know... don't call you Shirley!)

 

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0000/018/MI0000018458.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

 

 

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/6900000/Jewel-playing-her-blue-guitar-jewel-6974357-357-500.jpg

http://www.bigozine2.com/MP3AA/MP315/MELlondon/MELlondonFr.jpg

[maninsoma]

I was fortunate to be a teenager during music's golden age... the disco era.

 

Donna Summer was, of course, the Queen (I saw her in concert twice... including during the week she had the top 2 songs on the Billboard charts... still (I believe) the only artist since The Beatles to do so).

 

Another highlight of the period was that tired old songs got re-imagined with lively new arrangements that greatly enhanced their quality:

 

 

No argument from me about loving disco, though I know not everyone considers this era to be the "golden age." Just wanted to point out that while you later discuss The Bee Gees' contributions to the genre, you failed to correct yourself about Donna Summer being the only artist since The Beatles to occupy the top two slots of Billboard's Hot 100 chart. The Bee Gees did that in the spring of 1978 at the height of Saturday Night Fever popularity, with Night Fever being #1 and Staying Alive #2. Perhaps more impressive is that those two songs occupied the top two slots for five weeks and, for the week ending March 18, two of the other songs in the top 5 also had The Bee Gees' involvement, with Samantha Sang's Emotion coming in at #3 and brother Andy Gibbs' Love Is Thicker Than Water at #5.

 

And, being the chart hound that I am, I had to research your claim anyway. I'm not sure that Donna ever did occupy the top two slots at the same time. From my research at this early hour, it appears that the closest she came was having the #1 and #3 records at the same time.

 

Also of note, The Beatles didn't just manage to have the top 2 records at the same time. For the week ending April 4, 1964, they had the entire top 5 all to themselves with Can't Buy Me Love, Twist And Shout, She Loves You, I Want To Hold Your Hand, and Please Please Me. Beatlemania, indeed!

[+ E.T.Bass]

Rock historians have a lot to say about the Beach Boys.

Been listening to the Beach Boys exclusive channel on Sirius/XM.

Also saw a documentary on HBO about the making of Pet Sounds. Quite an album that is said to have inspired John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

 

[samhexum]

the Beach Boys.

 

 

Who knew Mike Love would have such a TALL, good-looking nephew?

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 25, 2020 by samhexum

[Guest NYCRich212]

And as if that wasn't enough.............

 

Ouch. Story goes that Donna Sunmer was brought onboard to teach La Merman to sing on the down beat. I guess she did what she knew.

[Guest NYCRich212]

In June 1979, the Bee Gees were on top of the world. Months before, their “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, featuring songs written and/or performed by the Australian trio, had won a Grammy for album of the year. The year before, it spent 24 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. And now the band was playing 60,000-seat arenas across America.

 

Disco was king, and the Bee Gees — brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, clad in white suits and flashing gold chains — were its ambassadors.

 

At the start of the tour, Maurice got hold of a T-shirt that made everyone backstage laugh. It read: “Shoot the Bee Gees.”

 

Six months later, as the tour was winding down, nobody was laughing. The disco craze that had ruled the late ’70s had come to a screeching halt, and the Bee Gees, lords of the airwaves for two years, found themselves banned from the country’s most influential radio stations.

 

They hadn’t been shot, but they were as good as dead.

 

“Nobody wanted to touch them,” said Simon Spence, whose new book “Staying Alive: The Disco Inferno of the Bee Gees” (Jawbone Press) chronicles the group’s meteoric rise and spectacular fall.

 

“What happened to them was unprecedented in popular music.”

 

The Bee Gees had first come to prominence in 1967 when manager Robert Stigwood, who’d had success overseeing Eric Clapton’s career, positioned the siblings as the next Beatles. With their tight harmonies and telegenic looks, songs such as “To Love Somebody” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” cruised into the top 10.

 

Still, they weren’t exactly winning over America as the Beatles had. Their album sales were faltering by the mid-1970s. But then Stigwood hit upon a bright idea. He had acquired the film rights to a New York Magazine story called “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night,” about working-class kids from Bay Ridge who become stars on the dance floor of 2001 Odyssey, a Brooklyn disco.

 

The movie — “Saturday Night Fever” — was to star John Travolta, a popular TV actor from the sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

 

The Bee Gees, with their exposed hairy chests and high voices, were now the butt of ‘endless comedy sketches.’

 

The Bee Gees were working on a new album at the time, but Stigwood insisted they scrap it to work on the soundtrack. He effectively pillaged five of their new songs, including “Stayin’ Alive” and “More Than a Woman.”

 

The Bee Gees weren’t thrilled. In fact, “They didn’t give the tracks much thought or care or attention,” says Spence.

 

“Saturday Night Fever” opened in theaters Dec. 12, 1977. Between Christmas and New Year’s, 750,000 copies of the soundtrack sold. By January, it was the No. 1 album in America. As a result, by 1978, 200 radio stations in America were devoted to disco.

 

“We all went a bit crazy,” eldest brother Barry Gibb recalled.

 

A backlash was inevitable. Steve Dahl, a Chicago radio shock jock who hated disco, kicked it off with a demolition on July 12, 1978, at Comiskey Park: About 10,000 people showed up at the ballpark, many clutching Bee Gees records — which were tossed into a bonfire.

 

Homophobia fueled much of the hatred. White men between the ages of 18 and 34 who loved rock “felt excluded, even threatened, by the disco scene,” Spence writes. “The phrase ‘disco sucks’ was a clear pejorative term.”

 

In February 1980, Billboard reported that American radio had adopted a “virtual ban” on disco. Barry called it “evil” and “censorship” — but nobody paid much attention. The Bee Gees, with their exposed hairy chests and high voices, were now the butt of “endless comedy sketches,” Spence writes.

 

Barry couldn’t understand what had happened: “It was almost like people were angry with us and it was more interesting to make fun of us than to actually try and understand or appreciate what we had done.”

 

Robin said simply: “The public had OD’d on us.”

 

Maurice, Robin’s twin, took it the hardest. He’d battled drugs and alcohol for years and now upped the intake. Shortly after the tour ended, he checked into a private London clinic for alcohol abuse. His recovery didn’t last long. In 1981 he was thrown off the Concorde for drunk and disorderly behavior.

 

Rumors swirled that the Bee Gees were going to break up.

 

“The exhaustion of being the Bee Gees set in, and we couldn’t see what tomorrow was going to bring,” Barry admitted.

 

But they made another album, “Living Eyes.” Burned by the backlash, they dropped the disco sound. Barry even lowered his falsetto. The record was a bust, overshadowed by tabloid stories about Robin’s tumultuous relationship with his estranged wife. Convinced she was having an affair with her divorce lawyer, Robin broke into his own home to collect evidence. He was arrested.

 

Still, Maurice and Robin wanted to keep the Bee Gees going. Only Barry understood their era was over. He said of “Stayin’ Alive”: “We would like to dress it in a white suit and gold chains and set it on fire.”

 

He persuaded his brothers that they should write songs and produce albums — for other artists. They came up with hits for Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton and others. Their biggest hit was “Heartbreaker,” which Dionne Warwick took to the top of the charts.

 

But its success further depressed Maurice.

 

“I cried my eyes out after we wrote it,” Spence quotes him as saying. “I drove home and thought, ‘We should be doing this one.’ ”

 

Maurice never kicked his addictions. He died in 2003 from ailments brought on by alcoholism. Robin died in 2012 of colon and liver cancer.

 

Barry, now 71, is the only Bee Gee left. Two months ago he performed at the Glastonbury Festival in England.

 

His set list included all the songs from “Saturday Night Fever.” The crowd went wild.

 

During their time apart, Barry co-produced & wrote songs for a movie called HAWKS, starring Anthony Edwards & Timothy Dalton. I saw it in England & loved a couple of the songs.

 

 

 

As a Massachusetts kid, I was always perplexed how they came about to record “Going Home to Massachusetts”. That’s An odd bird tune.