Bee Gees single by single thread

I don't understand why so many recorded it, I really can't get into the song no matter who does it.
I prefer the flip slide, 'you wouldn't know', even though it's not a very strong song either.
Great to hear and see how Barry developed his songwriting.

 

How do you leave your own superior version on the shelf for 40 years?

 

Anything Gibb is of at least passing interest; but it's with track 5, I Just Don't Like To Be Alone, that this starts to catch fire.

 

Sidebar 2: The non-Bee Gees "Bee Gees" 45

Between "Turn Around, Look at Me" and "Every Day I Have to Cry," Leedon released a single (catalog number LK-829), "House Without Windows"/"And I'll Be Happy," with the odd credit "Trevor Gordon and the Bee Gees." It's odd because, of all the times the Gibb brothers helped other Festival artists (and, surreptitiously, the occasional non-Festival artist), this 45 was the only time they received a co-credit.

They probably deserved it: Barry Gibb wrote both songs, and all three Gibb brothers sing and play on both sides. Unfortunately, Gordon's vocals are OK at best. He was a singer the Gibbs knew from joint television appearances, and they decided to give him a boost on this, his second single.

Despite the credit, this record is not usually considered a true Bee Gees release because none of them are the lead vocalist. Indeed, the two songs appear on Assault the Vaults rather than Brilliant from Birth.

Here's "House Without Windows":



And here's "And I'll Be Happy":

♬ Trevor Gordon ♥ And I'll Be Happy ♬

Replace Trevor's vocals with Barry's, and it would have been a pretty good Bee Gees single.

The Gibbs would add similar assistance to Gordon's next single, "Little Miss Rhythm and Blues"/"Here I Am" (Leedon LK-924). Barry wrote both songs; Robin is clearly audible on the A-side; and Maurice may have supplied organ. But this time, Gordon is credited alone.

Like the Gibbs, Gordon was born in the British Isles and emigrated to Australia in the 1950s. In 1966, he returned to England and signed with the Pye label, becoming "Trev Gordon" in the process. Gordon made two 45s for Pye, both of which were released on the Astor label in Australia; one of them, "Floating," was actually picked up by Mod, a short-lived subsidiary of Mercury, and released in the United States (catalog number M-1006) in late 1966.

Gordon then teamed with his cousin, Graham Bonnet, in a duo they called The Marbles. They re-connected with the Bee Gees, who helped them get signed to UK Polydor. In 1968, they recorded a Gibb Brothers composition, "Only One Woman," which reached #5 in the UK and was also released on the then-new Cotillion label in the U.S. to general indifference (it failed to chart in Billboard). The Marbles would release several more 45s and an album, with several other Bee Gees compositions prominently featured, but never had another hit of the same stature.

The group broke up in 1970. Gordon made a solo album and then largely disappeared from the music industry; he became a teacher and much later had a book published on jazz-guitar techniques. He was found dead of natural causes in his London flat on January 9, 2013. He was 64.

 

I hope at some point we do get a truly complete anthology of their Australian recordings. As decent as Brilliant from Birth was there are still some recordings left off it, both previously released and unreleased.
I noticed this notation to the Spicks and Specks album on Spotify:

These have always been in the hands of Festival. When did this change occur?

 

Gibb Songs

 

I'm sure you've noticed the obvious "Do You Want To Know A Secret?" Influence in the boy's backing vocals at 1:08 and 1:58.

 

Their songs for Bryan Davies reflect a prominent British Invasion sound.

 

Yeah, five of the 12 tracks on the Marbles' debut were written by the Gibbs and they produced three of them.

 

I like but don't love Dusty's version. There's something slightly clunky about the song itself. I've always felt like it needed a slight rewrite to make it something of a classic. But I couldn't tell you what needs to be done in the way of tweaking to make the song work the way it should.

 

A bit late, but one more vote for the excellent Claustrophobia...

 

Checking in.

Not a big fan of their early years but clearly the musical genius was always there.

 

My best guess is one of the following:
1. The credit is an error.
2. In 2005, Festival was sold to the Australasian affiliate of Warner Music Group. At the same time, the Bee Gees' 1967-and-later catalog was distributed by WMG. Perhaps some kind of deal was done when the catalog was under the same corporate control in which the Bee Gees bought or otherwise obtained the rights to the Festival recordings.
3. All of the Bee Gees' Australian recordings have now passed the 50-year copyright limitation in most countries outside the USA (I know there was some change in international law not too long ago that extended the term in certain situations, but I don't know the details). However, Capitol has long claimed that a "remastering" reset the clock, thus the new credit. It's a moot point in the States, which has never had the 50-year public domain law, but I don't know if this has ever been tested in European courts, for example.

These are just theories, though.

 

I'm a bit behind on this thread, but Peace of Mind gets my vote out of the last few. Very catchy tune once more showing the growth of the brothers vocally.

 

Next up we have their first Australian top 20 single...

Wine and Women (1965)

Released: September 1965
B-side: Follow the Wind
Charts: #19 (Australia)

 

This was their first single produced by Bill Shepherd. Shepherd would later travel with the group to England when they launched their international career and for many years arranged and conducted their orchestral backing on record and in concert.

Bill Shepherd, an Englishman who worked in Australia for about a year, was an experienced musician and arranger by the time he met the Bee Gees in the middle of 1965, at age 38.

Bill thought the Bee Gees had a lot of potential and gave them as much help as he could, which shows here, the first Bee Gees recording he produced. The story is that Festival was close to dropping the group, and that Bill recorded this pair of songs and then talked Festival into releasing a single since it had already been recorded.

The arrangement of ‘Wine and Women’ was designed to showcase all three brothers. Robin sings parts of the lead vocal for the first time, and if television miming is any guide, Maurice plays the brief lead guitar break. Barry’s distinctive guitar strumming is mixed forward and he sings most of the vocal lead. The song plods along, especially in the needless repeated section toward the end, but it has the authenticity of a beat group playing their own song, something Bee Gees records had lacked.

The B side is even better. ‘Follow the Wind’ is a beautiful folk-pop ballad worthy of being an A side— and in fact a folk group called the Flanagans quickly put out a version of it as an A side by the end of the year. Robin and Barry each take a verse, and Maurice gets another guitar solo. Robin may be playing organ.

sources: Gibb Songs : 1965 & Wine and Women - Wikipedia

 

I LOVE Wine & Women.

Fantastic song. Catchy harmonies and melody. They were really starting to come into their own sound by this point.

 

I agree - this one and "CLAUSTROPHOBIA" remind me the most about later Bee Gees songs. I even think the beat in "WINE & WOMEN" foreshadows the disco beat of their 70s hits. Sure, it´s slower and not as pronounced, but it´s there. And no, I´m not saying they invented disco! But a great song, nonetheless.

 

"It's got a good beat, and you can dance to it"

 

This of course, was the first of the two Viennese Waltzes the group would release in 1965 (the next single would be the second). There aren't a whole lot of songs in ¾ time in the Gibb catalogue, but the few that they did compose are all keepers ("Cucumber Castle" and "Daytime Girl" are others). "Follow The Wind" is very much in the same vein as what Peter Paul & Mary and The Mitchell Trio were doing at the time. Rather than instantly jump on to the folk-rock bandwagon like so many others in the immediate months after "Mr. Tambourine Man," they decided to just keep things acoustic for the time being.

 

I like both of these songs.

I heard "Wine and Women" after I heard its near-clone, "I Was a Lover, a Leader of Men," so I have a tendency to think of "W&W" as the knockoff when it was the other way around. I still like "Leader" more, and I'll talk more about that in a couple days.

"Follow the Wind" is a really nice folk- style song. Even in 1965, they had B-sides as good as many other acts' A-sides.

Barry Gibb later related that, through careful research, he was able to discover which record stores in Sydney reported to the national chart compilers. Armed with that information, he, his brothers, and various friends bought multiple copies of "Wine and Women" -- enough that it was able to make the lower rungs of the chart on sales alone. Once radio stations saw that the record was selling, they started playing it. Regardless how it was jump-started, it became a moderate hit, which convinced Festival to not only approve another single, but the Bee Gees' first full-length album.

 

I remember this story from the "This Is Where I Came In" documentary. He joked they had bought their own records ever since lol.

 

I'm liking most of these early Bee Gees tracks, although none as much as Claustrophobia ...

 

"Follow the Wind" is one of my favorite BG tracks of all.

 

WaW is great. The early stuff is the best.