"Rest Your Love On Me" is a welcome change-up- a straight country ballad complete with pedal steel, hearkening back to the early Bee Gees' interest in rootsy forms, but doing do now with bright, twinkly production. "Wind of Change", from Main Course, with Ray Baretto on congas and Barry belting out the melody in his natural range, transposes the meatier Philly soul aesthetic without the refinement of later hits. "You Stepped Into My Life" has a tougher, more funk-influenced beat that serves as an interesting contrast to Barry's falsetto, showing a possible road not taken had the ultra-smooth sound not panned out. "Too Much Heaven" from 1978 is a ballad with a winding structure Burt Bacharach would admire, though its extra saccharine cast puts it far below "More Than a Woman" and "How Deep Is Your Love" as far as Bee Gees slow-dance numbers. The liner notes to this reissue give this credit: "Recorded on MCI's JH-556 Console and JH-16 24 Tape Recorders." Sound mattered then, as it does now- the mastering on this reissue is excellent.īeyond the overly familiar hits are a number of other good-to-great songs. They understood that it was a culture of records and not bands, so they strove to make the records perfect, polishing the mechanized beat to a blinding sheen. The Gibb brothers were on a dazzling songwriting roll during these years, penning Top 10s for themselves and others almost at will, and they also had a firm grasp on the possibilities of disco as a sonic phenomenon. Some of them- "Jive Talkin'", "Stayin' Alive", "You Should Be Dancing", "Night Fever", "More Than a Woman", "Nights on Broadway", "Love You Inside Out", "How Deep Is Your Love"- are unassailable. Here, on an expanded version of a 2xCD compilation that first appeared in 1979 and covered just five years, are 20 or so arguments. Still, you can't help but feel that something important is being overlooked: Just how phenomenal some of this stuff was as pop, especially the Greatest of the Bee Gees. Not to mention, the narrative of those years, as told in books like Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and Turn the Beat Around, is fascinating. Disco needed to be understood in terms of its roots among marginalized subcultures (gay, black, Latino) and reclaimed by the people who made it happen in the first place, away from the glare of the media. In this century, disco has undergone an interesting critical rehabilitation, with early figures like, say, the Loft's David Mancuso and the Gallery's Nicky Siano being celebrated for their contributions to underground dance music while the pop stuff has, for the most part, been pushed aside. This may come as news to younger music obsessives for whom disco was the underground movement that birthed Italo and house and techno and brought us Larry Levan and Arthur Russell. They were the sun around which the rest of the not-so-brief fad revolved, the form's most important auteurs, the gold standard. To a lot of people at the time, the Bee Gees were disco. The article led to a movie- the soundtrack of which Bee Gees dominated- and disco was on its way to taking over popular culture in the U.S. Ten months later, journalist Nik Cohn would write a New York magazine cover piece called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" (a story later revealed to be completely fabricated) about a young, working-class Italian-American kid finding some kind of existential meaning in the new dance clubs that were popping up everywhere. You know what happened next: Singles "Jive Talkin'" and "Nights on Broadway" hit #1 and #7 in the U.S., respectively. They cut Main Course in Miami, everyone involved was listening to Philly soul, and Mardin encouraged Barry Gibb to try singing some tunes in falsetto. Many of those early songs endured, but the Bee Gees were no longer household names by the time they teamed up with Atlantic Records house producer Arif Mardin to record an album called Main Course, the group's 11th, in 1975. They enjoyed hit singles like "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and "To Love Somebody" and at least one great album, Odessa. First, there was the popular late-60s beat combo, who made a few waves in Australia before returning to England, where the three Gibb brothers- Barry, Maurice, and Robin- had lived before moving down under as kids.