Rediscovery and Memories: The Bee Gees

As I write, I am listening to Barry Gibb and Friends and an innovative rendition of many of the Bee Gees hits. I had forgotten. I loved the Bee Gees in their two major incarnations, or well, the ones I was aware of, the mid-1960s and then after nearly a decade the mid-1970s. They were entirely different in those two incarnations. Actually, make that three incarnations. The one in the seventies kind of had two parts. For me, they were enjoyable, in a crescendo kind of way.

I was a new teenager in the late 1960s, and I loved trying to belt out "I Gotta Get a Message to You" or the mournful "I Started a Joke". They had been around earlier, but they had been in England and Australia and I guess the Beatles kind of overshadowed them-at least in the earlier days. But they became part of my young life's tapestry. But though they continued to write music, for a while, I kind of lost track of them until I was in college, actually almost out of college, around 1975. I was was watching the "Midnight Special" on New York's Channel Four--I still lived in New York in those days--and there they were, Barry, Maurice and Robin, singing something called, "Nights on Broadway" from their new album "Main Course".  I didn't know these guys. But you know, I was so happy for them, as if there had been some achievement of my own. I was kind of happy in those days, despite some early life loss (the death of my mother). I had found my college radio station. I found that I excelled in that kind of avocation. I wanted it to be a vocation, but I realized pretty quickly that it was too hit or miss for me to take that chance and I was not a risk taker. So my life's achievements were pretty small, but somehow they tracked this large achievement of a group whose music had given me pleasure nearly a decade before. I liked this kind of new sound. It was enthusiastic. Energetic. Fun. When I made my first ever visit to Los Angeles in June 1977, I brought a copy of that album to my young (then 14) cousin. My affection for the Bee Gees was enormous. And then that same year 1977, the third transformation, the explosion of the album Saturday Night Fever which featured many of the Bee Gees compositions. When THAT album was released, which I think was actually the beginning of the year, I brought it to a New Year's Eve party held by my college friend Glenn, announcing it was going to be a big hit. I wish I had had a piece of the financial action. I could then have easily gone into radio and not worried about making a living. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2SDf42guB4

I moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s and after that I mostly lost trackof the Brothers Gibb. There was that album, which I liked, with Barbara Streisand and Barry, but I wasn't quite as intensely enthralled. By then their young brother Andy was in the mix, but I wasn't a huge fan probably because I was getting older and anyway, I was trying now to make a living as an attorney, and settle fully into my new surroundings, ever so different from those of New York where I had heretofore spent nearly three decades of my life. Andy died of a heart attack at the age of 30 after too much high life. 

And the years, my years, their years, passed. Robin and Maurice the younger fraternal twins of the threesome, died. I saw a You Tube clip in which Barry, the one who had been arguably the most handsome because of his mane of hair, aged and now long since having lost the healthy mane, regretting that he had not had a great relationship with either of his late brothers just before they died. His pain was real, and affecting.

Then the other day, as I was riffing through my documentary options during these Covid consuming days, I saw that one had been released on the Bee Gees. My affection for them was renewed. When some of the songs were played on the documentary, tears came to my eyes as the memories of my own life washed over me. And how their music had been a huge part of those memories. 

And I found out that Barry, in tribute to his brothers, but also in another re-invention, call it a fourth incarnation, had put out an album, Barry Gibb and Friends, Volume I, with a whole new vision of the old songs in a country vibe. Did it work? For me it did, and apparently it has for a whole lot of others, as it made the Billboard Country Chart. 

I just was listening to it as I began to write this entry. And it made me feel young again, as if all that time and all that history, good and bad, had not yet happened. 

I cannot wait for Volume II. The Bee Gees live!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxTqkR_qRM

 

A Black Cloud Day

 It is five days into the New Year. I am trying not to be disappointed by the expected nation and world-wide realities which I surely understood to be following from the last one. More than that, I am trying to sort out how I will adapt to the constant braying of human conflict and pride in the ability to determine the things of life, and death without reference to God in whose hands our lives actually reside. 

Today is the run-off election for Senators in Georgia. As I write, with early return percentages in, it appears that the Democrat candidates are in the lead. A lot of people will be delighted to the tips of their toes about that. Others will feel, in the marrows of their beings, that a noble, but still very young (in terms of the span of history) part of the civilization, once known as the United States of America, imperfect but better than all others, will fall. 

Los Angeles citizens, among citizens of many other places, have been told that Covid is everywhere. There is a "risk of exposure whenever you leave your home" quoth the LA Times.  Barbara Ferrer says, "It is everywhere;, looking for a willing host".  But isn't Covid finding its way into households, which I assume means where we are, indoors? I only know what I hear. I don't know what is true of what I hear any more.

Vaccines were to be the saving grace, but now we have heard that no, vaccines don't mean we can "get back to normal". Half the population believes that anyone who thinks there is something wrong with this approach--to stop EVERYTHING--is a moral imperative, although what is moral has long ago been rendered a matter of relativity, determined not by principle but by power. The other half's opinion is irrelevant because the first half has determined what "the science" is and is not and seeks to silence any objection, or alternatives. Someone says you can't stop a whole society in order to prevent illness and death. And he is trounced as a denier of Covid. 

We have everything to fear, including fear itself.  Nice to know that the world has caught up with my life long world view. Now I am in the mainstream. I have tried to fight the fears imposed from without, accompanying those within. I completely understand the power of propaganda. How it works on you. I don't believe that our leaders have a clue how this particular virus is spreading.  Frankly, I am now in the camp that believes this whole virus was manufactured, and released, accidentally or on purpose. And so it is unique in the way it spreads.  I have also found myself in the camp that believes there are people, some very not nice people, much like the not very nice people of the far and recent past, who are using this real virus, among other real viruses and bacterias, to control and deprive the rest of us. 

But it is going on a year and we are, notwithstanding that leaders and their followers insist that it is for our good, and we are effectively imprisoned for a felony we commit by merely going outside. No trial. Someone, "they" all got together and convicted us of something that used to be called living.

Yeah. Five days into the New Year, I am feeling pretty down. I am looking only to one place, one Person. God Almighty. Because everything and everyone else feels hopeless. 

One practical thing I have to do, aside from prayer, which never comes easily, is to absent myself from much of the news, or as much as I can without becoming an information luddite. I keep trying. 

We are dying, and not only from Covid-19. 

My downstairs neighbor is making the best of it. He is barbecuing on his tiny patio, attached to his apartment, which looks exactly like my own, which he is, like me, like all of us, exorted not to leave. For how long? Until we flatten the curve toward death, that can never, ultimately, be flattened by the human hand.  So a long time indeed. 

BTW. I think my neighbor just missed starting a fire. Smoke was gathering in my working dining room. I went downstairs. He said it was the barbecue was off.  I mentioned the flame and the smoke that I could see coming from the closed hood. 

Surely, it is no safer at home.