Saturday, December 4, 2010

Bob Mersereau's Top 100 Canadian Blog: MUSIC Review OF THE DAY .

MUSIC Review OF THE DAY:BEE GEES ON DVD
BEE GEES - ONE NIGHT ONLY (DVD) BEE GEES - IN OUR OWN TIME (DVD) So I've immersed myself in these Bee Gees DVD's the preceding couple of nights, while hiding out home alone, so nobody could see me. There is perhaps no other group that can take out such a visceral reaction, from joy to sheer hatred.

As a trial balloon, I updated my Facebook status to announce I was knee-deep in their music, and I got more comments than anything else I've ever posted, save my birthday. There were sneers, jokes, kudos, and there was the usual great number of venom. Even the Bee Gees know why so many people hate them. There's no doubt they became the whipping boys for committing the offence of disco. Barry Gibb, as seen in the new documentary In Our Own Time, admitted at the group's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame that he knows the huge backlash to disco pretty much soured the final 3 decades of their career. In the DVD they take to be quite happy to have held the masthead for disco, given the 30-million sales of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Yet of course, they weren't even making disco music, it was music you could dance to, the group's take on somebody and r'n'b.

So, it's hard to get a hold on my own feelings about the music. Watching the last concert set One Night Only from 1997, I'm impressed and repulsed in equal measures. The cheesy Vegas act makes me gag, but the songs are, to my ears, brilliant. It's the current hipster believe that early Bee Gees is cool, and surely such gems as Run To Me, How Can You Repair A Broken Heart, and To Love Somebody remain wonders. But the further Saturday Night Fever moves into the past, the more I can appreciate Jive Talkin', Night Fever, and Nights On Broadway, even with Barry's falsetto and gold chains. Heck, I can still get some newer songs I like. The documentary includes dozens of vintage clips from Australian TV shows and explains the beginning of the family band. Nothing's left out, including the first sibling fight and break-up in 1970, the loser of their early 70's albums, the accidental rebirth Jive Talkin' brought them, the drug and alcohol death of brother Andy, and the more recent demise of Maurice. Brand-new interviews with the remaining brothers are direct but wish the balance of the man has discovered, this is no easy story to tell, there's no resolution to the documentary, no resolution to the big question: Were the Bee Gees brilliant or brilliant at making candy floss? The concert's okay, you actually don't need to see it more than once, if at all, but the documentary will help you well, with piles of good archival material. After two years and some soul-searching I can say for me, I truly do love a lot of the band's music, even what's been incorrectly labeled disco all these years. Having said that, I'm still going to be a little careful where I hold that. We're all friends here, right?

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