Alsace-Lorraine: The Bee Gees were cool before they were cool.

I don't love if you know this, but the Bee Gees were so much cooler before they were cool.

My first encounter with them was when I was 8 years old. My father had gotten her custody on a VHS copy of the 1978 film, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It's one of her favorite drive-in memories, and no one ever told me that the movie was cheap or ill done or downright disastrous. When I was 8, I didn't know lots about music.

I had Kriss Kross, En Vogue, Marky Mark, Michael Jackson, and Janet Jackson cassette tapes and I played the hell out of them. Everything else I heard was from my mother's childhood (which was a lot of hair metal and Janis Joplin) or my father's (he had an extended Dazed and Confused soundtrack that seemed to accompany him from his car to his family to his garage to his fridge for his beer, etc). In this film, the piece of the cast I identified with the nigh was actually Aerosmith- my father had all their albums stored in a milk crate under a defunct record player (taken during the divorce and never used, but carefully dusted during Saturday morning chores). The picture was also my first notice of Alice Cooper, Steve Martin, and the medicine of the Beatles.

So the Bee Gees, to me (and my sister), were, with Peter Frampton, the circle in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the 3rd grade I took a newspaper cutting of Peter Frampton getting pulled over by the law in Indianapolis as my Current Event to deal with the class. The form didn't recognize who Peter Frampton was. My teacher told them he was a vocalist in the 70s. "He was in Sgt. Pepper," I corrected her, all matter-of-fact. I was a real matter-of-fact third grader.

Fast advancing to my own burgeoning record collection. I don't make any Aerosmith or Alice Cooper (sorry mom), but what started out as a sentimental impulse has led to an mixture of early Bee Gees albums. And they're really, really, really good.

You rather have to scrounge. The collecting's slow in these parts. So far, my favorites are BeeGees' 1st, 2 Years On, and Best of BeeGees. I don't get any of the disco, though I don't knock it. It's fun to be on the search for such strong old skool songwriting from a fertile band. I couldn't get to separate you who any of the "indie alternative" bands are that number on my boyfriend's Sirius XM (or whatsoever it is) radio station in the car. All those songs literally go the like to me. But I will bring the Bee Gees at dinner and people will say, "This is so cool. Who is this?"