Bee Gees Music Photos: Alsace-Lorraine: The Bee Gees were cool .

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

My first meeting with them was when I was 8 years old. My mother had gotten her hands 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 film was cheap or ill done or downright disastrous.

When I was 8, I didn't know much 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 follow him from his car to his house to his garage to his fridge for his beer, etc). In this film, the man of the project I identified with the close was actually Aerosmith- my mother 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 image was also my first bill of Alice Cooper, Steve Martin, and the music of the Beatles.

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

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

You rather give 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 hunt for such strong old skool songwriting from a fertile band. I couldn't get to tell you who any of the "indie alternative" bands are that amount on my boyfriend's Sirius XM (or whatever it is) radio station in the car. All those songs literally go the same to me. But I will get the Bee Gees at dinner and people will say, "This is so cool. Who is this?"