So Now It's Okay to Like the Bee Gees?

Barry Gibbs, the last living Bee Gee, is playing to large crowds in a solo U.S. tour.  He started in the huge Boston Garden, which is where I once saw the Rolling Stones.  It's very big.

Rolling Stone (the magazine) celebrates this with a collection of YouTube versions of "13 Essential Barry Gibb Tracks," most of them from the Bee Gees, beginning in the late 60s.  The accompanying paragraphs are laudatory.  They suggest that David Bowie essentially copied the Bee Gees in his early albums.

So it's okay to like the Bee Gees now?  Finally?  When they started, the reigning tastemakers at Rolling Stone considered them Beatles Lite.  Their middle period albums were ignored, their hits ridiculed.  And that's before they rode the Disco wave with their songs in Saturday Night Fever, which was of course beneath contempt.

Contempt was the attitude we faced when we included their first albums in our 1967-68 continuous play mix back in the Galesburg House for the Bewildered (169 W. First Street, now a national historical monument.  Wait--update: they tore it down) where the tunes of that fantastic year were our senior year soundtrack at Knox College.  Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Creem, Doors, Buffalo Springfield, even Vanilla Fudge, but...the Bee Gees?

I purchased and listened to every Bee Gees album in the early and mid 70s.  Idea played at Iowa,  Mr. Natural in PA. My allegiance while I was writing about rock at the Boston Phoenix was considered a puzzling eccentricity. Rolling Stone and other rock imperial powers notwithstanding.  I do remember reading one writer somewhere (it may have even been on an album cover) brave enough to write a positive essay, though a lot of it was about how quixotic he was considered, how defensive he sometimes had to be.

Now Bruce Springsteen is doing a Bee Gees song--and one from the disco era--and Gibb is doing a Springsteen (neither of them terribly good at it.)  But that's less of a departure than Rolling Stone's--musicians by and large did not buy into the snobbery.  Many recorded Bee Gees songs and copied their riffs.  Musicians are like that.

So I welcome the conventional wisdom to what I already knew: the Bee Gees were unique, unquestionably strange, but frequently haunting and oddly joyful.  Welcome to the fan club.