Barry Gibb: The Unexpected Story Behind Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive” | Apple Music

i mean john couldn't dance to stay in her life but he he said he was comfortable walking to it okay so we off you go apple music essentials the bee gees barry gibb music's most influential artists and the stories behind their songs we're talking about give about essentials right here and it is the longest most comprehensive list of songs and we're not even talking necessarily the songs that everyone else recorded just the ones that you recorded with your brothers it's unbelievable the list of songs here and i cannot wait to dive into it it's great to have this opportunity and you were such a weird band in the beginning because i've watched the documentary as well and i'm very familiar with your older music in the early days because i got turned onto it in recent years like you were a weird band you went out to the uk i mean you had a few records coming out of australia new zealand and then you went out to the uk and you immersed yourself in the 60s psychedelia weirdness and somehow you found success out of that i mean what do you put that down to because you listen to these records now and they're crazy yeah yeah but listen saying naivety is everything you know you we we were as naive as you could possibly be we were suddenly signed to uh nems brian epstein and robert stigwood and and from there on we were just floating we were just going along with the tide i was i remember being in an elevator with eric clapton going up to the dems offices and in those days you could dress any way you wanted it's different now but you could dress any way you want it eric was a cowboy you know um i was a priest and but it was flower power it was we didn't just we didn't just turn up in england we we walked into flower power as it was happening and so what do you do you you go down to king's road and you you buy caftans and you buy beads and just the way we were we were so naive and even during the 70s we were still naive we just didn't understand the industry we only understood that if we wrote a good song it might be successful let's talk about massachusetts which is one of the oldest songs if not the oldest on the playlist that i've got right here um a song that kind of brought you you know a real dose of success at the time and um kind of falls into that beautiful tradition of of picking apart some of these iconic and really idyllic parts of america that you never visit but you imagine what they're like i don't know if you had been to massachusetts we actually sang in the park in boston and it was raining and it was a wonderful experience but um the song came up the song would came about on our first trip to new york as a group robin was sailing around the harbor on some kind of tourist trip got the idea and came to the hotel we were just checking into the st regis and he said i've got this idea and and we took out the guitars and we just started playing because we didn't have anything else to do at that point and it the song just grew and grew and it was robin's idea and it was a wonderful thing and it was our first number one record you must love learning about your songs from other people covering them i mean that's let's talk a little bit about that because your songs have been have been written you know you've written songs for people and they've made them hits in their own right but ultimately your songs get covered a lot as well um it must be one of the real thrills to be able to hear the way people interpret your music i met with otis reading in new york 1967 and um robert had arranged that because he wanted me to write a song for otis reading and we talked for like half an hour and then he left and and to love somebody sort of came to life that same night to love somebody the way i love you and janice joplin of course immortalized that from the stage at woodstock as well which was a huge moment and i mean that's one of the most powerful performances of that entire weekend and it's so remarkable i think that people are still discovering that these moments they thought that i think a lot of people thought that that was that she wrote that song and it's just crazy i didn't even know that she'd recorded it until i heard it all of a sudden you know and i would blew me away because i think she's amazing i think she was amazing and and and i'm delighted that she sang that song so tell us the story about making jive talking i need to i need to know try and try and think of an image or a memory or something that really springs to mind about making that song guy talking was came came to life about midnight the night before and we hadn't figured it out what the lyrics were but we knew where we were going with it and we sang it to a reef and and he suggested what it really meant jive talking we weren't sure what it meant but we loved it and he focused the subject and said go write the lyrics and that's what we did when you come off the back of jivetalk and you know there's so many hooks and so many things to remember about that song there's so many production elements and so much playing in there which is incredible the guitar the rhythmic guitar playing on that song is unbelievable but the one thing that everyone really remembers musically and arrangement wise is the synth line [Music] it's so playful and and just so much fun uh it's almost it's almost guilty um and it's so loud in the song as well what's the story behind that how did that do because it's got a strange time signature about it as well it's almost you know yeah it turns around on itself and i i love to try and come up with things like that for me the best fun i had was was knowing where things should be knowing where when you stop singing something has to happen you know you can't just stop singing and let the track continue there has to be something else to attract people yeah how much is too much how much is not enough what's the right thing yeah part of it's all it is arranging the rift for staying alive came from alby what was the vibe in the room when you heard that for the first time because i mean that doesn't exist and then it does yeah i know i know can't i can't i can't even explain that except that when when he came up with it let's try this and alan played it allen kendall and it worked a treat and and you know you you just all i can tell you is you don't know this is the song this is the this is the one if you know there it's it's not going to be the one that people are going to refer to in the canon is as the greatest example of of songs about love or and you've got so many that you can't boil it down to one but that one song right there is insane when i hear it now i i hear how prophetic those words were you know new york times effect on man whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother you're staying alive how appropriate is that now yeah when in those days you might not have thought of it that way but a lot of people who who had heart attacks and things like that were saved by that groove because medicine and doctors were starting to use staying alive as some form of cpr you know really absolutely and and when we were doing shows or when i was doing shows about maybe two years back i was meeting fans all the time that that would tell me that their father had survived a heart attack because because they did cpr to stay in alarm and so that's that's that's gratifying it's a wonderful thing and it's whether you like the song or not i mean john couldn't dance to stay in line and and it wasn't a dance record if you think about it but he he said he it was comfortable walking to it so we off you go that's how that iconic scene came about as he didn't want to dance to it if he said let me strut to it yeah because it's not really a dance record you know and and and he said you should be dancing that's great i'll i'll dance to that but he didn't want to dance staying alive well it is a complicated it's the arrangement is tricky and i mean it's it's a powerful song and it's got a lot of vocal gymnastics in it i mean that moment again that hook that hook where you guys jump in there and do that like he got just that moment there you go looking very good laughing at my bg's got a falsetto little secrets in the canopy can you tell us a story about just that and that moment when you realize as you say that there's space between the lyrics and the chance for you as a band to put a vocal hook in there a riff well i mean the the falsetto was a discovery i didn't know i could do it and and uh arif marden wanted a wanted one of us to scream uh something like paul mccartney might have done and i saw her standing there and nobody volunteered to so i remembered that i'd sung falsettos on a song called please read me on bg's first i don't know why i did that but it worked great really well and i thought well i'll i'll volunteer i haven't sung in falsetto in maybe 20 years i never really sang in pulsar but i went out there and tried to do that and something else happened and it sort of became a lead voice rather than a voice for special effects you were trying to get that paul mccartney like whoa like with the rasp and in the end you got this really sweet high tone that's right that's right so that was the suggestion but once we discovered what it was um everyone started jumping up and down and and i couldn't escape from it so every time there was a record that might be a single or a strong song that the whole everybody's vote was do that falsetto you know and how'd you feel when they would ask you to do it because i mean like you said it wasn't your intention it was wonderful fun i mean once i started doing it i started exploring the range i didn't know i had so all i can say is um i don't understand how it works it must be a different set of muscles than than your natural voice you know justin timberlake said something really important in the documentary but the way that you sing it it's got an instrument vibe to it he likened your vocal arrangements to horns and once he said that a light bulb went off in millions of people's heads and we all started listening to your vocals in a different way was he onto something did you treat your vocals in that way no and what we did was that we had the pleasure of suddenly having like 64 tracks you know in the beginning we had four and and that became eight and then it became 16. then suddenly you've got countless tracks so we spend a lot of our time just adding adding more harmonies add more harmonies you know so too much heaven is is probably a perfect example of that we just kept adding more harmonies and it worked and so many elements in that song the record itself is actually pretty amazing [Applause] [Music] you should be dancing tell us a good story about that one please well there are there were four different sessions where you should be dancing and none of them really worked until we buckled down and and uh and started figuring out what the right group was you know what the right tempo was in other words you can write a good song but if it's if the showcasing is wrong it doesn't work and vice versa you know and so we spent a lot of time figuring out what that was i think we came up with it at 461 ocean boulevard in the lounge we were set up to play and the idea just came how deep is your love is one of those songs that when you hear it it's just such an effortless experience to listen to was it effortless to write sort of we we were having dinner at the chateau in harrellville outside paris because that's where we made that record and we were having dinner and and the the chorus of how deep is your love which is you know how deep is your love how deep is your love that just hit me in the head and and i said to everybody let's go back to the studio uh finish dinner let's go back to the studio now something's going on and i want to get this thing finished whatever this is let's let's figure it out and so we went up to the studio and i asked blue weaver play me the nicest chord on the piano and it happens to be a neat lap so okay that's a good key let's do it in that game it basically came about that way and then we spent the next day just doing lyrics and and figuring it out but it was a very uh what is it a very special floaty event we didn't we knew it was we knew it was good but we had to come up you know a lot of this is when you have a chorus you might come up with a chorus you you've got to work backwards you've got to figure out how you got how you get to the chorus and the chorus is something everyone's going to remember but you've got to get to it so it's a little bit of reverse thinking and there must be moments when you came up with a chorus that probably could have turned into another smash hit single but you couldn't figure out the past to go with it right that's right it's a little journey but you've got the chorus you've got it it works it's lovely now we're going to find out how to where the verse is what how do you get there who knows what's still to come such a joy such a joy remember it forever thank you barry you

Channel: Apple Music

Views: 33,727

Rating: 4.93819 out of 5

Keywords: bee gees, barry gibb, robin gibb, maurice gibb, essentials, barry gibb essentials, bee gees essentials, apple music essentials, stayin alive, bee gees stayin alive, massachusetts, too much heaven, you should be dancing, saturday night fever, one night only, musical group, album, songs, bee gees songs, bee gees greatest hits, bee gees hits, greatest hits, hits, interview, bee gees interview, barry gibb interview, zane lowe, zane lowe interview, apple, music, apple music, lyrics

Id: fYJeOKoeJAA

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021