But “Night Fever” stands as towering proof that the Bee Gees fully threw themselves into disco - not just the genre of music but also the idealistic notion that the club could be a site of salvation. In his definitive disco history Love Saves The Day, Tim Lawrence accuses the Bee Gees of presenting disco as “another incarnation of shrill white pop.” I get all that. Here they were, these already-rich white rock stars, teetering on irrelevance, seizing on this underground phenomenon centered around gay and black clubs, taking that sound and themselves to new commercial heights, irrevocably changing it in the process. Plenty of disco partisans still hate the Bee Gees. The club becomes the 2001 monolith at the center of everything. If you’re the right age, in the right moment, spending your life in the right place, then it starts to feel like your entire life revolves around those few stolen nightclub hours every week. It can make every other moment in your life feel like drab nothingness. But instinctively, they figured out one of the film’s main themes: A night in a dance club can totally overwhelm you. The Bee Gees didn’t know much of anything about Saturday Night Fever when they wrote their songs for the soundtrack. It’s a fleeting instant but a transcendent one: “Here I am/ Praying for this moment to last/ Living on the music so fine/ Borne on the wind, making it mine.” That’s poetry. The music has as much to do with that as the woman does. Later on, Barry is in the club, helpless before the sight of a beautiful lady: “That sweet city woman, she moves through the night/ Controlling my mind and my soul.” For Barry Gibb, this moment in the club is a psychedelic, almost religious experience. He’s completely in on this disco phenomenon. “There’s something going down, and I can feel it,” Barry Gibb sings in the opening moments of “Night Fever,” while the storm clouds are still gathering. It’s a song about love and attraction and desperation.
The bee gees saturday night fever album full#
And one of the things that sets “Night Fever” above so many of the other disco songs about disco dancing is that “Night Fever” is full Bee Gees. (There is a Bee Gees song with the word “boogie” in the title, but it’s not one of the hits.) Most of the time, the Bee Gees wrote about love and attraction and desperation. But the Bee Gees didn’t write novelty songs. The Bee Gees were not above a song like that. She responds with total ecstasy: “Oh my God, I just kissed Al Pacino!” This is all Tony Manero has ever wanted to hear.
Tony hesitates for a second, and then he does it. One of them immediately demands that he kiss her. Tony Manero, a Brooklyn teenager whose life is falling apart whenever he isn’t dancing, steps into the 2001 Odyssey club, sidles right between two girls, and twirls both of them. But “Night Fever” gets its own big sequence, too. The true classic dance scene in Saturday Night Fever is the one set to “ You Should Be Dancing,” a Bee Gees chart-topper from 1976. The Bee Gees didn’t like that title, and they tried to get him to change it to Night Fever, since they already had the song. Robert Stigwood, the Bee Gees manager and label boss who produced Saturday Night Fever, originally wanted to use just plain Saturday Night as the title. “Night Fever,” the longest-reigning #1 hit of 1978, was a strong enough single that a major motion picture had to change its marketing plans. March of 1978 was when that wave welled up and crested. It’s a 7.) The Beatles’ achievement is still totally singular in pop-chart history, but the Bee Gees had their own perfect storm. (One was baby brother Andy Gibb’s previous chart-topper “ (Love Is) Thicker Than Water.” The other was Samantha Sang’s “ Emotion,” which peaked at #3. If you include the songs that the Gibb brothers wrote and produced, the Bee Gees were responsible for four songs in the top five that week. The Bee Gees were the first post-Beatles artists to seize #1 and #2 at the same time. Those two songs held down the top two spots for five weeks in a row. The week that the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” hit #1, “ Stayin’ Alive” was the #2 song in America. But in March of 1978, the Bee Gees came closer than anyone else, ever. It’s the only time a single artist had ever occupied the entire top five. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.įor one week in April of 1964, the top five singles on the Billboard Hot 100 were all Beatles songs.
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