Bee Gees – A Kick in the Head is Worth Eight in the Pants

The last of three albums the Bee Gees recorded in 1972, A Kick in the Head is Worth Eight in the Pants was unissued thanks to the underperforming and underwhelming Life in a Tin Can.

Yet, despite its jokey title, A Kick in the Head… is reckoned to be the worthier contender and deservedly so.  Barry and Robin are in healthy vocal shape and the ballad heavy songs are at least well crafted.  More attention is paid to production than with its predecessor adding to an assured feel.

Sugar and grit

But still the writing lacks genuine inspiration.  The overall effect is of too much sugar and not enough grit.  Lonely Violin is the chief offender.  Despite an undeniably fetching melody it’s just too calculating to be really touching.  Lonely Violin wants to be taken seriously yet cannot truly touch me.  And yet neither does it tip into outright parody, Cucumber Castle style.

The most successful track is the striking Elisa, with its slow-build chorus gradually drawing us in.  Harry’s Gate extends nostalgic reminiscence into near self-mythology but it’s one of the more impressive songs here lent extra impact by the three brothers singing in unison on the chorus’ shared memories.

Production tends towards default lush as if hi-sheen surface alone demonstrates a quality product whereas it most likely suggests an overfriendliness towards AOR radio, ironic given that this album never made it onto the airwaves.  Like others, I can hear another Barry at times – Manilow – in the album’s romantic, schmaltzy sensibility.

Soft underbelly

And maybe that hints at the problem I have with the Bee Gees come 1972/73. In 1968, they simply wrote one freshly-minted song after another, put across with conviction, urgency and flair. Many were about lost love yet each conveyed a different emotional flavour. But five years down the line the Bee Gees’ emotion is like a kind of bland, en masse ‘thing’. They sound like a band producing what they think the public expects of them, no more and no less.

Four songs produced in London in early 1973 (King and Country, Jesus in Heaven, Life, Am I Wasting My Time? and the atypically political Dear Mr. Kissinger) are unfortunately not as compositionally strong as the best of the LA bunch.

It’s not hard to see why, at this point, even if at least one of the 1972 trio had fared rather better commercially, a change was required to relight the brothers’ fire. The Bee Gees’ soft underbelly was about to be made lean once again.

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A Kick In the Head is Worth Eight in the Pants [1973]

Side 1
Elisa
Wouldn’t I Be Someone
A Lonely Violin
Losers and Lovers
Home Again Rivers

Side 2
Harry’s Gate
Rocky LA
Castles In the Air
Where is Your Sister
It Doesn’t Matter Much to Me*

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Singles 1973 [related to A Kick In the Head…]
Wouldn’t I Be Someone
Elisa

* ‘It Doesn’t Matter Much to Me’ was B-side to 1974 single ‘Mr Natural’ from their album of that name.

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<- Life In a Tin Can

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Bee Gees Top 50 1966-72
Bee Gees’ Home Page

Bee Gees – Life In a Tin Can

The brothers don’t like this album much and neither do I.  An air of complacency hangs over proceedings not helped by the resolutely slow to middling pace across eight tracks lasting a mere thirty-two minutes.

Life In a Tin Can is the sound of the Bee Gees narrowing down their craft on almost every front.  Melodies mostly lack ambition and lyrics are unremarkable.  Where is the urgency, the passion?  Maybe the laidback LA vibe didn’t help.  At least they don’t pad out the tracks with superfluous instrumental breaks or extended codas so as to reach a forty-five minute running time.

Laidback LA 

Despite these shortcomings, Robin and Barry’s vocals are fine and Robin even stretches himself on Method to My Madness even if the material is too insubstantial to generate the necessary emotional payoff.  This being the height of Maurice’s struggles with drink, we also lack a Maurice lead vocal/composition; his down-to-earthness, often a necessary antidote to Barry and Robin’s aggrandising tendencies, is missed here.  Still it’s nice to hear Maurice’s electric piano updating the unobtrusive but fairly bland production.

The best tracks are the opener, I Saw a New Morning (good dynamics), Robin’s My Life Has Been a Song (Barry’s bridge anticipates mid-late 70s Bee Gees) and Method to My Madness: all three have melodies a cut above the rest whilst lacking the freshness and vitality of earlier triumphs such as To Love Somebody, I’ve Gotta Get a Message To You or even the hookability of the more recent Lonely Days.

Mushy

Elsewhere I Don’t Wanna be the One slides headlong into the mush which always threatens to engulf Life In a Tin Can.  Living in Chicago is well meaning but unengaging.  Barry plays with his post-The Gambler country thang again on South Dakota Morning but it’s getting a bit played out now.

So not a single Can track in My Top 50.  ‘I played the game, Still it’s not worth it’.  This just about sums it up.

 

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Life In a Tin Can [1973]

Side 1
Saw a New Morning
I Don’t Wanna Be the One
South Dakota Morning
Living in Chicago

Side 2
While I Play
My Life Has Been a Song
Come Home Johnny Bridie
Method to My Madness

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Singles 1973 [related to Life In a Tin Can]

Saw a New Morning
My Life Has Been a Song

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-> A Kick in the Head is Worth Eight in the Pants
<- To Whom It May Concern

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Bee Gees Top 50 1966-72
Bee Gees’ Home Page

Bee Gees – To Whom It May Concern

Not quite a coherent album, especially following Trafalgar, but one which definitely rewards repeated listens, To Whom It May Concern shows the Bee Gees firing pretty strongly during their so called wilderness years even if the album lacks a signature identity.

The two main singles are both in their familiar ballad vein but very contrasting – the smoothly reassuring Run to Me and the frantically persuasive Alive.   It’s perhaps surprising that the huge success of How Can You Mend a Broken Heart hasn’t inspired deeper ventures into smooth soul.  Run to Me really feels quite teenage beside How Can You Mend’s … silky, adult aspirations.

Elsewhere, the brothers search for new sounds and land on a number of touchstones.  Maurice is absurdly McCartnesque on You Know It’s For You, whilst Alan Kendall’s aggressive lead guitar propels Bad, Bad, Dreams into the crunchy spotlight.  Paper Mache, Cabbages and Kings is one of the wackiest tracks but it shows the Bee Gees could still marry quirkiness to a decent tune and leave you to read into the weirdness as much or as little as you like.  But perhaps most surprising is the moog prog of Please Don’t Turn Out the Lights, the closest the brothers would come to truly experimental in this incarnation at least, though it’s far from the strongest track here.

Scattergun

So diversity and a slightly low key approach ensure To Whom It May Concern is never tiring like Cucumber Castle and rarely dull like 2 Years On but, taken overall, not brilliant either.   The main problem is a lack of overall plan or purpose, its scattergun approach feeling slightly cobbled together, pervaded with a sense of doubt as to whether anyone out there was listening let alone cared.

Not many fans or casual listeners will head for this album as their first Bee Gees port of call, but when you’ve exhausted the big hitters, there are some surprises to be found here and I think you’ll find To Whom It May Concern grows on you.

 

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To Whom It May Concern [1972]

Side 1
Run To Me
We Lost the Road
Never Been Alone
Paper Mache, Cabbages and Kings
I Can Bring Love
I Held a Party
Please Don’t Turn Out the Lights

Side 2
Sea of Smiling Faces
Bad Bad Dreams
You Know It’s For You
Alive
Road to Alaska
Sweet Song of Summer

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Singles 1972 [related to To Whom It May Concern]

My World
On Time

Run to Me
Road to Alaska

Sea of Smiling Faces
Please Don’t Turn Out the Lights

Alive
Paper Mache, Cabbages and Kings

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->  Life In a Tin Can 
<-  Trafalgar

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Bee Gees Top 50 1966-72
Bee Gees’ Home Page

Bee Gees – Trafalgar

Trafalgar looks to new horizons with an uncertainty which sums up the band’s situation at the time.

Despite huge singles success with Lonely Days and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, the Bee Gees’ chart entries increasingly feel like isolated milestones measured further apart.  But here they turn the tenuousness of their position to their advantage.

Trafalgar is simply the Bee Gees’ best early 70s album, one which needs to be heard from the first to last groove and preferably in one sitting.  Allegedly it was to have been a twenty-track opus, thus overtaking Odessa, but even in two-sided format, Trafalgar’s monumentality is an altogether more measured affair and as a twelve track album of forty-seven minutes, it doesn’t feel at all foreshortened.

Emotional landscape

At last the Bee Gees have come up with a vision for the new decade and the songs to match it.  Those who only know the Bee Gees for their ‘disco’ hits are often stunned at hearing relatively unknown tracks like Trafalgar and Walking Back to Waterloo.  Trafalgar is underplayed and touching whilst Walking Back to Waterloo marks a breadth, maturity and sheer emotionality which is perhaps unrivalled in the brothers’ back catalogue.

Elsewhere, the extended songs which were tiresome on 2 Years On come alive, especially Don’t Want to Live Inside Myself where Barry really expands his vocals.  They almost savage Lion in Winter whilst When Do I sounds like a strange vocal exercise.

Sensuousness, alienation, frustration, a search for the heroic and the occasional influence of The Beatles (still) are felt in Trafalgar.  Maurice’s deep bass and chordal piano sound great and Bill Shepherd’s dignified arrangements provide orchestral weight.

It’s a different landscape – moody, expansive, atmospheric – and it works.

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Trafalgar [1971]

Side 1
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
Israel
The Greatest Man in the World
It’s Just the Way
Remembering
Somebody Stop the Music

Side 2
Trafalgar
Don’t Wanna Live Inside Myself
When Do I
Dearest
Lion In Winter
Walking Back to Waterloo

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Singles 1971/72 [related to Trafalgar] 

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
Country Woman

Don’t Wanna Live Inside Myself
Walking Back to Waterloo

Israel
Dearest

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Other artists 1971

Lulu – Everybody Clap

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-> To Whom It May Concern
<- 2 Years On

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Bee Gees Top 50 1966-72
Bee Gees’ Home Page

A Little Something Especially For You

Among the many family belongings I am still sorting through are stacks of greetings cards from the early 1950s to the early noughties.  

I thought I’d share some of those from the 60s/70s in random order across two posts. 

 

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Is this charming or merely kitsch?

It straightaway reminds me of the highly sentimental portraits of children lining the walls of department stores in the 70s (Woolworths, Boots, Timothy Whites).

Those shop waifs and strays invariably possessed doe eyes crying tears of dubious size down dimpled cheeks.  But this cheerful twosome have something of Bill and Penelope about them.

 

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The Woolworths associations apply even more strongly to this portrait of cute, moral uprightness from the mid-late 60s probably aimed at doting grandparents:

The prayerful pose would probably never find its way onto cards in our far more secular age, at least not outside of cathedral bookshops.  This isn’t how we want children to be any more.

 

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I’m surprised that this Wedding Anniversary card dates from as late as 1966:

It could easily be from at least a decade earlier.  I imagine the vase carefully positioned in a palatial hallway by a butler’s begloved hands.

My collection is stuffed with variations on these rather stiff bouquets in as assortment of urns and classical vases.  They strike me as emblems of prestige though not of material aspiration, representing a kind of official good taste.  But they are also dull and respectable, joyless even.

In an age of care bears and other fluff, it’s the adult seriousness of this card which dates it most.

 

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This has 1960s stamped all over it:

The chequered brown, yellow and green background adds a modernist touch though the card belongs squarely next to a gilt carriage clock on a tiled mantelpiece.  When I look at this, I hear Frank Chacksfield, Royal Daffodil or perhaps Jim Reeves. 

 

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A card which inspired a dozen These You Have Loved  LP covers.  Or was it the other way round?

To be given accompanying a large box of assorted milk chocolates.  The surprisingly underplayed message is rather endearing and all the more effective for that.

 

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An Englishman’s home is his castle.

It’s 1969 and here we have a reassuring image of sturdy masculinity in the making:

Background props are crucial; the bookcase implies inculcating a love of learning but the fireplace spreads parental warmth.

More choice selections in two weeks time.

 

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Moving House 
Growing up with Lego
Cuisenaire rods
Playplax

Bee Gees – 2 Years On

If Cucumber Castle was hyperbolic, 2 Years On is pervaded with an insipid feel and, for me, a sense of disappointment and anti-climax.  They got back together – for this?  Had the brothers used up their stock of quality material on their 1970 solo albums?  Perhaps but thankfully, as it turns out, they were also stock-piling for 1971’s Trafalgar.

Off their high horses

It’s clear the Bee Gees weren’t going to get back on their art-pop high horses to continue where Odessa left off.  Given the splintering in rock which had grown into a chasm during that 1969/70 hiatus, it just wouldn’t have been a credible move.  Indeed, the low-key feel of 2 Years On can be heard as a deliberate antidote to the ‘excesses’ (which I would argue were not excesses at all) of their red-velvet high watermark.  Only Lonely Days (the album’s only single) feels vital and attention grabbing here, though being just short of a Beatles‘ pastiche it is hardly impressively original.

For once, Bill Shepherd’s arrangements seem to suck the life out of the (fairly lifeless) songs.  Most are slow paced and sometimes over-stretched; The First Mistake I Ever Made is a repeat offender.

We have so-so country (Portrait of Louise), a would-be weepie (Tell Me Why) whilst the raw, lively though slightly out-of-place tour blues lament Back Home is annoyingly allowed to dissipate.  2 Years On might have worked in Robin’s Sing Slowly Sisters style but as an album opener it’s just uninspiring and meandering (nice chorale prequel though).  Sincere Relation is Robin at his most eccentric but with its gravely portentous ‘but then he died …’ can’t make me feel much – a shame as I sense it’s probably a most personal piece.  Robin’s contributions generally come off worst of the three.

Sub-prime Bee Gees

Hearing 2 Years On makes me long for the clipped precision of songs such as Lemons Never Forget.  The album actually feels most successful at its most incongruous – the stripped-down Back Home, the swampy Every Second, Every Minute (mimicking 1968’s The Earnest of Being George) and rootsy Lay It On Me which playfully hints at Maurice’s drink problem.  But these diversions into sub-prime Bee Gees territory often feel more forced than earlier excursions such as Lemons Never Forget (why do I keep coming back to that song?)

The brothers are in good voice and of course it’s great to hear them harmonising again but this hardly trumpets a return to form let alone an inspirational new departure.  Overall 2 Years On lacks identity, feels pedestrian and fails to create much in the way of atmosphere.

Already two albums into the new decade but it seems as if the Bee Gees are adrift in the 70s.  Thankfully they get it together on Trafalgar.

 

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2 Years On [1970]

Side 1
2 Years On
Portrait of Louise
Man For All Seasons
Sincere Relation
Back Home
The First Mistake I Made

Side 2
Lonely Days
Alone Again
Tell Me Why
Lay It On Me
Every Second, Every Minute
I’m Weeping

 

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Singles 1970 [related to 2 Years On]

Lonely Days
Man For All Seasons

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-> Trafalgar
<- Cucumber Castle

 

Bee Gees Top 50 1966-72
Bee Gees Home Page

Bee Gees – Cucumber Castle

High drama meets sock-it-to-me sentiment in big productions numbers.  The Bee Gees may be down to a duo but what they lack in manpower they make up for by delivering an onslaught of thick, multi-layered, multi-tracked, cavernous sound.

Cucumber Castle is moderately enjoyable as a genre-pastiche album, the genre being a kind of schlocky, Spectoresque take on country but it’s too dripping with sentiment to truly engage.  Talk about over egging the pudding…  And most worryingly, the songwriting has gone down a couple of notches as well.

Lacquered emotion

If Only I Had My Mind on Something Else is an uncharacteristically reflective, unassuming opener but thereafter we’re mostly drowning in choirs, horns and oodles of emotion.  I Lay Down and Die plasters it on so lavishly you have to admire its bravado whilst Bury Me Down by the River successfully marries a dark lyric to an instantly singalong, though somewhat generic, gospel-country melody.  I prefer to end the album with Turning Tide reaching out to Trafalgar so as to avoid the lacquered emotion of Don’t Forget to Remember.

My problem with Cucumber Castle is that it unashamedly pulls out all the stops for massive and massively sentimental ballads, providing the band’s detractors with all the ammunition they need for decrying the Bee Gees as appealing to bored, middle-aged housewives.  In contrast, Odessa carries sentimentality aloft amidst waves of unabashed grandeur, the orchestration aspiring to splendour not whipped up ersatz cream.  If there is a link between the two albums it is First of May which just about works within the context of Odessa but alarmingly signals the degree to which the brothers were prepared to ratchet up the sentimentality.

Cucumber Castle tires you the more you hear it.  And the stark corrective of Robin’s contributions are missed.

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Cucumber Castle [1970]

Side 1
If Only I Had My Mind on Something Else
I.O.I.O.
Then You Left Me
The Lord
I Was the Child
I Lay Down and Die

Side 2
Sweetheart
Bury Me Down By the River
My Thing
The Chance of Love
Turning Tide
Don’t Forget to Remember

 

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Singles 1969/70 [related to Cucumber Castle]

Don’t Forget to Remember
The Lord

If Only I Had My Mind on Something Else
Sweetheart

I.O.I.O.
Sweetheart

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Unreleased 1969/70

Who Knows What a Room Is

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-> 2 Years On
<- Odessa 

Bee Gees Top 50 1966-72
Bee Gees’ Home Page

Odessa – unlistenable?

I’m dumbfounded by David N. Meyer’s assertion that Odessa is ‘sentimental and derivative, harder to sit through than “Number 9” on the White Album’.*

First of May is a far more obvious candidate for the ‘sentimental’ tag with its oodles of strings and full blown nostalgic appeal to never-ending love.  And as for derivative, derivative of what precisely?

He also describes Odessa as ‘pretentious and unlistenable.’*  I can understand the ‘pretentious’ label because Odessa is straining at the leash of the three minute pop song; it’s a deliberate attempt to reach for new territories and one can argue about whether it succeeds.  But ‘unlistenable’ is harder to stomach when Meyer reserves his highest praise for Robin’s pained and frankly painful Avalanche, a brave experiment in emotional catharsis, possibly but hard to endure.

* David N. Meyer, The Bee Gees: the biography (2013) pages 80/82.

Odessa album review

Bee Gees – Odessa

The Bee Gees’ red velvet masterpeace (sic) brims with drama and melodrama.

Side 1 forms the core of a concept album of sorts, far-reaching yet highly personal, albeit in the brothers’ characteristically oblique fashion.

Then side 2 takes us on a wholly unexpected diversion – five songs in styles vastly different from what has gone before and from each other kicking off with the languid Marley Purt Drive (a competent but unimaginative Band tribute/rip-off) and wrapped up by the startling Whisper, Whisper – teetering melody, stoner vocal, slyly knowing late 60s in-referencing.

Forgotten concept

On sides 3 and 4, Seven Seas Symphony, With All Nations and finale The British Opera attempt, like some remonstrative baton-tapping conductor, to restore some semblance of over-arching order.  We’ve probably forgotten whatever concept there was by then anyway and perhaps that’s the point – the lushness, the grandiosity, the sheer sumptuous magnificence and the emotions conveyed – are the concept.

At times, Odessa barely feels like a rock album at all, not even a rock opera album.  The title track is almost devoid of conventional pop/rock elements and the theatrical Lamplight luxuriates in conservatism.

Magisterial

One thing hugely in the album’s favour is that, although epic and magisterial, only rarely is Odessa pompous (the choral/instrumental tracks and then knowingly so) and never is it dull.  The whole edifice hangs together with a certain strange splendour.

Far from fading with passing years, time has actually lent that red velvet a lustre in the eyes of fans and critics it never acquired at the time. Only now can Odessa’s unique delights take their place alongside the great albums of a great year in rock.

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Odessa [1969]

Side 1
Odessa (City on the Black Sea)
You’ll Never See My Face Again
Black Diamond

Side 2
Marley Purt Drive
Edison
Melody Fair
Suddenly
Whisper, Whisper

Side 3
Lamplight
Sound of Love
Give Your Best
Seven Seas Symphony
With All Nations (International Anthem)

Side 4
I Laugh In Your Face
Never Say Never Again
First Of May
The British Opera

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Singles 1969 [related to Odessa]

First Of May
Lamplight

Tomorrow, Tomorrow
Sun In My Morning

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Unreleased 1969

Nobody’s Someone
Pity

* released on Odessa Rhino reissue, 2009

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-> Two Years On
<- Idea

Bee Gees Top 50 1966-72
Bee Gees’ Home Page

Another Cold and Windy Day

Another Cold and Windy Day may have been only a promotional piece for Coke but it bares all the hallmarks of the Bee Gees’ melodic melancholia at its best (let’s, for the moment, overlook the small matter of the chorus lyrics: ‘Things go better with Coca Cola’).  It’s surprising that the drinks’ manufacturer wanted to link their product to such a sad, introverted little piece even if it does market Coke as some kind of panacea for Winter depression.

Hearing Another Cold and Windy Day makes me realise it’s this melancholic quality – plentiful on Horizontal – which is what’s missing from Side 1 of Idea.  I’d substitute Robin’s somewhat flat ballad In the Summer of His Years for a deCoked Another Cold and Windy Day any day.

Given the song’s likely recording date of late 1967/early 1968, I’m surprised to find Rhino filed it  under their Idea rerelease.  It’s overall sound – harpsichord, cellos – suggests a Horizontal sensibility.