Beam Me Up, Barry

As is our yearly custom, Dewey Dell and I are spending a month unplugged from city life, taking stock in the woods and contemplating what exactly we mean by The Good Life. Again and again this summer, we come back to a vision presented by the brothers Gibb and everything the Bee Gees stand for: An unrepentant love of hair and silky fabrics, falsetto harmonies radiating love and brotherhood set to an insistent hi-hat and wah-wah pedal, built on diamond-cut pop melodies. It's something we can each strive for in our best moments: a complete and total abandonment of the tired axies of white/black and male/female, a reaching out for a futuristic, Star Trek-ian post-religious humanism where no one blinks when you decide to combine beards with satin and sing in registers normally reserved for women and choirboys. It's a freer vision of human life, one free of sexism, misogyny, racism or fascism.

Take a gander at Robin Gibb in this video, bedecked head to toe in skin-tight flesh-colored clothes and a gold medallion. Only a completely free and self-actualized man can wear that outfit. Look at his face while he sings his part of "Nights on Broadway" and see if you can detect an ounce of false pretense, shame, ironic detachment or gauche theatrical indulgence. You won't find it. Fact is, at the time of this taping, 1975, Robin is actually married with small children. He's just a man hanging out with his brothers making unbelievable pop music and singing his heart out. Watching Barry and Maurice, there's nothing here that smacks of overweening pride or the shallow exhibitionism of disco. In fact, there's still a reticence about them, a leftover shyness from their foppish 60's days...



Four years later, on the Spirits Have Flown tour, the reticence has been utterly annihilated and the performance of "Nights on Broadway" has been polished to a laser-like intensity, urged on by a gazillion fans desiring to rip the knickers off their bodies. And who can blame them? Robin's hair is now that of a Greek god; Barry is a white-panted Zeus; Maurice rules a netherworld where shirt buttons don't exist. The overall sex appeal has reached its liberated apex, a quantum splitting of the pop-disco atom into a nuclear radiance -- pure l-o-v-e. Plus, observe this unexpected side-effect: They rock harder than they've ever rocked before. I've said it before and I'll say it again: late 70s Bee Gees is the sine qua non of all Bee Gees-ism. And Bee Gees-ism is just a fancy way of saying: There's a better way to Bee. Beam me up, Barry...



Noted: Barry Gibb has a blog and he writes of events in short poetic verse. But of course he does. He also has some samples of his comedy stylings in a selection of short home movies. Lastly, you can actually take a virtual tour of his personal studio in Miami set to the beautiful strains of "Too Much Heaven."