The Bee Gees: Spirits Having Flown
1979 saw The Brothers Gibb reach new heights
The following is an excerpt from David N. Meyer’s The Bee Gees: The Biography (Da Capo Press) available now.
The Spirits Having Flown tour opened in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 28 and closed—where else?—in Miami on October 6. It spanned forty-one shows, including Montreal, Toronto and three sold-out nights in a row at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The tour hit massive arenas—sports stadiums—like Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the Summit in Houston and the Silverdome in Detroit. “I’ve never seen them as nervous as they were before the tour started,” Dick Ashby said. “They’re at the pinnacle of their careers, and people will try to tear them down.” Tickets were going for $700 for scalpers, and in LA at least, Bee Gees merchandise sold at the rate of $3,000 a minute.
The Bee Gees wore their iconic outfits of white satin flared pants and white spangled jackets and scarves. Most nights those jackets were open down to their beltlines. The lights, the clothes, the stage, the postures—Barry with his legs akimbo, braced to send the sound outward and receive the applause coming in; Maurice goofy and self-conscious, always moving around the stage; Robin quite loose, hands on his hips, graceful and dreamily responsive to the rhythm of the music—turned every show into what the Bee Gees intended: a spectacle. A bigger than life, aggressively perfect, show-biz spectacle, half pop-music, half Las Vegas and determined to be the best at both.
The younger fans squealed like they were seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium. An eighteen-year-old Maryland girl said: “I can’t help it, it just comes out. I want them to know I’m their fan. Nothing can top them—not the Beatles, not nobody.” “I couldn’t take it,” Dick Ashby said. “I had to break off two cigarette filters and stick them in my ears.” Which is just what the cops at Shea Stadium had done.
“Tragedy” was one of only two songs from Spirits on the set list. The middle of the show was a medley of “NY Mining Disaster,” “Run To Me,” “Too Much Heaven,” “Holiday,” “I Can’t See No-body,” “Lonely Days,” “I Started a Joke,” “Massachusetts” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” The show-stopping climax—when the mirrored disco balls and gigantic Bee Gees logo descended—was “Nights on Broadway.” The show closed with “Jive Talkin’.” The band came back out for one encore, “You Should Be Dancin’.” “Dancin’” had an extended percussion break and ended with a bang. Within a minute of that bang, Barry, Maurice and Robin were in their limos, rolling either toward their hotel or the 707.
“Nineteen fifty-five was when we first stepped on stage,” Barry said later. “So we’ve been doing it longer than people think. After we toured America in ’79, the exhaustion of being the Bee Gees set in and we couldn’t see what tomorrow was going to bring.” And yet, despite the length of the tour, the logistics and security and the nightly pressure to be unforgettable, there is not one moment in videos of their performance when anyone on stage appears bored, disengaged or even tired. Some nights some folks might appear totally wasted, but that’s different. What the Bee Gees appear to be, night after night, is present, attentive, fulfilled and happy.
They did not regard this tour as a chore. They had a tremendously good time. The sales, the Grammys, the #1s from the new record, the sold-out forty-thousand-seat arenas; this wasn’t validation, this was victory. And it was valedictory—the Bee Gees were graduating, on stage, in front of the world, to whatever was next.
John Travolta showed up in Houston and danced with the band. There were sixty thousand paying fans at Dodger Stadium in LA. Celebrity guests included Harry Wayne Casey of KC and the Sunshine Band, Barbra Streisand, Cary Grant, Karen Carpenter and the Jackson family. At Madison Square Garden the guests included Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley from KISS—who were always interested in spectacle—and Al Pacino. President Jimmy Carter invited the band to the White House prior to the September 24 gig in Washington, DC, to honor the Bee Gees for their work with UNICEF.
Touring is unspeakably dull for those touring, especially those who don’t get onstage. Naturally, there must be distractions. But the security on this tour not only kept outsiders out, it kept inside information in. Few backstage stories of outrageous behavior ever emerged. One good way to quantify drug use on a tour with tight security is to consider the level of denial of drug use. On this tour, that denial was absolute. A tour security guy, an ex-FBI agent, claims there were no drugs at all anywhere at any time: “I checked my sources on these guys. I wasn’t going to risk my rep on three rock stars who are into hard drugs.” Robin said: “There is no Happy Hour on this tour, where everybody throws a TV set out the window.” Indeed, it is hard to throw a TV out of a moving 707.
