Review Summary: "Don't walk so tall/Before you crawl/For every child/Is thinking of something wild."
While the Bee Gees are most famously associated with being the poster boys of the disco craze in the mid-to late seventies, digging deeper into their discography reveals a band who in the sixties garnered a good amount of success creating psychedelic-pop albums that mainly took notable influence from the middle era of the Beatles. Armed with an impeccable knack for melody and immediately recognizable three part vocal harmonization, the Bee Gees, who were a five-piece at this point in their career, quickly proved themselves to be a force to be reckoned with, going tit-for-tat alongside with the royalty of the baroque-pop era, including their main influences at this point, The Beatles, as well as The Moody Blues, and
Odessey and Oracle-era Zombies. While one can argue that the band never created a single album as cohesive as many of their British counterparts during the 60s (although the colorful
Bee Gees 1st comes close),
The Best of Bee Gees, a compilation album released in 1969 that is made up of the band’s greatest singles and corresponding b-sides during the early stages of their career, proves that the Bee Gees of the sixties played a crucial role in the development of baroque-pop on both sides of the Atlantic.
Best of Bee Gees is a wonderfully compiled best-of album that does not falter once during its relatively succinct forty minute running time. Despite the tracks being culled from four albums of material (which for many bands of the sixties brought a lifetime of innovation and various musical ideas),
The Best of Bee Gees flows remarkably well due to similar instrumentation, and the brilliant string laced arrangements that run throughout. Tracks like “To Love Somebody” and “I Started A Joke” will be immediately recognized by many for their swelling strings and soaring choruses – but it is the lesser known tracks here that often shine through, with the tracks selected from the Revolver-influenced,
Bee Gees 1st, often being the most memorable in this short collection. “Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You” is among the most innovative in their entire discography, weaving in a Gregorian chant, rolling drums, tambourines, and, most notably, utilizing a Moody Blues-style echo to full effect to enhance the staggered vocals of the harmonizing brothers. Similarly, “I Can’t See Nobody” is one of the most lushly arranged tracks in this collection, with prominent timpani, harpsichord, and mellotron parts that often overwhelm the rhythm section, so much so that the back beat can barely be heard or distinguished. While this may be a problem for a typical pop track, the instrumentation and extravagant orchestral arrangements emphasize the psychedelic flavor and distinctive melancholy mood of the band’s work at this point in their career - and, the brothers’ Gibb impassioned, distinctive vocal deliveries work so well that one does not even notice or mind. Put simply, while the instrumentation remains elaborate, it never overwhelms the listener, instead, the arrangements work unbelievably well in tandem with the Gibbs’ on-point and layered vocals like the best psychedelic bands of the era.
It is also easy to overlook the distinctive melancholy, and theatrical qualities that are present in the lyrics in many of these tracks – “I Gotta Get A Message to You” tells the story of a man who is about to be executed via electric chair begging the prison chaplain to pass his final words in the form of a note, to his wife: “…But if I broke her heart, won’t you tell her I’m sorry/And for once in my life I’m alone/And I’ve got to let her know just in time before I go/I’ve just got to get a message to you, hold on, hold on/One more hour and my life will be through, hold on, hold on.” Similarly, the darkest track on here- “New York Mining Disaster 1941” - is a brooding, haunting track that tells the tale of miners who have become trapped inside a mine: “I keep straining my ears to hear a sound/Maybe someone is digging underground/Or have they given up and all gone home to bed?/Thinking those who once existed must be dead.” The dark lyrical nature of many of the tracks in this collection offers a nice contrast to the more upbeat arrangements and vocals. On both musical and lyrical terms,
The Best of the Bee Gees (made distinctive on the shelves by its remarkably awful goldenrod album art), is a wonderful collection of baroque-pop songs from the early days of The Bee Gees that stands as being a great relic of the psychedelic era, and goes a long way in proving how versatile the band was over the course of their entire career.
