Remember When: The Bee Gees Rebound to the Top of the Charts After a Dreadful Movie Flop in the Late 1970s

Rarely does a musician of note enjoy a career that follows a strictly linear path. Most careers are marked by a series of ups and downs. That said, The Bee Gees’ rollercoaster proved a bit more volatile than most.

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The Brothers Gibb hit a career nadir when they starred in an infamous flop of a musical. Luckily, they had some music in the can that helped them recover in a hurry.

Three Brothers Take on the Fab Four

You can kind of understand why Bee Gees would be attracted to the 1978 film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. After all, the guy pulling the strings on the film had already guided them to the biggest success of their career.

We’re talking about Robert Stigwood, Bee Gees’ longtime manager. Stigwood had optioned a New York Times article about disco and turned it into the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever. The Bee Gees’ music dominated the soundtrack. It made the three men the biggest pop stars in the world.

Naturally, when Stigwood tried to corral them into a movie dramatizing some of The Beatles’ most memorable late-career hits, the brothers signed on board. Peter Frampton, himself enjoying career-best success thanks to Frampton Comes Alive!, joined them atop the marquee. What could possibly go wrong?

Poor ‘Pepper’

In the annals of musical disasters, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ranks way up there. The acclaimed documentary The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart doesn’t even mention the film. That omission says a lot.

None of the brothers, nor Frampton for that matter, knew how to act. Also, the plot was downright silly. Even the musical interpretations labored to match the excellence of the originals. It also didn’t help that Robin Gibb spoke out at the time, predicting The Bee Gees’ versions of the songs would essentially replace the originals by The Beatles in the public consciousness.

Sales were tepid and reviews were awful. Only Aerosmith and Earth, Wind & Fire, who came up with solid covers of Fab Four classics, came away unscathed. Peter Frampton’s career took a major hit from the fallout. Luckily, the Brothers Gibb had some songs in the can that helped them return to the top of the heap, if only briefly.

Resilient ‘Spirits’

Even as the Sgt. Pepper’s movie was sputtering badly, Bee Gees were laying down material for the Spirits Having Flown album, which was released in early 1979. The singles from the record shook off the hangover from the movie flop quite handily.

“Too Much Heaven”, “Tragedy”, and “Inside And Out” went back-to-back-to-back to the top of the US pop charts. For the moment, The Bee Gees seemed impervious to any criticism. But that was about the change, through no fault of their own.

The disco movement, which had propelled the brothers to such dizzying heights, fell out of favor in a hurry as the 80s dawned. Even though by then they had adjusted their sound, The Bee Gees, seen as the leaders of that movement, were shunned by radio. It would be another decade before they scored another US Top 10 hit.

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