FEATURE:
Needle Drops and Scores to Settle
Scene Three: You Should Be Dancing: Saturday Night Fever (1977)
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I think I will…
move onto the score for Psycho for the next instalment of this feature. However, today, I am exploring one of the greatest film soundtracks ever. Saturday Night Fever was released in 1977 and is considered one of the all-time best films. I think that its soundtrack is more memorable and discussed as the film itself. I am going to start out with this feature, that tells the story of how the Bee Gees wrote the songs for the soundtrack in a week.
“Popular music in the '70s had many dividing lines, but none was bigger than disco.
Bee Gees played an undeniable role in this shift, notably with their involvement with the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. Starring John Travolta as Tony Manero, the film was a critical and commercial success, grossing more than $20 million within the first few weeks of its release on Dec. 16, 1977.
Saturday Night Fever may not have invented disco, but it brought it to the forefront of pop culture in a way that was "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant," as the Library of Congress noted in 2010 when the movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Bee Gees would became unshakably tied to the project, even though they never intended to be at the helm of the disco movement or even involved in the film.
In fact, their music had been more rooted in traditional pop, rock, country and R&B than dance-floor music. It hadn't always been easy. Bee Gees had split up and reconvened by the time Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood approached them, reaching both the top and the bottom of the charts. They were currently back on top thanks to hit songs like "Jive Talkin'" and "You Should Be Dancing."
There was something particularly compelling about Bee Gees to Stigwood, who had been managing the group since 1967. "I loved their composing,” Stigwood told Rolling Stone in 1977. "I also loved their harmony singing. It was unique, the sound they made. I suppose it was a sound only brothers could make."
Stigwood offered little detail about the new project when he called. "We were recording our new album in the north of France," Robin Gibb would later recall, "and we'd written about and recorded about four or five songs for the new album when Stigwood rang from L.A. and said, 'We're putting together this little film, low budget, called Tribal Rites of a Saturday Night. Would you have any songs on hand?' And we said, 'Look, we can't, we haven't any time to sit down and write for a film.' We didn't know what it was about."
"Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" was the title of a 1976 New York magazine story about the disco scene written by British journalist Nik Cohn. The article turned out to be mostly fictional but served as source material for Saturday Night Fever. Meanwhile, the production of the film had already started.
"The Bee Gees weren't even involved in the movie in the beginning," Travolta told Vanity Fair in 2007. "I was dancing to Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs." He was also grooving to Bee Gees' aptly titled "You Should Be Dancing," a 1976 No. 1 that Travolta insisted be kept in the movie even though it was not written for it. The Gibb brothers were unaware of any of that. They only knew that Stigwood was looking for songs and that he had faith in the group.
Even though they knew very little about the movie's plot, Bee Gees started working on music for it anyway, writing a handful of songs to show Stigwood. When Stigwood and film-music producer Bill Oakes came by the Chateau d'Herouville in France where the group was working, the film's script was still unseen. "They hadn’t even looked at it," Oakes told Billboard in 2022.
"What Robert did tell them in broad terms is it's about a guy who works in a paint store and blows all his wages on a Saturday night, and he goes to a club and they do the hustle," Oakes added. "Robert's mission was [to] get the Bee Gees to write a disco track that you cannot stop dancing to, with a great melody – and that's how they came up with 'Night Fever,' for instance. These are great melodies that happened to be in the disco mold. That was the breakthrough. It was interesting: they just simply dropped the live album they were mixing and went straight into it."
The songs began to roll in one after another, and Stigwood's initial feedback was simple: "We played him demo tracks of 'If I Can't Have You,' 'Night Fever' and 'More Than a Woman,'" Maurice Gibb told Rolling Stone in 1978. "He asked if we could write it more disco-y." They took that advice to heart when writing the platinum-selling "Stayin' Alive."
Barry Gibb said Stigwood gave them straight-forward instructions for the track: "Give me eight minutes – eight minutes, three moods. I want frenzy at the beginning. Then I want some passion, and then I want some w-i-i-i-ld frenzy!" The song was written in just two hours”.
Whilst we talk about the Bee Gees’ songs on Saturday Night Fever, it is worth remembering that these soundtrack features composed pieces by David Shire, together with songs by popular artists such as Kool & The Gang. On its forty-fifth anniversary in 2022, Albumism explored this iconic film soundtrack. It is an extensive feature, so I am only including a small part of it:
“The balance of the soundtrack album is comprised of original score pieces commissioned by American composer David Shire, in addition to an arsenal of mostly familiar tracks like The Trammps' "Disco Inferno" and Kool and the Gang's "Open Sesame" that were chart hits within the past two years. The artists probably benefited from the additional exposure in the film and on the soundtrack, but it's likely they didn't reap the rewards of the album's explosive sales. "In the annals of history, it could be one of the most profitable records ever created," Galuten insists. "Because it's a double album, and I don't know how much Robert paid David Shire in royalties, because a lot of the songs like 'Night On Disco Mountain' are just sort of orchestra stuff to fill out the album. I mean, you know, he did a good job and they're all fine and lovely, but they're not pop songs. And songs like KC and the Sunshine Band's 'Boogie Shoes'—it was all in the plan to have a few hits and to have a lot of stuff that was inexpensive. I believe I heard that [Stigwood] has licensed those songs, like the Ralph MacDonald track ['Calypso Breakdown']...for pennies.
I think the only things he was paying full royalties on were the major artists. I don't even know what the deals were like for Tavares or Yvonne Elliman. They didn't have huge hits at the time, so they probably had really low licensing fees. The person that made out like a bandit with that record, besides the Bee Gees because writers' royalties are fixed and they're not negotiable, was Robert and RSO Records."
When asked when he believes he realized that the songs he helped to create for Saturday Night Fever had become much more than just a stack of hit records, Galuten insists he had a hunch from the beginning that they were special. "These songs were so good, and we were all so focused. Because there was nothing else going on in France—we didn't know anybody there, it was out in the middle of the country. We'd get up in the morning and go to the studio and hang out all day long. There was nothing else to do. We knew that these were amazing. There was just the sense that, like, 'oh my God. These are absolute smashes.'
When you hear a phrase like 'Night Fever' and you go 'no-one has ever said the phrase 'Night Fever' before,' or associating the image of 'Stayin' Alive' with the streets of New York and daily life and...it's not about the Vietnam War, you go 'oh my God.' Barry had this knack for—you could call it hyperbole—but this brilliant sort of mapping of these extreme adjectives onto things that might otherwise be mundane. And it gives you perspective to see them as being important."
While the Bee Gees' music was ubiquitous throughout most of 1978, they made few public appearances and scheduled no live dates in support of Saturday Night Fever. In March 1978, right in at the pinnacle of their chart-breaking halcyon, they retreated back into the studio to begin work on what would eventually be the Spirits Having Flown album. When asked if the team was at all nervous to record a commercially successful follow-up to their Fever contributions, Galuten insists they weren't. "I think we were protected by the hubris of youth. When we were working on songs, we weren't wondering 'I wonder if this is a hit?' We would take bets on how many weeks at number one it would get. So to answer your question about us being nervous going back into the studio: no. We were on fire."
Public favor of Saturday Night Fever's music and, by association, the Bee Gees' popularity, has waxed and waned at different points over the years. Although perhaps no rejection of either was as caustic as the "Disco Demolition Night" baseball promotion at Comiskey Park in Chicago in July 1979, during which local radio station WLUP-FM offered 98 cent tickets to a Chicago White Sox-Detroit Tigers double-header in exchange for fans bringing their disco records to the stadium to be destroyed in an on-field explosion. It was nothing short of riotous, leaving many to speculate if the lambaste was really about the music or the cultural and social identities from which the music was appropriated. The Gibbs themselves, frustrated by the backlash they'd residually receive throughout the 1980s, have also dismissed their involvement with Fever at different points. When asked about "Stayin' Alive" by Rolling Stone in 1988, they quipped "we'd like to dress it up in a white suit and set it on fire."
But yet, great music is perennial (and yes, I consider the Bee Gees' contributions to the soundtrack to be indisputably great) and nostalgia seems to be working more for the music of Saturday Night Fever these days than against. Galuten believes the soundtrack and the film still have something profound to offer forty-five years later. "[It's] about how people...the music that influences them is what they listened to in high school and college. And when you're 30, 40, 50, 60, the music from your teenage years has an impact on you viscerally and emotionally that no later music ever has. If you talk to anybody and ask them what their favorite music is, across ages, the similarity itself is not the music. It's the age they were when the music was popular. So all the people that were growing up at this time—this was very important to them.
The thing that makes music really touch lots of people is when it gives some sort of a voice to people who have not had a voice. The Beatles gave a voice to adolescents, and obviously Motown and Stax gave a voice to people who did not have a voice, just like hip-hop did. And so I always wonder 'who did Saturday Night Fever give voice to?' And then I realize it was working-class Americans who had no output and nobody representing them. And here was something saying 'even though my day-to-day life may be mundane, I can go out on Saturday night and I can resonate. This speaks to me’”.
A soundtrack that was top of the charts for twenty-four weeks in 1978, Saturday Night Fever was this sensation! American Songwriter shone a light on some of the wonderful and timeless songs from the 1977 soundtrack. Of course, the Bee Gees’ contributions are the most discussed and most important. I think that Saturday Night Fever might be the best soundtrack ever:
“More Than a Woman” by Tavares, written by Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, and Robin Gibb
Oh, girl, I’ve known you very well
I’ve seen you growing every day
I never really looked before
But now you take my breath away
Suddenly, you’re in my life
Part of everything I do
You got me working day and night
Just tryin’ to keep a hold on you
The Gibb brothers wrote and recorded “More Than a Woman,” but the single released was by Tavares. Both versions appeared on the soundtrack album. Tavares had a successful career before they were involved in Saturday Night Fever. The Tavares version of the song was also included on their album Future Bound, released in April 1978.
“Stayin’ Alive” by Bee Gees, written by Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, and Robin Gibb
Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother
You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Drummer Dennis Bryon had to leave the studio during recording due to the death of his mother. The Gibb brothers had trouble finding a suitable replacement, so they turned to a drum machine. They were unhappy with the results, so producer Albhy Galuten looped a couple of bars from the already recorded “Night Fever.” This resulted in the inside joke with the drummer being credited as Bernard Lupe. After the “song”Stayin’ Alive”‘s success, Lupe became a sought-after drummer until it was discovered he was fictitious.
“If I Can’t Have You” by Yvonne Elliman, written by Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, and Robin Gibb
I can’t write one song that’s not about you
Can’t drink without thinkin’ about you
Is it too late to tell you that
Everything means nothing if I can’t have you
The original plan was to have ballad singer Yvonne Elliman perform “How Deep Is Your Love” for the movie, but Stigwood stepped in and switched the song, giving the disco song to her instead. The song would go to No. 1, knocking “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees out of the top spot”.
Before ending with a feature that is about the legacy and popularity of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, I want to highlight a feature from Pitchfork published in 2020. They argue why the film is much more than its soundtrack. This dark B-side of Disco, it is a gritty, controversial and often tragic film. Something we do not really associate or get from the soundtrack. If one thinks that Disco was all glamour and inclusiveness, Saturday Night Fever projects this more homogeneous and violent (often homophonic and toxic) side:
"But the movie doesn’t coast on the strength of the soundtrack alone. There’s something harrowingly poignant about the story that’s impossible to shake off, as opposed to a more vapid disco film like 1978’s Thank God It’s Friday, starring Donna Summer (for which “Last Dance” was written but deeply underused). In 1994, Cohn admitted that his famed New York piece was largely fiction—there was no disco pupil named Vincent, the basis for Travolta’s Tony. Even with the fabrication, Norman Wexler’s adapted screenplay speaks a lot of truth about disenfranchised Brooklyn youth in the ’70s.
Bottom of Form
Under the groovy undercurrent served by spectacular needle drops, the sinister nature of Saturday Night Fever can be felt early on. When Tony and his friends first arrive at 2001 Odyssey, their homophobic, racist, and misogynistic attitudes are revealed through slur-laden chatter. Even though the club scenes are the film’s most intoxicating, they also reveal the grotesquely white and heterosexual appropriation of dance culture.
The feeling that first drove disco—the sense of escapism provided by the club—remains intact, however. On the floor, Tony is no longer a poor paint-store employee, he is an Adonis. Women are happy to merely wipe sweat off his forehead, which you can almost understand given Travolta’s palpable boyish charisma. Many of the characters in this Bay Ridge crowd, especially Tony, show a desire to graduate to a better life, to eventually cross over to Manhattan and become the ideal New Yorker. Tony finds inspiration in pop-culture warriors like Bruce Lee, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, and Al Pacino in Serpico, whose photos hang on his bedroom wall alongside a crucifix. But he is simultaneously fettered by the expectations of his very Catholic, working-class family; he feels some pressure lifted when his goody-goody brother Frank leaves the priesthood.
The last few minutes of Saturday Night Fever are the most traumatic. Though Tony often shows a stronger conscience than his jerk friends, he is no less a participant in toxic masculinity. He seems to have a breakthrough toward the end when he realizes his victory at the big dance contest is served by white privilege. But the events immediately following turn even darker, as Tony attempts the reprehensible with Stephanie and allows the despicable to happen to another woman, Annette. Very generously, Saturday Night Fever lets Tony off the hook in its epilogue, thus facilitating an inevitable sequel, 1983’s Stallone-directed Staying Alive. Hope glimmers like a disco ball catching the light, the ending seems to say: 19-year-old Tony has his whole life ahead of him, he can still turn it around—on and off the dancefloor”.
The former President of RSO Records, Bill Oakes, spoke with Billboard ahead of the forty-fifth anniversary of Saturday Night Fever – 15th November, 2022 – and discussed its staggering success and enduring popularity. I have chopped a couple of sections from it, though I think that it gives extra insight and layers to this stunning soundtrack. I must have heard songs from it as a child. I think that it is vital to watch the film first. So you get more context into the song. Seeing how they translate to the screen and fit into this wider picture. However, as a standalone album, there is no denying the genius of Saturday Night Fever:
“Other numbers, such as Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven,” MFSB’s “K-Jee,” Ralph MacDonald’s “Calypso Breakdown” and the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno,” had been released prior to Fever but enjoyed renewed popularity when they were included on the soundtrack. They were augmented with instrumental scores composed by David Shire such as “Manhattan Skyline” and “Night on Disco Mountain.” However, not every artist that Oakes sought for the soundtrack came on board — including Boz Scaggs, whose 1976 hit “Lowdown” was initially used in the film’s dance rehearsal scene involving the characters Tony and Stephanie (played by Karen Lynn Gorney).
“I just thought Irving Azoff, who managed Boz Scaggs, would let me have the track,” Oakes remembers. “Why wouldn’t he? Of course, his response to me after we shot the scene was: ‘Bill, I don’t want my artist in your little disco movie,’ which was a phrase that I was assailed with throughout the production. In those days, music artists didn’t really want to be in movies. Now it’s completely different. Artists actually upfront tout their songs to get into a movie because they know how good it is for their sales.”
As he was wrapping up work on the album, Oakes saw something one day that told him the disco trend was on its last legs. “I was finishing up after listening to the tracks for a straight 14 hours for any defects at the mastering lab. And then I put the masters in my car, which would become the album. I was stuck behind a truck [whose bumper sticker said] ‘Death to disco,’ and it dawned on me. I told Robert, ‘We might have missed this one.’ We didn’t coin the word ‘disco’ — disco was around. What [the soundtrack] did was just when disco seemed to be dying, it gave it a new lease on life. We certainly didn’t create disco–we created a real global, across-the-board demand for it. That’s what Fever did.”
Oakes admits that he is surprised by the soundtrack’s longevity decades after the fly-away collars and bell bottoms became passé. “It’s easy to see how it resonates with people who were young at the time. When you go to a party or a wedding anywhere in the world, they’ll still play ‘More Than a Woman,’ ‘Night Fever’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive.’
“’Stayin’ Alive’ is probably one of the most-played songs ever—I get that. What is interesting to me is how is it that young people today are finding it. I think because it is a classic combination of melody and dance. The Bee Gees combined the tune with the dance record. There is something haunting about their hook lines and choruses, which is unique. That’s really down to their music, it’s down to their combining melody with dance and rhythm. I think that’s the combination that still hasn’t been surpassed”.
I will move to a film score for the next part of this series. Psycho will be under the spotlight. I am a big Disco fan so, alongside the Bee Gees classics, we get these amazing composed pieces (score) and heavyweights like Yvonne Elliman and Kool & The Gang all coming together. A masterpiece film soundtrack, I hope this feature has given you an idea of why it is so seminal and influential. We will be playing and discussing this sensational soundtrack…
FOR decades to come.