The Bee Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb [Paperback]

Melinda Bilyeu (Author), Hector Cook (Author), Andrew Mon Hughes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002

A comprehensive biography of The Bee Gees, whose career spans four decades and whose popularity shows no sign of waning as the Gibb brothers take their music into the 21st century. Most famous for having created the soundtrack to "Saturday Night Fever", Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb have also written countless hits, both for themselves and others. This biography covers their early days in Manchester and the Isle of Man before the family emigrated to Australia and returned to London to find fame in 1967 with "Massachusetts". Over the years the Bee Gees' career has mixed triumph and tragedy in equal measure as well as celebrating their success this biography covers their doldrum years, the divorces and the tragic death of their youngest brother Andy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Omnibus Press (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0711987483
• ISBN-13: 978-0711987487
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,322,972 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

177 of 187 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ultimately Satisfying! A Complete Celebration!, November 17, 2000

By 

Martin A Hogan "Marty From SF" (San Francisco, CA. (Hercules)) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bee Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb (Can Be Fun) (Hardcover)

How can you possibly write a biography about one of the most successful rock bands of the last four decades and get it all right? Writers Bilyeu, Cook and Hughes (along with Brennan and Crohan and many others) have managed to achieve the impossible. With uncountable interviews and years of research, this team has placed the Gibb family and all their triumphs and tragedies into perspective.

Starting chronologically with the pre-marriage days of Barbara and Hugh Gibb in the 1940's up to the present, continually active Bee Gees, we are presented with every viewpoint, memory and recollection of the three brothers and their freinds and acquaintances. The highs and lows of the Bee Gees and Andy Gibbs' careers are not glossed over or over-emphasized. They are told with 'matter-of-fact' honesty and sincerity; a refreshing exercise in storytelling. The read is fast and crisp with a personal edge lacking anything close to newscopy.

After the conclusion, there are numerous, wonderful appendixes including more comments from folks close to the Gibbs, a complete album and singles discography, a cover versions list and a bibliography with book, magazine, newspaper and Internet Web Sites.

All the beauty marks and all the scars are here. It just makes the Gibb family more human. They may be ordinary people, but they have had extraordinary lives.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Clip Job Has Moments, February 14, 2004

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bee Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb (Paperback)

Sad but true. The Bee Gees did an amazing lot in four decades, writing songs for themselves and others that topped charts in every corner of the globe from the 1960s to the 1990s. But for most people, even those who know the Beatles didn't originally record "To Love Somebody" and "New York Mining Disaster 1941," they were the ultimate purveyors of pop music's guiltiest pleasure, disco.

For 667 pages, "The Ultimate Biography of the Bee Gees" offers a somewhat more rounded take on who the Bee Gees really were and what their music was about. Not that it will change much. This is not a book for anyone but the sincerest Bee Gee fan. The first 300 pages are like a massive loyalty test: Can you plow through pages of choppy narrative, contextless quotes, and drawn-out references to nearly every person who sold the Gibb brothers an ice cream or recorded one of their songs?

The Bee Gees were made up of three very creative and somewhat unstable people who never would have spent much time with the others except for the sometimes inconvenient, more often redeeming fact of their brotherhood. Each was a real character onto himself. Since the quintet of authors behind this book didn't have access to the Bee Gees when writing this in the late 1990s, they rely on press clippings and fail at providing adequate attribution, editing, or context.

So we get long transcript-like statements from Music Maker articles and the like, say from Barry about not liking Robin's wife Molly. There's no follow-up to say how or if that was ever resolved. All three brothers, talking long ago in various forums, throw up a number of wild comments. These are often long and sometimes contradictory, with little attempt at contextual insight from the authors. The narrative is weak throughout the book; it really lacks a central voice or point of view. Especially early on, it reads like an artless clip job, because in essence that's what it is.

The book picks up right when the Gibbs tap into R&B. Being able to interview studio insiders like producer Arif Mardin and keyboardist Blue Weaver first-hand make a difference. The next 100 pages are the most readable in the book, but as it deals with the Helium Years (their 1975-79 disco heyday), that only serves to feed the white-satin stereotype many will have of this band going in. Also, I'm more than a little concerned about the factual integrity of a text that refers several times to the singer of the Gibb-penned hit "Grease" as "Franki" Valli.

The authors do try to cram every fact they can into the book, but the result is cumbersome and at times unreadable, especially at the beginning. I'd say this is two stars for fans, one for everyone else. Here's hoping that now that the Bee Gees story is at an end with Maurice's sudden death last year, some writer will come along to give it the class-A treatment it deserves. I'll just hang on to this while I'm waiting.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Bee Gees: success, fall and redemption., February 4, 2001

By 

Catpeople "catpeople" (Aguascalientes, Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bee Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb (Can Be Fun) (Hardcover)

Tales of the Brothers Gibb achieves its purpose, being a great bio-graphy about the life of a family dedicated to music, a journalistic account of their sharp "up and downs" in the public's preferences and final, long-awaited redemption, when a new generation of fans and artists, who never danced their hits on discos, decided that they were a legend.

The book fails to deliver, though, one of the promises made in the first pages, where the authors state that the main focus will be in the musical aspect of their lives. There is not that much discussion about the chords, harmonies, musical significance of their works or a detailed anylisis of the great albums, as it should be. The Bee Gees are, after all, more about music than anything else.

But that shouldn't stop us from enjoying a good biography or even from learning many, many facts about the music, about the way it was made, about the historical context that gave birth to Odessa or Main Course. I can only begin to imagine now what a song like "Really and Sincerely" must mean to Robin. Or Robert Stigwood's insane obsession with the Beatles, which the Brothers Gibb suffered too and still suffer. A very unhealthy obsession that led them to make unforgivable mistakes like their Sgt. Pepper movie and album.

The book is also too "clean" because the Bee Gees always appear like saints, and I somehow suspect they are not. The part dedicated to Australian years is too long and the final stage of their career (1981 and up) is too short, but I enjoyed the book a lot anyway.

And it gives us all a very important lesson: No matter how bad it looks, be always like the Bee Gees and never give up.