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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Clip Job Has Moments, February 14, 2004
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.
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