Bee Gees

It’s probably a waste of time trying to convince 90 percent of the population that the Bee Gees were ever anything other than slickly produced, silver-lamé-suit-clad, blue-eyed R&B hit-makers of the disco era. Even the rock history books have largely written out the Bee Gees. However, among the small fraction of listeners who either were around in the late 1960s or who have since been able to discover the rich psych-pop legacy that the Brothers Gibb created before their rise to global superstardom and the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever, there’s generally an understanding of the greatness therein.

When the discussion turns to which is the greatest of those first era Bee Gees albums, there always seems to be clear-cut winner: Odessa. Recorded in New York City in 1968—the so-called “Summer of Love”—it proves a recording very much of its time, laden with the spirit that other pop groups like the Beatles, Beach Boys, and the Who were imbibing. Pop records, musicians and their producers were realizing, could be more than a few singles and handful of throwaways. Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb weren’t intent on making the kaleidoscopic interconnection of Sgt. Pepper or writing a proper rock opera like Tommy. Instead, the Bee Gees took what they considered to be a collection of simple ballads with deep emotional messages and touched them with grandiose arrangements, orchestral movements, and acute studio perfection. The result is without question one of the finest baroque pop works ever, and something of a signpost hinting at the rise of progressive rock, which would follow in the coming decade.

For all its orchestral bigness and chamber pop pomp, Odessa is a textured record that blends different stylistic grounds with grace. “Melody Fair” takes a gently strummed acoustic folk base and builds on it a mass of strings. The laidback country rollick of “Marley Purt Drive” bears echoes of Dylan and the Band. “Whisper Whisper” is psychedelic-skewered swinging 1960s pop to the core, presented in two parts. The centerpiece across Odessa, as always with the Bee Gees, is the Gibb harmonies, perhaps best highlighted on the epic “I Laugh in Your Face,” which was originally scheduled as a throwaway B-side but might be the best song on the album.

This three-disc incarnation celebrates the Bee Gees with two separate discs of the complete album, one stereo and one mono, along with a third disc titled Sketches for Odessa, comprising 23 demos, studio outtakes, and other ephemera that reveal the album from its birth to its final form. The stellar remastered recordings include a book of liner notes that offers writing and recording notes for each song. Like the original pressing of the LP, this reissue is housed in a red-flocked case with inlaid gold lettering, which provide a regal look and feel deserved by a record that is, without question, a masterpiece.

—donny kutzbach