The Bee Gees

The long overdue, definitive narrative biography of The Bee Gees, by the acclaimed author of the award-winning "Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and his Cosmic American Music". Between 1967 and 1972 the Bee Gees sold twenty-five million records. And during those five years the Bee Gees wrote and sang some of the most memorable, iconic songs of their era, songs that were everywhere, in the air, on the radio and in everyone's head, one Top 5 single after another, in America and in the United Kingdom: "1941 New York Mining Disaster", "To Love Somebody", "Massachusetts", "Holiday", "World", "Words", "I Gotta Get a Message To You", "I Started a Joke", and, "Lonely Days". In 1969 they played the Royal Albert Hall with a seventy-piece orchestra and a one-hundred-piece marching band. Of course they sold out the joint - standing room only. The Bee Gees were the first band to play and sell out 100,000-seat sports arenas. (The Beatles sold only a measly 55,000 tickets at Shea Stadium). In 1971 the brothers wrote and sang one of the most beautiful and enduring pop songs of all time: "How Do You Mend A Broken Heart?" And in 1972, "Run To Me" became the final No. 1 of the first Bee Gees era. Pop charts are fickle; pop audiences more fickle still. Bands have always come and gone, bands have always been forgotten. But no band has ever risen as high as the Bee Gees did in 1972 and then fallen as low as the Bee Gees had by 1974. The "Bee Gees" will chronicle the life and career one of the best known, most enduring, most recognizable, and singular bands of the last fifty years. Their story is the story of pop music over the last forty years, of music that was neither rock nor soul nor country, but a singular sound that fit no genre and that no other artist could emulate. The Bee Gees' saga is the epic story of three men, three brothers, in a unique musical partnership. Unlike, say, the Jacksons, the Bee Gees always needed one another. Each brought a unique gift to the mix, and the others knew it. From that need grew the reality of having to put up with each other. For forty years...Even with Barry's mad ambition, he could not succeed without his brothers. Each brother's personality warrants its story told, and all three are caught in this compelling family dynamic. And as weird, human, tragic and compelling as the Bee Gees are as individual characters, the tensions between them provide the core of their amazing drama. Through all their musical changes, the core of the story remains: family. The Beatles could, after all, break up and go their separate ways. The Bee Gees never had that luxury. Over a four-decade career, they were conjoined by blood and the demands of a sound none of them could make alone.