Show Business: The Bee Gees: They Make You Feel Like Dancing

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The Bee Gees started peddling their demos in the crowded, demanding London scene. They received scant interest until they got a call from a Mr. Stickweed, who turned out to be Robert Stigwood, the pop music nabob. An audition was arranged. Stigwood arrived, late and hung over, and kept his head buried in his arms as the boys gave him their version of Puff (The Magic Dragon). "We started to worry we were making his hangover even worse," Maurice remembers. Finally Stigwood cut them off, mumbled something that sounded complimentary and signed them to a five-year contract. Says Robin: "We realized Bob didn't really care what we sounded like. It was our songs he wanted."

Under Stigwood, the group had nine hefty hits, mostly deep-pile ballads that were like carpeting for the ears. "We would write rock songs—good ones—and they'd say, 'That's nice, where's the ballads?' " Robin remembers. "That was all they wanted." The boys were also suffering from the aftershocks of sudden success. They drank to excess, indulged in lots of speed, lived crazy and spent big. "There was a time," recalls Barry, "when I could walk out the front door and every car to the end of the street was mine, from the white Rolls at the front door to the Alpha at the corner." Maurice, who had five Rolls-Royces and six Aston Martins, practiced his own kind of inventory control by periodically pickling himself and trashing one of the cars. Says he: "I was getting to be a real alky."

The group buckled under the pressure, broke up for a year and a half, from 1969 to late 1970. "Dad came to me," says Robin, "asked me to make it up. I told him, 'Go 'way, Dad, or I'll put a pair of cement shoes on you.' Then he tried to make me a ward of the court." It was the brotherly bond that finally forced a reconciliation. "If we hadn't been related," Robin speculates, "we would probably never have gotten back together."

The boys cooled off and cleaned up their act. Their sound gradually became more sinuous than in years past, bouncier and less simplistic. Barry and Maurice moved to Miami, where the recording-studio conditions are ideal and the living is easy. Their experience in the Stigwood-produced Saturday Night Fever worked out well enough for the Bee Gees to enlist in another Stigwood enterprise, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which will appear this summer. They show up in this one singing 30 old Beatles songs and co-starring with Peter Frampton. "The whole focus of the movie is on Peter," reports Robin with some dissatisfaction. "We're always running around saving him from something."