ten from the brothers gibb, 1

While my sister was in town taking care of me in the aftermath of my knee surgery, we had occasion to listen to a lot of Bee Gees music.  I’d actually been thinking a lot about the Bee Gees recently due to Robin Gibb’s recent passing.  I love the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack a lot, but it tends to obscure all the great songs they had previously, particularly their 60s and early 70s output, when they were quite simply the best Beatles imitators around and acted as an Australian answer to the Fab Four.  Coming up with a list of the ten greatest Bee Gees songs is pretty tough since one could easily come up with at least twenty-five really great ones.  So how about something a little easier, like ten Bee Gees songs, in no particular order, that are among the many that demand to be heard?  That sounds pretty good to me.  …Today’s offering is from Odessa, a record that looms quite large in my memory because I had it when I was a kid.  It seemed larger than life with its red (fake) velvet sleeve and gold stamped lettering, as good a testament as any, I now realize, to the ascendant self-importance of pop in the late 60s.  The thing about Odessa that’s so interesting is that it has a lot of the pomp that characterized the transition from pop to rock, yet the music remains light (not in a bad way) by the standards of when it came out in 1969.  Make no mistake: Odessa is a bloated double album with a fair bit of bombastic filler, but the good songs are nimble, infectiously melodic, and might even make you cry a little if you’re not careful…