Word: robin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Four weeks ago, an incredible half of the Top Ten hits belonged to the Bee Gees. No one has crowded so much competition off the charts since the Beatles, who once had five records in the Top Ten, but, as Robin Gibb hastens to point out, "they hadn't written all of them." The Brothers Gibb (whence Bee Gees), three sassy-smart lads from Down Under, have clearly scaled to the Very Top. The boys netted between $12 million and $15 million last year. High on the perks of stardom (big houses behind high iron gates, lots of jewelry...
...careers of the brothers far dodgier. Born in Manchester, England, to Barbara (a former nightclub singer) and Hugh Gibb (leader of a 13-piece dance band on a ferryboat), the brothers started singing in public in 1955 due to technical difficulties. Barry, then nine, and the twins Robin and Maurice, three years younger, would show up at local Manchester movie palaces and come out between shows as the Rattlesnakes, dancing and moving their lips to pop records piped in from backstage. One day the record broke just as they were about to do a Tommy Steele ditty, and the Rattlesnakes...
...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...
...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...