The unlikely musician Mark Lanegan compared to John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix: “He’s incredibly brilliant”
The lion’s share of all great grunge songs have been defined by pain. If you look at any band that was coming out of Seattle around the turn of the 1990s, half of them were most likely talking about their internal struggles than the traditional love song tropes. You can’t get to a genre like grunge without listening to great classic rock first, and for Mark Lanegan, Barry Gibb was the kind of songwriter who deserves to be up there with the all-time greats.
No, you did not read that incorrectly. The same guy who wrote songs like ‘Nearly Lost You’ and was responsible for some of the darker solo albums in the Seattle scene actually sported some Bee Gees records in his back catalogue. For everyone a little bit uncomfortable with that, let’s get one thing straight: The Bee Gees’ music is criminally underrated.
There are still some ignorant fans who just swear them off because of Saturday Night Fever, but the early version of the band was a completely different animal. They may have gotten started a little late, but their first albums sound like you’ve been transported to an era when The British Invasion was still alive and well.
If you pick up any of their greatest-hits records, you’ll hear some of the greatest songwriting of the decade, including anthems like ‘To Love Somebody’ and ‘I Started A Joke’. And as much as people still clown on them, Saturday Night Fever tracks like ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ are still around because they are simply just that good.
For Lanegan, Barry Gibbs’s approach deserved to be celebrated among the best to ever put melodies together, saying, “Barry Gibb is a genius along the lines of John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, etc., but the staggering amount of mind-blowing, incredibly brilliant, heartbreaking tunes he wrote that were chart hits for his band, as well as for others, puts him in a class by himself”.
When you look at the number of accolades thrown their way, you’d think the Bee Gees would be the exact opposite of what the grunge scene would listen to, but there’s still a lot more to unpack. Gibbs’s natural instincts as a melody writer most likely had an effect on grunge rockers without knowing it, including Lanegan stringing together the pop hooks in Screaming Trees’ catalogue.
And as much as Nirvana fans might not like to admit it, that disco wave had its roots in all of the band’s most celebrated material. It’s easy to pick out drummers like John Bonham when Dave Grohl plays, but you’re also going to hear the same essential elements of classic acts like The GAP Band and Cameo on their records.
For a group like the Bee Gees, they arguably deserve a seat in both chairs as titans of the singer-songwriter genre and the biggest disco stars of the decade. People might want to reject them on principle openly, but just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s automatically bad. It’s just that they might have found the right sound that resonates with a lot of people.