BEE GEES: ODESSA (1969)
1) Odessa (City On The Black
Sea); 2) You'll Never See My Face Again; 3) Black Diamond; 4) Marley Purt
Drive; 5) Edison; 6) Melody Fair; 7) Suddenly; 8) Whisper, Whisper; 9)
Lamplight; 10) Sound Of Love; 11) Give Your Best; 12) Seven Seas Symphony; 13)
With All Nations; 14) I Laugh In Your Face; 15) Never Say Never Again; 16)
First Of May; 17) The British Opera.
«Fourteenth
of February, eighteen ninety-nine, the British ship Veronica was lost without a
sign...» Rhyming apart, this introduction line reads more like the start of
some Jules Verne adventure novel than that of a pop record by one of The Former
British Empire's sissiest bands. But in the magic year of 1969 everything was
possible — and with concept albums being all the rage, particularly when
stretched over two LPs, the Bee Gees needed their own answer to The Beatles (Tommy still had a few months to ripen).
Granted, the «literal» concept begins and ends
with the title track, a seven-and-a-half minute suite that runs through several
sections, several moods, a bunch of sound effects, and a mystery that pulls
your leg hard enough to create the impression of the band being «really on to
something» when they really aren't — in fact, rumor has it that the original
title of the song was ʽOdessa (City On The White
Sea)ʼ, and the endless references to «Baltic Sea» and «North Atlantic» in the
lyrics show that, perhaps, the band has not fully mastered its geography even
by the end of the sessions. Furthermore, there are no Vicars in Odessa, and it
is not that easy for Odessa people to move to Finland (not in 1899, it wasn't),
but never mind all that — if the Bee Gees require artistic licence, it would be
prudent to grant them artistic licence before they take offense at our
nitpicking and start singing ʽNights On Broadwayʼ instead.
In any case, Odessa is very much a
concept album if the «concept» is not understood in a «rock opera» sort of way.
If 1st and, to a slightly lesser
extent, Horizontal were planned as exuberant
potpourris, with the Gibbs taking a sprint through the musical candy shop and
swiping off bits of everything, and Idea
was an intentional balladeering «sellout» to clear their heads from excessive
psychedelia, then Odessa, the last
and most ambitious of the band's Sixties' adventures, is a huge romantic
sprawl, penetrating your subconscious with the help of bombastic strings and
multi-tracked harmonies rather than fuzzy guitar tones, distorted vocal
effects, Mellotrons, sitars, and references to lemon trees, orange skies, and
Lucies with diamonds.
Formally, it is like a test — is it possible to
make a genuinely «cool» sixty-minute experience with the aid of nothing but
fully traditional, «conservative» means? You do not even seriously need any
electricity to play the Odessa stuff
— acoustic guitars, pianos and strings dominate most of the proceedings: Vince
Melouney quit the band in frustration after having recorded a few of the songs,
understanding that his services (as the band's resident electric guitar player)
are no longer needed. (Colin Petersen, the drummer, still held on throughout).
With echoes of Idea's occasionally
excessive sweetness still fresh in the ears, this could all spell disaster.
And it did
spell disaster, but only on the real-life level: the recording of Odessa caused a major split within the
band — Robin and Barry ended up fighting both over the musical directions to
take and over the «leadership» issue: the somewhat dictatorial elder brother
was being challenged by the somewhat more adventurous (at the time) younger
brother, and there was a serious row concerning the lead single from the album.
Barry won in the end, with his ʽFirst Of Mayʼ fixed as the A-side and Robin's
ʽLamplightʼ relegated to the B-side — but at the cost of Robin calling it quits
and effectively bringing the first stage of the Bee Gees to a close. (And yes, in
the light of what would follow, many people would probably be happy if the
first stage were to be the last stage — but what difference would it make if
ʽStayin' Aliveʼ were credited to «Barry Gibb» rather than «The Bee Gees»?)
As for the artistic level, Odessa is a total success. Yes, it is made up of lush ballads from
head to toe, with a small bunch of acoustic pop and country-rockers thrown in
for diversity's sake — but this is definitely «art» balladry, with complex, intelligent,
meticulously crafted harmonic hooks and equally complex orchestral arrangements:
easily Bill Shepherd's finest hour with the band (Paul Buckmaster, who would go
on to famously orchestrate Elton John's early albums, may be noticed here among
the credits, playing cello on the title track — however, as far as I can tell,
he is not responsible for the arrangements in general; rather, he was probably
soaking in the experience in order to begin profiting from it just one year
later). It is Bill Shepherd, by the way, who is responsible for the only few
psychedelic twists we get — the Mid-Easternish violin «swoops» on ʽYou'll Never
See My Face Againʼ, for instance, are quite trippy.
There are no highlights and no lowlights. This
is not a «cathartic» experience: be it Barry's «knight in shining armor»
approach, or Robin's «green-clad lyre-stringin' minstrel» impersonation, both,
as usual, suffer from mannerisms and theatricality — it is as hard for me to
imagine anybody (anybody I know,
that is) driven to tears by this stuff as it is to picture anybody's eyes
watering to the sounds of a Diane Warren power ballad. But hopping from song to
song on Odessa easily affects the
same nerve centers as those responsible for, say, responding to a visit to some
old Dutch masters' gallery. The colors. The vividness. The little details. The
unpredictability of all the twists and turns within what, at first, seems to
be a rather limited-formula model. It's a case where, at first, you seem to
think of a «triumph of form over substance», then begin to realize that there is no difference between form and
substance here — form is substance,
and substance is form. (Granted, one
could say the same about the Saturday
Night Fever soundtrack, but the form-substance duality of 1977 and the
form-substance duality of 1969 are two entirely different things, aren't
they?).
Each of the songs does work on its own, but Odessa is still much more than the sum
of its parts. There are some recurrent motifs — mostly on the instrumental
compositions such as ʽSeven Seas Symphonyʼ and ʽBritish Operaʼ — and with
quality control in complete effect, each subsequent song somehow builds up on
the legacy of its predecessor, stockpiling the «formalistic beauty» in your
memory until it reaches the «grandiose» mark. Actually, Odessa is a bit short for a double album — barely over sixty
minutes, where The Beatles ran over
ninety — but that helps it minimize or even totally eliminate «filler»: ʽNever
Say Never Againʼ on the last side echoes ʽYou'll Never See My Face Againʼ on
the first side as a full-time respectable partner rather than an inferior
re-write to pad out the remaining space.
In the past, I used to strongly favor Barry's
material over Robin's — his «knightly» deliveries, sometimes with a bit of
irony and always with a strong debt of gratitude to the Beatles, seemed to
agree much better with my tastes than Robin's increasingly «bleating» minstrel-boy
vibrato, here demonstrated most perfectly on songs like the title track, ʽBlack
Diamondʼ, and ʽLamplightʼ (in general, Barry has more leads here than Robin,
which is not surprising given the circumstances). But today, there is no
question in my mind that ʽBlack Diamondʼ is an absolute vocal masterpiece —
there is probably no other song in the Bee Gees catalog that would pull all the stops in the same way (stuff
like ʽMr. Naturalʼ is quite unique, too, but it leaves less space for subtle
variations, whereas on ʽBlack Diamondʼ, few lines are sung the exact same
way). And if we accuse songs written in the shape of medieval folk ballads of
mannerisms, well, the logical thing to do would be to follow up on that and
extend the accusation to the medieval folk ballads themselves — the Bee Gees
are simply honoring the time when real emotions had to be hidden behind a façade
of «regulated» ones. So I just admire the «regulations» in Robin's voice when
he is belting out his "...and I'm leaving in the morning... and I won't
die, so don't cry..." as if Henry VIII and all of his eight wives were in
the audience.
If lush orchestration, starched ruffs and
doublets aren't really your thing, Odessa
is not for you, but you might want to
try out some of its more down-to-earth segments — ʽMarley Purt Driveʼ, for
instance, an acoustic roots-rocker with a ringing lead vocal à la Hollies (who were doing very much
the same thing in the late 1960s), or the light, upbeat, catchy country-rock
ditty ʽGive Your Bestʼ, with the classical cellos and violins laid to rest in
favor of a rustic fiddle, or the shuffling ʽSuddenlyʼ (although the latter does
have some strings and woodwinds). Still, it's only a tiny fragment of the total
amount of delicacies you get if you subscribe to the whole package — and I even
like the instrumentals: ʽSeven Seas Symphonyʼ, as far as I'm concerned, is
grander, more imposing and more memorable than any of the orchestral work on,
for instance, the Moody Blues' Days Of
Future Passed, often quoted as «the» textbook example of the neo-classical
approach on a pioneering art-rock album.
Naturally, it is all a matter of the Zeitgeist. It was the musical context of
the time that brought out the best in the Bee Gees, and stimulated them to work
in a direction that does not look dated, cheesy, or ridiculous fourty years on
— Odessa may still easily be
revered, be it by only a tiny bunch of connaisseurs, long after the band's disco
stuff has been buried and the gravestone weathered down. But nobody asks
anybody to love Odessa because it is
a Bee Gees album — the Bee Gees were one of those bands that let itself easily
be blown about by the wind, and I love Odessa
because it is an album blown in by the adventurous, extravagant wind of 1969,
not because it materialized itself in the hands of three competitive,
opportunistic, narcissistic singer brothers whose tastes and priorities, not
fully evident behind the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s, would become more and
more questionable with each new year. So, in a way, it is to that Zeitgeist that
I dedicate the thumbs
up rating — honorable second prize going to Barry, Robin, and Maurice,
not forgetting Bill Shepherd and whoever else responsible.
PS. Being a double album, Odessa released the deluxe treatment over the course of the recent
reissues — an entire 3-CD boxset, with stereo and mono mixes of the album and an
extra CD of outtakes. I do not have the reissue: as far as I can tell, the
majority of the tracks on the third disc are alternate mixes and demos, which
might make it less of a necessity than the reissues of the previous three
albums. Apparently, most of the stuff recorded during the Odessa sessions did make it onto the final record, and since there
was only one single (ʽFirst Of Mayʼ), there were no extra juicy B-sides either.
So, unless you are a major fan of red backgrounds with gold letters, you might
want to hold off this time. Curiously enough, the Reprise Records routine of
reissuing Bee Gees remasters with extra tracks broke down on Odessa — rather like the band itself.
Check "Odessa" (MP3) on Amazon
First of May never did much for me. It has the same problem as Words: Good ideas, nice chords and melody, but spun through the cotton candy machine until it's light as a feather. I guess I also just don't like Barry sans The Glitter Twins. The geniality and grandeur is carried by the uncanny connection that happens when they sing together; I can take Barry's whispers and whines or Robin's bleating and bawling only when the promise of a ringing chorus looms on the horizon. Maurice Gibb, I tip my fedora to you.
ReplyDeleteGreat review, the bit with Henry VIII cracked me up. Their second best album may not be flawless yet certainly deserves a solid review. "Suddenly" is a personal favorite of mine with an untypically "mean" vocal delievery (for Bee Gees of course) but the rest sucks you in, eventually.
ReplyDeleteNow Mr. Perkins, carry on with that square dance of yours and proceed to the remaining part of the Bee Gees catalog. I wish you luck (and patience).
The only songs I recall pulling off of Odessa's deluxe edition's extra disc for my own mixes (one CD of 1st/Horizontal and one CD of Idea/Odessa) are the demo for the title track, which I prefer largely for the lack of the Ba Ba Blacksheep recitation, and Nobody's Someone, which may be a b-side and stands up well with the rest of the album's highlights.
ReplyDeleteI like most of the songs, but I think the album is a bit forgettable. I actually prefer Lamplight and Black Diamond to some extent simply because they have a unique style and stand out more. Probably the best song of the album is Melody Fair, I think it's the type of song that probably nobody could find offensive.
ReplyDeleteGood review of a fine album from 1969. I bought it when it had just been released. The sleeve was a lush velvety deal. In the 60'syou could walk out of a record store with a Hendrix album, a Zeppelin album and a Bee Gees album under your arm and no one would bat an eyelid. It was all music and you just listened to what you were in the mood for. By the way, Henry VIII had six wives and not eight.
ReplyDelete