
There's very little about the late '60s version of the band that carried on after Robin briefly left - for a short time sister Lesley stepped in for Robin - recording the 1970 album "Cucumber Castle," which was named for a track on 1967's "Bee Gees' 1st" (which itself wasn't the band's first album but its third, after 1965's "The Bee Gees Sing and Play 14 Barry Gibb Songs," credited to Barry Gibb and the Bee Gees) and 1966's "Spicks and Specks."
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Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" movie that starred the Brothers Gibb as members of the title band (they were joined by Peter Frampton as Billy Shears). There's nothing in it about the ill-fated "Sgt. "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," veteran Hollywood producer Frank Marshall's ("Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Back to the Future") loving look at the band's rise, slide and retrenchment as a cultural inevitability that's now streaming on HBO Max, necessarily leaves out a lot. The Bee Gees - brothers Maurice, Robin and Barry Gibb - perform in 1979. It's one of the weirdest records to ever infiltrate the Top 40. It was the first of 30-something hits for the band and Bee Gee adjacent acts, which included their younger brother Andy, who was born in 1958. And it sounded like it could have been the Beatles, like a lot of records did in the '60s.Įven so, the track only did moderately well by what would become the Bee Gees' standards. This led to speculation that the track was a clandestine Beatles' project. Some of the labels came with the letters B and G scribbled on. But does it matter, given that "New York Mining Disaster 1941" is one of those rare pop songs in which the title never appears in the lyrics.įamously, the record company distributed promo copies of the record to radio stations with a blank label, allowing only that the group's name began with a B. The brothers placed their imaginary mining disaster in New York because it sounded more glamorous, and 1941 sounded better than 1939, which was when, Robin thought, there might have actually been a mining disaster in New York, though I couldn't find mention of it. I'll always believe the title is something of an homage to/goof on Woody Guthrie, though the official story is that Barry and Robin wrote it in a darkened hallway of Polydor Records during a power cut, and that if it referred to anything it was the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster in Wales in which a coillery spoil tip - shale and sandstone and other worthless rocks excavated from a coal mine - slid down a mountain and engulfed part of a town, including a school, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Jones a photograph of his wife and wondering if they will be rescued. The song is called "New York Mining Disaster 1941," about a doomed miner showing his colleague Mr. (Maybe we all get the Bee Gees we deserve.) This is where the Bee Gees begin for some of us, though some might go back to "Spicks and Specks" or caught on in the later mid-'70s when the band was both a commercial inevitability and a laughing stock. "In the event of something happening to me. Maurice's testimony notwithstanding, I'm not sure I hear two guitars, but then when Barry and Robin start singing in unison (in the chorus Barry will drift to the lower harmony notes, Robin would overdub a high harmony) at the back end of the fourth second, you really can't be sure you're hearing more than one voice either. (Barry had learned to play in open D when he was 9 years old a neighbor who played Hawaiian slack key-style guitar had showed it to him.) In an interview 20 years ago, Maurice Gibb told Mojo magazine there were two guitars playing the chord, that he was playing it in standard tuning (presumably as a barre chord on the fifth fret) and that his older brother Barry, who had written the song with his other brother, Maurice's twin Robin, was playing the open D variant.


That's good enough for campfires and talent shows, but misses by a spooky fraction, by the distance between competence and glory. The easy-play guitar chord books will usually diagram it as a simple open A minor in standard tuning.

It's a primitive, janky sound voiced in open D tuning, played on four strings fretted up the neck. It's an A minor chord that sounds slightly out of tune and thinly metallic.
