The 1970s: A Great Time to Be Named Barry

The 70s were a great time for Barrys indeed. Gibb, Manilow, Williams and White -there may be others that I'm leaving out, but these were the titans of Barry.

...just thought this needed to be said.

Fads #3: When Musicians Got Hairy

I love to look at pictures of bands from the mid-sixties -they looked like such clean cut gentlemen. Then something happened around the end of the decade. By 1970, these bands became almost unrecognizable from their former fresh faces. These dapper young men all of a sudden became greasy hippies!

The perfect examples are the famous 1963 and 1969 pictures of the Beatles taken in a stairwell at EMI. The two images were wonderfully merged as shown above. (found here) It's striking to think that it was just a matter of six years between the two photos.

Another example is The Young Rascals, who changed their name to The Rascals and two of them got a whole lot hairier. They also mercifully ditched their Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits!

Another striking transformation was the psychedelic group, Marmalade. Look at one of my previous posts and see their metamorphosis from clean cut lads to unshaven stoners. Thankfully, they decided to no longer go by the name of The Gaylords!


Well, who are these fine young men trimming the Christmas tree? Why, it's the Beach Boys all dappered up in sweaters and slacks for the holidays!
Surely, such an upstanding group of gentlemen would never become a bunch of hippies. Right?

Wrong.

By 1979 Dennis Wilson was looking more like Charles Manson than Charles Manson!

Look here at an earlier post to see jazz flutist Herbie Mann go from mild-mannered nerd to oily sex machine.

My favorite hairy metamorphosis would have to be the Bee-Gees. From dapper gents to jive-talkin' kings of the chest hair. It's a wonder what a decade will do!

Sgt. Pepper's Loney Hearts Club Train Wreck

The Beatles' LP Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is perhaps the high water mark in the history of popular music. There are only two types of people who would not include it in their top ten albums of all time: (1) those that would put Fergie or Beyonce in their top ten, and are thus on a completely different musical plane and likely will never read this post and (2) rock snobs who would put an album by Gentle Giant or Captain Beefheart on their list just to show you how musically superior they are.

Anyway, only a couple of musicians have gotten away with covering any of Sgt. Pepper's songs. Elton John scored a hit with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and Joe Cocker did a wonderful (if not spasmodic) rendition of "With a Little Help from My Friends". But who would dare to cover the entire album (and even a little Abbey Road as well)? Who would be so bold and pretentious? The Bee-Gees, that's who.... and, boy did they learn to regret it.

(Dynamite cover courtesy of a Blogfoot post) The Bee-Gees vs. The Beatles? My God, what was going on in 1978? Well, for one, the Bee-Gees had an absolute stranglehold on the charts in a similar way The Beatles had about a decade earlier. Everything they touched turned to gold -from Saturday Night Fever, Spirits Having Flown, Grease, a live album, songs for Andy Gibb - they had the Midas touch... that is, until Sgt. Pepper.

Granted, it didn't ruin their career (although, Peter Frampton insists it killed his, and it destroyed the RSO record label) - the disco backlash in 1981 was what ultimately drove the brothers Gibb into hiding. Consequences aside, the titanic train wreck of a film is fun to watch.

A highlight of the film has to be George Burns' rendition of "Fixing a Hole".

Of course, there's been other rather sad attempts at Sgt. Pepper that make the Bee-Gees version look good. The Bill Cosby rendition comes instantly to mind.

A thanks to Frank's Vinyl Museum for this awful treasure.

For years, the Bee Gees 2 disc LP could be found in bargain racks at record stores across the country. I wonder if the cheesy poster inside the sleeve was ever hung on anyone's wall.

The soundtrack's high point: Aerosmith's version of "Come Together". Low point: Steve Martin's rendition of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer". Oh well, sometimes you win and sometimes you... destroy an entire record lable.