If copyright holders prefer this removed, please consider contacting me directly via YT (instead of delivering a strike to the account) and I will be happy to oblige.
Otherwise, let's all bring some joy into our lives and enjoy an
album that is iconic and musically defines the era it came from. One of the biggest selling albums of all time (over 25million sold), it stayed on the
US charts for over two years and held the top spot for almost half a year (24weeks!): 16 weeks at #1 in the UK.
AllMusic's excerpted review is reprinted below.
Another article that puts the album in a cultural context:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/micheleca
...
Track Listing, track length, start times
1 --Bee
Gees -
Stayin' Alive (4.42) 0:12
2 --Bee Gees -
How Deep Is Your Love (4.02) 5:00
3 --Bee Gees -
Night Fever (3.31) 9:06
4 --Bee Gees -
More Than A Woman (3.15) 12:39
5 --Yvonne Elliman -
If I Can't Have You (2.57) 15:
57
6 --Walter Murphy -
A Fifth Of Beethoven (3.02) 18:57
7 --Tavares - More Than A Woman (3.15) 22:01
8 --David
Shire -
Manhattan Skyline (4.43) 25:20
9 --Ralph McDonald -
Calypso Breakdown (7.49) 30:04
10 --David Shire -
Night On
Disco Mountain (5.12) 38:00
11 --Kool &
The Gang -
Open Sesame (3.59) 43:30
12 --Bee Gees -
Jive Talkin' (3.43) 47:18
13 --Bee Gees -
You Should Be Dancing (4.14) 50:58
14 --K.C. And
The Sunshine Band -
Boogie Shoes (2.16) 55:15
15 --David Shire - Salsation (3.51) 57:35
16 --M.
F.S.B. -
K-Jee (4.13) 1:01:24
17 --Trammps - The
Disco Inferno (10.51) 1:05:40
Review by
Bruce Eder
Every so often, a piece of music comes along that defines a moment in popular culture history...
Saturday Night Fever, although hardly as prodigious an artistic achievement as those precursors, was precisely that kind of musical phenomenon for the second half of the '70s -- ironically, at the time before its release, the disco boom had seemingly run its course, primarily in
Europe, and was confined mostly to black culture and the gay underground in
America. Saturday Night Fever, as a movie and an album, and a brace of hit
singles off of it, suddenly made disco explode into mainstream, working- and middle-class America with new immediacy and urgency, increasing its audience by five- or ten-fold overnight.
The Bee Gees had written "Stayin' Alive" (then called "
Saturday Night"), "Night Fever," "How Deep Is Your Love," "If I Can't Have You," and "
More Than a Woman" for what would have been the follow-up album to
Children of the World, and they might well have enjoyed platinum-record status with that proposed album.
Instead,
Robert Stigwood asked them in early
1977 to contribute songs to the soundtrack of a movie that he was financing, a low-budget picture called "
Tribal Rites on a Saturday Night." More out of loyalty to him than any belief in the viability of the film, they obliged; the group's involvement even survived the decision by the original director,
John Avildsen, that he didn't want their music in the film -- instead, Stigwood fired him and brought in the very talented but much more agreeable
John Badham, the movie's title was changed to Saturday Night Fever, The Bee Gees' music stayed, and the result was the biggest-selling soundtrack album in history, a 25 million copy monster whose sales, even as a more expensive double-LP, dwarfed the multi-million units sold
of Children of the World and
Main Course.
Strangely enough, for all of the fixation of the movie and its audience on dancing, the
Bee Gees' new songs were weighted equally toward ethereal ballads, which may be one reason for the soundtrack album's appeal -- it delivers what its audience expects, plus a "bonus" in the form of the soaring, lyrical romantic numbers that were, as with most ventures by
the Gibb Brothers in this area, virtually irresistible
. ...
Even the presence of
David Shire's "
Night on Disco Mountain" and "Salsation" and
Walter Murphy's "
A Fifth of Beethoven" don't hurt, because these set a mood and a surrounding ambience for The Bee Gees' material that makes it work even better. Heard on CD as 79 minutes of music, Saturday Night Fever comes off like an idealized commercial-free radio set of late-'70s dance music (and, in that regard, the decision to leave
Rick Dees' "
Disco Duck" off the soundtrack album was a good one for all concerned, except Dees).
- published: 10 Sep 2014
- views: 748880