RIP: Robin Gibb ...

[Allan Black]

Very sad to hear that this morning.

Bee Gee Robin Gibb dies after battle with cancer - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Those 3 certainly put an all time positive stamp on pop music and gave other artists the benefit of their talents, John Travolta included.

When they started in Australia, I was an 19yr old panel operator at 2UE here in Sydney. UE was the top rating Top 40 station and Bob Rogers was one of their top announcers. As kids the Bee Gees used to come in to record station promos for Bobs' nightly 'Bob Rogers at 6' program.

I remember one time when they came in to Studio E to sing and record in their distintive sound ..
'hullo Hullo, HULLOOOO we're the BeeGees and we're on the Bob Rodgers Shoowww' It was all one mic and sounded great.

But their father stood behind them and if anyone got out of tune, he'd smack him over the head.

I always used to keep the tape running, standard procedure in those days.

Another time after a very funny break up, Rogers says 'we'll play all of it on the show tonight' The next morning, their father rang the station manager and threatened to call the whole deal off. He was a hard task master but nowhere near the managerial style of Robert Stigwood.

2UE was great, you could bottle the adrenalin. Later as permanent breakfast producer with 6 turntables, I was collected by a cab at 4am,
breakie 5.30-9am with about 200 commercials, go to the Green Parrot for breakfast, then back to station and stay ALL day till after the Rogers show at 7PM. There was 8 operators and we raised h*ll at times.

UE was also very strict with their Top 40 policy, one time I played 30secs of Miles Davis/Gil Evans 'Springsville' out to the news at 6am.
At 9AM the program manager stormed into my booth and the roof fell in. 'Do it again and you're out!

Another time a bulldozer went through the buried line cable out to the transmitter and next morning we did the breakie from the transmitter shed about 15miles away. It was in a field with about 200 sheep.
With no aircon, I opened the window and when the sheep heard the music, they flocked around the shed. When they heard the announcer, they started to bleat, on air, and the listeners went nuts, ringing us to laugh about the sheep etc. Our ratings went through the roof.

Years later I worked at Col Joys studio in Glebe here, if you've got time here's a bit more stuff, 2nd story .. The Official Site of Buddy Rich

I got to meet some wonderful talent and they were real talent, all analogue with no digital support. Time moves on but their music will be with us always. Thx for reading.

Cheers.

[Mark Ahrens]

Thanks for sharing. I always enjoying hearing those types of stories. Especially the shed/sheep episode.

[Andrew Smith]

Fathers, eh? These days we have auto-tune plugins. :-P

Andrew

[Allan Black]

Slip in here with another 2UE story. When the Beatles were to arrive in Sydney in 1964 for their tour, UE decided to broadcast the breakfast session from the terminal out at Mascot International.

The crew went out to Mascot about 2 days in advance to recon and work out the gear we needed. The best place was the soundproofed bar overlooking the disembarking terminal. Back at the studio I spent hours dubbing about 150x30sec spots to alternate off 2 mag tapes.

The Sunday night before, for security, we left Nelson our engineer locked in the bar with his sleeping bag. The 707 was scheduled to arrive Monday at 8am, and we all arrived at 4.30am for the breakie as usual. But we couldn't get in, pounding on the doors of the bar .. no response.

Time was wasting, so we called the airport security, they used master keys to open up and there was Nelson, snoring away fast asleep on the floor, he'd gotten into the Whiskey. We stepped over him and switched everything on to warm up (analogue) then we woke him. He went out to wash and we started the show.

It was raining cats and dogs and Beatles fans, about 2000. When the fab 4 disembarked down the stairs, we couldn't tell who was who, they each carried giant black Qantas umbrellas, and the screams from the girl fans was absolutely terrific.

So Nelson was vindicated with his choice of the soundproof terminal bar as our b/cast studio. Great times.

11 June 1964: The Beatles arrive in Australia | The Beatles Bible

Cheers.

[Steve Game]

To pull this thread back to its title, I think popular singers everywhere will recognise the significant contribution that the Gibbs have made to their craft. You don't have to like the Bee Gee's music style but it is always recognisable as complete and polished. I remember their earlier material such as the 1941 Mining Disaster some of the material from the Horizontal album. There, Robin's distinctive voice offered something completely different from the music of the day.
The number of artists queueing up to record their compositions bears testament to their writing.