This may come as news to younger music obsessives for whom disco was the underground movement that birthed Italo and house and techno and brought us Larry Levan and Arthur Russell. They were the sun around which the rest of the not-so-brief fad revolved, the form's most important auteurs, the gold standard. To a lot of people at the time, the Bee Gees were disco. The article led to a movie- the soundtrack of which Bee Gees dominated- and disco was on its way to taking over popular culture in the U.S. Ten months later, journalist Nik Cohn would write a New York magazine cover piece called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" (a story later revealed to be completely fabricated) about a young, working-class Italian-American kid finding some kind of existential meaning in the new dance clubs that were popping up everywhere.
You know what happened next: Singles "Jive Talkin'" and "Nights on Broadway" hit #1 and #7 in the U.S., respectively. They cut Main Course in Miami, everyone involved was listening to Philly soul, and Mardin encouraged Barry Gibb to try singing some tunes in falsetto. Many of those early songs endured, but the Bee Gees were no longer household names by the time they teamed up with Atlantic Records house producer Arif Mardin to record an album called Main Course, the group's 11th, in 1975. They enjoyed hit singles like "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and "To Love Somebody" and at least one great album, Odessa. First, there was the popular late-60s beat combo, who made a few waves in Australia before returning to England, where the three Gibb brothers- Barry, Maurice, and Robin- had lived before moving down under as kids.
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