Greatest remains the first and only set to couple the Gibb brothers’ mid-’70s run of eight number one hits with key album cuts from that era. Tracing the gold embossed Bee Gees logo on the cover of Bee Gees Greatest with one’s fingertips, it’s hard not to wonder, “Is a re-release of a 28-year-old Bee Gees ‘greatest hits’, that was already released on CD, even necessary?” Absolutely. Including their work with brother Andy Gibb and songs written for Yvonne Elliman, Frankie Valli, and Samantha Sang, The Bee Gees amassed such an unprecedented amount of success over the course of five years, that nearly three decades later, “greatest” seems far too modest an adjective to describe this music. Originally released as a two-record set on RSO (you do remember that bemused bull, don’t you?), Bee Gees Greatest neatly tied up the Brothers’ Gibb monumental achievements just in time for the 1979 holiday shopping season.
Despite the saturation of the Bee Gees’ sound, Spirits Having Flown (1979) dispelled any notions of a backlash when it lodged three singles at the top spot. The Saturday Night Fever (1977) soundtrack catapulted the Bee Gees to unprecedented commercial success, spending 24 weeks at the summit of the charts while their extracted singles spent a collective 15 weeks at number one. The follow-up, Children of the World (1976), featured another batch of radio and dance floor hits, including “You Should Be Dancing” and “Love So Right”. The singles from the album, “Jive Talkin'” (almost immediately covered by Rufus and Chaka Khan) and “Nights On Broadway”, announced an enervated musical style that caught fire across the airwaves even the ballad “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)” had some bite lacking in their earlier compositions. He helped reinvent the band on Main Course (1975), an album that steered their seraphic harmonies towards R&B. Only three years earlier, they’d been declared has-beens, relics of paisley-painted pop and tunes about mining disasters and Massachusetts. There Robin, Barry, and Maurice Gibb stood smiling and tanned from the Floridian sun, and with good reason: though Saturday Night Fever was still months from release the Brothers Gibb already found themselves in the middle of a remarkable career resurgence.
The headline on the 14 July 1977 cover of Rolling Stone read, “Bee Gees: The Saga of a Not-So-Average White Band”.