Blog
Remembering Robin Gibb…and not all memories are fond ones
Written by Jimmy
Robin, Rest in Peace. We loved you and hated you. And we love your favourite song, How Deep is Your Love, almost as much as we hated it.
In 1977-78 in Odenton Maryland, it was definitely NOT cool to like the Bee Gees. It was very cool, however, to like Saturday Night Fever and we all went to bed at night dreaming of being able to dance like Tony Manero (See Rude Note 1 below).
And, given that Tony liked girls and we liked girls and given that Tony liked How Deep is Your Love (evidence that he allowed it to play while he was in the subway – we couldn’t really sort out reality from movies), then we liked the song (although we never mentioned it’s Bee Gee Origins). Here’s our view of the song:
The drinking age in Maryland was 18 at the time and no one cared about drinking ages – you simply had to laminate a piece of paper that created your age at 20 or so and you got in. I think mine was for a phony lacrosse club. As teenagers, my best friends and I (all guys) would hang out at one of the bars that played disco and try to meet girls. It was tricky. If we called too much attention to ourselves, we got chased out by the local soldiers from Fort Meade, who didn’t like teen age boys hanging out in their bar. If we called no attention to ourselves, we sat together in a dark corner drinking Long Island Ice Teas and Whiskey Sours (our analysis said they were the highest alchohol content per dollar, See Rude Note 2).
Our mission was to meet a girl and impress her with our disco moves and still be on the dance floor when How Deep is Your Love came on. This mission was frustrated by seven sad facts: 1) the ratio of boys to girls in Odenton Maryland was 3.61 to 1, due to a very large Army base next to the town, 2) soldiers were all muscles and had far more cash to splash, putting pimply teenage boys with fake ID’s at a big disadvantage, 3) we had no disco moves of note and we all know a bad disco move is worse than no disco move at all, 4) even if one of us by miracle suceeded in getting one girl to dance with us, we were quickly joined by the other six of us, who surrounded the girl like worker bees surround the queen – this generally led to said bee flying off, 5) if we survived the worker bee onslaught it was almost impossible to survive multiple disco songs waiting for slow dance to happen, 6) if you were on with a slow song, there was a 98% chance a rather large soldier would ‘cut in’ and take the girl to dance with him and 7) if you did survive all this, well the really bad news was no one knew what the seventh sad fact was because we never got that far.
So, we loved How Deep is Your Love as the song that would act as a soundtrack to our mythical slow dance where we’d rotate quietly on a dance floor with the love of our life. We hated the song, of course, because it was the soundtrack for our harsh reality of sitting in a dark corner, sipping our Long Island Ice Tea, watching the entire US Military to dance with our women. As I write this in London, with a Discovery Channel TV series on the Roman Invasion of Britian playing in background, I have extraordinary sympathy for those poor Brits.
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Rude Note 1: Read this at your discression. I’m not proud writing it. While we all wanted to be Tony Manero, we were all very dissappointed with his choice of the girl at the end. None of us found her that appealing. This was a common theme in 1977-78. When the Superman movie came out, none of us liked Lois Lane at al, who was played by Margo Kidder, nore were we in love with Karen Allen from Animal House; and no one went to bed dreaming about Princess Lea in Star Wars (now Star Wars IV) played by Carrie Fisher. We were, however, very content with Farah Fawcett and the 1977 and 1978 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (soft porn you mother actually gave you for your birthday!).
Rude Note 2: We were all pretty obsessed with the most efficient means to get drunk/high. A Long Island Ice Tea had five shots of liquor (when made right) and cost $1 at Happy Hour. A case of Weidemans (frequently named as worst beer ever cost you $3.50 for 24 beers, but then you had to drink it. We thought you’d get more drunk by sipping it through a straw. Gallo made boxes of wine. Whiskey Sours we big because we thought Whiskey must make you drunker because your grand dad drank it but we couldn’t stand the taste so we added the Sour. Here’s how to make a Long Island House Tea – double the portions though.