Critic's Review
Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
Every so often, a piece of music comes along that defines a moment in popular culture history: Johann Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus did this in Vienna of the 1870s; Jerome Kern's Show Boat did it for Broadway in the 1920s; and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album did it for psychedelic music in the 1960s. Saturday Night Fever, although hardly as prodigious an artistic achievement as those precursors, was precisely that kind of phenomenon for the second half of the 1970s -- ironically, at the time before its release, the disco boom had seemingly run its course, and seemed confined to primarily Europe and 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 tenfold. 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, when 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. They obliged him by turning over the best of their new numbers to the project; 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 and much more agreeable John Badham, and 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 those 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 extraordinary appeal -- it delivers what its audience expects in dance numbers, plus the soaring, lyrical romantic numbers that were, as with most ventures by the Gibb brothers in this area, virtually irresistible as music. Despite the presence of other artists, Saturday Night Fever is indispensable as a Bee Gees album, not just for its array of hit songs -- which became the de facto soundtrack for the second half of the '70s -- but because it showed the Gibb brothers as composers as well as artists, in recordings by Yvonne Elliman ("If I Can't Have You") and Tavares ("More Than a Woman"). And because it placed their music alongside the likes of Kool & the Gang and MFSB In essence, the layout of the soundtrack release was the culmination of everything they'd been moving toward on an artistic level since the Mr. Natural album, and even the presence of David Shire's "Night on Disco Mountain" and "Salsation," and Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven," didn't hurt, because these set up a surrounding ambience that made the Bee Gees' material work even better. Heard on CD as 79 continuous 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 Mr. Dees). The album has been out several times on CD, including a Mobile Fidelity audiophile disc that's rarer than hen's teeth and a 1995 newly annotated audiophile edition from Polydor that's so sharp you can hear the glistening harps on Tavares' version of "More Than a Woman" and feel like you're almost in the bell of the clarinet during Ralph McDonald's "Calypso Breakdown."
