And yet after living with the tribute album for so long and then listening to the Bee Gees' versions afterward, Cost notes somewhat mordantly, "I can see where about half the time there's been an improvement on the original version by the artists that did Melody Fair stuff. That's just my opinion, and some Bee Gees fans would quake at hearing that."
Dennis Davison and Alec Palao would quake. Last summer the pair, assisted by Cost, put together three shows (two in Los Angeles, one in San Francisco) that featured bands performing only Bee Gees songs. Davison's Jigsaw Seen and Palao's Sneetches played, as did other bands from the tribute album. Also on hand at the San Francisco show was singer/songwriter John Wesley Harding, who, Davison recalls, performed the Gibbs' "Don't Wanna Live Inside Myself." But Cost remembers Harding's performance for the way he jived the crowd: "John Wesley Harding got up there and said, 'Fuck the Bee Gees! They were never any good. What are all you people doing here anyway?'"
Well, Davison and Palao, at least, were genuflecting to their heroes. Both in their thirties, coming of age musically in the wake of the late-'70s punk-rock explosion, they missed out entirely on the Bee Gees '60s hits, and later dismissed the group's disco output. ''Like a lot of people from my generation, I disregarded that stuff completely," Palao says. As for Davison, he remembers that "when it [disco] was happening, I didn't like it. Of course, I wasn't allowed to -- I was in a punk band." Now Davison scarfs up as many Bee Gees records as he can, including imported bootlegs of ancient material.
Davison already has begun coordinating two additional tributes -- one to late-'60s L.A. psychedelic savants Love, the other to poppy first-wave Brit invaders the Hollies -- and in January the Bee Gees repaired to their Miami studio to write and record their next album, due out some time next year. Meanwhile, Bee Gees-written songs keep surfacing: former Bronski Beat/Communards singer Jimmy Sommerville recently reworked yet another version of "To Love Somebody," this one in a reggae style, and made it a British hit, while Chicago-based indie nippers Catherine included the brothers' 1967 "Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You" on their debut album, Sorry.
"It's the greatest form of flattery that someone thinks your songs are worth enough to sing and then do their own version and enjoy it at the same time and actually love the song," Maurice Gibb says. "That's a great honor for us, and I don't think that feeling ever changes."
Melody Fair is available from eggBERT Records, 2755 Via Hacienda, Post Office Box 10022, Fullerton,
