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While the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever is generally uninteresting, the Bee Gees are an exception. The brothers Gibb not only have the best falsettos in the business, but also the keenest sense of disco's potential for transcendence.
The Bee Gees have everything going for them: lyrics that don't insult, a band that can open up and utilize each and every electric and/or acoustic possibility without sounding overproduced, great harmonies, superb dance music. Indeed, "You Should Be Dancing" comes as close to disco perfection as anything I've heard, save perhaps Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "Bad Luck" and Labelle's "Lady Marmalade." The Bee Gees are very busy on Saturday Night Fever. They perform six of their own songs (four new, two old) and wrote the record's only other worthwhile track, "If I Can't Have You," sung by Yvonne Elliman, who sounds authentically resonant enough to give it the necessary poignancy.
Generally, however, this double album is irritating when it's supposed to be exciting, funny when it's supposed to be dramatic. "Night on Disco Mountain," adapted by David Shire (who did most of the scoring) from Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, is but one example of high hilarity, while K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Tavares and MFSB are better represented by their own LPs.
Though Saturday Night Fever is more dross than gloss, it winds up being saved by the grace of the Bee Gees. God bless 'em.
- Susin Shapiro, Rolling Stone, 3/23/78.
Bonus Reviews!
An all-star lineup, spearheaded by the Bee Gees, join forces on this two-record soundtrack from the forthcoming flick starring John Travolta. The Bee Gees perform on six tunes including its fast-rising "How Deep Is Your Love" while penning five new ones, one performed by Yvonne Elliman. The other contributors are Tavares, K.C. & the Sunshine Band, the Trammps, Kool & the Gang, Walter Murphey, Ralph McDonald, M.F.S.B. and David Shire. The music contains something for everyone, from disco to soft jazzy instrumentals to out and out boogie to ballads and rockers. Singularly, the Bee Gees are the standouts and nucleus, yet collectively this album is filled with bundles of talent. Best cuts: "How Deep Is Your Love," "Staying Alive," "If I Can't Have You," "More Than A Woman," "Night Fever," "Boogie Shoes."
- Billboard, 1977.
So you've seen the movie -- pretty good movie, right? -- and decided that this is the disco album that you're going to try. Well, I can't blame you. The Bee Gees side is pop music at a new peak of irresistible silliness, with the former Beatle clones singing like mechanical mice with an unnatural sense of rhythm. And the album climaxes on a par-tee even non-discoids can get into, beginning with the best of David Shire's "additional music," then switching almost imperceptibly to something tolerable by MFSB and revving into all 10:52 of the Trammps' magnificent "Disco Inferno." But I find the other two sides unlistenable, mostly because the rest of Shire's additions are real soundtrack-quality stuff -- he even discofies Moussorgsky without making a joke of it (compare Walter Murphy on side two). And there's one more problem. While you're deciding to buy this record, so is everyone you know. You're gonna get really sick of it. Maybe you should Surprise Your Friends and seek out Casablanca's Get Down and Boogie instead. B+
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
One of the biggest-selling albums of all time, this double-disc soundtrack features the Bee Gees hits "Stayin' Alive," "Night Fever," and "How Deep Is Your Love," Yvonne Elliman's "If I Can't Have You," and a selection of popular disco hits by Tavares, K.C. & the Sunshine Band, and others. This wasn't only the soundtrack to a film, it was the soundtrack to an era. That era is over, but it's evoked by the music. * * * * *
- William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
In 1977 music critics were too busy flopping around the dressing rooms of punk bands who were softening into immensely disappointing "power pop" acts to notice the year's true music revolution. The very word, "Disco," was so unhip that many of the poor fools had taken to wearing embarrasing "Disco Sucks" lapel badges. The general premise was that Disco was big, commercial and phony... that it wasn't real music. This ludicrous attitude prevailed in the British music press until, in late 1978, some bright spark at New Musical Express dusted off a copy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and actually realized what the general public had known from the outset. This was a fresh, vibrant, intoxicating sound that latched onto the heartbeat. It was fun. It was sexy. It was funky. At the time, Saturday Night Fever was probably the most critically underrated album in popular music history -- witness The Trammps pulsating "Disco Inferno," Tavares' sublime "More Than a Woman" or even K.C.'s hilarious "Boogie Shoes." Every single track has retained that surging sexual freshness. This was the soul of the 70s. True, the album was dominated by The Bee Gees who, with Robert Stigwood's guidance, climbed to the top of the disco pile. But "Stayin' Alive," "How Deep Is Your Love," "Jive Talkin'" and "Night Fever" have equally grown in stature over the years.
- Collins Gem Classic Albums, 1999.
Disco might forever be remembered as mere kitsch if we didn't have Fever to remind us that is was also the unlikely music of emancipation. Whether at a Brooklyn ballroom or Studio 54, disco delivered participatory escapism, and it hardly mattered who provided the beat. Fever did boast stars, of course, in the Bee Gees, who were busy reinventing themselves as R&B titans just as surely as Travolta became a new dude when he put on those duds. But if "Stayin' Alive" was a reason to live, even the lesser lights on this double LP gave us happy feet. "Disco Inferno" still makes us want to wear white after Labor Day.
- Entertainment Weekly, 2001.
Grab your white leisure suit, get out that disco ball and boogie down to the disc that launched the craze. "Seminal" doesn't do justice to the soundtrack that epitomized the '70s when the Bee Gees were at their height, pumping out the hits for John Travolta to dance his way to stardom in those tight polyester bell bottoms. Barry, Robin, Maurice and a host of smooth contributing artists transport you back to shake your booty, baby! * * * * *
- Zagat Survey Music Guide - 1,000 Top Albums of All Time, 2003.
 Further reading on Super Seventies RockSite!: "Dancing Madness" Album Review: Single Review: Single Review: Single Review: |
This tremendous success spawned a second wind for the Bee Gees' career. Though they had scored a number of hits in the late sixties, the Australian pop fraternity's popularity had been waning. Then they recorded "Jive Talkin'," a syncopated bump 'n' grind anthem, which gave them their first number-one hit in the United States and revived the public's interest in a vocal group who had previously been known for their goody-two-shoes image and ditties like "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and "Lonely Days." With this change in artistic direction bringing them newfound levels of popularity, their manager Robert Stigwood decided the group would be the perfect overseers of his most recent project, a film adaptation of a Vanity Fair article, "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night." The brothers ended up writing half the album and recording six tunes, three of which would end up hitting the top slot on the American charts, and would help them win a brace of Grammys for the mantel.
Thirty years later, everybody still aspires to be as swaggery as Tony Manero, even as the songs of Saturday Night Fever remain perennial favorites and ensure that the Bee Gees will not be forgotten anytime soon.
Saturday Night Fever was voted the 57th greatest album of all time in a VH1 poll of over 700 musicians, songwriters, disc jockeys, radio programmers, and critics in 2003.
- Nevin Martell, VH1's 100 Greatest Albums, 2003.
In the mid-Seventies, the Bee Gees swept away the arch pop of their Sixties hits and applied their silvery-helium harmonies to the creamy syncopation of disco. They made great albums in their new incarnation (such as 1975's Main Course) but none bigger or more influential than this soundtrack. In the past quarter-century, Saturday Night Fever has sold 30 million copies worldwide, and its musical worth justifies the numbers. The Bee Gees dominate ("Stayin' Alive" is the pulse of the picture as well as the album), but the Trammps' hot-funk assault "Disco Inferno" affirms disco's black-R&B roots.
Saturday Night Fever was chosen as the 131st greatest album of all time by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine in Dec. 2003.
- Rolling Stone, 12/11/03.
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