![]() Stretching back to their earliest hits, the Bee Gees always had a mordant, gothic streak. But there’s a predatory grace to the way he and his brothers ride that colossal beat. After the second chorus, Gibb lets loose with a full-on drawn-out terror-screech, like a teenage girl in a horror movie who’s just tripped over a dead body. Gibb’s vocals are an electric-shocked falsetto yip, a squeal of pain. Without that deep need, that insecurity, Gibb wouldn’t strut through the song the way he does. When he says that we can try to understand the New York times’ effect on man, he’s not talking about the newspaper. He feels the city breaking, and everybody’s shaking. He’s been kicked around since he was born. But the rest of the time, he’s lamenting his own hardships. ![]() He’s a dancing man, and he just can’t lose. He’s got the wings of heaven on his shoes. You can tell by the way he uses his walk, he’s a woman’s man, no time to talk. Half the time, Barry Gibb is flexing, talking shit. The Bee Gees wanted to write a song about New York survival, and there’s a duality at work in the lyrics. In 1983, when Sylvester Stallone directed the long-awaited Saturday Night Fever sequel, that movie was called Staying Alive. It helps establish the stakes of the story, the desperation that might be underneath that Travolta strut. ![]() “Stayin’ Alive” - both the song and the title - transforms Saturday Night Fever simply by existing. But the Gibb brothers thought “Saturday Night” was a stupid, corny, overused title, and they refused. Robert Stigwood, the Bee Gees manager and label boss who produced Saturday Night Fever, wanted the group to record a song called “Saturday Night,” since that was the original title of the movie. None of that happens if that opening scene is set to any song other than “Stayin’ Alive.” It hangs over the entire history of disco music. Thanks to the pulsing soundtrack, it hangs over the entire career of the Bee Gees, too. It continues to hang over Travolta’s entire decades-long career. That image didn’t just hang over the rest of the movie. It’s the Travolta of that opening sequence. And yet the Travolta that everyone remembers isn’t the pathetic go-nowhere kid, the inarticulate slob who can’t recognize celebrities’ names, or the attempted date-rapist. The next two hours of the movie work overtime to break down that image, to burn it to cinders. That opening scene of Saturday Night Fever establishes Tony Manero as some kind of white-ethnic masculine ideal - a peacocking prince of Brooklyn. He’s the man, and we know this before he even says a word. ![]() He pops into a store to put a shirt on layaway. He eats two slices of pizza stacked-up, one-handed, not even remotely stressed about dripping grease or tomato sauce on his clothes. He struts down a Bay Ridge sidewalk, taller than everyone else around him, in no particular hurry. Travolta’s red shirt collar is splayed over his jacket. He’s wearing impeccably shiny red leather platform joints, which can’t be all that practical for his hardware-store job. In that opening scene, we see Travolta’s feet before we see the rest of him. ![]()
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