Before the Gibb brothers became disco kings, they scored a hit with “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.”
It was an unexpected first-wave success. In the early days, Maurice, Robin, and Barry Gibb were known as the BGs, because Barry and an early promoter shared the initials B.G. And they were known for a too-familiar sound: After their first recording, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” came out in 1967, rumor had it the BGs were actually the Beatles, with BG standing for “Beatles Group.” Then the rebranded Bee Gees released “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” and radio deejays got on board.
The tale of a man on death row trying to communicate with his wife, “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” like many of the Gibbs’ recordings, was composed on the spot in the studio. “It was like acting, you see, we said, let’s pretend that somebody, his life is on the line, somebody’s going to the chair,” Robin wrote in the liner notes for Idea, the 1968 album that included “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.” “What would be going through their mind? Let’s not make it doom and gloom but sort of an appeal to the person he loves.” It was catchy and different, and it went to No. 1 in the U.K. and No. 8 in the U.S.
The song was the capstone to a strong year, which included a tour in Germany where the Bee Gees were met by screaming fans waxing Union Jacks. The reception would be eclipsed by the fame the group achieved in the 1970s as the kings of disco. That made the Bee Gees massive—a success that somehow worked against them with critics. The siblings were ridiculed in the media and in the early 1980s were even parodied by a spoof group, the Hee Bee Gee Bees, in a track titled “Meaningless Songs (in Very High Voices).” Not that fans cared. In the four decades the group sang together, they sold more than 250 million records.
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