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Tag: Saturday Night Fever

  • Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees Remembers His Late Brothers Ahead of Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

    Barry Gibb received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award Saturday on behalf of the Bee Gees, which will air on the Grammy ceremony Sunday, but said it would be a bittersweet moment without his late brothers Robin and Maurice Gibb there to share in the award.

    “Of course there will [be a void],” Barry Gibb told Entertainment Tonight. “But I always believe they’re close.”

    Robin Gibb died in May 2012 after battling colon and liver cancer, and Robin’s twin Maurice died to complications following a twisted bowel in 2003. Another brother who had a successful singing career in his own right and was not part of the Bee Gees, Andy Gibb, died of the heart condition myocarditis in 1988.

    When thinking about the disco era of the 1970s, the Bee Gees absolutely come to mind along with 1977’s Saturday Night Fever star John Travolta, who sent a special message for Barry prior to Sunday’s award ceremony.

    “Barry, you know I love you,” John Travolta said. “Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me and everything I’ve done for you.”

    The four brothers had a slew of number one hits in the 1970s and early 80s, but Barry Gibb told ET he prefers How Can You Mend a Broken Heart and Lonely Days over perhaps their most famous hit, Stayin’ Alive, because of the high notes in the disco anthem.

    Barry Gibb acknowledged the impact the movie and the soundtrack, which featured several Bee Gees tracks, had on the culture of the world in the disco era.

    “Saturday Night Fever is something now that everybody knows about all over the world,” Gibb said.

    Barry Gibb continues to record and perform and has plans for a new album and tour with his 37-year-old son Ashley.

  • Barry Gibb, Only Living Bee Gees Member, Embarks on Solo Tour

    Barry Gibb is the only remaining member of the Bee Gees and he is now embarking on his first ever solo tour. He kicked off his tour this week in Philadelphia at the Wells Fargo Center to an impressive crowd. His second stop on the tour was Boston.

    The Bee Gees consisted of Barry Gibb along with brothers Maurice and Robin. Maurice died back in 2003 and Robin passed away in 2012. Younger brother, solo artist Andy Gibb, died in 1988 at age 30. Barry Gibb is no stranger to the music world, but in a career that spanned several decades he never did much on his own. He released only one solo album–Now Voyager–and he wrote two albums for Barbra Streisand–Guilty and Guilty Pleasures.

    “It was time,” Gibb said from his home in Miami about finally going out on a solo tour.

    When asked about his apparent avoidance of much solo work throughout his career, he gave a very simple answer.

    “My heart wasn’t in making solo records with all that,” he said. “We were brothers, but if you stepped too far out, somebody would pull you back in. You couldn’t go too far on your own. There was always that conflict.”

    “Why do you think I titled that Streisand album after something guilty? Having success on my own meant having to not really talk about it. It’s not as if my brothers ever mentioned me winning a Grammy for that record with Barbra, let alone congratulate me,” he added. “There it is.”

    Gibb’s reasons for not doing solo work are sadly gone.

    “I don’t have anyone to look out for except myself,” he acknowledged.

    He did, however, express his feelings about Justin Bieber and his recent issues that have prominently graced the media in recent months, as seen in the video clip above.

    Barry Gibb was close to his brothers, both personally and professionally. Whether he was writing Bee Gees hits alone or as a group, from 1967’s New York Mining Disaster 1941, 1977’s watershed Saturday Night Fever, or 1977’s I’ve Gotta Get A Message to You, they were, as he says, a band of brothers.

    “I know I make it sound as if I wanted to get away from them, but I didn’t,” he shared. “We inspired each other in many ways.”

    As the eldest he was always looking out for his younger brothers. Barry Gibb says he is a religious man, and he also believes his brothers will square their problems in heaven.

    “Too many coincidences to think otherwise,” he said.

    He even dreams about his brothers who have passed on before him.

    “In so many of my dreams now, I see my brothers. I see Robin a lot, presently. I see his expressions. Maurice and Andy, too, but less than Robin. He and I, we were as close as we could be within those circumstances. Maybe we were worried that we would become so close, it would have to come apart,” he said.

    Barry Gibb isn’t only a compassionate man when talking about his late brothers, but is compassionate in his writing and performing of music as well. One need only listen to an old Bee Gees song like How Can You Mend A Broken Heart that dates all the way back to 1971 to see and hear this quite clearly. His audiences will no doubt hear it, too, along with a taste of whatever else the iconic singer puts out there for them during his first ever solo tour.

    Image via Twitter

  • John Travolta Opens Up About His Son’s Death

    If you remember, John Travolta’s 16-year-old son Jett Travolta passed away in 2009 after suffering from a seizure. Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston later confirmed that Jett had a history of seizures, along with being autistic.

    During a recent interview with BBC News, Travolta opened up about the lowest point of his life, and what it took to get him to the point he is at today. At the time of Jett’s death, Travolta described the pain of losing his son as “the worst thing that’s ever happened in my life.”

    “The truth is, I didn’t know if I was going to make it,” he admitted, during an interview at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. “Life was no longer interesting to me, so it took a lot to get me better.”

    Travolta gives most of the credit for his recovery to the Church of Scientology. He explained that without the church, he didn’t think he would be able to get through the death of his eldest child. Travolta, now 59-years-old, has been a follower of the Church of Scientology since the early 70s, and says they have helped him through every tragedy he has been forced to deal with, including the death of Jett.

    “I will forever be grateful to Scientology for supporting me for two years solid, I mean Monday through Sunday,” Travolta explained. “They didn’t take a day off, working through different angles of the techniques to get through grief and loss, and to make me feel that finally I could get through a day.”

    Travolta also discussed the gap in his career after filming the hit movies Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and how his new goal is to play a villain in a James Bond film.

    “It got a little complicated for a few years,” Travolta explained. “A lot of things added up to a five-year period that wasn’t so good for me. There were people who were much hotter than me who wanted the role, but Quentin put his career on the line and refused to make the movie without me in it.”

    Travolta and Preston have two other children: Ella Bleu, 13, and Benjamin, 3.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • John Travolta Wants to Be in Bond…James Bond

    John Travolta, the 59 year-old father and Academy Award-nominated actor, has become the epitome of a professional in his career; he has been one of Hollywood’s top male actors (and sex symbols) for over forty years, reaching a level of success that few ever do, being cast as the leading male in film after film, decade after decade.

    According to him. Travolta first broke into show business at 17, when he won his first professional role after spending two summers at a theatre camp.

    The Saturday Night Fever and Grease heartthrob relates that his interest in show business was borne long before his time at the camp and his first “real” acting job, however.

    “I could take out the garbage and I would be heard, Travolta told The Telegraph. “I never needed to do a lot to get attention, so my performing honestly came out of joy.”

    John Travolta has long-been one of the world’s most loved actors, as his humility and obvious zest for life have always been apparent, both through his personal, and professional, work.

    The Pulp Fiction star says that being humble is a trait he attributes to having come by after experiencing, both, life’s greatest successes, as well as its most debilitating losses and suffering; Travolta lost his long-time girlfriend, Diana Hyland, in 1977 after a lengthy battle with cancer. Then, in January 2009, the star and his wife of twenty-three years, actress Kelly Preston, experienced the most personal and heart-wrenching tragedy a parent can imagine: their 16-year-old son, Jett, who was the spitting image of his father, passed away after having a seizure in the Bahamas.

    Still, even in light of two such extremely painful events, Travolta says he has always been “a glass-half-full man…an optimist by nature.”

    “I’m probably less terrified of death than your average fellow now, because people so near to me have suffered before their time and I just feel that if they can do it, so can I. The edge – the panic that most people feel – has been taken off death for me. I almost feel like it’s disrespectful to fear it when others have been able to do it.”

    That perspective proved to serve the actor well, when, a year after Jett’s death, Travolta and Preston learned that they were expecting their third child; son Benjamin, now three, was born in November 2010.

    Travolta now says he has his life back on track after two years of angst and torment over Jett’s untimely death, and contributes his positive outlook today to Scientology, the religion he has been practicing since 1975.

    Travolta has taken a hiatus from acting for the last several years, staying almost entirely out of the public eye; now, however, Danny Zuko is back, playing a husband who suffers from memory loss after a car accident opposite Salma Hayek in the film, A Three Dog Life, based on the best-selling memoir by Abigail Thomas. The movie is being produced by screenplay adapter, Nick Guthe, and J. Todd Harris and Clark Peterson; The Solution Entertainment is currently looking for a buyer of the film in the European Film Market.

    In A Three Dog Life, Travolta will play the amnesiac husband of Abigail Thomas (Salma Hayek), a far cry from the villainous roles he has become so well-known for, and that he is still enjoying playing; he says that his quest for the bad-guy roles will probably continue until the day he gets to play such a character in a James Bond movie.

    He told The Telegraph that his still-unachieved goal will prevent him from really being able to “close the chapter on playing villains” until he is cast in a Bond.

    “I would love that,” he says. “They’re going a different way with their villain in this next film but I’ve spoken to Barbara Broccoli [James Bond producer] about it and she loves the idea, so that would be great.”

    Main image courtesy Michael Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.