CD Odyssey Disc 392: Soundtrack

Well a promising day has turned rather sour in the end, a tough end to my work day, followed by watching my Bruins bow out of the playoffs in Game 7 overtime.

Also, my cat is still dead.  Thought I'd throw that out to the universe, just in case it thought I was suddenly fine with that.  I'm not.

OK, let's shake this dour mood off with a frivolous review of an album filled with dance music.

Disc 392 is…Saturday Night Fever

Artist: Various, but with a large helping of the Bee Gees.

Year of Release: 1977

What’s Up With The Cover?:  John Travolta kicks it old school, in the role that made his career.  Behind him we have the Bee Gees, Barry Gibb in the middle, with Gibb Twin 1 and Gibb Twin 2 flanking him.  Oh, Barry - gifted with the best voice, the writing talent and all the looks.  It just seems so unfair that one guy should be so lucky.  To this day I wish I had Barry Gibbs' hair.  

How I Came To Know It: If you are of a certain vintage, then you couldn't escape this music since the day it was released.  I am of a certain vintage, and like every home in North America, we had this record.  We also had "Yuletide Disco" but sadly, it has been lost to the mists of time, and will not be reviewed on the CD Odyssey.

How It Stacks Up: I have twenty-four or twenty-five soundtracks (depending on how I file them).  Saturday Night Fever is as good as it gets, so I'll go with tops of however many there are.

Rating: 4 stars

What to say about one of the most iconic soundtracks ever made - arguably the soundtrack that made the releasing of movie soundtracks a thing that is now widely done.  It remains the highest selling soundtrack of all time.

For those of you who been living in an alien zoo on Planet Tralfamadore for the last 35 years and therefore haven't heard of the movie "Saturday Night Fever" it is a dance film about working class New Yorkers with limited prospects forgetting their troubles every weekend through the power of disco.  As silly as that sounds, it works.

What works about it best is the quiet desperation of the characters.  Travolta's main character works in his Dad's paint store, making a lowly wage, and spending it all on booze at local discotheques.  When he's in the club, he's a god among men.  When he's not, he's a bit of a schmuck, feeling trapped and not sure what to do about it.

From the first (and best) track on the album, the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive", the soundtrack captures these duelling visions.  If you've never listened to the lyrics, here's the first section:

"Well you can tell by the way I use my walk
I'm a woman's man: no time to talk
Music loud, and women warm
I've been kicked around since I was born."

Why Barry Gibb, you sly devil, sneaking in that last line on us while we were trying to enjoy a vacuous dance song.  Yet despite the feeling of being kicked around, you can't help but strut a little if you're walking when you hear this song.  It infuses a little of John Travolta's magic in all of us.

Musically, this song is the anthem for an entire style of music; I'm not sure any other genre has such a clear cut example.  Maybe Beethoven's 5th for classical music?

The next three tracks are all Bee Gees, and all awesome, "How Deep Is Your Love," "Night Fever" and "More Than A Woman," all of which remind us how much easier it was to hook up in 1977.  Or at least that's how I imagine it was - I was seven at the time.

The Bee Gees dominate the soundtrack overall, with six of the tracks (the other two are "Jive Talkin'" and "You Should Be Dancing" - also excellent).  This keeps the record with a coherent sound throughout.

In fact, even the non-Bee Gees songs stay in line.  This album is a celebration of disco music, and only disco music and that really works for it.  Sometimes soundtracks can feel disjointed when de-paired from the film they are designed for, but "Saturday Night Fever" stays true.  Also, it reminds us that while it has been fashionable to make fun of disco for many decades now, there was a time when there was plenty of good music coming out of the genre.

Other non-Bee Gee winners on the album include "If I Can't Have You" by Yvonne Ellman, "Disco Inferno" by the Trammps and a guilty pleasure of mine for many years now, Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven."   A take on that other iconic ditty I mentioned earlier.

In fact, this album has twelve disco songs so good, that it has developed a strange ability to actually make people forget the five that are actually kind of terrible.  As I talked with people about this album over the last couple of days, it was amazing how easy people would forget the bad stuff.  You'd mention one and they'd say, 'oh, yeah - I forgot about that one!".  How someone could  forget not one, not two, but three instrumental abominations by some guy called David Shire would be hard to fathom, except that I do it too when not actively listening to the record.

As bad as Shire's "Salsation" is at abusing salsa music with a disco groove, Ralph McDonald's "Calypso Breakdown" manages to top (bottom?) it with an assault of Caribbean music.  Someone obviously told these guys 'as long as you 'disco it up' anything goes!"

Sadly, while I'd like to put the five bad tracks into a crate and dynamite them in a baseball stadium, they are inextricably part of this album.

Fortunately, the last song on the record is over ten minutes of "Disco Inferno" that gets you back in the groove.  By the time it is over you will have forgotten all about the filler until the next time you listen to the record.

"Saturday Night Fever" isn't perfect, but any record so full of awesome tracks that it can make me forget "Night On Disco Mountain" is worth four stars and then some.  Also - Barry Gibb.

Best tracks:  Stayin' Alive, Night Fever, If I Can't Have You, A Fifth of Beethoven, Jive Talkin', You Should Be Dancing, Disco Inferno.