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The Bee Gees became quite adept at mastering pop music with sweet ballads in the 60's and ended up claiming the pop charts for themselves with a white hot streak of disco/dance oriented songs that began with 1975's #1 hit “Jive Talkin'“. This new funkier Arif Mardin produced incarnation set the trend in quality of production and arrangement of music and vocals. “Jive Talkin'“ was a hit at the time “Jaws“ was rolling over the competition at the movies that summer. A second from the same album was also a #1 hit, “You Should Be Dancing“. Mardin was the producer who got them in touch with what was happening in pop radio at the time, had them listen and then directed their sound towards R&B. In the meantime, Robert Stigwood had signed a new distribution deal with Polydor instead of re-signing with Atlantic. When the time came to record the follow up to “Main Course“, they found out that Arif was no longer available to them due to his being a house producer under contract to produce only Atlantic artists. Instead of giving up, they took what they learned from Mardin's productions and did them one hiring the studio engineers they had worked with on their biggest hits to date. They did run into a problem when the drummer had a family emergency and had to return home before he was able to complete the rest of the tracks for the “Saturday Night Fever“ soundtrack. Experiments with a primitive drum machine to replace him failed but gave birth to a novel idea. One of the engineers remembered that they already had a drum track in the can and floated the idea of making a drum loop from it and using it for other songs. Barry picked the bar and the two engineers labouriously came up with the loop “which sounded insistent without sounding machine-like“ and used it on “Night Fever“, “Stayin' Alive“ and their version of “More Than A Woman“. Pretty cool, eh? Apparently, they also used it on Barbra Streisand's “Woman In Love“ single. “Night Fever“ was the biggest hit they had from that album, spending eight weeks at the top of the pop charts in early 1978. Even after their #1 pop successes up to “Stayin' Alive“, “Night Fever“ was not the highest new entry that week hopping in at #76, while Barry Manilow took the honor with “I Can't Smile Without You“ which entered at #63, 13 slots song will always represent the absolute peak of disco to me, it is sweetly intoxicating with a magical backbeat and spent eight weeks at #1.
