![]() Andy immediately started working with Barry, who had songs to spare.īarry Gibb wrote “I Just Want To Be Your Everything,” the first Andy Gibb single that most of the world would get to hear, in about 20 minutes, while an awestruck Andy watched. Here, Stigwood had a baby Bee Gee who looked like a teen idol and who could sing, more or less, like his brothers. With the Bee Gees on a hot streak - one that would soon lead to a period of almost unfathomable commercial dominance - Andy Gibb must’ve seemed like a hell of a discovery. Robert Stigwood, the Bee Gees’ manager, liked Andy’s demo tape and signed him to his RSO label, so Andy moved to Miami in 1976 and started working with his brothers. In Australia, Gibb sang with a couple of different bands, got married, and released his first single, 1975’s “Words And Music.” (It only came out in Australia, and it didn’t really go anywhere.) He moved around some more - first back to the Isle Of Man, and then, at 16, to Australia, where his brother Barry thought that he might mature into a better performer. At 13, Andy dropped out of school and started singing at local nightclubs, often covering his brothers’ songs. While the Bee Gees were on the ascent, Andy and his parents moved to the Spanish island of Ibiza. A young Andy would come home from school to find his house mobbed with screaming admirers. When Andy was nine, his family moved back to England, and his brothers scored their first hit. (Andy was 12 years younger than Barry and 11 years younger than twins Robin and Maurice.) That band would, of course, become the Bee Gees. In 1958, the year Andy Gibb was born, his family moved from the UK’s Isle Of Man to Australia, and his three much-older brothers formed a band. Consider, if you will, the case of the #1 song in America at the time of Presley’s death: A lush and slinky love-squeak from a 19-year-old kid who’d lived his entire life in a post-Elvis world. (Presley had moved away from them, too, but he’d moved away in a different direction.) The big songs of Presley’s final year must’ve sounded strange to him. In the ’70s, popular music had moved away from the pounding sex-howls that Presley had helped popularize. But by the time of his death, Presley hadn’t been much of a chart presence for a half-decade. Presley had dominated pop charts for years, long after he’d stopped even trying to make exciting music. When he entered the national stage in 1956, looking like sex and venom, Elvis Presley had been a key catalyst in a massive, sweeping wave that would go far beyond music and come to touch every last aspect of global culture. He wasn’t exactly the vital and charismatic force that he’d been 21 years earlier, when the world first met him. When he wasn’t playing concerts, he’d become something of a recluse, holing up at Graceland. Presley’s live show had still been a big draw in the last years of his life, but onstage, he’d often been hazy and near-incomprehensible. ![]() Nick - had been pumping Presley full of drugs, including a variety of painkillers. Presley’s personal doctor George Nichopoulos - known as Dr. A couple of weeks later, three men were arrested for trying to steal Presley’s body.Īt the time, the Memphis medical examiner claimed that Presley had died of heart failure and that drugs weren’t a factor. Tens of thousands of fans turned out to watch Presley’s Memphis funeral procession. ![]() A few hours later at a local Memphis hospital, Presley was declared dead at the age of 42. Paramedics found Presley unresponsive, and they tried and failed to revive him. On the afternoon of August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley’s girlfriend Ginger Alden found Presley’s body on a bathroom floor in Graceland, his Memphis mansion. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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