Six for Six: The Bee Gees' Unbroken Run at Number One, 1977-1979
For most of their first decade on the Hot 100, the Bee Gees were a band that kept getting a second chance. Look at their chart record in this archive before the autumn of 1977 and you see a group that could not stay hot. They arrived on the chart the week of May 27, 1967 with "New York Mining Disaster 1941," a song about men trapped underground, which peaked at #14. Over the next year and a half the three Gibb brothers, Barry, Robin and Maurice, turned out moody, string-drenched singles that kept knocking on the top ten without getting in: "To Love Somebody" at #17, "Holiday" at #16, "(The Lights Went Out In) Massachusetts" at #11, "Words" at #15. Two finally got through, "I've Gotta Get A Message To You" at #8 and "I Started A Joke" at #6, both in the back half of 1968. Then the floor gave way.
"Don't Forget To Remember" stalled at #73 in 1969. "If Only I Had My Mind On Something Else" reached #91 in the spring of 1970. "I.O.I.O." lasted exactly one week on the chart that July and peaked at #94. Three years in, they were charting like a band nobody had heard of.
Three Number Ones in Ten Years
The comebacks are the story of that first decade. "Lonely Days" climbed to #3 in the winter of 1970 and 1971, and "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart" gave them their first #1 on August 7, 1971, taking over from James Taylor's "You've Got A Friend" and holding for four weeks. Then, within two years, they were back in the nineties: "Saw A New Morning" at #94, "Mr. Natural" at #93, three weeks on the chart apiece. If you had wanted to write the Bee Gees off, 1974 was the year to do it.
"Jive Talkin'" was the pivot. Two weeks at #1 starting August 9, 1975, and suddenly the rhythm moved, the voices went up, and the band that had made its name on ballads found out it could make people dance. "Nights On Broadway" went to #7. "You Should Be Dancing" got them a single week at #1 on September 4, 1976, wedged between Elton John and Kiki Dee's four-week "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" and KC and the Sunshine Band. "Love So Right" reached #3. Even then the momentum stuttered: "Boogie Child" stopped at #12, "Edge Of The Universe" at #26.
So here is the ledger after ten years and 28 charting titles: three number ones, seven weeks at the top all told, and a lot of time spent in the nineties. Respectable. Not remotely a dynasty.
Six for Six
Then Saturday Night Fever, the 1977 film, came out, and the next six Bee Gees singles in this archive all went to #1. Every one. No misses, no #26s, no near-things. Six straight between December 1977 and June 1979, and together they add up to 20 weeks at #1, nearly three times what the previous decade had produced.
"How Deep Is Your Love" led the way. It debuted the week of September 24, 1977 and took its time climbing, finally reaching the top on December 24, 1977, Christmas Eve, where it unseated Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" after a ten-week reign. Three weeks at #1, and 33 weeks on the chart in all, the longest chart life of any Bee Gees record in this archive. Player's "Baby Come Back" took the top for three weeks in January, and then "Stayin' Alive" arrived on February 4, 1978 and stayed four. The next record to reach #1 was Andy Gibb's "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water," and Andy was the Gibbs' kid brother. After two weeks of that, "Night Fever" took over on March 18, 1978 and did not let go until May 6. Eight weeks, the longest run at #1 any Bee Gees record ever managed.
Add it up. From December 24, 1977 through May 6, 1978, a span of 20 chart weeks, the Bee Gees held #1 for 15 of them. Their little brother held it for two more. Only Player got a word in edgewise. The record that finally followed "Night Fever" was Yvonne Elliman's "If I Can't Have You," another song out of the same film, written by the same three men. Say what you like about disco; that spring the top of the Hot 100 was a family business.
The 1979 Sandwich
The second half of the streak is a different animal, and I find it more interesting. By the time "Too Much Heaven" debuted in November 1978, the film was old news, and the Bee Gees were back to being a band releasing singles rather than a soundtrack. The singles kept going to the top. What changed was who was waiting when they left.
"Too Much Heaven" reached #1 on January 6, 1979 and held for two weeks. Look at what it interrupted: Chic's "Le Freak," which had been #1 for the last two weeks of 1978, and which took the spot right back on January 20 for three more. "Tragedy" got to #1 on March 24, 1979, also for two weeks. What did it interrupt? Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," which had been on top for the two weeks before and came back for one more the week after. "Love You Inside Out" managed a single week at #1 on June 9, 1979. Before it: Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff." After it: "Hot Stuff" again, for two more weeks.
Three times in a row, a Bee Gees single climbed to #1, and three times the record it displaced came back and reclaimed the spot the moment the Bee Gees let go. Chic, Gaynor, Summer. Each of them the filling in a Bee Gees sandwich, or maybe the Bee Gees were the filling in theirs. Either way, by 1979 the Bee Gees were still winning the week, but the chart was no longer clearing out for them the way it had the year before. They were sharing the summit with a whole disco generation they had helped set loose, and that generation's own reckoning was only a few months off. The streak was intact. The monopoly was over.
What Six Straight Actually Means
Here's how I think about it. Before "How Deep Is Your Love," the Bee Gees had reached #1 three times in ten years and never twice in a row. From that record on, they did nothing else for a year and a half. Nine number ones in this archive, 27 weeks at the top, and six of the nine and 20 of the 27 weeks fall inside one 18-month window. Everything before was a long audition. Everything after was silence, at least at the summit: in this archive the Bee Gees never reached #1 again. "He's A Liar" peaked at #30 in 1981, "The Woman In You" at #24 in 1983, "You Win Again" at #75 in 1987. "One," in 1989, got them back to #7, and no closer.
That shape is unusual. Most acts with nine #1s spread them out over a career. The Bee Gees packed theirs into a burst so bright that everything else in their chart history, including a four-week #1 in 1971 that plenty of bands would kill for, reads like preamble.
And the streak deserves more respect than it usually gets, because the six singles were not the same record six times. "How Deep Is Your Love" is a ballad, the kind of thing they'd been writing since "Words." "Stayin' Alive" and "Night Fever" are the strut. "Too Much Heaven" is a slow, high-harmony ballad again. "Tragedy" is close to a rock song with a disco pulse under it. "Love You Inside Out" is smooth and unhurried. The brothers had been trying every one of those approaches for a decade, usually to a shrug. For eighteen months the audience said yes to all of them at once.
The last week of the streak, June 9, 1979, was one week at #1 before Donna Summer took the spot back. Nobody looking at that chart could have known it was the final time the Bee Gees would sit on top of the Hot 100. Six singles, six number ones. The band that once spent a single week at #94 with "I.O.I.O." had, for a year and a half, simply been unable to miss.
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