The Smiley Smile Message Board

Could the BBs have had a disco hit by remaking a different song instead of HCTN?

Firstly, I wonder how many people had heard of the original 1967 HCTN in 1979… That came from an album that is and was a cult album, and not a great seller.  I imagine that the majority of people who heard the disco version thought they were simply hearing a brand-new BB song and not a remake of an old obscure song.

That said, I wonder if the single tanking had to do with it being released too late in the game for the disco genre, the public not wanting to hear that disco sound from this band, or if it was a production that just didn't connect with listeners. Or all of the above.

But... My real question is: If the BBs had instead reworked a different old song, possibly another obscure older BB song, or possibly a very famous song, into a disco version… Would that have made a difference? And maybe if it was done a year or two earlier? Could they have possibly under another set of circumstances had a disco hit?

they should have stayed away from doing any Disco song.... IMO

...and mine!

This might sound crazy, but I think Slip On Through could have been a good disco song. But probably not any bigger on the charts than HCTN.

I think the problem was, that apart from the vocals, they totally gave up their own sound to go disco. It was possible to have a disco influence on a record, as the Rolling Stones proved with "Miss You", and still sound like yourself. Wings had a disco hit with "Goodnight Tonight" around the same time as the BB's released HCTN, but the difference was, it still felt like a record produced by Paul McCartney. And no way should the 10 minute HCTN been an album track - that should have been exclusive to the 12 inch single.

I don't think there's a problem with Beach Boys + Disco, personally. I even looped up Brian's disco tag to Thinkin' Bout You Baby by Spring from 1972 cause I dug it so much. https://soundcloud.com/davesegal/spring-ooh-baby-loop-demo


I think Darlin' was a good candidate, hopefully better than this Flo + Eddie assisted version though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsQmzHeaE0w (not quite disco, but they're trying)

Sail Plane Song or Don't Talk would sound cool with a Giorgio Moroder "I Feel Love" type vibe underneath.

Forever would have been pretty perfect actually turned upbeat. Be With Me too. Actually, Dennis could have been a great disco writer.

The Night Was So Young, All I Wanna Do, and Don't Worry Baby would work

Wild Honey. I Can Hear Music though it's a cover. I'd check a remix album if someone made one for sure.

well at least have them do a separate album (or EP) and not place the song (Or songs) on LA... I guess "Darlin'" is as good as any, "You're so good to me" also could have been a good contender..

I have said before that it was the music of the time however there was only room for one 'legacy' act to pull it off, and that had been the Four Seasons a few years prior.

Go hard or go home - a Good Vibrations '78 could have nailed it...

Wild Honey (as an album) is hardly a "cult" album. I've never heard it referred to in that context.  It is more a BB tribute to "soul music" and shifting gears after Smiley was released.  It is "Brian" heavy with 3/4 of the tracks from his composership. And, heavy on the "Carl" leads.   I prefer the artwork to Smiley which "popped" on the LP store rack. Primary colors do that.  Christgau gave it an A.  It never ( the double 2001 CD) comes out of the car.  A favorite!

Here Comes the Night was a little late, on the time-line end of disco.  But an interesting remake.  I like the long version a lot.  What happened with the Bee Gees was somewhat unique, after having a BB-like decline. A fluke.  I remember having seen them (The Bee Gees) at a public show where there weren't a hundred people around 1971-2.  Talk about a disco-renaissance!

Saturday Night Fever was their Kokomo! It brought them out of almost obscurity, with people diving after their original work.

Who cares ????????

Although, I have to be in the mood to listen to it, I embrace the Beach Boys touching on the Disco, like they later did with rap. Why not? Just a hit and run.

And I'd have to admit that it occured to me that they remake the entire Wild Honey album and called it Wild Honey Disco. A few tracks would be interesting with the disco flavor, such as the title track, How She Boogalooed It and Darlin.    :afro


(It's funny to think about this while Revolution 9 is playing in my headphones!)

Actually I think it was Jive Talkin' a few years earlier. I saw them on that tour in Milwaukee and they were already back. That Main Course album has a lot of great songs on it.

As far as The BB's Disco ...had HCTN come out around Love you I think it would have worked.

You could be right.  But the sound track with the Travolta movie really made a huge career difference.  Jive Talkin' was big as well. 

Only a few years might have made a difference with HCTN...you're correct!

I think a disco version of Roller Skating Child would have been a big hit... and the version they played live in 1979 had a very rollicking disco sound, particularly the bass line.

I do. That's why I started the thread.  ::)

As do the people who cared to reply.

Geez.

I think there's a very good possibility of that. Roller Skating Child (in a redone disco form or in its original album form) is probably one of the very biggest missed opportunities in the band's catalog. Maybe the biggest post 1960s. It rocks, and in a fun "single" radio hit type of way, IMO.

I also wonder if any other songs were in consideration by The BBs for being remade as a disco hit.

You'd think that the idea *must* have been floated around of remaking a hit song, like Good Vibrations. I'm certainly glad that didn't happen. Though I'd bet a few bucks that if the disco HCTN 1979 song had become a hit, that we'd have seen a disco Good Vibrations remake, and way, way more.

The thing that made The Bee Gees (one of my favorite bands) have disco hits was that they weren't remaking old Bee Gees songs, but they were writing new songs on a very high level of songwriting, at the very least equal to their best pre-disco material. Much as I love the other BBs material around this time, the band would probably have needed an engaged Brian to pull that off. Plus a sober Denny up front as the hunk, Barry Gibb style.

But what made the band choose HCTN, specifically? It's a rad song, to be sure... but just an odd one to pick. I'd imagine there had to have been a few other contenders on a list, what do you think? Maybe Bruce knows.

The only thing that makes sense is that HCTN  does indeed blatantly reference "night", and nighttime was a big topic of disco lyrical content. I recently came across this Onion article, which may sum up the band's reasoning:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/study-not-many-disco-songs-about-daytime,38263/

Definitely "Surf's Up".

GV? Disco? Yikes! Sacrilege.  

Fine for Bee Gees. Somehow, I'm not seeing Dennis as a disco duck... :lol

HCTN lends itself to disco (doubled tempo)...it is night music!

"Match Point of Our Love" could have worked with a full-blown dance treatment, given the right production. Don't know that it would've been a hit. But it would've worked.

I agree with all of this and also will say that in order to have made a good disco song they would have actually had to be fans of the genre rather than trying to simply cash in on a fad which is what HCTN sounds like to me. While it is true that the Beach Boys had always responded to fads (like, you know, surfing) their sound always seemed genuine - in other words, Brian really loved the Four Freshmen, hence the way he approached vocals came out of that rather than some attempt to cash in on a sound that was chart friendly.

Totally. Match Point and Sweet Sunday Kind of Love want to be disco songs so bad it hurts. The beat keeps nudging them in that direction. I do wonder if that disco-ish drum beat on those two songs was Brian's idea. Who played drums on those songs anyhow?

And That Same Song also has those little brief string flourishes near the end of the song which also show a nod to disco, IMO.

I don't think any song sounds good as disco -- not by any artist, let alone the BBs. Too this day, I still turn disco songs off when they come on the radio or online music feeds. As far as I'm concerned, there's one great version of HCTN and that's on Wild Honey.

I Can Hear Music and Pipeline worked well for California and Bruce Johnston respectively.

https://youtu.be/e4UJiG35LxU

https://youtu.be/2lxGstAel7c

Matchpoint was a disco song.  Would have been a very commercial track in the fall of 1978.  Very tasty top forty sound.

Personally...I really enjoyed the 3'18" version of Here Comes the Night. Had it been issued at that length, it might have made a good album track along with two other tunes added to fill out the album.

won'tcha  come out to nite?   Has a nice flow that could have mutated to a disco dance number.     And I mean mutated

 To me the Beach Boys caving in to disco was a low point.

http://popdose.com/lost-in-the-70s-the-beach-boys-here-comes-the-night/ (http://popdose.com/lost-in-the-70s-the-beach-boys-here-comes-the-night/)

<<Personally...I really enjoyed the 3'18" version of Here Comes the Night. Had it been issued at that length, it might have made a good album track along with two other tunes added to fill out the album.>>

Peter - is this available anywhere?

I can't believe we've spent two pages talking about disco.  Surely we can shoehorn in an argument or two about autotune and C50 just to mix things up, right?

I think maybe what the BBs needed for a disco hit was to remake some Surfin' Safari tracks as disco jams.

Disco Cuckoo Clock and disco Heads You Win–Tails I Lose, anyone?

Just to point out, She's Got Rhythm celebrates disco.

There's a lot of good disco music. My main problem with HCTN is the overload of gimmicky disco-type sound effects. A hard driving rhythm would have served it better.

>>There's a lot of good disco music. My main problem with HCTN is the overload of gimmicky disco-type sound effects. A hard driving rhythm would have served it better.<<

I read an interview somewhere with Dennis at the time.  He didn't object to disco; liked some of it, especially Miss You by the Stones.  Because it retained the band's raw edge.  But he hated HCTN, because it sounded so programmed, especially the drum sound, which he described as boring.

My thoughts exactly.    some bands and artists managed to take on disco on their own terms.  some didn't.     same as electronica.    some of it is fine,  some of it short circuits my auditory cortex and just plain drives me nuts.  Can't hit the skip button fast enough.   I really tried to get thru one listen to HCTN recently....I lasted about 20 seconds.   I' d rather listen to Make It Big or even almost anything on LBWL.

Someone - I think seltaeb1012002 - made a disco mix of "Pacific Ocean Blues". When I heard it, the original seemed much better and it was already my favorite. Speaks volumes. However, I never had issue with "Here Comes the Night", 10 minutes or no.

This is a pretty interesting question.

To start with whether HCTN was at the tail end of disco: It is sometimes argued that "Disco Demolition Night," masterminded by Chicago-area DJ Steve Dahl at that city's Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979, marks the point after which the music's popularity went into a tailspin. The disco HCTN came out in Feb '79 so it predates this event and so could be said to have come out in disco's heyday, or towards the end of that heyday.

After that bizarre "Demolition" event which became a riot, disco records hung on in the charts through the rest of the year and into 1980.  But nearly the last really big definite four-on-the-floor disco hit that I remember was the Spinners' "Working My Way Back To You/Forgive Me Girl" 45 which peaked at #2 in March 1980. (It had been released six months before but had trouble getting airplay partly because the negative reaction to disco had set in.)

 And the very last one I remember is the Spinners' follow-up, "Cupid/I've Loved You For A Long Time," which reached #4 on the Billboard chart in July 1980. They did two more singles after that which failed to chart, and then a version of the Carpenters' "Yesterday Once More" in a less pronounced disco style which stalled in the 50s in early '81.

I remember "Heart Of Glass" coming out as a single and topping the charts in the early '79.  For punks and new-wavers in those days it looked like disco's ultimate triumph - it had corrupted their own music! But listening to that song now, it's got a lot more in common with what evolved into '80s dance music than it does with disco. So it was more like new wave co-opting disco instead of the other way around.

Then there's "Stars Of 45." Interesting case. The first version of the record came out in Holland in Dec. '79 when disco records were still charting worldwide. By the time it started to catch on in Europe, disco was otherwise finished.  It reached America in the summer of '81 and served to spur a medley boom that kept the four-on-the-floor beat on the charts for another year.  But the "on 45" records could hardly be called disco apart from the beat. No strings or Latin percussion for the most part.

And so it was that the disco beat ended in a string of novelty records.  Kind of the reverse of rap, which was at first marketed to white audiences as a kind of novelty, as was the case with the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" when it cracked the bottom of Billboard's Top 40 in Jan. '80. Blondie's Rapture was a big hit a little later but is not a rap record per se.  After "Rapper's Delight" the first record in a recognizably rap style that I can remember hearing on stations aimed at white listeners is Chatsworth & Burt's thoroughly novelty 45 "Preppy Rap" in early '81, a record now so utterly obscure it isn't even mentioned in Wikipedia.

But heck, let's answer the question.  There are several BBs songs that could have been hits with the disco treatment. I still think "Honkin' Down The Highway," if it had been souped up with four-on-the-floor, strings and a little steel guitar, would have been the first country-disco crossover hit - well before Glen Campbell's "Southern Nights" - and would have changed not only the career of the BBs, but music itself, had something like that happened in '77.

 Let's face it - would punk really have been necessary if country-disco had come into being, especially with the BBs creating it? But unfortunately, the man who could have hatched up that idea, Bruce, wasn't working with the guys at the time.  

Songs that could have worked as disco remakes per se include "Darlin'," "Do It Again" (in fact, four-on-the-flooring that intro would have sounded like, say, Kraftwerk doing the "on 45" intro) and "Don't Worry Baby."  

"Don't Worry Baby" would especially be a natural for it not only because B.J. Thomas's version of the song from '77 was pretty close to disco, but also because a very similar sounding song had been a proto-disco #3 hit at the end of '75 - the Four Seasons' "Who Loves You."  Indeed, had I been in Bruce's shoes, DWB is the song I would have chosen for the disco treatment.  Disco remakes of '60s hits tended to favor either big hits from that era or at least records that had gotten enough airplay in that time to be vaguely recognizable to an audience a decade later.

"Songs that could have worked as disco remakes per se include "Darlin'," "Do It Again" (in fact, four-on-the-flooring that intro would have sounded like, say, Kraftwerk doing the "on 45" intro) and "Don't Worry Baby."

There was a disco remake of Do It Again, On and On and On by Abba and, if it had a disco beat, Mike Love.