By Sharon Oliver
Contributing Writer
REGION – English-Australian melody makers the Bee Gees are widely known for their disco chart-topping success. Their singles “How Deep Is Your Love,” “Night Fever,” and “Stayin’ Alive” from 1977’s “Saturday Night Fever” film soundtrack helped crown them with titles like The Disco Kings and The Kings of Dance Music. Ten years earlier, the Gibb brothers (Barry, Maurice, and Robin) had another hit on their hands.
The Bee Gees, pictured here in 1977, are best known for their disco hits on the soundtrack to the movie “Saturday Night Fever,” released that year.
Early hit
On October 11, 1967, their song “(The Lights Went Out In) Massachusetts” went to number one in the UK and stayed there for four weeks. The song also made the Bee Gees the first non-Japanese act to top the Japanese singles chart, the Oricon Singles Chart, in 1968. Foreign artists had rarely reached number one status and only 12 Western acts achieved such a feat in its first 54 years in existence.
Written by the three brothers, the bittersweet ballad about a man who is homesick and longing to return to the place of his birth—Massachusetts, was originally intended to be given to Australian folk-influenced pop group The Seekers for recording.
Unsurprisingly, there does seem to be a girl involved at the heart of the song, since someone was “left standing on their own.”
How they came up with the song
Remarkably, the brothers had never set foot in the Bay State before having written the song even though Barry Gibb once said in an interview that the song was inspired by memories of America and all the songs they loved from the US, including those by The Beatles.
One report is that the song was written while staying at the Regis Hotel in New York City. However, Robin Gibb had a different memory. He explained to Daniel Rachel, author of “The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters,” “We wrote that in a boat in New York harbor as a challenge. When you look back, it’s quite a good exercise if you are songwriters to challenge yourselves to do something; we’d never been to Massachusetts. It’s an unusual title with all the S’s.”
Robin had another memory of the time. He also recalled the date of November 5, when the song was still number one, he was riding a train when it crashed in Lewisham near Hither Green Depot, killing 49 people. It was one of the UK’s worst rail disasters. In November 2009, Gibb told newspaper The Mail On Sunday, “I remember sitting at the side of the carriage, watching the rain pour down, fireworks go off and blue lights of the ambulances whirring. It was like something out of a Spielberg film. I thought, at least there is one consolation, we have our first UK number one.”
“Massachusetts” was not the Bee Gee’s first hit to include something American in the title. Earlier in 1967, they scored “New York Mining Disaster 1941 (Have You Seen My Wife, Mr. Jones” and then in 1975 the pop-rock band recorded “Nights On Broadway.”
Legacy lives on
The song was featured in the 2019 American crime drama television series “City on a Hill,” starring Kevin Bacon and Aldis Hodge in Season 1, Episode 2, “The Night Flynn Sent the Cops on the Ice.”
Other artists have covered it as well and it should be noted that The Seekers recorded “Massachusetts” on their “50 The Golden Jubilee Album.”
In a 2011 ITV British television special, “Massachusetts” was voted third behind “How Deep Is Your Love” and “You Win Again” in “The Nation’s Favourite Bee Gees Song.”
RELATED CONTENT:
Malden native Norman Greenbaum is still singing about that ‘Spirit in the Sky’
Strawberries Records & Tapes was the perfect pick for sweet music
