Earth’s last surviving Bee Gee was calling from his home studio in South Florida, just steps from the waters of Biscayne Bay.
“I used to have a great boat,” Barry Gibb said. “A speedboat.” He called it Spirits Having Flown, after a 1979 Bee Gees album that has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. “I would tear around the bay and get ideas.”
Sometimes he didn’t even need the boat. One day the Bee Gees’ manager Robert Stigwood called. He was producing the film version of the musical “Grease” and needed a new title song. Barry had not seen the film; this was a creative challenge.
“How in heaven’s name,” he asked himself, “do you write a song called ‘Grease’? I remember walking around on the dock, and it suddenly occurred to me that it’s a word, and you’ve just got to write about the word.”
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