Losing a BeeGee

Bee Gees singer dies. Maurice Gibb, who had hits in five decades as part of legendary harmony group the Bee Gees, dies in a Miami hospital at the age of 53. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition]

Ok, so the BeeGees aren't really a topic you'd normally find in a mostly-serious political blog, but for many, many years, the BeeGees were one of the most important forces in my life.  I learned to sing by trying to match Barry Gibb's falsetto (and stretched my range upward by about an octave in the process -- the foundation of my vocal range is in the contralto to near-tenor range), and most of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar were theirs.  They were my first star crushes (along with Shaun Cassiday and the BeeGees little brother, Andy Gibb), and my introduction to music with more "oomph" to it than could be found in your typical John Denver or Captain and Tenille songs.  I went to "Teen Night" at our local disco so I could dance to their songs on a flashy lighted floor, and I had plans to actually see them in concernt, until the roof of Kemper Arena collapsed and the show had to be cancelled.

At one point, I owned virtually every album they'd ever released (to that point), and I was familiar with all of their different sounds. I tracked how their songs did on the Billboard charts by listening to Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" every week (I was so obsessive, in fact, that my parents had to buy me a portable radio/tape recorder so I could tune it into the show while we were in church, recording it so I could find out how everything had changed during the week, and running out between church and sunday school to flip the tape over so I could be sure to get every minute.  I even kept a spiral notebook throughout the year, so that at the end of the year, I could try to predict what songs would be in the Year-End Top Ten.)  I had posters, music books - I even tried to style my hair like Barry's (not one of my better ideas).

While I've not listened to a lot of their music in recent  years, I have still kept a few cherished tracks to play in those moments when I long for a reminder of those years before I became truly aware of just how messed up this world is.  Loosing a BeeGee isn't the most traumatic thing that can happen, but it closes out another chapter of my childhood, and leaves me feeling a bit melencholy tonight...