ANDY GIBB: The Bee Gee's Smarter Brother?

ANDY GIBB: The Bee Gee's Smarter Brother?

by

Toby Goldstein

Nineteen-year-old Andy Gibb has the sort of complexion that would make the Breck girl feel ravaged sitting in the same room with him. Contrasted with the rest of us suffering a typical New York day, buried under a clever blend of 1000% humidity and petrified funk which dares to call itself air, the youngest Gibblet is long-blond-haired, pink-skinned and insisted, as I envied his healthy exuberance: "You're kidding! I'm shattered. You should have seen me before the tour. Three months of two shows a night." He prat-fell off the fake-antique hotel chair.

Gibb had just completed a torturous three-months-plustour, primarily as an opening act to Neil Sedaka. The combination could have been embarrassingly staged as a father and son routine, but even given Andy's respect for the 25-years-ongoing entertainer, many of their shows brought generational differences into sharp relief. And Gibb's disgustingly successful discobopper tune, "I Just Wanna Be Your Everything", didn't help matters any. "I think the song reached its biggest peak on tour. It wouldn't stop peaking, it was number one and then it would come back again," he admitted sheepishly.

"The audience responses were incredible all the way through. When Neil opened with 20 minutes of acoustic grand piano...all you could hear was, 'We want Andy!' from 5000 kids..."

Andy's stature as a teen idol was certified by the trappings of fan adulation that rested stacked on a coffee table. An ID bracelet, a wooden plaque, a stuffed animal, flowers, numerous cards and letters in girlish rounded handwriting with protestations of loyalty and phone numbers. It was tempting, but I refrained from asking Andy if he gets any porn. An item did circulate about him buying Hustler at tne hotel newsstand; he insists that it was for Tony, his "road person." I know, he really bought it for the articles...

In fact, Gibb is not very different from his clean-living famous relations, brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice. Though he never became the fourth Bee Gee, Andy shares the vocal quaver that marks their style and works closely with Barry on career decisions. except for Robin, who lives in London. Even though we've been a close family, I don't think we've ever been as close as we are now. I love it, the best studios are there, the sun, my boat. I'm a fishing freak—from dawn until five or six at night I don't come in; I stay out for game fishing.

"All my family live in Miami Beach

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"We never go out, we never really mix that much. The most we mix is to come but to each other's houses."

Gibb hasn't so much lucked into his career as made it part of a plan. There's an equation working here—if you're a Gibb, you sing, and since you're young and cute, it works. When Andy's brothers had their first wave of success, he was only nine, so why not grow up a bit and join them, like that other singing family, the big O's? "We were living for 3V2 years in Ibiza," the sun-worshipper recalled, "and I was performing and writing there non-professionaily. Twice I nearly joined them, we talked about it and started to work on a few ideas, but we could never really make the final plans. They were .touring ten months of the year, it was ridiculous, and we couldn't really pin them down to get it . sorted out. While all this is going on, I'm still playing in clubs, solo things, and thinking to myself—whatever happens, this'll always be there for me. And Barry has always given me a lot of help as a solo artist.

"I think as far back as I can remember I've loved performing. I'm just a show-off. I've always said if I had to be a recording artist and songwriter and never perform, I don't think I could handle being in the business for five minutes. It's a matter of getting off on your songs and to me there's no better way of getting off than onstage." And when someone as innocent looking as Andy Gibb drops a line like that into your lap, the best thing to do it let it sit there and fade away.

Gibb is quick to defend his brothers' decision to hustle their way back into the charts. "They have always had the ability to go in any direction; it was just deciding upon the one they wanted to go into. R'n'b has always intrigued me—it's more satisfying musically to sing it, to write it, than any other style. Like Steve Miller gives the cross of r'n'b and country rock. That's what I like about him, 'cause he's really where I'm trying to go now.

"When my brothers made the change, they also made a very distinctive sound change. Even though they're r'n'b,' they were playing an r'n'b that nobody ever heard before and that's the important thing, to come up with something new."

Andy Gibb isn,'t putting up any musical landmarks at this stage in his career. His set at New York's Other End combined the lightweight optimism of his first album with a couple of acoustic tunes. Except for the polished smile, trembling vibrato (which he insists is something he can't alter), and crowd acknowledgement for "Everything," Andy Gibb could be one of a hundred just-OK guitar-picking-singersongwriters. But he's only 19 and still not sure of what an image is, least of all his own. He is intrigued by the irony of the English punkers being his contemporaries in age, but knows he's light years away from their compulsions, from his suntan deep down.

"I didn't write the single. It's done a lot, it broke everything, it's a hard song to follow up. It has created a very teen-bopper commercial image but certainly that's not what I am in concert,

I don't think.

"My brothers always talked about my work and they always seemed very positive about it. It was just always a dream for me. I just didn't/think I could do it myself. Now that I have, now what?" m>