Tragedy – ‘Stayin’ Alive’

Some things probably don’t need explanation. And Tragedy’s cover of the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’ is probably one of them. I mean, listen to it! Listen! It’s the Bee Gees done like metal! Of course, I’m going to explain it anyway. Feel free to skip to the end, press play, and then listen while you look at your Facebook.

But anyway: the reason it’s funny is because the Bee Gees are so far from metal! Metal fans hated the Bee Gees. In 1979, the ‘Disco Sucks’ movement culminated in the famous ‘Disco Demolition Night’, where fans donated disco LPs to be blown up with dynamite. There was a riot and everything. And the disco sucks movement definitely included a large contingent of metalheads. And yet: it totally works. Tragedy’s cover totally proves the point that, if ‘Stayin’ Alive’ were written and recorded by, say, Judas Priest or Led Zeppelin, the same metal dudes who hated the Bee Gees would be pumping their fists in the air in righteous metal fury. The riffs of the song just work when you play them through screaming guitars, and the John Bonham-style pounding drums fit exceedingly well for a song that originally had a subtle disco rhythm. The falsetto vocals which sound somewhat fey in the Bee Gees’ version sound like metal when Tragedy’s lead singer sings it – and all he does is add a bit of grit, because his vocals are just as high.

And the thing is, you could easily imagine an alternate timeline where the Bee Gees went metal instead of disco. The Bee Gees could easily have ended up a metal band rather than the leading men of disco. I mean, their contemporaries in Australia back in their 60s pop days (see ‘Spicks and Specks’) were the likes of Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs (see ‘Poison Ivy’) and the Easybeats (see ‘Sorry’). And both of those went in the direction of loud guitar rock. Billy Thorpe later went on to discover the volume pedal on his guitar amp (see Sunbury). The songwriters in the Easybeats, Vanda and Young, put together AC/DC, and produced most of their classic records in the Bon Scott era (e.g., ‘Let There Be Rock’, ‘Long Way To The Top’). And it’s not just Aussie ’60s pop bands going metal in the 1970s; think of how the immortal Spinal Tap started off doing ‘Listen! To The Flower People’ and ended up doing ‘Sex Farm’. Even the Bee Gees’ contemporaries in baroque pop, the Zombies, had later went on to become a proggy metal band, Argent. And Led Zeppelin first played together as the backing band for fey Scottish folkie Donovan on ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’.

Which is why Tragedy totally works as a concept. Their album We Rock Sweet Balls And Can Do No Wrong is all Bee Gees gone metal, from a very Spinal Tap spoken word metal section in ‘You Should Be Dancing’ to the Led Zeppelin-y ‘Too Much Heaven’. And the Bee Gees, for all their sleek disco rhythms, are a 1960s pop band at heart, a bunch of Beatles fans done good. The guitar riffs in ‘Stayin’ Alive’ are influenced by the kind of guitar riffs in Beatles tunes like ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ or ‘Ticket To Ride’. But then, plenty of 70s metal bands were basically Beatles fans gone bad; the Beatles famously introduced Eastern-influenced drones and riffs into rock and roll, and you can trace the kind of droning riffs of the likes of Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath back to the Beatles.

Perhaps there is an alternate timeline where the Bee Gees went metal and Rod Argent/The Zombies went disco. Where Led Zeppelin kept on as Donovan’s backing band. And in that alternate timeline, there is almost certainly a band called Tragedy doing humorously disco versions of the Bee Gees’ heavy metal music.

Tragedy – ‘Stayin’ Alive’