How the Bee Gees created the first-ever drum loop: “Felt really, really good”
Some of the most revolutionary moments in music history have happened with a balance of intention and serendipity, a bit like when the Bee Gees created the first-ever drum loop.
It’s easy to take most things in music for granted, especially when we hear so much of the same tropes over and over again. But what we miss out on by doing that is the origin stories of greatness, like Patti Page, who changed music in more ways than we’ll ever know. She was actually the first person to popularise overdubbing while creating her song ‘Confess’, a move she chose from a lack of backing singers but which eventually became a new standard.
There are countless incidents that tell the exact same story. In fact, many musicians-turned-inventors ended up becoming so influential in culture that they became somewhat overlooked, so embedded that it’s easy to miss their impact entirely. And genres like rock might have always had an authenticity complex, but this was only instated by those who set the bar high in the first place and tried out things nobody had ever done before.
You could also look at Pete Townshend, who basically invented guitar-smashing on stage. Or Ritchie Blackmore, who became so fixated on his quest to find the biggest, best and most explosive sound that he basically manipulated Marshall into creating a secret mega-amp. But the Bee Gees had their share of straight-up genius moments, too, and one came in the shape of a development so cutting-edge we still hear it today.
Just after they officially “went disco”, they got together to smash the next thing that would grip the music world for several years after – Saturday Night Fever. During this time, their drummer, Dennis Bryon, was absent from some of the sessions, causing them to improvise. Producer Albhy Galuten later recalled how this prompted them to discover accidental genius by looping the drum parts in Byron’s place.
“Dennis [Byron], our drummer, was called away during the sessions, and we wanted to keep working, so Barry [Gibb] and I sat around listening to the drums, going through the song,” Galuten told MusicRadar. He went on: “We found these two bars in ‘Night Fever’ that felt really, really good, so we copied it onto a half-inch tape and we spliced it together and spread it out across the room, running a huge loop of tape across the mic stands, across the studio.”
You listen to a record like ‘Night Fever’ nowadays, and it’s almost easy to assume that countless influences factored into making it as great as it was. But weirdly, that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, according to Galuten, disco wasn’t even on their radar, nor was it something that even came up in the studio when they were recording the songs.
Instead, it was simply about making a record that “we thought sounded good”. More than that, Galuten said that Barry Gibb was so attuned to what was going on that he was able to tap into the “collective unconscious of the world”. Which he did with an unrelenting fervour on Saturday Night Fever, unintentionally earning the title of legend of disco in the process.
