The night Chuck Berry performed with the Bee Gees
Strange collaborations in music, while not always good, have always been fascinating, and sometimes you have to wonder who the person responsible for bringing together two seemingly disparate artists together is and why they even imagined it would be worth pursuing. Despite both being Australian, nobody had on their 1995 bingo card that pop star Kylie Minogue would team up with gothic rock icon Nick Cave for a duet, but for some unknown reason, it happened, and inexplicably, it was a hit.
It’s probably far easier to come up with a combination that won’t work than it is to find two artists whose styles and interests align with each other in a startling but exciting new way, but plenty of duos have tried to find common ground between each other in the past with mixed results.
Whether for just one song, an entire album or even more, there are times when these ludicrous pairings work, and when their time together is perhaps on the more limited side, you have to wonder why more of an effort wasn’t made for further meetings of minds. This is especially true when two acts combine in a live environment for one show only and can often leave the audience salivating at the prospect of the two parties joining forces again, only to be disappointed by the lack of activity.
One fine example of this stems from a 1973 broadcast of the US TV show The Midnight Special, where guests included Chuck Berry and the Bee Gees. With the Bee Gees having already taken to the stage, Berry stood alone on a central platform in front of the stage to perform a deep cut called ‘Reelin and Rockin’, a very idiosyncratic number that showed off his rock and roll prowess.
As Berry reeled through the many near identical verses of the song and repeated the same lyrical structure of having “looked at his watch” and it being “a quarter to [the hour]”, followed by some innuendo-laden line about what he and his female partner were getting up to, around halfway through the song it would become Berry and Barry, as the eldest Gibb brother joined him on stage to deliver his own variation on the lyrical formula.
When the younger twins, Robin and Maurice, joined shortly after and had their respective turns to rinse and repeat, the vocals on the chorus were suddenly feeling considerably more full than before, with each of the Bee Gees providing their harmonies to Berry’s rip-roaring hollers.
With the song extending to be six whole minutes of the same down-the-line rocking, rolling, and time-based sex gags, not a single one of the performers or audience members seemed to tire of it at any point, with each verse’s punchline getting an equally big whoop from the studio crowd, and the beaming smiles of the brothers and Berry getting increasingly wider as the song stretched on.
It would perhaps have been a far more exciting and electrifying moment to have been there witnessing it at the time, but the evidence shows that everyone who did experience it in the flesh had the time of their lives. Considering how much fun it was, you have to wonder why the ‘Father of Rock and Roll’ never reunited with the trio beyond this one television appearance, but you can be sure that they all cherished the moment for a long time.
