Oh! Oh! Woe to us all! While we were all busying ourselves with our daily occupations, the checking of e-mail, the responding to voice-mail, the far-too-affectionate fondling of Blackberries and iPhones; while our cripplingly challenged attention spans were trained on important current events and concerns - Is class-ism really the new racism? Will John McCain's planned inner city town hall meetings work for or against him in the long run? Which of the two partnered lesbian Top Chefs will be ejected from the competition first? (A: Zoi, apparently) - Polydor Records' CD reissue of the soundtrack to the 1983 film Staying Alive, the misbegotten (directed and co-produced by Sylvester Stallone, starring John Travolta) sequel to Saturday Night Fever, quietly went out of print.

The cost of our tragic inattention to this seemingly minor pop cultural detail? Exorbitantly priced listings (that'll be $30, please) for the CD in Amazon.com's third party seller marketplace, for one. But perhaps the bigger tragedy - wailing! weeping! gnashing of teeth! - is the relative unavailability of a very good, however underappreciated, just-post-disco Bee Gees album (or half of one, at least). And need I mention that the record represented the commercial (though maybe not artistic) apex of the career of one Frank Stallone, a man with the face of Rambo, the hair of murder-trial-era Phil Spector, and a jones for Gino Vannelli-style adult-pop-lite, whose only previous appearance on record had been a song for the soundtrack of brother Sylvester's 1979 movie Paradise Alley, but who nevertheless had a pretty gigantic hit - his only Top 40 hit - with this album's hopelessly cheesy big rock number "Far From Over", a song fraught with all the soullessly synthesized intensity of a sweaty, "rise-to-glory" montage, and burdened by one spectacularly pointless instrumental passage after another.

That the insipid "Far From Over" ultimately eclipsed the pair of excellent Bee Gees singles issued from the record as the soundtrack's focal point should speak more to our failures as a listening public than the Gibb Brothers' failure as hitmakers. As with the monumental Saturday Night Fever soundtrack five years earlier, the Bee Gees essentially recorded an entirely new studio album (or, more accurately here, a five-song EP), that, while used for the film, would have stood just fine on its own merits (and, in this case, really should have - cross-promotional consequences be damned). Released to a public that had long grown hostile towards anything that might even vaguely remind it of 1978 (as the sound of Barry Gibb's falsetto most certainly would), the first side of Staying Alive is given over entirely to the Bee Gees. But, quite contrary to the disappointing chart performance of the wickedly (and wonderfully) sleazy "The Woman in You" (Pop #24) and the gorgeous "Someone Belonging to Someone" (Pop #49), it's a fine set of songs, full of the Gibbs' typically ingratiating vocal harmonies and meticulously constructed melodies, amply demonstrating the infinite adaptability of the Bee Gees' art.

If radio listeners in 1983 couldn't get past their erroneous fixation on the Bee Gees as disco's foremost practitioners and nothing more, it was hardly due to lack of effort on the Bee Gees' part. On these songs, Barry wisely (mostly) foregos his trademark falsetto. In fact, the chorus of "I Love You Too Much" finds him working the opposite extreme, singing a down-escalator hook, descending by steps deep into his lower register to beautifully becoming effect. Where the Saturday Night Fever songs might have had elaborate string arrangements and rubbery, soulful grooves, the songs for Staying Alive boast harder, more rock-oriented beats and guitar hooks, and make jaunty allusions - Barry's conspiratorially whispered verses on "The Woman in You", for instance - to new wave's sharp angles and urgency. While the songs here are still danceable, they are also very clearly 1983 songs, a fact underlined by the insult-to-injury inclusion of a minute-and-a-half edit of the iconic song from which this movie ignominiously stole its title.

The flip side of the soundtrack is split pretty evenly between contributions from Frank Stallone (who co-wrote most of these tracks with Joe 'Bean' Esposito, himself a fixture of cheesy 80s movie soundtracks), Tommy Faragher (an in-demand session player and producer), and actress Cynthia Rhodes, who would go on to greater success in the late 80s, both as Patrick Swayze's girlfriend in Dirty Dancing, and as the lead singer of Animotion on their hits "Room to Move" and "Calling It Love". Unlike the more unified Bee Gees side (overseen by the time-tested production team of the Gibbs, Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson), Side 2 volleys between Tommy Faragher's testosterone addled, cliche-infested ("Look Out for Number One") rock numbers and Stallone's generic adult contemporary balladry, coming across as a not very good mix tape. At best, songs like Stallone's "Moody Girl" are merely listenable. Cynthia Rhodes turns in professional performances on a couple of Stallone-penned torch songs (the closing "I'm Never Gonna Give You Up" is a duet), but there's nothing here to suggest that she has a future as even a minor pop star. Aside from "Far From Over", which is good for a nostalgic groan or four, these songs don't offer much incentive for us to flip the record over (or to stay with the CD past Track 5 as it were).

The silver lining of the second side's infuriatingly dullness is, of course, that all of that dullness is conveniently grouped together in the second half of the disc, so that our enjoyment of the Bee Gees contributions is unsullied. It's still heartbreaking that the Bee Gees didn't steer clear of this project and produced a complete and proper studio album in 1983. It still may not have been a huge hit, just given the musical climate at the time, but it probably would have found the audience it deserves eventually. As it stands, with the monster success of "Far From Over" and the punch-line value of the movie itself, it's easy to forget that the Bee Gees had anything to do with the soundtrack, much less that (the start of) one of their better latter-day albums is fossilized within it. It looks like a big, sad, joke - but the soundtrack to Staying Alive, the first side of it at least, is a lost gem.

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

Staying Alive Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Polydor Records
Released 1983

Producers: Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Robin Gibb, Karl Richardson, Albhy Galuten, Frank Stallone, Stewart Levine, Johnny Mandel, Randy Bishop, Tom Marolda
45 min.

SONGS: The Woman in You (The Bee Gees) - I Love You Too Much (The Bee Gees) - Breakout (The Bee Gees) - Someone Belonging to Someone (The Bee Gees) - Life Goes On (The Bee Gees) - Staying Alive (edit) (The Bee Gees) - Far From Over (Frank Stallone) - Look Out for Number One (Tommy Faragher) - Finding Out the Hard Way (Cynthia Rhodes) - Moody Girl (Frank Stallone) - We Dance So Close to the Fire (Tommy Faragher) - I'm Never Gonna Give You Up (Frank Stallone & Cynthia Rhodes)


Recommended: Yes