Marley Purt Drive
Bee Gees
By Natalie Silver
It was during the early 2000s when I first started to mold my own apparatus of morality and taste, growing up in a chaotic and loving household under two pseudo-Dead Head, radicalized UC Berkeley-grad parents with basically one rule:
“Love thy neighbor…except for George Bush…Oh and also, Disco SUCKS.”
At some point, I stumbled upon a red velvet double album in our record collection titled Odessa by Bee Gees, a group I had only known as disco divinity. I dusted it off, gently placed the needle down, and had a riveting experience that didn’t suck…and wasn’t disco.
Before Bee Gee’s reached colossal fame and disco divinity, they were another English rock group of three brothers—Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibbs. Until 1975 when they dramatically changed their sound, the trio was heavily influenced by early rock, R&B, and even country.
Odessa is a mosaic of prog rock, classic rock and folk, and it’s lurking dark star is the B-side’s first track, “Marley Purt Drive,” which features a country violinist and banjo player and pays homage to the American country music the three Gibbs brothers were listening to at the time.
This particular narrative is a resigned and reflective one, striking a tender chord between nonchalant self-deprecation and pure desperation. It tells the story of a man living in poverty with 15 kids, who goes on a drive to escape the chaos on a Sunday, only to come back and “realize his fate” that he had 20 more kids.
Throughout the song, he earnestly processes the brief lust for self-fulfillment, then the sacrifice of that individuality, and finally the impossible responsibility of his circumstance. He’s just a man with good values and too many damn kids, singing through the realization that he lost himself somewhere in the noise and procession it in an introspective soliloquy and concession to his fate.
The experience of hearing Barry’s melodic, angelic voice removed from the background of disco frills is riveting. The humble and sad narrative serves the dual effect of humanizing the song’s character, but also more importantly, the band itself – providing a raw, untouched and intimate look into the band’s soul and roots – something that would be masked over with synth and pop and glitter and drum machines less than a decade later—an glitz that would redefine the group and render them unrecognizable from their early sound.
This is a sweet song—one of those universal art forms with the power to invoke nostalgia in everyone it touches, like a lullaby that a loved one sang to you back when you were steadfastly starting to form your radical tastes and your own unique apparatus of morality.