Heads-up! Starting two weeks from today on August 30, in honor of Barry Gibb’s birthday and his anniversary with Linda, all stories in the month of September will be Barry stories and anniversary stories. Since there are many, I may post on additional days besides Friday.

August 16, 2013

Although it took him ages to write about this, I applaud Josh for discussing his “bad boy behavior” with the girls in his early life. Indeed, the music took on new meaning when his heart was in jeopardy. A broken heart always remembers…..

Josh

Tampa

When I was a college kid, I had a different girl every week, had my Bee Gees music and had my fraternity brothers. I thought I was hot shit. Growing up with the Bee Gees’ music is one of my best memories. I went through all of their changes and stuck with them, no matter what they wanted to sing or do or say. They were my idols. After “Main Course” I thought “Children of the World” was really a funk and disco combination, and I loved it. Then “Night Fever” was released when I was a sophomore in college. The campus had one disco party after another, and times were wild, and so was I. That music was in my dreams. My story is a memory that still hurts sometimes, but it makes a good point and once in awhile, I even get a bit of sympathy! I never had really thought about my love ’em and leave ’em attitude with the girls until I had it happen to me when I fell hard for this cute little redhead from Boston who really knocked me out. She came to a party my friend John threw at his off campus apartment. Of course, we had “Saturday Night Fever” playing and the party was like something out of the movie. This girl with curly red hair walked in wearing a really gorgeous yellow knit dress and she was sexy without trying. At first she struck me as aloof, but she was just shy. Colleen. You can’t get more Irish than that. She was a religious girl, wouldn’t let me get to first base, and I wasn’t used to that. Finally, she agreed to go out with me. It was the first time I was ever nervous on a date. What the hell was wrong with me? I had been a real ladies’ man all through high school and for two years on campus. I thought the date was great, and she agreed to a second date but no sex. She wouldn’t even make out, and I was dying for this girl. We dated for six months, and she was driving me mad. All I could think of was spending time with her; I was distracted and was a lost puppy when she wasn’t around. I was getting pathetic. When you hear that people “ache” for someone, well, that was me for the first time. I was in love with Colleen. Then the bad news came. At the end of spring semester, she left for Boston. I planned to go up during the summer to visit her. All I wanted to do was be with her, hold her, make love to her. My mind was full of this girl. Well, she called me a week later and told me she wasn’t coming back to school. She went back to her old high school boyfriend and was going to transfer back to Boston College. I had the wind knocked out of my sails pretty quickly; and for the first time, songs like “How Do You Mend a Broken Heart” and “Baby, As You Turn Away”, had new meaning for me. I was hurting, really had fallen hard for Colleen and knew how the girls had felt that I’d dropped who cared about me. Until then, I never paid attention to what anyone else was feeling. I realized how selfish I’d been. I think it was the beginning of my growing up and maturing. What a concept! That experience changed me, and the brothers’ music meant more to me. They knew how to get to the real emotions people experience. I respected them in a different way and admired them even more. It was a painful lesson, and I think of it to this day. I nursed a broken heart for the whole summer and cried for the first time over a girl; and when I listened to the love songs or sad songs, the messages really hit home. This sound sappy, but it was a help to hear the songs because I knew what it was like to really be hurt. I still get a little ping of hurt when a song triggers my memory of Colleen. It wasn’t just about the melody or the beat of the songs. The real creative talent of the brothers is the way they touch peoples’ hearts. That is their gift.