By Randal C. Hill
During the first half of the 1970s, the Bee Gees (“Brothers Gibb”) were floundering. “We didn’t know where we were going,” admits leader Barry. “We ended up doing dreary ballads. That was totally wrong, but we seemed to be stuck in that mode.”
Good friend Eric Clapton urged the Gibbs brothers to move from Los Angeles to Miami, where exotic music and a thriving club scene were at hand. When the lads relocated, Atlantic Records’ producer Arif Mardin scheduled the trio to record at Miami’s Criteria Studios.
On their daily drive from Miami Beach to downtown, the brothers would cross the 4.4-mile Julia Tuttle Causeway. As they passed over the regularly spaced road seams, the tires of the Gibbs’ car throbbed with a steady “chunka chunka” noise. One day, Linda, Barry’s wife, said to her husband, “Hey, listen to that noise… it’s our ‘drive talking’.” Barry chuckled and, to mimic the rhythmic sound, began to sing “D-D-Drive talkin’…”
Mardin loved the idea as a song title and wanted the Gibbs to use it in a dance tune, but with a change from “Drive Talkin’” to “Jive Talkin’.” Maurice Gibb later recalled, “Arif went, ‘Do you know what jive talking means?’ And we said, ‘Well, yeah, it’s, you know, you’re dancing.’ And he says, ‘No, it’s a black expression for [deceitful talk].”
Related: Music Flashback: Barry Manilow Croons “Mandy”
In creating “Jive Talkin’,” the Gibbs discarded the delicate singer/songwriter language of their lengthy catalog and replaced it with the kind of hip lingo heard in many soul hits of the day. In this case, we listen in on a man grown tired of his girlfriend’s deceptive ways:
J-J-Jive talkin’, you’re telling me lies
Jive talkin’, you wear a disguise
Jive talkin’, so misunderstood
Jive talkin’, you’re really no good
On Atlantic’s RSO label, the single caught fire and shot to the peak of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it reigned for two weeks. The success of the disc allowed the brothers to get a jump on the nascent genre of disco music.
“Jive Talkin’” has undoubtedly gone down in history as the only million-selling disc to be inspired by a drive across a bridge.
