Bee Gees – 1973.XX.XX – A Kick In The Head Is Worth Eight – Unreleased LP + Midnight Special – STo 1CD A+

1. A Lonely Violin
2. Losers And Lovers
3. Home Again Rivers
4. Dear Mr. Kissinger
5. Jesus In Heaven
6. Harry’s Gate
7. Rocky L.A.
8. Castles In The Air
9. Where Is Your Sister?
10. Life, Am I Wasting My Time?
Bonus Tracks
Midnight Special 1973 US TV Broadcast
11. Money (With Jerry Lee Lewis)
12. Alexanders Ragtime Band
13. Hey Jude (With Wilson Pickett)
14. Beatles Bedley :
If I Fell
I Need You
I’ll Be Back
This Boy
She Love’s You
15. Bye Bye Blackbird

Between the recording of their Life in a Tin Can and Mr. Natural albums, the Bee Gees cut
an entire album in Hollywood titled A Kick in the Head Is Worth Eight in the Pants,
working with musical arranger Jimmie Haskell. Although a couple of songs
(“Elisa” and “Wouldn’t I Be Someone”) did come out on a single in mid 1973,
the group was dissatisfied with the result and decided to cancel the release.
This bootleg presents all ten tracks from the shelved LP in their original running order.
It’s not one of the Bee Gees’ major works, but it’s not too obvious why they decided to withhold
it from the public. These are amiable, tuneful songs in the group’s usual mildly bittersweet,
introspective early style, though perhaps the production was a little too lushly laidback
for its own good. The arrangements sometimes fall just short of early Barry Manilow territory,
albeit with much better songs and singing. But others, like the winsome “Losers and Lovers,”
have a far more forceful edge. With its steel guitar and strings, “Home Again Rivers” skirts
countrypolitan music; “Castles in the Air,” with its Badfingerstyle slide guitar and dramatic
keyboardbased melody, is perhaps the strongest track; and “It Doesn’t Matter Much to Me” would
be redone shortly afterward by the band in a faster arrangement. The four numbers that might
have been recorded as B-sides rather than album tracks are similar to those that would have
definitely been on the LP, the most interesting of them being “Dear Mr. Kissinger,” in
which the Bee Gees’ relatively seldomvoiced social consciousness rears it head. For those
who have little or no use for the group’s subsequent souldisco phase, it’s the last hurrah
for the classic early Bee Gees sound.
Enjoy!