SPAC Show Considered Mediocre

by Bruce Husten, The Times Record, August 30, 1968

There was little to rave about at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center last night. The featured attraction was The Bee Gees, and at best their performance was mediocre. A group called The Main Attraction proved to be hardly that when it appeared for the first half of the evening and received nearly unanimous disapproval from the audience—disapproval which was, in fact, most justifiable.

One of the first numbers The Main Attraction tried to put over was a rendition of The Beatles’ “High With A Little
Help.” The group’s vocalist, a female who also plays lead guitar, began with the now-classic lyrics, “What would you do if I sang out of tune?”

And with that bit of irony, The Main Attraction announced its platform for the evening while the sizeable crowd of 5,000 largely teenage listeners answered the song’s question with catcalls of disapproval.

Hackneyed, Unoriginal

After intermission, therefore, when The Bee Gees came on, one was confident the entertainment could only get better. The Bee Gees were in fact an improvement over their predecessors on the SPAC stage; nevertheless, one couldn’t help feel that pervading the air was a genre of music whose style was both hackneyed and unoriginal.

Their performance, in other words, was not bad. But by the same token it lack the refreshing quality that happily seems to have saturated SPAC this summer.

The one touch of originality The Anglo-Australian Bee Gees can boast is their 30-piece orchestra which travels with them and backs them up on nearly every number they perform

Novel Effort

The uniqueness of violins, violas, cellos and even a harp in the midst of a popular combo is an admirable attempt at novelty. The attempt became blatantly overdone, however, when the resonance of the glockenspiel’s tones were overly sustained and therefore made parts of songs sound too much like “Jingle Bells” smack in the middle of hard rock ‘n’ roll numbers.

The Bee Gees’ biggest hit, “Massachusetts,” received substantial audience applause, while the group’s version of “Your Holiday”—first recorded by The Hollies—was nearly indetectable from the original. Other appreciated numbers last night included “Gotta Get A Message To You” and “Words.”

The inexplicable paradox of the evening came following the finale.

For while the thunderous applause which followed the last number brought The Bee Gees back to play several encores, by the time the group had taken its bows and finally returned to the stage to play the encores, over half the audience had already left the theater and was well on its way home to bed!