1978 Robin Gibb – Oh Darling
Since it came out on the heels of the 1977 blockbuster film Saturday Nite Fever, there were high hopes for the next film the Bee Gees got involved with, 1978’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The film was based on an off-Broadway play. It featured almost wall-to-wall music made up of most of the songs from two Beatles’ albums, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. There was almost no dialog between the songs except some passages from George Burns that existed to further (or explain) the plot of the film.
The album and several singles came out five weeks before the film and sales were reasonable at first.
The music was primarily by the Bee Gees, with Peter Frampton supplying lead guitar. They released Oh Darling as a solo single crediting Robin Gibb as the artist rather than the Bee Gees. The record peaked at #15 on the Hot 100.
Three other singles from the film’s soundtrack reached the Hot 100:
- Earth Wind and Fire sold over a million copies of their version of Got To Get You Into My Life, which topped the R&B chart and reached the top ten on the Hot 100.
- Aerosmith’s single of Come Together reached #24 on the Hot 100.
- Billy Preston’s version of Get Back peaked at #86 on the Hot 100.
Other songs on the soundtrack featured a strange mix of artists, including Steve Martin, Alice Cooper, and George Burns.
Critics did not like the film. Critics really did not like the film. Critics hated the film, and once the reviews came out, attendance at the film stopped. Sales of the soundtrack albums stopped. An all-time record may have been set by that album when retailer returned over four million unsold copies of the album to the distributors. The record company eventually destroyed hundreds of thousands of copies of the album.
While the film lost money on the production because of low attendance in theaters, sales of the music generated an overall net profit for the project. Unfortunately, the film tarnished the careers of almost everybody associated with the film.
The film appears to be slowly developing a cult following.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgt._Pepper%27s_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgt._Pepper%27s_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band_(soundtrack)
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