TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

By: Adam McGovern
April 2, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of heartthrobs from our adolescences). Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

ANDY GIBB

The best pop is what we listen to to feel worse. Which is to say, misery loves company, and if the company is absent too, that’s an even purer, more perfect solitude. Pop music is the echo that actually answers you; like every other echo it’s the same sound every time, but this one seems to confirm that you’re not alone. Andy Gibb was the extra child, the afterthought to his megapopular brothers the Bee Gees; yes, he was the only one who was famous fully under his own name, but it could still seem like that meant there was something wrong, rejectable about him. Kids just entering the phase of life where they want to be wanted, by a crowd, by a crush, could relate to Andy’s siren songs from his lonely heights.

We get things from our siblings other than “left out,” and just as Barry wrote most of Andy’s biggest hits, my sister’s serial boy-band attachments gave me a place to put my cheap, lofty longings, between the ages I was steeped in impersonal ivory-tower rock like ELP and when I collapsed into the proud ostracism of punk. There’s a reason that quintessential tough guy Frank Sinatra was most known for songs of emotional vulnerability; he was giving an outlet for feelings his WWII-era male fans couldn’t otherwise express, and painting a picture for his female fans of the sensitive man they would probably never meet. So, too, was Andy the definitive object of desire who is most attractive when he can’t find somebody himself.

My gateway drug was “I Just Wanna Be Your Everything,” but that was about an emotional distance within a relationship, so I needed stronger (more wounded) stuff. “An Everlasting Love” was the epitome, the lament of a love that can never end because it never even starts. Closed-in and dissociative kids (and teens, and young adults) like I was especially relate to secret-admirer, love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name stories, and before I had Cyrano I had this song. The speaker is caught in what we would now call the friend-zone, amplified to the superlative hopelessness of an unseen ghost watching from the afterlife, a disregarded god whose beloved chosen one can’t hear him (“I was yours before the stars were born/And you were mine/I could have saved you all the pain you knew”).

He’s melancholy like Yahweh, and he’s ready to suffer like Jesus: “If it’s the pleasure of taking my heart that you need/Then it only makes me love you more.” In an ever-arcing falsetto, swept along on upward gusts of violins, it’s an ascension of sublime misery; for the Romanticist ideal of unending sorrow borne with elan, this would last me all the way to Morrissey. Andy’s songs were a syllabus of tortured love in a way the Bee Gees’ just weren’t; maybe Barry also had some feelings he himself could not express. Ten years later there would be no one to sing Andy’s songs, when, five days past his 30th birthday, it was proven that he cared for cocaine more than life itself. “An Everlasting Love” reminds us that, like everything else, even our worst times will come to an end — and that these, too, we will mourn.

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TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

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