Happy 40th Anniversary to Barbra Streisand’s twenty-second studio album Guilty, originally released September 23, 1980.
When asked what it was like to experience Barbra Streisand’s otherworldly voice in the studio, Albhy Galuten readily affirms he and his Guilty co-producers Barry Gibb and Karl Richardson, notwithstanding their own prodigious talents, were awestruck.
“No question. When she opened her mouth, and we were on the other side of the glass, we were, like, ‘what the fuck?!’”
Streisand’s instrument had become an American institution in and of itself, instantly recognizable for its inimitable power and clarity. It made its first appearance on wax via the Broadway cast recording of I Can Get It For You Wholesale on Columbia in April 1962, marking the beginning of her relationship with the label that has lasted almost sixty years. Her proper debut, The Barbra Streisand Album, followed in February 1963, immediately landing her in the top ten of the Billboard Top LPs chart.
Her earlier studio efforts were an eclectic mix of standards, show tunes, and a handful of original songs with classic undertones. 1969’s What About Today?, her eleventh release, was the first of her records to fully explore contemporary pop tracks, covering compositions by Lennon-McCartney, Paul Simon, and Jimmy Webb, among others. Critics and audiences responded coolly to the project, but with time and indisputably stronger albums like 1971’s Stoney End and Barbra Joan Streisand they, and Streisand herself, became increasingly comfortable with her embrace of modern pop-rock flavors.
As Streisand’s portfolio expanded, so did the list of à la mode producers who steered her 1970s output: Richard Perry, Rupert Holmes, Phil Ramone, and Gary Klein. By decade’s end, she would accumulate four Billboard number one singles and five top-ten albums. 1979’s “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” a (deservedly) much-hyped dance hit that paired her with Donna Summer, cemented her status as a veritable pop diva.
Her next creative partnership would be career-defining for everyone involved.
The inspiration for the Barbra Streisand-Barry Gibb pairing for Guilty was allegedly sparked in July 1979 after Streisand paid a visit to the Bee Gees during the Los Angeles stop on their Spirits Having Flown tour at Dodger Stadium.
The idea of a creative diversion must have been a welcomed one in the Gibb camp. The Bee Gees’ halcyon was burning the brothers out, and the rapidly changing musical landscape in North America had also begun to stoke a backlash against their omnipresence in records and radio. The Spirits tour was the first time the Gibbs had been on the road since 1976, and the fifty-city outing marked the first public performances they had given since the Saturday Night Fever (1977) soundtrack had transformed the respectfully successful Bee Gees into a commercial and cultural phenomenon. It was a lot to contend with.
In the middle of championing the most lucrative three years of their history as a group, the Gibbs implied they would take a hiatus from the Bee Gees to write for and produce other artists. Robin and the Bee Gees’ keyboardist Blue Weaver were soon enlisted to produce soul/R&B veteran Jimmy Ruffin’s forthcoming album, Sunrise (1980). Barry and the balance of the Bee Gees’ production team, Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson, had already started work on Andy Gibb’s third studio effort, After Dark (1980), by May 1979.
Streisand’s manager, Charles Koppelman, officially set Guilty in motion with the initial idea of Barry writing just half the songs on the album. “It started off with them suggesting a few songs, which we listened to,” he told Billboard’s Paul Grein in 1980. “We then submitted five of our own songs and Barbra liked them and asked us to write five more.” Of the tracks written specifically for the project, Barry and Robin ended up finishing four together (“Woman In Love,” “Run Wild,” “Promises,” “Life Story”), adding Maurice to the team for a fifth (“Guilty”). Barry and Albhy Galuten furnished the balance (“What Kind of Fool,” “Never Give Up,” “Make it Like A Memory”). “The Love Inside” was written separately in 1978.
Two additional songs written for Guilty (“Carried Away” and “Secrets”) were not used in the end, however, they both appeared on projects by other major artists within relatively short order. Olivia Newton-John included “Carried Away” on her 1981 album Physical and British stage star Elaine Paige recorded “Secrets” for her eponymous release that same year.
Galuten recalls the songs for Guilty shifting Barry’s writing paradigm from those he had composed for the most recent Bee Gees and Andy Gibb projects, especially as they had to be believable from Streisand’s perspective. The protagonists in Guilty’s songs are markedly different from, and decidedly more empowered than, the ones heard on Spirits Having Flown.
“It’s interesting how the lyrics are Barbra-relevant rather than Bee Gees-relevant,” he muses during my phone interview with him alongside Richardson. “‘I’ve got nothing to be guilty of’ is sort of the whole Jewish guilt thing. It’s the same thing with ‘I am a woman in love.’ It’s uncompromising. It’s not ‘I love you, please come back to me,’ it’s ‘I love you and I’m strong about it.’ It’s Barbra’s image and the things that were relevant to her, and Barry was writing about them with her in mind.”
“I mean, I think Barry and Barbra had a conversation or two,” offers Richardson. “But it was his interpretation that became these songs. How he comes up with that stuff, I don’t know. I asked him a couple of times and he just said, ‘there’s a well down there, and I just put the rope down and pull something out.’”
“I think I have kind of an understanding,” Galuten adds, “because Barry taps into the collective unconscious. In the same way that he could come up with a phrase like ‘Night Fever,’ he would think about what was in the zeitgeist for Barbra. It didn’t really matter what Barbra was. What mattered was how she appeared to the world and how that could be molded into something that she would be comfortable with, and that resonated with people’s view of her. That’s what makes a great songwriter is [that] ability.”
Once the Spirits Having Flown tour wrapped in October 1979, the production team regrouped at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami. “We went into Studio ‘A’ and we just put down the demos,” Galuten explains. “I think we had maybe the LinnDrum machine, and I played piano and Barry played acoustic [guitar] on…some of the songs. On some he didn’t play because I think he didn’t have…some were musically different than what he’d usually play on a guitar.”
The demos for each of the songs were sung by Barry almost exclusively in falsetto to serve as precise blueprints for Streisand’s vocals in her exact register.
“We cut the first versions of the tracks at Criteria to take them to Los Angeles so we could capture Barbra singing there,” Richardson confirms, “because I believe she was filming a movie at the time. Recording was sort of like a hobby for her at that moment, and we could only get her for so many hours of so many days, originally. So, the decision was to cut the music in Miami, then produce her vocals, then come back to [Miami] do the mix.”
The extensive roster of musicians brought on board for Guilty reads as a “who’s who” of session players, including drummer Steve Gadd, guitarists Cornell Dupree, Pete Carr, and Lee Ritenour, bassist David Hungate, and pianist Richard Tee.
With the basic instrumentations in place, the sessions moved to Sound Labs and Digital Magnetics in early 1980 to record Streisand’s vocals. According to Galuten, some of the original guitar and bass parts were scrubbed and re-recorded in Los Angeles.
Musically, Guilty is arguably the most cohesive of Streisand’s albums. There is no mistaking that Barry Gibb’s handprints are on every note of its production, but the arrangements mesh seamlessly with her vocal performances.
The ethereal ballad “Woman In Love” was chosen as the set’s first single. While it sounds like nothing the Gibbs wrote or produced for Saturday Night Fever, the track has a very visceral connection. “‘Woman in Love’ was the same drum loop we used for ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ just slowed way down and EQ’d radically,” Galuten proclaims. Credited to “Bernard Lupe” in the album’s liner notes, the loop is also employed on “Life Story” and “What Kind of Fool.” The song is a remarkable showcase for Streisand’s vocal range and instinct for effective phrasing.
According to Barry, there was some debate from Streisand on the lyrics. “She questioned the line ‘it’s a right I defend / over and over again,’ he told Billboard. “At first she felt that it was a little bit liberationist; a little too strong for a pop song.”
In the end, the lyrics were unchanged, and the song was released as a single in August 1980. In late October, it became her fifth Billboard number one single. It also topped the singles charts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Spain, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and France. By 1981, the single had sold over 2.5 million copies.
The second single from the album was the title track, one of two duets between Barbra and Barry. With its Latin-hued rhythm and punchy falsetto background vocals, “Guilty” would have been equally at home on any of the Bee Gees’ or Andy Gibb’s albums. But the flirtation between Barbra’s soprano and Barry’s full-chested tenor provides compelling contrast. It became a US top-five hit late in 1980.
Galuten remembers the song presenting the production team with a few unique challenges during its conception. “Steve Gadd is one of the finest drummers that ever lived, and right now he’s straight and he’s still fantastic. But, at the time he was pretty loaded. When we cut the track, his timing was great, but he was so loaded he could barely stand up. And I realized after the first run-through what it should be. We used to do these chord charts, and they were just, you know, bar lines with chord names on top of them.
And Steve came into the control room—Steve and [Richard] Tee and whoever else—and while we played back the first take, I was scribbling and hen-scratching the bass drum patterns on this chord chart while Barry was singing him drum turns that he wanted. And when the playback was done, Steve went back out and sat at the drums and we played back the tape—and it was the take. He had remembered every bass drum pattern I’d written, and every drum turn Barry had sung to him—and just nailed it. He and Tee were so incredible.”
Barry’s vocal also required some major finagling to make the duet into a finished product. “When we recorded ‘Guilty,’ we’d already cut the track. Originally, Barry was not going to do any duets. They talked him into it. So, for his verses, we had to change the key and had worked out modulations to go from one key to another, from verse to chorus, and then overdub the instruments, fit them in, and fly that stuff around to literally create the verses for Barry that were in another key. Wherever Barry sang verses, those were never recorded in that key—they were originally recorded in different keys in different parts with everything but the drums.”
The Bee Gees would eventually include a shortened version of “Guilty” in the medley section of their concert sets beginning in the late 1990s. It was captured on their 1997 live album, One Night Only.
The album’s other duet, “What Kind of Fool,” is perhaps one of the most beautiful compositions in the Gibbs’ songwriting catalog. Galuten remembers it as one of the earlier songs that had been written for the project, and they worked on it together during an evening session at his house around the piano.
The track begins with a gorgeous run of Fender Rhodes piano and both Barry and Barbra vocalizing with tender restraint—two voices that are completely disparate in tone, but complement one another quite magnificently. The song escalates in intensity throughout, peaking during a dramatic bridge that alternates the time signature between 4/4 and 3/4. It’s a heartbreaking, emotional piece that’s beautifully produced and sung.
Released as Guilty’s third single, “What Kind of Fool” reached number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1981.
The song was resurrected as an a cappella cover in 2011 by actor/singer Darren Criss’ character Blaine Anderson on the Fox musical dramedy television series Glee. The performance was not aired on the show, but it was included on the Glee: The Music Presents The Warblers soundtrack album. It’s obvious that Barry’s original demo was used as the template as opposed to the album version.
“Promises” and “Never Give Up” notch up the set’s tempo—the latter is driven by a catchy, Nanigo-esque tempo and prominently displays veteran Harold Cowart’s expert bass playing and a pleasantly acidic synth solo by George Bitzer. Both tracks use Barry’s background vocals effectively to buoy Streisand’s lead and add rhythmic interest. “Promises” was released as the album’s fourth and final single, but missed the top forty in the US. It did fare significantly better on the American and Canadian adult contemporary charts, where it landed at number eight and number five, respectively.
“Run Wild” is a lovely, rich ballad, and its subtle, spacious arrangement gives Streisand plenty of room to linger as she reaches and sustains the track’s highest notes. By contrast, “Life Story” is urgent and tense, using celestial synths, shiny brass, and stuttered acoustic guitar as its fuel.
On the original LP, the stunning “The Love Inside” closed out Guilty’s first side. Streisand uses her dulcet head voice for the majority of the song, only allowing it to climb to full throttle for the last verse and refrain. It’s an incredible example of how she can affect tremendous power even when her singing is barely above a whisper.
The copyright registration credited Barry, Robin, Maurice and Andy Gibb as the song’s writers, which has caused speculation that it may have initially been intended for Andy’s After Dark. For whatever reason, the album’s liner notes credit Barry as the sole writer. “The Love Inside” was later covered by Joan Baez on her Live Europe ‘83 album.
The album’s closer, “Make It Like a Memory” is an epic seven-and-a-half-minute opus that merges multiple musical styles and varying tempos. The track is sectioned into movements, swaying between pop, classical, rock, and jazz influences, reaching its first peak with a wailing guitar solo by Pete Carr and cascading piano runs by Richard Tee. The second begins after a false ending where Streisand’s vocal finishes and an orchestral blitz ramps up for the final two minutes of the song.
Streisand’s classical sensibilities allow her to navigate the tricky timing of “Make It Like a Memory” effortlessly, an asset that Galuten remembers distinctly from the session.
“When we were recording the song ‘Make It Like A Memory’…there’s a long pause [on the chorus] when she sings ‘make it like a…memory,’ and the downbeat is supposed to be on ‘memory.’ I remember doing the demo, it took Barry, like, ten times to get the vocal to come in on time with the downbeat, because there was no time through there. There was no beat going on.
For Barbra, it’s not her natural thing to sing like Michael [Jackson] or Barry rhythmically. In fact, we ended up having to do a lot of fine-tuning and adjustment to get her meter to line up in a way that was, you know, sufficiently rhythmic for Barry. But on ‘Make It Like a Memory,” she did five takes, and on every single one she nailed the downbeat. So, even though Barry has incredible detailed meter and absolute accuracy, Barbra has this intuitive sense of long-time that she knows when to come in based on some aesthetic that is not countable by the rest of us R&B musicians.”
The “other fine-tuning” to which Galuten refers found the production team spending months in the studio after the recording sessions were complete to meliorate the pitch and timing on Streisand’s vocal tracks relative to the instrumentals.
“It took us two weeks to combine the vocal,” explains Richardson. “I spent days in the studio with an oscilloscope and looking at her and the rhythm of the song and moving things in milliseconds because, again, these are rhythmic songs, [sings, emphasizing the beats] ‘and we got nothing to be guil-ty of…’ and all that stuff. You’ve got to have that nailed. She wasn’t exactly there all the time.”
Galuten continues: “Barry’s feeling and his vision is that meter is pretty much on time. There’s a beat and it goes right there. And the same thing with the pitch—you don’t really scoop into pitches, you just…you’re supposed to hit the pitch and nail it.
So, in order to adjust Barbra’s vocal so that it met with Barry’s sensibility, we were moving the time—and this was before the days of sampling and being able to move vocals around—with these little tiny offsets and fractions and punch-ins and delays. And doing the same thing with harmonizers to do three or four passes at the beginning of a vocal word so it would hit it right on and not slide up the way Barbra liked to do.”
“I had two machines locking up, and punching a cross-fading machine into the recording machine was a several week process to do that for the entire album,” Richardson recalls. “I had a book of lyric sheets…I think I used a loose-leaf binder that was about six inches thick by the time we got done with the album with all my notes. Every little nuance with ad libs or breaths, because you have to cross them before breaths, and things like that. From a technological perspective, when you listen to Guilty you don’t realize that behind the scenes, a lot of editing was going on.”
The technical experimentation and exploration in which the production team had indulged during the eight months it took to record the Bee Gees’ Spirits Having Flown had set the bar for quality exceptionally high. Attending to the smallest details if it could improve the project by some measure was a necessity.
“We wouldn’t release a record unless we knew it was our best foot forward,” Richardson asserts. “We just couldn’t let it out of the studio unless we’d done everything we knew was humanly possible, because once you release a record, you’ve released a record. You can’t go back in the studio when it’s in the shrink wrap.”
“The definition of ‘best,’ though, is an interesting concept,” Galuten insists. “Lots of people have an opinion about what they think is best. What happened during this phase of my and Karl’s relationship with Barry was there was a synchrony, and there was an understanding of the goal of everything—what this project is and was, and how it would be executed. In this case, ‘best,’ was when everything we knew intuitively was accomplished the way it was supposed to be. There was this clear vision about the way Barbra’s vocal would sound and how it would work.”
In 1980, there were still technological limitations that required producers and engineers to do much of the post-session work by hand. But, Galuten insists that newer technology hasn’t necessarily offered solutions that bring the same quality results as older methods. The adjustments made to Barbra’s vocals on Guilty fixed problems without destroying their integrity.
“Today, because you have the technical ability to auto-tune…the vocal we’d put together of Barbra’s after you have to struggle with everything and find that right pocket is much richer than if it’s done by auto-tuning. Auto-tuning is pretty thoughtless and not human and it just fixes stuff. But the struggle somehow or another makes it into the tape when you have to offset stuff and do it by hand, you know.
You have to make compromises—and you make creative compromises based on all the possibilities at hand. So, it’s not like you could just move any random vocal anywhere you wanted. You would always be making these creative choices that would very often have serendipitous effects—something would happen that you didn’t expect and you’d go, ‘oh, well that was really cool.’ It is a very different creative process than it is today.”
The finished Guilty album finally landed in the hands of record buyers in September 1980. Fans of both Streisand and the Bee Gees had much to celebrate, but even non-followers found themselves compelled to buy a copy to savor the undeniably strong singing and songwriting.
Within weeks of its release, Guilty rose to the top of the Billboard 200 album chart in the US, and did the same in ten other countries. Streisand became the first female artist to have simultaneous number one entries on the album and singles charts (with “Woman In Love”) in the United Kingdom.
Guilty was nominated for five GRAMMY Awards in 1981, including Album of the Year and Song and Record of the Year for “Woman In Love.” Only one of the noms materialized, and Barry and Barbra took home the trophy for Best Pop Vocal Performance Duo or Group for the single “Guilty.” Streisand also received an American Music Award for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist.
To celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2005, Guilty received a CD reissue, remastered and accompanied by bonus interview footage and live performances of Barry and Barbra singing “Guilty” and “What Kind of Fool” that were initially recorded for Streisand’s 1986 concert video and album, One Voice.
The same year, Streisand also released Guilty Pleasures, revisiting her collaborative relationship with Barry Gibb with a set of new songs. Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson did not return as co-producers, and the bulk of the tracks were written by Barry and his sons Ashley and Stephen. The album didn’t quite match the commercial achievement of its predecessor, but it landed the duo back in the top five of Billboard’s Top 200 tally.
In 2006, the original demos for Guilty recorded in October 1979 were made available via Apple’s iTunes platform, although they had been circulating as bootlegs for several years prior. The demo for “Never Give Up” was omitted from the bunch for unknown reasons.
Barry Gibb’s overarching vision with Guilty was to produce the most successful album of Streisand’s career, and he got his wish. To date, it has sold over fifteen million copies worldwide and remains her best-selling release.
Beyond chart positions and accolades, however, Guilty’s enduring legacy is its culmination of intuitive songwriting, disciplined production, and, of course, Streisand’s exceptional ability to interpret music through her own unique lens. Forty years downstream, Guilty remains an album worth exploring for the pure joy of hearing two talented artists at their performative peak.
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