1977 · Behind the Songs
Written for Saturday Night Fever, sung by someone else, and hidden on the back of “Stayin’ Alive.”
In 1977 the Bee Gees were writing songs faster than they could sing them. For the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack they cut a pile of new material at the Château d’Hérouville in France, finishing the work at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles with Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson co-producing. One of those songs was “If I Can’t Have You” — and the brothers fully intended to sing it themselves.
Then Robert Stigwood, the RSO chief steering the whole Fever project, made the call: the Bee Gees would keep the tender “How Deep Is Your Love” for themselves, and the driving disco number would go to Yvonne Elliman, the singer who had played Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar. Elliman’s version, released as a single in early 1978, shot to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on May 13, 1978.
The Bee Gees didn’t abandon their own recording, though. Their version surfaced in the most low-key way possible: as the B-side of “Stayin’ Alive,” released December 15, 1977. So while the A-side was busy defining a cultural moment, the flip side carried a number-one song in the brothers’ own voices — a secret hiding in millions of record collections.
It’s one of pop’s great what-ifs that isn’t really a what-if at all. Elliman’s take is the hit everyone knows, but the Bee Gees’ B-side proves the song was theirs from the first note. Sometimes the best version of a song is the one the writers kept for the flip side.