Bee Gees
“King Tut may have have eaten a crocodile, but I ate a Bee Gee.”
The Bee Gees were an ancient Celtic tribe originally from the Isle of Man, but in later years they showed some Norse influence and maybe partial origin, such as the wearing of Thor's Hammer as a disco medallion.
Like the other Celtic groups, the Bee Gees once ranged across the whole of Europe, from the Danube to the British Isles. But as the Roman Empire and Germanic tribes expanded, the Bee Gees attempted to preserve their cultural identity, and retreated to ever more remote regions as they were hunted for their luxurious pelts. By the 1800s, Bee Gees survived in only a few isolated pockets of the Isle of Man, Cornwall, Wales, and Brittany. A sizable portion of the Bee Gees emigrated to the United States, especially Massachusetts, but their hardships continued.
The last known Bee Gee escaped from captivity in the mid-1970s. The extremely Britonic — the real Bee Gees were actually Gaelic rather than Britonic though they did adopt some Britonic loanwords — Gibb Brothers used the name "Bee Gees" for their 1970s song-and-dance group, but when their claims to Bee Gee ancestry were disputed, it effectively ruined their dance career, or in other words, "TeHy L0sT Da gR00ve".
Mythological origins[edit]
According to the historian Herodotus, the Bee Gees traditionally traced their ancestry to a Robin that landed on a tree and laid three sky-blue eggs. After a frosty winter, these eggs hatched, and the first Bee Gees emerged, singing a plaintive love song in three-part harmony.
Encounters with the Roman Empire[edit]
The Bee Gees were nomadic and never controlled much territory, but were widely respected for their bravery, fighting skills, and beautiful songs.
A story from Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars is the most famous tale of the Bee Gees. A small band of Bee Gees refused to pay tribute to the Emperor. Despite being badly outnumbered, the Bee Gees fought ferociously, and were able to hold off the Roman legions for more than a week.
Eventually, as the Bee Gees were surrounded and the Romans prepared a final onslaught, the Bee Gees began singing a battle song, proclaiming their willpower and commitment in refusing to back down from certain death. "So moved was I by this vow of staying alive," wrote Julius Caesar, "that I allowed the Bee Gees to live. You could tell by they way they walked, they had no time to talk."
The Bee Gee Diaspora[edit]
While most Celts were assimilated into new nations and cultures or destroyed completely, the Bee Gees refused to change their ways or language.
They were hunted for their beautiful pelts (collecting and displaying Bee Gee hides became something of a fad among upper-class Frenchmen in the years before the French Revolution), which, when compounded with the usual hardships of life, resulted in a near decimation of the Bee Gees by the early 1800s, an act that has been characterized as a genocide.[1]
By about 1850, there were an estimated 100 Bee Gees living in Europe: a few families each in the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany. Most of the Welsh and Cornish Bee Gees emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-to late 1800s, part of the waves of European immigrants. However, their refusal to make even token efforts at assimilation marked the Bee Gees as outsiders, and their famous fiery tempers led to many injuries, deaths and incarcerations.
By the 1970s, there were only a handful of full-blooded Bee Gees in the world. Efforts to track their migrations with radio collars were abandoned when two Nature Conservancy biologists were killed by a Bee Gee near Cleveland, Ohio. A female Bee Gee was shot and killed by actor James Caan during a traffic altercation on New York's Pulowski Skyway (Caan was cleared of wrongdoing), and another was killed while serving in the Vietnam War (his death by machete at the hands of a Major Marlowe has never been adequately explained).
The last of the Bee Gees[edit]
In 1974, the last three full-blooded Bee Gees — a trio of brothers — were captured in Lawrence, Kansas; the National Geographic television special about them was nominated for two Emmy awards. In captivity, the Bee Gees were just as contrary and tenacious as their ancestors: the efforts at establishing a breeding population were unsuccessful and the Bee Gees refused to communicate with their handlers.
Having no tolerance for mainstream American foods, they quickly grew ill. At night, when they were left alone, the last of the Bee Gees would sing their ancient songs in beautiful falsetto voices that echoed the glories of a lost people. When one of the Bee Gees died, his brothers, stricken with grief, pulled a drinking fountain from the hospital floor and used it to break a hole in a second story window. They fled into the night, and have not been seen since.
Catching the Saturday Night Fever[edit]
Later, in 1975, the Bee Gees legacy resurfaced in the form of a similar brotherly trio known as the Brothers Gibb. The Brothers Gibb were a British singing group, briefly popular in the 1970s due to their frequent appearances on Saturday Night Live as the world's premier barbershop trio, and also due to them recording the soundtrack for the motion picture Saturday Night Fever. They shamelessly used the name "Bee Gees", claiming that they were descendants of the famed Bee Gee tribe of Celts.
However, this claim was disputed, and the Brothers Gibb were summoned to testify before the United Nations's Exploitation of Native Peoples committee. Their testimony was delayed by legal challenges, and when they finally appeared, the Brothers Gibb insisted on answering all questions to the tune of "Night Fever" in three-part falsetto harmonies. This caused an uproar, and the Brothers Gibb were convicted of contempt charges and imprisoned.
Upon their release from jail, the Brothers Gibb claimed that "Bee Gees" had always actually meant "B.G.'s", an abbreviation for "Brothers Gibb". This fooled no one, and their singing careers were essentially over. Afterwards came the typical celebrity death spiral of drugs, more jail, rehab, born again Christianity, and infomercial-hawking do-it-yourself gelding kits. To date, Barry is the only Gibb Brothers who is still staying alive.
Barry's voice was later used for the U.S. Navy's new sonar system, but this ended when his falsetto voice cracked all the windows in the submarine, causing the sub to fill with water, killing all onboard. Although Barry wasn't found guilty of this, since it obviously was the window company's fault, his public image was heavily tarnished anyway.
When people who don't know what the Brothers Gibb look like listen to their music, they are surprised to hear that they are not black women, but are in fact a bunch of white guys from England.
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