IF I CAN’T HAVE YOU

A song from the movie - Saturday Night Fever “If I Can’t Have You“ is a disco song written by Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb in 1977. The song initially appeared on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in a version by Yvonne Elliman, released in November 1977. The Bee Gees’ version appeared a month later as the B-side of “Stayin’ Alive“. The song later appeared on the Bee Gees’ compilation Their Greatest Hits: The Record. The remixed version was released and remastered in the compilation Bee Gees Greatest in 2007 and marked the return of the Bee Gees to the US Hot Dance Tracks charts after 28 years. According to Maurice, this track was the first song they did while they were recording the other songs for the film. The recording was started at Château d’Hérouville as a basic track only and completed later at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles.[1] Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American dance film directed by John Badham and starring John Travolta as Tony Manero, a young man whose weekends are spent visiting a local Brooklyn discotheque; Karen Lynn Gorney as Stephanie Mangano, his dance partner and eventual friend; and Donna Pescow as Annette, Tony’s former dance partner and would-be girlfriend. While in the disco, Tony is the king. His care-free youth and weekend dancing help him to temporarily forget the reality of his life: a dead-end job, clashes with his unsupportive and squabbling parents, racial tensions in the local community, and his associations with a gang of macho friends. A huge commercial success, the film significantly helped to popularize disco music around the world and made Travolta, already well known from his role on TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter, a household name. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, featuring disco songs by the Bee Gees, is one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time.[5] The film is the first example of cross-media marketing, with the tie-in soundtrack’s single being used to help promote the film before its release and the film popularizing the entire soundtrack after its release. The film also showcased aspects of the music, the dancing, and the subculture surrounding the disco era: symphony-orchestrated melodies; haute couture styles of clothing; pre-AIDS sexual promiscuity; and graceful choreography. The story is based upon a 1976 New York magazine article by British writer Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night“. In the mid-1990s, Cohn acknowledged that he fabricated the article.[6] A newcomer to the United States and a stranger to the disco lifestyle, Cohn was unable to make any sense of the subculture he had been assigned to write about; instead, the character who became Tony Manero was based on a Mod[7] acquaintance of Cohn’s. In 2010, Saturday Night Fever was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthecially significant“ by the Library of Congress and therefore preserved for all time in their National Film Registry. The sequel Staying Alive (1983) also starred John Travolta and was directed by Sylvester Stallone.