Robin Gibb will be remembered as the falsetto voice on countless Bee Gees hits from 'Massachusetts' to 'Stayin' Alive'. Back in 1969, however, Gibb briefly split from brothers Barry and Maurice and commenced an intermittent solo career with the UK smash hit 'Saved by the Bell'. Keith Altham interviewed him for Top Pops magazine in August of that year——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

With Robin Gibb hurtling up the charts with his first solo single, 'Saved by the Bell', it would appear that the answer to the question, "Who was the key figure in the Bee Gees' success?" has been firmly given. If Robin had a motto it would be covered by that line from the Max Bygraves hit of yesteryear — "You've Gotta Have Heart."

"I don't sing with my voice, I sing with my heart," Robin informed me during a recent interview. "I sing how I feel. I know I haven't got a great voice but I manage to touch something inside other people that they understand. It is an accident but the best

In memory of disco queen Donna — one of the sanest and smartest singers I ever interviewed — we present Richard Cromelin's Rolling Stone interview with the girl who'd just set the world's dancefloors alight with the 17-minute spectacular 'Love to Love You, Baby'——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

BEVERLY HILLS — The question was: how do you take a recording-studio orgasm on the road?

"I'm sort of eager to find out myself," Donna Summer answered. On the verge of taking her hit single, 'Love to Love You Baby', on a two-and-a-half-month American tour, Summer gave 'Love to Love You' a live trial run at a string of press parties.

"The audience," she said, "was groaning worse than I was."

'Love to Love You Baby', Summer's 17-minute vinyl aphrodisiac filled with rapturous moans, groans, murmurs and yelps, is more than just a Number One record. After Time magazine dubbed it "a marathon of 22 orgasms" and the BBC banned the single, it became a bona fide cause celebre.

L to R: Booker T. Jones, Duck Dunn, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr.

Donald "Duck" Dunn (1941-2012) was the linchpin of soul's ultimate backroom team — the interracial Memphis quartet known as Booker T. and the MGs. Laying down timeless grooves behind Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and most of the immortal Stax Records roster, the MGs tragically lost drummer Al Jackson, Jr., in 1975 and have now lost Duck, one of the all-time great bass guitarists. Here, from a 2001 piece in MOJO, is the MGs story from 'Green Onions' into the 21^st century…

If ever there was a piece of music that deserved the epithet "timeless", it's Booker T. & the MGs' 'Green Onions'. The most basic of blues instrumentals, set to a walking 2/4 beat, it doesn't amount to a whole hill of beans. And yet after almost 40 years it remains astoundingly funky, a vehicle for the most sinuous of Hammond organ grooves and for the vicious Fender Telecaster licks of Steve Cropper, in the fine words of Gerri Hirshey "cutting across the top like a sugarcane machete."

What makes 'Green Onions' even more

In memory of the great Adam Yauch, we bring you Danny "Shredder" Weizmann's terrific LA Weekly interview with the Beasties from September 1989. MCA R.I.P.——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

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"Real life is much stranger than fiction, man." Mike D speaks from the turntables in the den of King Ad-Rock's Hollywood apartment. He haphazardly scratches a reggae dub record, repeating the same section over and over. "Jamaica, Jamaica ... J-J-Jamaica, Jamaica … Jamai-ca, Ja-mai-ca …" the record blurts over the loudspeakers. "Much stranger than fiction."

For Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA, known collectively as the Beastie Boys, the cliché about real life is an understatement. From the eye of the hurricane they have witnessed the 1980s' most intense and unpredictable phenomenon. Irreverent, obnoxious and masterfully creative, the Beastie Boys are perhaps the only recording artists to cause international chaos among press, fans and parents alike since the Sex Pistols and punk rock.

My Bloody Valentine inspired purple journalistic prose and surreal interpretation. But onstage they merely enjoyed inflicting pain. Stephen Dalton spoke to them for Vox in April 1992——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

"My Bloody Valentine are not rock 'n' roll, they are God!"

Pardon?

Backstage at Reading University on the first night of the band's UK tour, My Bloody Valentine main man Kevin Shields cowers in bashful bemusement under a barrage of hysterical praise from 20-year-old superfan Jason Kelpie.

"If the world ended tomorrow and there was nothing left but My Bloody Valentine, I'd be happy. They are the coolest f---ing sonic visual experience we've got. You can't beat My Bloody Valentine with a big stick! Only having your brains blown out with a massive shotgun while on acid comes close to My Bloody Valentine! Worship at the altar of My Bloody Valentine! Religion sucks, but the closest thing to religion we've got is My Bloody Valentine..."

Strange that four

Bonnie Raitt's career was dumper-bound until a P45 from her record company inspired her to rediscover her musical roots. Andy Gill interviewed her for Q in September 1991——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

All of a sudden, Bonnie Raitt was Number 1. After a career of close on two decades, it was hardly an overnight success, but so little had been heard of her since the early '80s that when 1989's Nick Of Time album hit, it hit with all the shock of overnight success.

Most people who cared thought she'd given up long ago, retired into that twilit hinterland of rock'n'roll memories. Since 1982's Green Light, there had been a yawning silence from the first lady of the slide guitar, broken only by Nine Lives some four years later. The truth was simple and brutal: in 1983, Bonnie Raitt had been unceremoniously booted off Warner Bros, the first and only label of her career, in some corporate cost-cutting exercise. As it turned out, she was in good company: that Van

Levon Helm's funeral is held today in Woodstock, the Catskills town where The Band — following in Bob Dylan's footsteps — settled in the late '60s. Al Aronowitz visited the group there in the summer of 1968 and filed this report for Rolling Stone. Rest in peace, brother——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

NEW YORK — Big Pink is of those middle-class ranch houses of the type that you would expect to find in development row in the heart of suburbia rather than on an isolated mountaintop high above the barn architecture of New York State's rustic Woodstock.

When The Band moved into Big Pink in the spring of 1967, the house looked as if it had been tenanted by little more than a housewife with a dustmop who only crossed its threshold once a week to clean it. The Band, of course, had spent its six previous years living in hotels, motels, rooming houses, bus stations, airport terminals, and the back seats of newly wrecked cars. What The Band brought to Big Pink was the

Levon Helm was the Arkansas-born drummer/singer/mandolin player with the otherwise Canadian group The Band: his brilliant playing and inimitably good-old-boy singing supplied the cornerstone for the sound of these Americana forefathers. His death yesterday brought to a close the life of a man who lived, breathed and drank American music like a sacred elixir. Levon, we salute you — and remember you as you were in this profile from Uncut in October 2009——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

If Levon Helm's studios have a Green Room, then this must be it. A ramshackle den leading off a homely wooden kitchen, it's currently crawling with musicians warming up for the Midnight Ramble, the weekly musical revue hosted by the former Band linchpin at his backwoods spread in Woodstock, New York.

Framed pictures of comrades — fallen or otherwise — cover the back wall, The Band's Rick Danko and Richard Manuel prominent among them. Conspicuously missing among these war heroes is the