Two Bee Gees Drummers Die Within Days

Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the original drummer, and Dennis Bryon, who played during the band’s disco heyday, died within four days of each other.

Two drummers for the Bee Gees — one during the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group’s early days of hit-making ballads, the other during its white-hot disco superstardom — died four days apart, according to posts from a tribute band and former bandmates.

Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.

Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.

Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.

Mr. Petersen played on a string of hit ballads from 1967 to 1970, including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” He was also a child actor, known for his role in the 1956 film “Smiley,” which was the origin of his nickname, among a few other movies in the late ’50s.

In a 2022 interview with The Strange Brew Podcast, Mr. Peterson said that the band would always create songs together in the studio.

“I think the fact that a lot of those tracks came from nothing gave the tracks a real spontaneity,” he said. “We would work the songs up, the five of us as a team, and again I think that that’s why the songs sound so coordinated. We never recorded separately.”

Mr. Bryon, born in Cardiff, Wales, was a part of the Bee Gees for many of its greatest hits in the 1970s, including “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep is Your Love,” “You Should Be Dancing,” “More Than a Woman” and the rest of the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack. He started playing drums when he was 14.

More recently, he played with a tribute band called the Italian Bee Gees formed by three Italian brothers.

In Mr. Bryon’s memoir, “You Should Be Dancing: My Life With The Bee Gees,” he wrote about listening to his car radio while driving to his home in Miami in 1978. He flipped between stations and came across five that were playing songs from the Bee Gees’ “Saturday Night Fever” album simultaneously.

“That’s when I knew this record was big,” Mr. Bryon wrote. “Very, very big.”

The Bee Gees sold 220 million records during their career, according to Billboard.

The band was formed by the brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb as teens in Australia in the late 1950s. Their long career was filled with improbable ups and downs, from heartache ballads in the late 1960s to re-emerging in the mid-1970s as the multiplatinum pop face of disco.

By 1974, around when Mr. Bryon joined, the Bee Gees had waned. They had drinking and drug problems, and their albums weren’t selling. Their label was “about to drop us,” Barry Gibb recalls in a 2020 HBO documentary, “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” Their embrace of what would become the disco sound quickly turned their fortunes around and made them one of the world’s most popular groups.

Barry Gibb is the last surviving brother. Maurice died in 2003, while Robin died in 2012.

Jon Pareles contributed.