A little Gibb and take
Doc explores the brothers behind music
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
Crave
Wherever you land on the subject of the Bee Gees, director Frank Marshall's thorough and beautifully appreciative HBO documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart will get you where you need to be — a sublime state of awe.
An exemplary lesson in how to make a revealing rockumentary, The Bee Gees will satisfy skeptics and loyal fans. The movie is also a unique consideration of the phenomenon of rise and fall, and how one learns to live with it.
It heads straight into the recurring theme of success and fame as a matter of raw determination: Hugh Gibb, the father of Barry and twins Robin and Maurice, was a musician who simply believed his sons' harmonizing vocals and knack for songwriting deserved as much or more attention than, say, The Beatles. He wrote to Beatles manager Brian Epstein and offered up his cheerfully ambitious offspring; Epstein handed them over to a subordinate, Robert Stigwood, and the rest is pop-music history.
The Bee Gees insists the Gibbs's musicianship and success is as impressive as anyone in the rock pantheon. The film also has an adept awareness that such statements are always up for heated debate. No greater authority than Barry Gibb himself, the band's sole survivor at 74, can confirm the ways in which celebrity stories, and images, change with time.
“I am beginning to recognize the fact that nothing is true,” he says. “Nothing. It's all down to perception. My immediate family is gone, but that's life ... I have fantastic memories, but everybody's memories are different. So they're just my memories, you know?”
In other words, The Bee Gees is years too late to present the fullest possible account, relying on past documentary interviews with Maurice (who died in 2003), and Robin (who died in 2012), to supplement the narrative of a band that continually recalibrated itself to radio's whims.
In the relentless pursuit of hits, the Gibbs were unfazed by popularity. Rather than reject it or treat it in an aloof manner, they seemed to acquiesce to it. The point, after all, is to be adored.
Living in a glitzy bubble, they were unaware, while performing in Oakland on July 12, 1979, that a belligerent rock DJ in Chicago, Steve Dahl, had summoned tens of thousands of listeners to a White Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park for a “Disco Demolition Night” rally. Fans could get into the game for 98 cents if they brought a disco album to add to a heap that were to be blown to smithereens on the outfield. Plenty of those albums were Bee Gees records.
The brothers were hurt by the backlash; record companies started dropping disco acts and everyone's gaze was about to turn toward MTV. Yet, respect came in due time (including a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1997), as did a recurring theme of loss.
“I can't honestly come to terms with the fact that (Robin, Maurice and their younger brother Andy) are not here anymore. I've never been able to do that,” Barry says. “I'd rather have them here and no hits at all.”