The hits and history of the Bee Gees
When you think about the Bee Gees, you have to think about gold. Gold records dancing up the charts. Gold medallions gleaming through thickets of chest hair. The three-headed golden goose that kept the music industry up to its happy eyeballs in platinum eggs until it was unceremoniously shipped out to pariah pasture.
But most importantly, when you think of Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, you think of the songs.
You think of “To Love Somebody” or “Words” and you get out your handkerchief. You think of “You Should Be Dancing ” or “Night Fever,” and your hips move without you. “Tragedy.” “How Deep Is Your Love.” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.” “More Than a Woman.” “Stayin’ Alive.” The popmusic vaults are full of 24-karat songs written and performed by the brothers Gibb, all of them just as priceless and brilliant as ever.
From the stories behind the brothers’ signature sound and chart-topping hits to the boom-and-bust roller coaster ride that was their decadesspanning career, all of the Bee Gees’ treasures are present and lovingly
accounted for in “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the new documentary from Oscar-nominated producer Frank Marshall that debuts Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO.
If you are already a geek-level fan, Marshall’s detail-rich, interviewstuffed film will still yield many delightful gems. (Didn’t know that the Bee Gees’ disco rebirth was jump
started by Eric Clapton? Now you do.) But if your interest in the Bee Gees begins and ends with the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” will leave you dazzled by the group’s long, chart-topping history and thrilled that you have so many amazing musical discoveries ahead of you.
Marshall’s 111-minute documentary starts at the beginning, with three brothers who were born on the Isle of Man, raised in England and Australia, and convinced from a young age that somehow, some way, they were going to be famous. Fortunately for Barry Gibb and his younger twin brothers, Robin and Maurice, they had the prodigious talent to make their dreams a staggeringly successful reality.
“Whatever is going to happen,” Robin remembers the brothers thinking, “we will make it happen.”
At the age of 9, Barry got an acoustic guitar for Christmas. Before he knew it, Robin and Maurice were at the foot of his bed, singing along. With the support of their musician father, Hugh, and their stalwart mother, Barbara, the young Gibb brothers were soon performing in Australian bars in front of patrons who were quick to cheer on the trio and even quicker to take swings at each other. By 1967, the brothers had moved to London, signed a deal with Robert Stigwood (who was working with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein), and released their first album.
And then the hits started coming. There was “Massa
chusetts,” which Robin seemed to conjure out of nowhere. There was “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” which the brothers wrote while sitting in a recording studio stairwell during a blackout. There was “To Love Somebody,” which you might be surprised to discover the brothers wrote for Otis Redding, after Barry saw him perform at the famed Apollo Theater in New York. Redding died in a plane crash before he could record the song. The Bee Gees ended up taking it to No. 17 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart.
All of these songs — along with more than 30 others, including “Words”
and the eccentric “Harry Braff ” — were recorded in 1967. It was the year Barry turned 21, Maurice and Robin turned 18, and the Bee Gees had perfected the heavenly harmonies that would carry them to the top of the charts and back, many times over. It was the sound of brothers singing together, and in one of the documentary’s most fascinating sections, we find out why that sound was so tough to ignore, and even tougher to imitate.
“You’ve got brothers singing, and it’s like (having) an instrument no one else can buy,” says Noel Gallagher of Oasis, one of the documentary’s many inter
viewees and an expert in brotherly dynamics. “You can’t buy that sound in a shop.”
With its deep-dive mix of recent interviews with musician fans (Gallagher, Justin Timberlake, Nick Jonas); archival interviews with Maurice (who died in 2003 of cardiac arrest) and Robin (who died in 2012 after a long battle with cancer); new interviews with the 74-yearold Barry; and the wealth of performance and recording studio goodies (including a quick listen to the demo tape of the “Saturday Night Fever” tracks), “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” is the TV version of a lavishly illustrated, expertly curated coffee table book. Which is exactly the treatment the Bee Gees’ dramatic story deserves.
First came the disorienting blast of initial success, followed by the wretched excess (“I had six RollsRoyces before I was 21,” Maurice says. “I don’t know where they are now.”) and the brotherly disharmony that led to the inevitable breakup when Robin left the group in 1969. Then came the second chapter, when the reunited group survived a dismal chunk of the 1970s, followed their friend Clapton’s suggestion that they move to Miami and record at Criteria Studios, and ended up creating the dance-f loor-fueled songs that had them ruling the charts and the zeitgeist.
The documentary offers some thoughtful big-picture analysis of what happened next, as bad disco songs (and disco exercises classes, disco clothes and “Disco Duck”) hijacked the airwaves and alienated listeners to the merits of the good stuff. The “Disco Sucks” movement was anti-Black, anti-gay and very anti-Bee Gees. Before they knew it, the brothers were radio poison. But were they over? No, they were not. As Marshall reminds us, the Bee Gees went on to write and produce massive hit songs for Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion and many others. They survived. Again.
Despite the confessional promise of its title, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” does not spend much time on the sadness lurking behind the sequins. The fate of younger brother Andy, who struggled with the pressures of his sudden fame and long-standing substance-abuse issues until his death in 1988 at the age of 30 — is discussed brief ly. Except for Barry’s melancholy acknowledgement in an early interview (“My immediate family is gone,” he says. “But that’s life.”), Robin and Maurice’s deaths are only noted in text blocks at the end of the film.
But if there is one thing the Bee Gees taught us, it’s that music has the power to mend broken hearts, lift tired spirits, and inspire bodies of all ages to shake their groove things until all of their troubles have boogied away. The Bee Gees gave us that music, and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” gives us a look at Barry, Maurice and Robin that will make you appreciate the magic of their music even more.
We may not be able to leave the house right now, but the Bee Gees will always be able to take us out of ourselves.
“The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” airs Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO.