Movie Review: The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, a documentary Directed by Frank Marshall (2020)

 

Poster for The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, directed by Frank Marshall, 2020.

The Bee Gees, late 1970's. Talkin' 'bout chest hair, talkin' 'bout crazy cool medallions. Left to right: Robin Gibb, Barry Gibb, and Maurice Gibb.

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a new documentary directed by Frank Marshall. It premiered on HBO in December of 2020, and it’s a highly entertaining look at the group’s music and lives. The Bee Gees were three brothers: handsome and immaculately coiffed oldest brother Barry, and fraternal twins Robin and Maurice. (I never knew that Maurice’s name was pronounced Morris, I always assumed it was pronounced More-eeece, like Maurice Chevalier.) The film inevitably focuses slightly more on Barry, as he’s the last surviving brother, but there are still lots of archival interviews with Robin and Maurice. We get a sense of each brother’s personality, and Maurice’s ability to be the connector between Robin and Barry, who sometimes clashed. (Robin left the group for a while in 1969-70, and Barry and Maurice recorded the album Cucumber Castle without him.)

It’s fascinating to me how many great musical groups have featured siblings: the Andrews Sisters, the Mills Brothers, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys, the Kinks, the Bee Gees, the Carpenters, Heart, Oasis. (I’m sure there’s probably a million I’m missing.) As Noel Gallagher says in the movie, “When you’re singing with a sibling, it’s like an instrument that no one else has.” That was certainly true for the Bee Gees, as their high tenor voices blended to create gorgeous harmonies. I can’t imagine adding the stress of sibling relationships to the strain of being in a band, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why several of the aforementioned groups have had such strained relationships.

This sounds kind of stupid, but I didn’t realize how young Maurice and Robin were. They were 17 years old when they sang “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” “To Love Somebody,” and “Massachusetts.” I know that all 3 brothers had been singing and performing together from the time they were children, so they were certainly very experienced by the time they had their first hits, but still, it’s amazing how good they sounded at 17. And they sounded like themselves. Even if you only know the Bee Gees from their disco songs, if you hear those early records, you can still tell it’s the Bee Gees. That’s something that continually amazes me about singers is how a voice can be like a fingerprint, it’s like, “Yup, that’s Robin Gibb.”

The film tells us the story of how Barry Gibb discovered his trademark falsetto during the recording of “Nights on Broadway.” Producer Arif Mardin wanted someone to scream during the fade-out. Barry opened his throat and out came a powerful falsetto. Soon the brothers were writing songs around Barry’s falsetto. It’s curious to me that it took Barry so long to find his falsetto—after all, all 3 brothers had very high tenors. I guess they never tried singing along to Frankie Valli and the 4 Seasons? Joking aside, Barry’s falsetto gave the brothers another tool in their formidable musical arsenal.

It’s fun to watch the brothers’ comeback in the mid-70’s as they fully embraced the new disco sounds coming out of the gay, Black, and Latin clubs. You could argue that the band was co-opting the music of minorities and making it more mainstream by making it straight and white. But I’d argue that in 1975 the Bee Gees weren’t a commercial juggernaut cynically co-opting disco. Their embrace of disco and funk really started with the album Main Course, released in June of 1975. Their previous album, Mr. Natural, released in June of 1974, had peaked in the US at #178. The group hadn’t had a Top 20 album in the US since 1969, and they hadn’t had a Top 10 single in the US since “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” in 1971. The Bee Gees were not exactly riding a commercial wave when they embraced disco.

There’s a great sequence in the movie where the engineers explain how they made a tape loop of a drum sample from “Jive Talkin’” to create the beat of “Stayin’ Alive.” In the mid-1970’s, this was a very laborious process, all done by hand. Now you could probably create that drum loop in 10 seconds.

The film also shows how the Bee Gees became a symbol of everything disco, as they had a phenomenal run of success during the late 1970’s, highlighted by the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album, which spent an incredible 24 weeks at Number 1 in the US. The Bee Gees even had their own plane for their 1979 tour, a Boeing 720 customized with their logo on it. But as the backlash against disco gained traction in the media, it seemed as though people took their frustrations out on the Gibb brothers. Disco faded from the mainstream, even as the brothers continued to write hits for other artists. The Bee Gees ended with Maurice’s death in 2003, although Robin and Barry did perform together several times before Robin’s death in 2012. Barry’s latest project is an album of duets with country singers titled Greenfield, The Gibb Brothers Songbook, Volume 1. It went to Number 1 in the UK, and the success of the Gibbs’ brothers continues into the 2020’s.

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a fascinating portrait of 3 brothers who made unforgettable music together.