Introduction:
More than 60 years after the Bee Gees’ formation, for Barry Gibb, all that matters now are the songs. “The only thing I care about is that people remember the music,” he says. “I really don’t care if anyone remembers me or the group. I just want the music to live. I want people to hear that music in 20 years or 30 years that was made more than 40 years ago.”
In the new documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, out Dec. 12 on HBO and HBO Max, the music lives gloriously on. The film, directed and produced by Oscar nominee Frank Marshall, explores the trio’s tremendous musical legacy, but also looks at the personal dynamics that forever bonded the brothers, even though at times it ripped them apart.
During the mid-to-late 1970s, the music of The Bee Gees — older brother Barry and twins Robin and Maurice — was inescapable. Between such hits as “Jive Talkin’,” “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love),” “You Should Be Dancing,” “Staying Alive,” “Night Fever,” and “Tragedy,” they dominated the pop airwaves. The prolific group scored nine No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, a mark that still stands as the third-highest for any group, bested only by the Beatles and the Supremes.
The film traces the Bee Gees from their start in Australia in the 1950s as young lads managed by their father, to their 1967 move to London and subsequent breakthrough in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following substance abuse issues, infighting that led to a brief breakup, and a career dip, they resurged again in the mid-‘70s — hitting peak prominence in 1977 with the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, which has sold more than 16 million copies in the U.S. (according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America), and won the Grammy for album of the year.
In the ’80s, the group fell victim of the disco backlash, and their pop success as a recording trio largely dried up. But the three brothers reinvented themselves once again, as songwriters and producers for other acts (including on Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s “Islands in the Stream” and Barbra Streisand’s “Guilty”), before returning to the charts as artists. They continued to score top 10 singles through 1989, with that year’s “One” marking their final trip to the Hot 100’s top tier.
For all their success, the Bee Gees felt the pitfalls of fame, which led to wild indulgences; in the film, Maurice boasts of having six Rolls Royces by the time he was 21. There was also conflict between the three, especially between Barry and Robin, who died in 2012, over who would sing lead vocals — leaving Maurice, who died in 2003, to play the intermediary.
“We became famous, and that became a real powerful element in our lives,” Gibb, 74, tells Billboard. “It became a competition. The sibling rivalry and all those things. Because success creates that and you’re not the same anymore.”
For Marshall, who produced such films as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Seabiscuit, the Bee Gees story was as compelling as any fictional drama. In addition to the brothers’ 50 years of music making, Marshall was also drawn to “how they were able to reinvent themselves over five decades and the ups and downs,” he says. “You’re always going to have complicated relationships with your brothers, they survived them. They transformed themselves through the adversity. I also realized what an amazing story this was of family, love of family, longevity and adaptation.”
The project came together with relative ease. In late 2016, Marshall visited his friend, Capitol Music Group chairman and CEO Steve Barnett, at Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood to tour the revamped recording studios where Marshall’s composer father was under contract during the 1950s and 1960s. Barnett mentioned that the company was moving into documentary production and that the Bee Gees had recently signed a worldwide agreement with Capitol that covered their expansive recording catalog. (Sister company Universal Music Publishing Group also handled the Bee Gees song copyrights).
“I said, ‘How about them?’” Marshall says. Gibb was coming to Los Angeles shortly for a 2017 Grammy tribute to the brothers, including younger brother Andy, who died in 1988. “We really connected,” Marshall says, of Barry. “We’re both the oldest in our musical families. I have two brothers. It was a smooth and easy connection.” Marshall and his brothers even formed their own band “for about 10 minutes,” he jokes, under the name the Mersh Brothers.