We think of the Bee Gees as extraordinarily popular, which they were, but my God, the whiplash series of fades and comebacks they experienced! Put on the map by their musician father, who was like Joe Jackson or the Beach Boys’ dad minus the sadism, they’d sung together professionally in Brisbane since the late ’50s (they started when Robin and Maurice, who were twins, were just five), and they sounded like the missing link between the Everly Brothers and the Fab Four. In its middlebrow celebratory way, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” reveals the Bee Gees’ saga to be one of the most fascinating and, at times, awe-inspiring in the history of pop. The film examines the Bee Gees’ vast array of influences and dizzying ups and downs on the pop charts, and though it doesn’t get too much into their personal lives, it touches on enough of their rivalries - mostly between Barry and Robin - to give you a sense of where they meshed with one another and where they didn’t. It tells the Bee Gees’ story from the ground up, with never-before-seen archival footage and lots of highly illuminating talking heads (the clips of Robin and Maurice, who died in 20, respectively, are lifted from an extensive interview conducted in 1999).īarry Gibb, who is now 74, appears before the camera as a more wizened version of himself, with thin white hair and a voice that dips into gravel, but the sense of looking back that he brings is quite moving. Directed by Frank Marshall, it isn’t just a nostalgia trip (though how could it not be?). If you do love the Bee Gees, or just like them a lot, or even if you’re too young to have grown up with them and are curious, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” is a movie you’ll want to see. and the U.K., and those songs became the soundtrack to a lot of people’s lives. They wrote over 1,000 songs, including 20 number-one singles in the U.S. The blissed-out harmonies, the melodic rapture that caressed you with its melancholy sweetness (“How-w-w-w can you stop…the sun from shining?”), the way their songs had unexpected chord changes that could make an emotion leap into the next dimension - if you didn’t like the Bee Gees, it’s probably safe to say you don’t like pop music. The Bee Gees elevated catchiness to a kind of transcendence. Yet you could make a case (I would) that “Stayin’ Alive,” along with “Billie Jean,” is the most stupendous pop song of the last 45 years. The Bee Gees, in their incandescent and sublimely melodic way, worked inside idioms they didn’t create - in the late ’60s they sounded like the Beatles with a touch of Herman’s Hermits (whereas the Beatles sounded like no one but themselves), and in the ’70s they were dance-pop avatars playing with a form they both followed and heightened. Those artists were revolutionaries whose music remade the culture. There is, of course, the God-like strata of pop music, the rarefied upper echelon of Olympus: the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys, Dylan. How deep was their greatness? Even if you love them (as I do), that’s not such an easy question to answer. 12, on HBO, is a gratifying, conventional, heartfelt documentary that tells the story of one of the great pop groups, but part of the film’s excitement is how thoroughly it explores the question of where, exactly, the Bee Gees fit into the pop firmament. “ The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” which premieres Saturday, Dec. United by a silky timbre that was in their DNA, those voices, crooning and soaring, often into the higher register, fused as gorgeously as the colors of a rainbow. And those voices! To say that the Gibb brothers blended together with seamless perfection wouldn’t do the sound they created justice. and raised (mostly) in Australia, they had different versions of the same overbite (though Barry had the handsome-jock version, Robin looked like a gopher, and Maurice was the cute everyman). The Bee Gees, of course, were brothers (there were three of them), a fact that in itself isn’t remarkable, though like the Beatles they rhymed in ways that were at once visual, temperamental, and sonic. For all their iconic differences, they had variations on the same thick billowy dark hair, gleaming lemon-shaped smile, and Liverpool singsong and mocking twinkle. One of the things that made the Beatles, when they first arrived, seem magical was the uncanny way the look and sound of all four of them matched up.
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