I can’t remember either, but here’s one more …
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Frank Marshall (“Seabiscuit”, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) chronicles the triumphs and hurdles of brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb, otherwise known as the Bee Gees.
The iconic trio, who found early fame in the Sixties, went on to write over 1,000 songs, including twenty number one hits throughout their storied career. This film follows the Bee Gee’s meteoric rise, as they rode the highs of fame and fortune, negotiated the vagaries of the ever-shifting music business and navigated the complexities of working so intimately alongside family.
The feature documentary premieres December 12 on HBO Max.
I’m all over this.
When they conquered the world (1977), I thought it was total wuss music.
But it must have grown on me by the time they released Haaaah.
Fascinating to learn that the falsetto was a late-career shtick. And that they wrote the SNF songs in a weekend:
The band’s involvement in the film did not begin until post-production. As John Travolta asserted, “The Bee Gees weren’t even involved in the movie in the beginning … I was dancing to Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs.” Producer Robert Stigwood commissioned the Bee Gees to create the songs for the film. The brothers wrote the songs “virtually in a single weekend” at Château d’Hérouville studio in France.”
Although I was a fan of their 60’s stuff, the falsetto/disco phase never really worked for me, athough it obviously worked for them: at one point in ’77 I think they had the top five singles at once, either as writers/performers or as writers, something that hadn’t happened since the Beatles. And I concede that some of those songs are well-written and produced. I always respected their abiity: I never hated them the way some other guitar-rock types did, nor did I hate disco as a genre. You can find good songs in almost any genre, and as Chris Bell pointed out, at least it got peolple dancing again. Anyway, many of the “disco sucks” types had been into it until it became unfashionable.
Of course, the gods decree that any band on top must do something stupid to fuck it up. For them it was the execrable Sgt. Pepper movie, which managed to be even worse than the Kiss movie Phantom of the Park from around that time. Phantom at least managed to be somewhat comically bad. Sgt. Pepper was unwatchable (I think I lasted ten minutes). The Bee Gees did have some hits afterward (unlike poor Peter Frampton, whose career never recovered), but not like before. Perhaps a larger problem was that they didn’t have a viable exit strategy from disco. Maybe they were too rich to care about one. I dunno, guess I’ll have to watch the documentary.
By the way, their manager was Robert Stigwood, he whom Peter Grant once dangled from a balcony by his ankles. Or, as PG put it, “I showed him the view.”
Even the preview bites!