The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? (Diamond Docs, PolyGram Records, Polygram Entertainment, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 29) I turned to CNN hoping that they would have some actual news coverage, but instead they were 45 minutes into a surprisingly interesting two-hour documentary on the history of the Bee Gees. Garry and I picked this up in 1974, as the Bee Gees were about to be dropped by Atlantic Records because they hadn’t had a hit since “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” in 1971. Desperate for a way to revitalize their career, brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb (the name “Bee Gees” simply is short for “Brothers Gibb,” though there were a lot of fanciful explanations for the name, including that it was slang for marijuana cigarettes in their native Australia) hit on Black rhythm-and-blues as a way to make their music more modern and more salable. They seized on the dance-funk style that was the hot new “thing” in the African-American community in the early 1970’s and made a quite credible record in the style called “Jive Talkin’,” which gave them their first hit in three years and saved their careers. From there they made a series of records in similar dance grooves, including “You Should Be Dancing” and “More Than a Woman,” which got them the plum assignment of writing original songs for the soundtrack to the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, produced by Robert Stigwood (their long-time manager and founder of RSO Records, which took over their contract from Atlantic even though that meant they could no longer work with Atlantic’s in-house producer Arif Mardin; fortunately the Bee Gees found Karl Richardson and Ahlby Galuten, who took over as their producers and worked in a similar style) and starring John Travolta in what became a legendary blockbuster.

Stigwood actually released the Bee Gees’ songs for the film in advance of the movie itself and used their success to promote the film; he also got his distributor, Paramount, to do a wide release of the movie so it would open in 300 theatres all at once (though this wasn’t that pioneering a marketing strategy; producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown and director Steven Spielberg had done just that with Jaws two years earlier). I remember the Saturday Night Fever two-LP soundtrack album from early 1978, when it was inescapable in the dorms of San Francisco State University; I liked the Bee Gees’ own songs and the Trampps’ “Disco Inferno” (which despite being in the disco style had a real sense of drama and excitement and wasn’t just a few words barked out over a dance groove), but hated the rest of the album. The rest of the album was pretty much a compilation of Disco’s Greatest Hits (save for the records of Donna Summer, which were being reserved for her own movie Thank God It’s Friday, and once again I liked her own songs but hated the rest of the soundtrack). The documentary discussed the anti-disco backlash and made it seem quite nastier than I remembered it; they showed the infamous Nuremberg-style rally anti-disco D.J. Steve Dahl organized at Comiskey Park in Chicago (home of the White Sox), in which you could be admitted for 98¢ if you brought a disco record for Dahl to add to his bonfire and blow up on the baseball field in between games of a double-header. About 9,000 people showed up and Dahl literally exploded a pile of disco records and left such a mess on the field that the White Sox couldn’t play the second game of their scheduled double-header and had to forfeit it to the Detroit Tigers.

My own memories of Steve Dahl are a lot kinder than the way he’s presented here as a sort of Joseph Goebbels wanna-be; I remember him mainly for his brilliant parody record “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?,” a spoof of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” which features lines like, “My shirt is open/I never use the buttons/Though I look hip/I work for E. F. Hutton,” and “Do ya think I’m disco/’Cause I spend so much time/Blow-drying out my hair?/Do ya think I’m disco/’Cause I know the dance steps/Learned them all at Fred Astaire’s.” Stewart’s manager at the time thought the parody was offensive and asked him to sue to have it taken off the market, but Stewart himself said, “I think it’s hilarious! Leave it alone.” (The song is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLFMELubizU, and one commentator wished Dahl would have done a similar bonfire when rap emerged about a decade or so later.) The talking heads (some white, some Black) said the anti-disco backlash was an expression of racism and homophobia; as an anti-racist Gay man I think it’s entirely possible to dislike disco on purely aesthetic grounds, just as I have an even deeper loathing for virtually all rap. But the anti-disco backlash reached such extremes that the Bee Gees literally got death threats while they were touring in support of their album Spirits Having Flown – their first release since Saturday Night Fever, and given that it was the follow-up to the biggest record seller of all time (until Michael Jackson’s Thriller) the Bee Gees would have had problems maintaining their career momentum even without the ludicrous backlash they now faced. The rest of the show peters out along with the Bee Gees’ career, and it includes the tragic story of the Bee Gees’ younger brother Andy, who had a brief, stellar solo career but succumbed to drug addiction and died at 30, just after he’d achieved his long-time ambition to be admitted to the family as a full-fledged Bee Gee.