'I just want the music to live': Barry Gibb reflects on the Bee Gees' new HBO documentary

There's more to the story of the Bee Gees than meets the eye.

Brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb formed the Bee Gees, known for hits like “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Love So Right,” and became masters of music – and of reinvention.

The band's tumultuous early years, commercially successful disco era and everything in between (and after) are chronicled in a new HBO and Max documentary, "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" (streaming now).

The film, directed by Frank Marshall, goes deep into the archives with never-before-seen footage from concerts, recording sessions and home videos. It also features interviews with Barry, 74, as well as archival interview footage with his twin brothers Maurice and Robin, who died in 2003 and 2012, respectively.

“You never know really what's going to be a hit, you just know what you love,” Barry Gibb tells USA TODAY by phone from his home in Miami. “But you've got to want to do it more than anything else.”

Gibb says he isn’t sure what the Bee Gees’ legacy will be, but he wants the songs to endure. His coming album, “Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1” (out Jan. 8), features mainly country stars such as Dolly Parton and Keith Urban duetting with him on Bee Gees hits.

“I just want the music to live,” he says. “I want people to maybe enjoy it years from now. Doesn't matter about whether people remember us or me or the Bee Gees. It’s the music that counts.”

For both casual listeners and fans who lived through it, the documentary is a trove of discoveries and memories.

Among the most poignant moments:

The Gibb brothers hashed out their family issues in the press before reconciling

The Bee Gees navigated the trappings of fame and working with family, providing a blueprint for subsequent stars on how to maneuver the industry.

Fame, the ego that comes with it, and sibling spats led to the trio disbanding briefly in early 1970.

“We had this fascination with calling the newspapers up. You call NME or Disc or Music Echo and you say, ‘Robin said this about me and I just want to be able to correct the record,'" Barry can be heard saying in the doc, as headlines like “Robin Breaks the Silence” and “Barry says Robin ‘extremely rude’ ” flash across the screen.

It wasn’t until music executive Robert Stigwood formed a record label and took the Bee Gees with him that the brothers began to communicate again, reuniting and writing “Lonely Days.”

“It was a whole strange episode of our lives,” Robin said. “We needed time apart to think about it. … We’d always been boys growing up together, and I think we came back together as men.”

Still, Barry has countless fond memories of making music with his brothers.

“There's a lot of great moments between the three of us," he says. "Music always kept us happy and together."

Fellow sibling stars Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers and Noel Gallagher of Oasis appear in the film to talk about the perils and proud moments of working with your brothers.

“Brothers in general, it’s a very complicated thing. Emotions are heightened and there’s things that go back to childhood … When you magnify that with the whole world, it changes the game a little bit,” says Jonas, whose own band turmoil was chronicled in 2019’s “Chasing Happiness” documentary. "Something about entering the world from the same place I think has an affect on your ability to sing together, your creative awareness and your artistic voice.”

“Making music with your family is equally the greatest strength and the greatest weakness you could ever have in a musical partnership,” says Gallagher, who has had public disputes with brother Liam.

The brotherhood is the secret sauce, it seems:

“You can’t sing like the Bee Gees because when you’ve got family members singing together, it’s unique,” Gallagher says.

Barry Gibb discovered his falsetto well into the group's career

As the group fell into a creative rut in the years following their reconciliation, they decided to relocate to Miami in 1975, where they found a new, more Americanized sound – and Barry’s falsetto.

The result was “Main Course,” the album that spawned the hits “Jive Talkin’” (the beat of which, Barry says in the documentary, was inspired by the sound of their car going over a bridge on the way to Miami’s Criteria Recording Studio) and “Nights on Broadway.”

“That was the turning point where we literally did find ourselves, because we never really knew what we were until that album,” Barry says.

When recording “Broadway,” producer Arif Mardin asked the band to ad lib background vocals. Barry’s signature falsetto was born, becoming part of the group’s trademark sound.

“My whole life, I didn’t know I could do this,” Barry says in archival footage.

Though Maurice noted “we weren’t the first to sing falsetto,” listing The Stylistics and The Delfonics as inspirations, the group made the new sound its own.

Backlash against the Bee Gees and disco was steeped in racism, homophobia

“Tragedy” and “You Should Be Dancing” were on rotation at clubs as the then-underground disco scene thrived, when Stigwood tapped the Bee Gees to write songs for 1977’s “Saturday Night Fever,” starring a young John Travolta. “Stayin’ Alive” was among the five songs the group penned for the film's soundtrack.

All at once, disco rocketed the trio to the top. The soundtrack was certified 16 times platinum and won album of the year at the Grammys.

But just as suddenly, the '80s revolt against disco, in part because of racism and homophobia, wrapped them in backlash.

Initially, the cultural and musical phenomenon of disco was based primarily in Black, brown and LGBTQ communities, but that didn’t stop critics like Chicago DJ Steve Dahl from lumping the Bee Gees and their music in with the takedown of the genre.

“A lot of straight people feeling threatened” and the corporatization of disco was the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” former Studio 54 resident DJ Nicky Siano says in the documentary.

'Stayin' Alive': Bee Gees tune helps hand washing for coronavirus prevention

Yes, Dolly Parton, Celine Dion and more have recorded songs written for them by the Bee Gees

Even those who think they’ve never heard the Bee Gees have almost certainly heard one of their songs.

Barry reveals the group would “write our lyrics in the studio itself” instead of composing them ahead of time. The unconventional approach led them to create countless chart-topping hits, with the trio ranking third under groups with the most No. 1 singles in Billboard Hot 100 history.

“It’s very hard to describe how we write, but the only way I can describe how we work at it is by becoming one mind,” Maurice said.

Reinventing themselves once again, the band turned to songwriting for other musicians in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They wrote songs for Barbra Streisand’s 1980 album “Guilty,” with Barry singing alongside her on the title track; Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” single; Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream” duet; Diana Ross’ “Eaten Alive” album; and the group's “Immortality” duet with Celine Dion.

“We just decided to write for other people and to ignore the slings and arrows,” Barry says. "You know, let's just write songs (for other artists) and make sure the songs are great songs, and we prove ourselves to be songwriters more than anything else."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bee Gees: Barry Gibb talks 'Greenfields,' HBO documentary, brotherhood