Bee Gees: Tapestry of the 70s.

I ran across a biography of the Bee Gees tonight. I was back in the Bronx, a senior in college. The Bee Gees had been hit makers of the sixties and then they had faded away. One night I was watching a show, after Saturday Night Live (still in its early-ish days), called "The Midnight Special" and there they were in entertainment reincarnation. The performance, cuts from their then new album "Main Course" was electrifying, same falsetto voices, but with an edge that they had never possessed in the Aquarius heydey.

I was a late bloomer. (Heck, still am!) So, I was still living at home, a college commuter. Dad must not have been home cause I had the volume way up on the Sony Trinitron. And I was dancing around the room and oddly feeling pride at the comeback of the threesome.

It was only a year or two later that I heard the soundtrack of a new movie that launched disco, "Saturday Night Fever" and I raced out and got that record (prehistoric times that they were) which I brought to a New Year's Eve party at Glenn's (I was now in my first year of law school and no longer up to New Year's Eve party throwing) feeling like I had some obligation to promote the next big thing. I had no idea how "next big thing" it would be.

And so, watching the biography, with interview cuts of Barry and Robin together and separate ones of Maurice, I was smiling nostalgically and then I remembered.. They haven't been three Brothers Gibb for how long? I couldn't remember. Which brother had passed? Of course, it was the solitary interviewee. Maurice. The two remaining brothers sat at the end of the story, just two, singing "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart", the always thin Robin looking thinner and the formerly buff Barry bloated and his old mane of hair scarce and gray, and it was wonderful and sad, because I could hear how missing was the missing voice.