Song of the Day 12/29: The Bee Gees, “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)”

However you felt about them at the time, the new documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” on HBO takes viewers on a roller-coaster ride tracking the course of their career. The brothers Gibb had three separate periods of success, each time followed by popular rejection that forced them to reinvent themselves. They wrote more than 1,000 songs, 20 of which reached No. 1 when you include those written for other artists during the post-disco days when radio rejected them.

They operated like Brill Building pros, usually churning out lyrics in the studio while laying down each song’s basic tracks. They could compose in virtually any style, and when they moved to Miami in 1975 to record “Main Course,” they began writing R&B and working with noted R&B producer Arif Mardin. The album included two of their hits on the new dance charts, “Jive Talkin'” and “Nights on Broadway,” but this gorgeous soul ballad was relatively overlooked.

As songwriters, they could find inspiration anywhere — “Jive Talkin'” was based on the rhythm of their car’s tires on a bridge they crossed on their daily drive to the recording studio. Fanny was inspired by their maid. As Barry recalled years later,

“We had a housecleaner named Fanny when we stayed at 461 Ocean Blvd. [in North Miami Beach] during the making of Main Course. We were sitting in the lounge at Criteria [Studios] writing the song with the lyric idea, ‘Be tender with my love’. Maurice turned round and saw Fanny and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a better song if it was a woman’s name in there, and you’re asking her to be tender?”

Keyboard player Blue Weaver admitted the key change at the end was “a complete rip-off” of Hall & Oates’ “She’s Gone” from their 1973 “Abandoned Luncheonette” LP. “I only had it on tape, and I didn’t know that Arif produced it,” he said. Because the song used so many overdubbed harmonies, they never performed it in concert, which no doubt contributed to its relative lack of success, though it did reach No. 9 on the Hot 100.