“The truth is, when we started this, it’s been largely your band and we’ve done things your way.”
Even I, despite being an enormous fan, was dismayed at the run time. It’s all fine and dandy to THINK that you’d like to see The Beatles in real time drink tea, eat toast, and mess with amps. In reality, that wears off after about an hour. So while I was initially excited to hear that Peter Jackson had decided to make a series of Get Back including unseen original footage from Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film instead of just a film of, say, two and a half hours, I was not really interested in sitting down for the entirety of this. And yet, it was so brilliant. Don’t get me wrong, I’m convinced the first episode had about fifteen minutes of fat, the second about half an hour, but the third had about thirty seconds. I can’t much argue with that, at least not in the same way I complained about The Hobbit.
But it WAS genius. It WAS original, despite reusing most footage from the failed 1970 film. And it WAS ground breaking - not in necessarily showing us The Beatles how we had never seen them before, but the narrative was different. In fact, the narrative Peter Jackson showed us is all together NOT the narrative we have been sold all these years. In fact, Get Back exposes most of the history of Let it Be as a lie, and that is doubly insulting considering the disservice that lie does to the band’s musicianship, to the band’s history, and to the history of pop music. If Let it Be exists in a vacuum of no context, Peter Jackson has firmly put Get Back into a world of context, considering the history of the band on either side of the Saville Row Sessions. Not everything is remarkable, but everything is different, and we must reevaluate what that is using this film. How many documentaries do that?I mean, we’re not Errol Morris getting people off death row, or anything, but this film does change the history of pop culture, and I’d like to understand why.
Let it Be, despite being an enormous success for The Beatles in terms of sales, is forever marred by it’s consistent mishandling by The Beatles themselves and by historians wishing to confirm many things historians want to believe in their nature as contrarians. The very existence of the album and the horrid film that followed it (at which premiere, none of The Beatles cared to show up) seemed proof positive that the band was at its end, had been falling apart for years, and was an auditory (and the film a avisual) history of how a band breaks up. This outlook ignores certain truths that happened around the album, and the narrative itself falls apart under examination. Following the upturning of this theory, the album has had a turn around in the last fifteen years, which I will get into, but at the release of Get Back more context is needed.
The Beatles, as they existed from 1955 to 1967 was, in essence, John Lennon’s band. He formed the Quarrymen. He asked Paul McCartney to join his band. He chose the name The Silver Beetles, and he changed it to The Beatles (being more reminiscent of The Crickets and other like minded names with a vowel change - which carried on to The Monkees). If he had fought for his good friend Pete Best, the original drummer would have stayed. But as George Martin gave an ultimatum of ‘the drummer goes or I don’t record’ Lennon sacrificed his lad for his success. This does not mean that there is no Ringo without John Lennon, but Lennon’s ascent was crucial to the future of the band. The fact that everyone else agreed to go along with it was no surprise. They knew Ringo was a better drummer. After this enormous change, the band basically stayed on the same trajectory under the management of Brian Epstien, the only person in their orbit who had vision and a modicum of management skills and ideas (he lacked plenty, as research will tell you, but he gave them direction). And it isn't until his death during Sergeant Pepper that the band undergoes a transformation that puts it virtually on edge for the remainder of their short career. From the release of Sergeant Pepper in the summer of 1967 to the recording of Abbey Road in the summer of 1969, is a very short two year period in which the band cranked out an unbelievable five studio LPs. JUST LET THAT FUCKING SIT IN FOR A SECOND. Pepper, Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine, The White Album (really the White Two Albums), Let it Be, and Abbey Road). This is the output by a band that journalists called in the summer of 1970 “washed up.”
If the band was anything by January of 1969 when they showed up at the agreed upon location of Twickenham studios outside London, it was exhausted. Paul, who for the first time exceeded Lennon’s compositions on Pepper, who tried to replace Brian as the idea man to give focus for the band on the Magical Mystery Tour, and whose leadership, however ill suited he was for the job, led him to demand the release of a double LP instead of a single White Album, was the only one in the group that still had steam to go on, and as evidenced by Get Back, he kept it throughout the Savile Row Sessions. It was this band, who had kicked out seven studio records from 1962 to 1967 (let that sink in as well) who wanted nothing to do with going on stage, much less a tour, whom all had found a wife or a future spouse to start a family with in their late twenties, that decided to record the experience making their next album not simply because it was Paul’s idea, but because as The Beatles, every album experience should be different, and they wanted Get Back to be different, too.
The fact that the cover of Get Back was initially going to be the same staircase photograph of their first album, Please Please Me, in which the fab four look down the EMI staircase was supposed to show the longevity of the band. It was a gag - “Get Back,” get it? In tune with their sense of humor. John later mused in a band meeting that it was proof The Beatles had run their course. They had started and ended with the same album cover. This, too, was thwarted. The Please Please me cover was used on the Red Vinyl, issued after their breakup in 1971 to satiate the masses who wanted a greatest hits album (the Red Vinyl was 1962-1967). The Get Back cover was used on the Blue Vinyl issued in 1972 (1967-1970). This set was never reprinted except for Cassette in 1984 and for CD in 1994, causing a scandal because although all of the songs from the Red and the Blue could be put on one 74 minute compact disc, Capitol EMI decided to issue the double CD out of ‘continuity’ raising the price from $17.99 to $34.99. In fact, the Get Back Sessions, started in Twickingham and ended in Saville Row, became just as convoluted as the cover that was meant to package it.
By all written accounts, Twickingham was a disaster. Every book I’ve read, including the seminal work SHOUT! And everything Mark Lewisham has written, has portrayed Twickingham as a badly planned experiment that almost broke up the band. What we see is rather different in Peter Jackson’s documentary. Within a span of fifteen minutes, while waiting for John to show up at his normal ‘11 to 11:30” time frame, Paul plays guitar chords on his famous Hofner bass to search for a new song, since the band has a shortage of songs for their new album. At the end of the fifteen minutes, Get Back emerges and judging by the finale of the doc, becomes the one song that ties the band together. Watching the other Beatles is telling. Ringo yawns and George looks disinterested. They’ve seen this before, I’m sure. It’s the first time we’ve seen it. It was like Pual pulled a hit record out of the fucking ether, based on old blues baseelines, and hammered it home. In fifteen minutes, Fifteen fucking mintues, and Paul write a song that is famous sixty years later. Twickingham can’t be all that bad. It’s at least 5% good.
George complained miserably about Twickingham in the Anthology series. Cold, damp, unorganized. After a famous argument with Paul over how George was playing, George gives it one more day, then takes off at noon with this famous “see you around the clubs” remark as he leaves the studio. The Beatles don’t know what to do. So they go on. They keep playing and making dry jokes. “If he’s not back by Tuesday, we’ll get Eric Clapton” John said, but it is not clear how much of a joke this is. Cream was kaput by January 1969, and Blind Faith had not yet started. Clapton was in limbo and touring with this band and that band, recently with Bonnie and Delany and….George. John jokes again how they’ll split up Georges’s instruments. Sometimes you use humor to work through situations.
The Beatles could have ended right then and there. John and Paul could have thrown their hands up and said “well, that’s it.” But they didn’t. What occurs, which I’ve never read about and have never heard about, was that John and Paul went to the studio cafeteria to talk about what to do next and unbelievably, Michael Lindsay-Hogg taped the conversation with a microphone to record what was going on and what to do next. On one end of the spectrum, you can see George’s (and John’s) point. George felt like he was being harassed and micromanaged as an equal member of the band instead of someone who had excellent musician skills and was starting to compose some real breakout tunes. On the other hand, and one can certainly see Paul’s point, it was Paul’s song. And Paul wants George to play it a certain way. The Beatles had always been that way. George had always played songs the way they had wanted them. What was so special about now? Paul’s rebuke, played over and over again in history, seems quite light in response to George. Americans would probably get into fist fights, but not these proper Englishmen. And George leaves, not destroying equipment, but by simply saying “I’m done. See you around the clubs.”
John and Paul don’t rehash any of it in their secret conversation. In fact, John takes responsibility with the way George has been treated. Paul, shockingly, agrees with John, and then says something revealing about the band that we as fans have only suspected and read about for sixty years. “The truth is, when we started this, it’s been largely your band and we’ve done things your way, (I’m paraphrasing here),” to which John replies “that’s not exactly true,” and although John may believe that, we as fans don’t. The friction is coming, Paul explains, because he rather than John has emerged as the “leader” of the group, and the group is fracturing under this transition BECAUSE there is no Brian Epstien to keep them together. John admits this much in the open during the Savile Row Sessions when he and Paul openly about “Mr. Epstein” with such reverence. The solution they agree upon, is to go to George as a band and ask him to come back. There is no discussion on what they do if George refuses. In my opinion, if George declined, that would be the end of the group - but at the time a reunion before 1980 would not have been ruled out. The meeting, which took place on a sunday at Ringo’s house (ostensibly so if George wanted, he could leave) did not go well. In one of the most remarkable sequences of the film, the cameras capture a wandering conversation in Twickingham when Paul comes in to work before any of the others show up. Apple Corp employees, EMI staff, and a load of Hogg’s camera and sound men that forever crowd the frame, are milling about as Paul, Hogg, the legendary producer George Martin, and the equally legendary sound engineer Glyn Johns, all discuss the crises of the moment. It begins by someone asking Paul how he was composing with John, which was basically not at all. In the early days, Paul explains, they were forced together via hotel rooms, trains, or long drives with their faithful rock of reliability the roadie Mal Evans at the wheel. Composition work came in an endless flow for years. After the Revolver tour, in which not a single song from the album could be played live because there was no current technology to amplify it, The Beatles were largely left at home, worked at Abbey Road, and settled into a twelve hour day that started roughly at eleven A.M. on a cycle that lasted for the next four years. There was no obligatory reason for John and Paul to spend time together, so their collaboration period waned. With that, their songs, starting with Pepper, started to become largely solo affairs. John wouldn’t write a bridge for Paul and Paul wouldn’t help with lyrics for Lennon. What made the first five albums go so fast, in fact, is the band had already written them by the time they got into the studio (Please Please Me, for example, was written in a lighting 12 hour session).
The conversation then switches to George when someone, probably Martin, asks Paul how it went at Ringo’s house the day before. Paul’s mood doesn’t change. You can tell he is worried. It looks like he is biting his fingernails and he nervously digits. “Not well at all,” Paul finally says, and shifts in his chair. He starts to enumerate the problems in the band very generally, until someone, whom I believe to by Glyn Johns, brings up Yoko.
And this, folks, is why you paid your monthly fee to watch Get Back on Disney Plus.
I can not recall how many times I have read in countless books and spoke to people in every possible setting about Yoko Ono’s involvement with The Beatles and her culpability as the culprit that broke them up. Thirty years later, on That 70’s Show, Topher Grace screams at Mila Kunis as she comes into the basement to smoke weed with his friends. “You’re breaking up the band, Yoko!” This has become so fact as to become undeniable. Yoko’s introduction to the band was while John was still married to Cynthia Lennon, with whom he had a child Julian (named after John’s mother, Julia). Yoko’s constant blithering in the studio to Paul about his songwriting composition. Yoko’s irritating presence everywhere John went. In the late 1960’s, “John and Yoko” replaced “John and Paul.” It did not help matters that when Paul released his first solo album “McCartney” right on the heels of Let it Be’s release and announced he was leaving the band (the third to do so over the preceding year - technically Ringo never left the band finally, though he briefly left during the White Album), Paul included an interview sheet he wrote himself - questions and answers. “Will The Beatles make another album?” “I don’t know” was the response. “Will Paul and Linda (Eastman) become another John and Yoko?” “No, they will become a Paul and Linda.” This seemingly innocuous rejection of the media’s characterization of Paul’s relationship was absolutely misconstrued as Paul’s judgement of John and Yoko’s - completely unintentional. But it was three years too late to do anything about it. The evil myth had been born.
So when Glyn Johns asks about Yoko, there is already a history going back 18 months of Yoko’s presence in the group. She sat next to John during the entire White Album recordings. They were inseparable. John had even taken Yoko to Ringo’s house the day before to talk to George about coming back to work and, as Paul explained it...John spoke through Yoko. This, admittedly, was not helpful. John is his own person, and despite his experimentation with human relationships, could have chosen not to experiment with George’s feelings at this particular moment. This interaction led to George’s refusal. So that, on the face of it, put Yoko in the center of the situation if you don’t think through and realize that John PUT Yoko in that situation. That was shitty for John to do, for Yoko to consent to, and especially for George to put up with - from a friend he’d known since he was thirteen. But as this comes to the fore, while the cameras are rolling, something amazing happens that puts a full stop to this way of thinking. Paul, without hesitation or any ambiguity, destroys the myth in two minutes of dialogue. “They want to be together, what’s wrong with that?” and he even clairvoyantly describes the final analysis: “50 years from now, people are going to be talking about The Beatles breaking up because Yoko sat on an amp. It’s absurd.”
The Beatles did not have a plan on going into Twickingham. What they had was Ringo going to start acting in a movie that started shooting on January 30, and their winter holidays ending on January 2nd. In 28 days, they were trying to write, record, rehearse, and perform 12 songs in a venue. This is a Herculean task, even for the most successful rock group of all time. They did not have a theme, nor a tone, nor did they even decide, at any point during the recordings, what the sound of the album should be. They didn’t even have proper equipment, as we find out in the first episode - leading everyone who is a moderate if passing fan of pop music in the 60’s, why does the richest record label in the world not have an 8 track recorder? They borrow George Harrison’s for fuck’s sake, and plug in two EMI 4-tracks. This is insanity on a grand level. They’re arguing about the PA system for ten whole minutes. In effect, Let It Be is a miniature White Album, widely hailed as the Chaos Theory production of the group. The idea that For You Blue is on the same album as Across the Universe, that The One After 909, a song John wrote in 1955 for an Elvis audience, is turned into a Billy Preston quick rhythm trip and on the same LP as The Long and Winding Road, is a joke. Those songs do not belong on the same album as much as Helter Skelter and Goodnight, Goodnight belong on the same playlist. They wanted to film a movie but they had no direction of the album. They had no direction of the film. First the finale was in an amphitheatre in Libya (Ghaddafi’s Libya of all fucking places!), then a TV special, then a concert right there in the Twickingham studio itself booked for Ringo’s film The Magic Christian later that month. All these plans were jettisoned. All of these ideas or non-ideas - even the rooftop concert. There’s even footage that goes on forever about the rooftop concert. Like everything else, George doesn’t want to do it. He doesn’t want to do anything, really. John wants to do anything to keep George in the band. Ringo’s up for whatever. Paul doesn’t want to go on the roof because he wants the big TV ending instead of the rooftop. This argument goes on forever. Finally, Paul caves, and George consents. This is how The Beatles managed themselves after Epstein died. It’ a fucking miracle Pepper is regarded as one of the greatest game changer albums of al ltime. It’s a miracle they survived the Mystery Tour, or showed up to the White Album AT ALL. The Beatles were winging it, day by day, hour by hour, through the rest of their careers. And everyone wants to blame Yoko.
Paul was right, it’s absurd.
Alongside all of this is an underlying belief that the cameras are affecting the performances you see on screen. They are all aware of what is going on. That they are being recorded. They are guarded and in many cases, filtering what they say and what they do. One gets a sense that John is suffering from some sort of fatigue, or, as Chuck Klosterman pontificated, most likely in the throes of a heroin addiction with Yoko. He’s silent for several reasons. Ringo alternates between having fun, being bored, and sleeping. Paul is the one that seems hyper aware that it is all up to him, to be that draw power on screen. To write. To perform. To be that thing that audiences want to pay a movie ticket to see. It’s very apparent that Paul was the only one trying to save the band. It is an irony that he got the blame for ending it.
There are other gems in Jackson’s menagerie of 1960’s culture. Peter Sellers, Linda Eastman, and Billy Preston grace the camera for periods of time that personally I feel are too brief. Is there an interview with Linda Eastman regarding her point of view of these events? I would very much like to hear it. Glyn Johns is a joy to see dressed in the era of swinging London. The hero of the film, though, is Mal Evans, The old reliable roadie, constantly with a smile on his face, bringing coffee, writing lyrics, tuning pianos. Footnoted during the documentary are references to Beatles lore to help the non-fan through their rise to fame, their trips to India, the Rock N' Roll Circus, and in many uncomfortable times, their first meetings with Allen Klein - the real reason the group broke up in any kind of accounting. Finally, there is the finale, with breathtaking footage of their final performance. All we have seen to date is endless repeats of Don’t Let Me Down - officially the only single from the album (which is why it was issued on 45, but not on the LP). Whatever we may say about Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and there is a lot of unflattering things to say about hism based on our observance of him here, he must have been the one that set a camera across the street. This was pivotal. Without that camera, everything looks to tight. There is no scope, no sweeping vistas. The Beatles are just playing to the street below. With that camera across the street, they are playing to London, and the world beyond. And when the cops come up, as they repeat songs, as the stakes start to rise, they all start to REALLY get into it. George, who didn’t want to do this at all, magically turns when he sees a band and then he REALLY doesn’t want to get into it. Mal unplugs an amp, and Lennon plugs it back in again. They play Get Back one more time while the polite bobbys finally bring it to a stop.
When I was in college, in the 90’s, the album had a horrible reputation, ranked near the bottom of their hits - The Long and Winding Road and Let it Be being the only two stand out songs. The Beatles themselves made decades of sneering remarks about the album. Lennon even called it shit in his Playboy interviews with David Sheff released the month he died. Part of the blame was hurled towards the fact that Lennon and Neil Aspinall, the head of Apple Music who had joined the band as a roadie, had authorised Phil Spector to produce a mix of the album for release the following year to coincide with the film. With the output the band had achieved, fans would start to get nervous if too much time had followed an album. The White Album having debuted in the summer of 1968, Abbey Road marked the longest time between albums the band had yet let lapse - an entire year. Lennon left the band in late 1969, and by the summer of 1970 it appeared to insiders the group, which had not stood in the same room in almost a year, was not going to reform. To give the band more time, Spector was given the Twickingham and Savile Row Sessions to make something out of nothing. What he did has always been controversial. Having invented what he called “the Wall of Sound,” an orchestral effect mixed with harmony or choir vocals that filled out the song along with fills and echos, Spector proceeded to change Let It Be from The Beatles’ raw, urban achievement of love angst and pain (For You Blue, Don’t Let Me Down etc), to a dated, 1960’s pop album complete with an angelic choir during the Long and Winding Road - which Paul detested. Across the Universe, the only song completed before the Twickenham Sessions, is the ultimate pinnacle of the Wall of Sound. It has every right to be on The Plastic Ono Band or Imagine. It has no business being on Let it Be.
The response to the album was decidedly mixed, the ‘worst’ the band had done since The Magical Mystery Tour. Don’t Let Me Down was not even on the album, much to everyone’s anger. If you wanted that, you had to buy The Beatles Past Masters, Vol II (the Black vinyl) or the Beatles Greatest Hits Vol. II (the Blue Vinyl) or in the late Seventies the double album re-release of all their hits The Beatles Rock’n’Roll (The Silver Vinyl). Why the fuck, you wondered, was that song omitted, and Maggie May and Dig It, useless rambles, were listed? Ugh. Even with the included power ballads and the long, interesting riffs from Don’t Let Me Down and Dig a Pony, the album failed to hit the mark, and a lot of people blamed that little stamp on the back of the album embossed on the first five hundred thousand copies of Let it Be: the Wall of Sound. I was once in a pub with a guy who claimed to have tracked one down from a store owner who did not know what it was in about 1997. He saw the stamp and the price of $25. The owner thought he was over charging. For the Wall of Sound stamp on Let it Be, you’re in the $1000 range then. Much higher now. The purchaser lamented to me how he was waiting for his next drug test at work so he could bake hard and listen to Let It Be “for the first time, on vinyl.” I felt sorry for him that I Got a Feeling could only be induced by drugs.
In Houston, in the same time period, there was a radio station called the Arrow, at 93.7 FM, that was your typical classic rock station you find in any city in America. My best friend and I used to joke that you only needed five albums to run The Arrow: Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume II, Physical Graffiti, Super Tramp’s Greatest Hits, The Eagles Their Greatest Hits, and Let It Be. If you listened to The Arrow long enough, you could check off every song on Let It Be except for Maggie Mae and Dig It. They even played Dig a Pony, and not just on Sunday morning’s eight A.M. perfunctory Breakfast with the Beatles. I think it was this standard rotation of the entire album that started to gain it fame throughout America. No one played ALL of Pepper, or ALL of Abbey Road, for instance. No one dared to do that to Revolver, or even Rubber Soul. Even A Hard Day’s Night has one or two songs you skip. But not Let it Be.
You accepted it, with all its flaws, and you took solace that The Wall of Sound wasn’t THAT bad, and there were three tracks that were recorded live on the roof, including Get Back and I’ve Got a Feeling. I must admit that I asked my brother to buy my Let it Be on CD for my birthday thinking ‘well, I don’t want to waste money on that’ when in fact, next to The Cranberries’ second album, CCR’s Greatest Hits Volume II, What’s the Story Morning Glory, Nevermind, and Fleetwood Mac’s Green CD (never released on vinyl), Let it Be rarely, if ever left my ten disc changer.
Just before George Harrison died in 2002, he consented to a stripped down version of Let it Be to be remixed and re-released. Three producers waded through hundreds of hours of audio to find the original tracks that Spector used, and in some cases made composite tracks from two recordings of the same song to the same beat to make up for a flaw in either recording. George’s guitar was missing on the Long and Winding Road, and Lennon flubbed a line on Don’t Let Me Down, though the instrumental on that recording was flawless. The answer? Take one and mix it in with the other. All of Spector’s work was undone. What arose from the ashes was an amazing drop that was the best of everything. Critic reaction? Just as mixed as the first time.
The Wall of Sound, so hated for thirty years, I guess had finally grown on people. Famed record producer Rick Rubin claimed to have really loved Spector’s work on the title track, but still other musicians preferred it. Rolling Stone, which dogged the first release, gave Let it Be… Naked three stars out of five. And though we should always recognize that Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess we also have to recognize no one can please everybody ALL of the time. With the Beatles has a higher rating in Rolling Stone, than Let it Be…Naked. And that’s is completely fucked up.
I’m not going to lie and say I don’t listen to Let it Be, but I prefer Naked. And one of the best things about the Get Back documentary, is that Phil Spector is nowhere to be seen. Not in the corner, not in the background. His name isn’t even mentioned. Instead, we have Glyn Johns dressed as Austin Powers, and George Martin dressed as the Prime Minister, giving their ultimate advice as experienced gurus, and if you watch - The Beatles listen to them every time. They just don’t like to listen to each other much. Despite this, look at the result. The result in Let it Be…Naked, and the result in Get Back. Those are the Beatles, in all their fine glory and not so cool manners. They are exciting, and they are boring. They compose greatest hits, and they argue over things that don’t ultimately matter. In the end, this towers others as the greatest documentary of The Beatles ever, and it might be the greatest documentary about music ever. It blows Gimmie Shelter out of the water. And, considering his catalogue, this might be the greatest film Peter Jackson has ever ‘directed.’ He sure as shit put Lindsay-Hogg to shame.