Beatles: Let It Back

 

The long video chronicle of a month in the life of the Beatles called Get Back has been streaming on Disney Plus since late last year, but the full eight hours was made available on Blu Ray and DVD only in July.  That's the way I watched it, and watched it again, and watched... So it was a major part of my musical experience this summer, especially as it sent me to reviewing other Beatles material I've got. (I've missed recent pricey books and boxed sets, but my decades-long identity as a Beatles fan has reaped gifts of books and music over the years from at least three girlfriends, my sisters, etc.  I've had a lot of birthdays and Christmases. These DVDs were gifts from Margaret.)  I found the series engrossing, mystifying and often enough, exhilarating. 

After completing what's known as the White Album in October 1968 (official title: The Beatles), the Beatles decided to have themselves filmed in the recording studio to be made into a TV special.  At first they were going to do White Album songs, but then decided it would be more interesting to show them creating new songs, rehearsing them, and then performing them in a live show...somewhere.  The day after New Years in 1969, they began.

Until now, all that officially resulted from these sessions were the feature film Let It Be and the album of that title, both released in 1970.  By the time they came out, the Beatles as a band effectively no longer existed.  The movie in particular became known as the story of them breaking up.  

About a half century later, the Beatles' still-existing company called Apple, still had the original 16 mm footage of all the hours filmed that month, plus audio tapes that ran even when the cameras didn't.  Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings films, jumped at the chance to try to construct a new something or other out of that footage.  When he started watching it (he would say repeatedly to interviewers), he was astonished: the Beatles didn't look like a dour group who hated each other.  They were often affectionate, and often having fun. The sessions had tensions but also a lot of joy.  Sometimes in subtle ways, they showed the earned closeness of a band of self-selected brothers, who had made magic together for nearly a decade, and still could. Some four years later Jackson delivered Get Back, an eight hour selection for Disney to run in three segments, and eventually, for Apple to issue as three DVDs.

Apart from doing it at all, Peter Jackson earns high praise for doing two basic things.  First, he used today's technology to "restore" the visuals and the sound.  I'm guessing that in fact the visuals look even better than the original 16 mm film, although 16 can look pretty damn good.  The sound of the music probably needed less work, but the real contribution was to clean up the sound so that the conversations etc. can be heard.  

Second, Jackson structured the film chronologically, which in itself changes the impressions often created by the Let It Be movie, which was directed by the guy who filmed all those hours, Michael Lindsay-Hogg.   Let It Be has the barest sense of chronology.  It's basically a collection of scenes.  It also looks terrible.  Even when it first came out, blown up to 35 mm, it was grainy and dark.  Surviving versions are often further edited and panned-and-scanned.  The one I have on VHS looks like a series of extreme close-ups shot during a blackout.  My fading memory of seeing it a couple of times in theatres, however, supports the idea that close-ups or one and two shots predominated.  Jackson's film has a larger sense of space.  We get the full studio and the full band. 

But even as a chronology of that month and of these sessions, Jackson's film isn't complete.  Important events outside the studio aren't mentioned, both in terms of background (the Beatles finances were a mess, and Apple was going broke) and specific events.  For example, early in the month, George Harrison suddenly gets up and leaves, quitting the group.  It's a big dramatic moment, and Jackson's film does a great job of showing the other Beatles' responses.  Then a few days later, Harrison comes back, inexplicably cheerful.  Jackson's film doesn't even try to suggest why Harrison left, except to show a painful conversation with McCartney that the Let It Be film also shows part of.  (Some Beatles scholars however suggests George and John Lennon had an off-camera tiff earlier that day, which precipitated George leaving.)  But what Jackson's film doesn't mention is that the day before George quit, his wife Patti left him.  And then she returned at about the time he rejoined the group.  He seemed to remain in a very good mood from then on, very committed to the band.

Apart from leaving out external events (including alleged drug use), Jackson leaves out parts of some conversations, skipping sentences and even moving the order of statements within the same conversation.  I know this because Beatles scholars on YouTube play the original audio tapes, which became available long before Jackson's Get Back was released.   So while this is a huge improvement in understanding what actually happened in these January 1969 sessions, Jackson's film isn't quite as complete or straightforward as it might seem.

Get Back tells a story that seems to be basically accurate.  The initial idea was to make use of the otherwise empty building of the British film company, Twickenham Studio, because Apple had leased it for the month in preparation for the making of The Magic Christian feature film, that was scheduled to begin shooting there in February.  That movie starred Peter Sellars and Ringo Starr, so that was another reasons the Beatles had to finish this musical adventure in January--Ringo would be unavailable.

But the Beatles were miserable at Twickingham. They were in a huge, cold room in the London winter, showing up in the morning at a time they would normally still be asleep, and unaccustomed to making music in a studio that early. The sound in the room was awful. They had to deal with every moment being filmed, as well as still photographers roaming around them constantly.  Director Lindsay-Hogg was badgering them about where they would do the live show.  They couldn't agree.

Harrison's departure seemed to change the game.  The other three Beatles met with him and all agreed they weren't going back to Twickingham, they weren't doing a TV show but the footage could be used for a feature film (they owed their studio one anyway) and they weren't going out of the country for a live show (which is what their director wanted.)   George helped organize the equipment needed to record in the Apple headquarters basement.

The mood lightened immediately when they got there, where a a homey space was created that they all liked.  Though the film shows a disconcerting amount of jamming and fooling around, they got down to working out songs.  This is the stuff that I really like, and I suppose anyone who has been in a musical group, especially one working with original songs, will recognize the process, even if this is on a whole other level. I love artistic process movies.  I love Sting's Bring On The Night.  So even what may seem tedious to others tends to delight me.

But several songs are getting bogged down, with several of the Beatles realizing they need another player, someone to do keyboards live.  Then one day, Billy Preston just shows up to say hello--he has known them since they were all teenagers playing dubious clubs in Hamburg.  (In fact, George Harrison had been talking him up to the others, and invited him to "drop in.")

 They ask him to sit in on the song they're working on ("I've Got A Feeling"), and immediately everything starts to fall into place.    Billy Preston provides the musical spark to several songs that completes them, and gets the juices going.  One of the early highlights of the series is watching Paul McCartney working out the basics of "Get Back" from scratch. Then we see the lyrics gradually change from an anti-racist protest song (anyone remember Enoch Powell?) to the words we know.  Billy Preston's keyboards finally completes it.  He remained part of the group through the rest of the sessions.  His work on "Get Back" has been praised, but he's equally essential to "Don't Let Me Down."  

Throughout we hear each of the Beatles bringing in songs (several times, something they had written the night before), and everyone gets interested.  Most of these songs, and others they are working on, will appear (we know now) either on their next album, the incomparable Abbey Road, or, more hauntingly, on their post-Beatles solo albums.  The explorations of George Harrison's song "Something" are especially fascinating.  The musical accompaniment for once comes easily, and that great tune is there.  But Harrison has almost no lyrics to what will eventually be known as one of the greatest love songs of all time.  It sounds so heartfelt, but for months, George didn't know what "something in the way she moves" attracts me like.  

Of the songs that eventually do make it on the Let It Be album, one of the most troublesome is "Two of Us."  It was the song Paul and George argued about at Twickingham.  For weeks the group is never satisfied with it, no matter how many times they do it--and they do it a lot.  Paul and John sing it to each other in posh London accents, Scottish accents, Bob Dylan accents, and eventually sing it without moving their lips, like two crazed ventriloquists.  But it is Paul getting tired of playing the electric bass and picking up an acoustic guitar that gets the song going, as a kind of skiffle or folk song, with Ringo's tasty drumming and George playing bass notes on his electric guitar.

Yoko Ono has been a constant presence sitting silently beside John (in Let It Be she seems ominous; in Get Back, pretty neutral. Both she and George Harrison's second wife Olivia are listed as producers for the Get Back series.)  By the third and fourth week of the sessions, the studio opens up.  Paul's girlfriend Linda Eastman (who was shown as present once at Twickingham) brings her six year old daughter Heather to the Apple studio, and Heather's interactions with John, George and Ringo as well as Paul, and her imitation of a Yoko vocal, are highlights. (Paul and Linda would marry a week before John and Yoko. Paul soon adopted Heather as his daughter.)   Patti Harrison and Ringo's wife Maureen also visit the studio, and most of them listen to a day's recordings in the control room together.  These are some of the most affecting scenes.

But the Beatles can still never agree on a live show, and until the last moment, aren't sure if they will do their now famous rooftop concert.  Jackson intercuts the entire concert (just five songs, some repeated).  He included more street reaction than did Let It Be, so Jackson has the narrative of the police officers arriving, being diverted and finally ascending to the roof, all in split screens.  The Beatles road manager finally tries to turn off George's amp, but he curtly turns it back on and they finish the song. 

 Each time I've seen these scenes I've gotten a different impression. Sometimes the street interviews were mindless distractions.  Other times they were overpowered by the energy of the music.  Once I marveled at the reaction of people on adjacent rooftops and the street.  There's no telling how well they could hear (a segment in the Beatles Anthology suggests the sound wasn't really very loud on the street), but they show little emotion.  I couldn't help thinking of the contrast with the years of screams and fainting.  On the other hand, the people complaining about their music and the police showing up could have been straight out of A Hard Day's Night.  That much didn't change.

I was surprised then by how briefly Jackson treats the final day, in which the Beatles alone in the studio record the acoustic "Two of Us" and the two McCartney piano numbers, now classics: "The Long and Winding Road" and "Let It Be."  The movie Let It Be presented full versions of both songs, but without context, it reinforced that movie's narrative of a dominating McCartney, and the others literally (in this scene) sitting at a lower level, playing supporting parts.  In context, it was just the most efficient way to do the final recordings of these two songs, at the end of an exhausting month.  However, it would have been nice to hear more of them.  ( For my money, the best cut of "Let It Be" on film is in the Beatles Anthology.)  

What about the Beatles themselves?  Paul McCartney is neither the authoritarian monster and central villain that the Let It Be movie casts him to be (though his beard and black suit don't help), but neither is he the genial and articulate statesman of interviews.  Emotionally he seems all over the place--capable of far-seeing insights and long monologues of near nonsense. He comes off as a paradox at times.  For example, who was the most actively opposed to doing the rooftop concert? And who looked like he was having the best time doing it?  McCartney, both. 

John Lennon is always the class clown, but he's also very quiet and subdued for long stretches, though when they play in the Apple basement he's right there, energetic and engaged.  There are moments when both McCartney and especially Lennon are pretty open about their fears and insecurities, past and present.  Paul is uncomfortable in his role and worried about the band's direction.  On the music itself, he worries that his classic ballads drag too much.  John is contrite for showing up late and not being at his best. (This may be the result of his reputed occasional heroin use, or he's just sick.  It's the flu season and both Paul and Ringo also complain of being ill at different times.) John is realistic about the limits of his own guitar work, though I was surprised to see that he did the guitar solos on "Get Back," and some of the jams show he had more lead guitar skills than I would have guessed.

George Harrison appears all black or all white, sour or sunny, and in Martin Scorsese's biographical film about him, that's how Ringo describes him: either saint or sinner, nothing in between.  It wouldn't be until Abbey Road and his own All Things Must Pass album (the most successful of all the immediate post-Beatles releases), that the quality of his songwriting was fully revealed, along with his unique, haunting and supple voice.  Just before the Get Back sessions, he had spent six months producing other artists, and his production of All Things Must Pass (despite what Spector did to it) is musically remarkable.  In that sense, he never really had a "solo" career.  He was the instigator of the Traveling Wilburys in the early 90s, which he formed (Olivia  Harrison said in the Scorsese film) because he missed being in a group.  He missed the Beatles. 

Ringo Starr was the backbone of the Beatles sound, and the glue that held the Beatles together. Though he's not heard saying much in this series, it's partly because he does his job so well.  A lot of Beatles songs sound simple until you get into their structure.  For instance, George comes in with a song, "I, Me, Mine," best known now for its eloquent lyrics, that he was inspired to write by seeing a grand waltz performed on a TV movie.  Most of the song is in waltz time (John and Yoko actually waltz to it), though it breaks into a four-four rocker, and back again.  Other songs are replete with even more subtle complications, and Ringo has to engineer these time-jumps seamlessly. 

Even so, Ringo has a nice scene doing a comic take to the delight of Heather McCartney, and also when he brings in the basic idea for "Octopus' Garden"--  George (the other non-Lennon-McCartney songwriter) immediately starts working with him to extend it, soon charming everyone and interesting the other Beatles in developing it.

Transcending all other impressions of this series is this magic opportunity to spend this much time with these four extraordinary people, all of them still in their twenties, as this extraordinary group.  Though this experiment was artificial in that it wasn't how the Beatles made their records anymore, it did bring them together every day over an extended period for the last time.  In the decade to come, as they went their separate ways (though different combinations of them collaborated), they all had periods of depression or despondency, and they all at times had serious drug and/or alcohol problems; two marriages ended, and they all endured tragedies.  John Lennon was weeks past his 40th birthday when he was shot dead.  These hours in the studio, during which they often revisited their past music as well as shaping new songs, seem like a time out of time.

With the benefit of hindsight, we do see suggestions of what would soon break up the band.  We also see the Beatles' luck start to change.  In the beginning they happened to find the right manager, the right producer, and then the right film director to help them blossom.  But this film makes a joke of their association with "Magic Alex," the supposed electronics genius they hired who is exposed as a total and expensive charlatan.  Not so funny is reference to John Lennon meeting Allen Klein, and his glowing account of Klein's knowledge and business acumen.  Eventually, Lennon convinced George and Ringo to make Klein (then managing the Rolling Stones) the group's manager.  Paul saw through Klein, and the resulting conflict was the proximate cause for the Beatles to break up.  Klein did get them more money, but his nefarious schemes eventually turned John and especially George against him.  They all dumped him, and he became an active nemesis for awhile, until more money changed hands.  

Also at about this time, John and George brought legendary producer Phil Spector into their efforts, and Spector's production of the long delayed Let It Be album did not go over well.  Eventually, McCartney backed a re-release that stripped it of Spector's effects, for the album Let It Be Naked. 

Yet, just weeks after the rooftop concert, the Beatles began recording again, this time with their producer of all previous records, George Martin, and did so at their EMI studios on Abbey Road, for their last, transcendent album.  And in the end...