A Beatles fan reviews The Beatles: Get Back documentary.
by Joey Green
Since a number of my friends and family — familiar with my obsession with the Beatles — have asked for my opinion on the new Peter Jackson film, The Beatles: Get Back, I thought it might be easiest to share my inklings with everyone at once. (Spoiler alert: The Beatles break up in 1970.)
I’ve watched the entire Get Back documentary twice. The first time alone. The second time with my wife Debbie. I think Peter Jackson did an incredible job assembling the footage into a coherent and compelling storyline, a race against the clock filled with obstacles that up the stakes, something sorely lacking from the original Let It Be movie.
For more than forty years, I’ve known about and have yearned to see the treasure trove of 56 hours of film from the Beatles ill-fated January 1969 Get Back sessions that remained in a vault, unseen by the public (except for the 80 minutes used to make the 1970 movie Let It Be). I also knew that, in the early 1970s, thieves stole the 150 hours of original mono sound recordings made on Nagra tape decks by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s crew during the Get Back sessions.
In July 1975, as a 17-year-old high school student attending a college summer program in Massachusetts, I went to a Beatles Convention promoted in the Harvard Crimson and held at the Bradford Hotel on Tremont Street, a few blocks south of the Boston Common.
At that point in my life, I had read Apple to the Core by Peter McCabe and Robert Shonfeld (a detailed account of the Beatles’ financial disputes), The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard DiLello (a memoir by Apple Corp’s “house hippie” from 1968 to 1970), and Lennon Remembers by Jann Wenner (a transcript of an interview with John Lennon conducted in December 1970).
Much to my amazement, the Beatles Convention (the only one I’ve ever attended) featured a panel discussion with authors Peter McCabe and Richard DiLello, and photographer Jürgen Vollmer (responsible for the photo on the cover of John Lennon’s 1975 Rock ’N Roll album, taken when the Beatles played in Hamburg). In the lobby of the hotel, New York street musician David Peel, immortalized in the lyrics to John Lennon’s song “New York City,” strummed his guitar and led sing-a-longs of Beatles favorites. On Saturday night, along with hundreds of other attendees, I watched eight hours of Beatle movies, including Hard Day’s Night, Help!, The Beatles at Shea Stadium, The Beatles Live at the Washington Coliseum, and The Beatles in Japan.
Vendors at the convention sold their Beatle wares, and I bought an original copy of the Official Beatles’ Fan Club 1969 magazine (still one of my prized possessions) and a double bootleg album entitled Sweet Apple Trax Volume 2, culled (unbeknownst to me) from the stolen Nagra tapes. The bootleg includes excellent sound-quality recordings of Paul McCartney teaching the other Beatles the chords to “Let It Be,” seven versions of “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” one take of “Be Bop a Lula (by Gene Vincent),” “Hi Heel Sneakers (by Tommy Tucker),” seven versions of “I Me Mine,” two versions of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and one version each of “One After 909,” “Norwegian Wood,” “La Penina” (a McCartney song later recorded by Carlos Mendes) “Shakin’ in the Sixties (by R. Stevie Moore),” “Move It” (by Cliff Richard),” “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (a Roy Brown song made popular by Elvis Presley), “Across the Universe,” “Two of Us,” “Ramblin’ Woman” (believed to be a George Harrison composition), and Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away” and “Mama You Been on My Mind.” Those recordings sound like a garage band struggling to write and learn new songs, and the unpolished versions helped me realize how much time and energy the Beatles dedicated to making their songs shine.
Two years after the Beatles Convention, I saw the movie Let It Be for the first time at a midnight showing at a theater in Sunny Isles, Florida. The grainy, poorly lit, and incoherent film is a colossal disappointment. There’s no plot. It’s like watching a bad home movie — with the exception of the exuberant rooftop concert, which lasts a mere twenty minutes.
Over the years, many other bootlegs from the stolen Nagra tapes went into circulation, and while many of the takes can be found and downloaded for free from the Internet, I find listening to fifteen half-baked versions of “I Dig a Pony” more monotonous than illuminating. Anyone who has ever worked with musicians in a recording session knows how tedious the goings-on can be.
In 1996, as a part of the Beatles Anthology project, the remaining three Beatles released the Beatles Anthology 3 double CD set, which included several songs found on Sweet Apple Trax, but gleaned instead from multi-track studio masters from EMI Records.
In January 2003, after bootleggers released a comprehensive 38-part CD series of the stolen Nagra tape recordings, police in Amsterdam raided a warehouse and recovered 504 reels of the original Nagra tapes (each sixteen minutes in length) and arrested three culprits; London police arrested another two accomplices. (Those recovered tapes — previously available underground to hard-core fanatics — would become essential material for Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary.)
In November 2003, the Beatles released the album Let It Be. . . Naked (a stripped down version of the Let It Be album) which includes an additional disk called “Fly on the Wall,” featuring a 24-minute collage of conversations from the Nagra tapes and a variety of songs (“Because I Know You Love Me So,” “Child of Nature,” “Taking a Trip to Carolina,” “All Things Must Pass,” and “Fancy My Chances with You”). The accompanying booklet provides transcripts of some of the Beatles’ more noteworthy conversations recorded during the Get Back sessions.
Although Apple Corps pulled the Let It Be movie from circulation, my literary agent’s husband gave me a bootlegged DVD of the movie in 2014 — in exchange for an original cartoon of “Trots and Bonnie” by my friend Shary Flenniken, which she drew specifically to help me get a copy of Let It Be — thanks again, Shary! I’ve watched Let It Be several times since then (and again the other night with my wife Debbie), and I stick by my original assessment. Aside from the rooftop concert, the film is dreck.
Despite having heard many recordings from the Get Back sessions, I’ve remained overeager to see the actual film footage, and I’m happy to say the forty-year wait was well worth it — thanks to Peter Jackson’s superb production and attention to detail.
First, Peter Jackson and his team did a remarkable job cleaning up the film footage and the sound recordings. In the original films and tapes, the Beatles talk over each other and attempt to hide some of their conversations by playing their instruments. Technological advances enabled Jackson and his team to separate out musical instruments and voices, homing in on individual comments. Rather than using camera angles seen in Let It Be, Jackson strove to use previously unseen film footage of those same scenes.
Jackson also wisely used captions to identify all the participants in the film (rather than assuming the viewer knows everyone in the Beatles entourage), and he added subtitles whenever anyone speaks softly, quickly, or in thick Liverpudlian. I also love his use of visual inserts to help explain some of the Beatles more obscure references.
By starting the documentary with a ten-minute history of the Beatles, Jackson puts the Let It Be sessions into context for anyone unfamiliar or not well versed with the Beatles’ chronology. Jackson also does a wonderful job playing up the original project’s lack of decisive direction. Ironically, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg can’t seem to figure out or get the Beatles to commit to a cogent plotline throughout the Get Back sessions, and he fails to realize he could use that quandary as the plot of the original Let It Be movie.
Some viewers might get tired of seeing the Beatles hash out new songs that evolve through multiple rehearsals, but I find it enthralling to watch the chemistry between the foursome, hear the lyrics change and develop, and eavesdrop on their comical banter — infused with rapid-fire inside jokes. I play a little piano (it’s three inches tall), but I am no musician, so I can’t fully comprehend the intricacies of the four Beatles’ unique musical shorthand. I imagine any of my musician friends will find the Beatles’ interchanges both fascinating and inspiring.
For me, Get Back shows us that the cute Beatle is actually the bossy Beatle, the quiet Beatle is actually the disgruntled Beatle, the funny Beatle is actually the melancholy Beatle, and the witty Beatle is actually the weird Beatle and desperately needs to shampoo his hair.
While Paul comes across as a brilliant songwriter and the engine of the group, he also appears to be a muddled film producer. Having conceived the idea for the Get Back project, he seems sadly alone in his passion for it. He experiences difficulty mustering the other Beatles’ enthusiasm because the Twickenham Studios location sucks and he cannot articulate his vision for the project’s ultimate direction. He feels the film should end with something climatic, but he can’t figure out what that something should be. Nor can he get his band mates to understand the importance of a movie climax. Sixteen months earlier, Paul concocted the idea for the Beatles’ first major flop — the 1967 Magical Mystery Tour made-for-TV movie, which similarly lacked a coherent plot. Paul’s outline for that improvised bomb was simply a circle drawn on a sheet of paper and divided into eight segments, like pizza slices. In 1984, Paul once again proved his poor screenwriting ability with his disastrous solo movie endeavor Give My Regards to Broad Street.
Peter Jackson cleverly focuses his documentary on the original film’s lack of direction to comic effect. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg keeps trying to steer the Beatles toward a bizarre concert in a Roman amphitheater in Sabratha, Libya, proceeded by a trip with fans aboard the QE2, which the down-to-earth lads from Liverpool sensibly reject. John Lennon proposes the idea of a studio stage designed with large clear plastic boxes, pictured six months later on the picture sleeve for the Plastic Ono Band’s single “Give Peace a Chance.” To me, the Beatles’ indecision, half-cocked ideas, and mismanagement clearly illustrate their desperate need for a new manager to succeed Brian Epstein in the wake of his death sixteen months earlier.
In Get Back, Jackson also shows the Beatles’ self-awareness of their need for a new manager. “Ever since Mr. Epstein died,” says George Harrison, “things haven’t been the same.” Paul agrees. “It’s discipline we lack,” he says. “We’ve never had discipline. We had a sort of slight, symbolic discipline. Like Mr. Epstein. You know, he sort of said, ‘Get suits on,’ and we did, you know. And so we were always fighting that discipline a bit. There really is no one there now to say, ‘Do it.’ . . . Daddy’s gone away now, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp.”
I was also awed to hear the Beatles refer to Brian Epstein, who died at age 32, as “Mr. Epstein,” which, to me, shows how highly they held him in esteem.
The original Let It Be movie shows snippets of conversations taken out of context to illustrate the impending dissolution of the Beatles — most notably, the infamous fight in which George tells Paul, “I’ll play anything you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Now, whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.” In Get Back, Jackson shows the full context of that conversation, revealing that Paul and George were simply expressing differences in artistic temperament common in any collaborative effort. In the Let It Be movie, the very few conversations featured are abridged, and reviewers, convinced the film documents the disintegration of the Beatles, have spent decades overanalyzing crumbs under a microscope.
Conversely, in Get Back, Peter Jackson shares some enlightening, heartwarming, and funny moments. My favorites:
• In Let It Be, the Beatles road manager Mal Evans, who once worked as a bouncer at the Cavern, bangs the anvil while the Beatles play “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” but the footage is dark and gloomy. In Get Back, we can clearly see Mal bang the anvil with childish wonder and glee, grateful to be a part of the Beatles inner circle. Throughout Get Back, Mal also serves as the Beatles’ secretary of sorts, jotting down lyrics as Paul and John compose songs on the spot, often suggesting lyrics himself. I love seeing his enthusiasm.
• John and Paul sing “Gimme Some Truth,” and I was amazed to discover Paul proposing lyrics to a song that ultimately appeared on John’s Imagine album.
• George explains how he got the inspiration for the tune for “I Me Mine” from a waltz performed by an Austrian brass band on a BBC television program.
• Paul plays the guitar and drums during a jam session with a caterwauling Yoko Ono, clearly demonstrating his receptiveness to her avant-garde howls.
• Paul defends John’s desire to be with Yoko all the time. “See, but their point is that they’re trying to like be as near together as they can,” Paul says. “They wanna stay together, those two. So, it’s all right. Let the young lovers stay together. But it’s not that bad, you know. We got a lot out of the Beatles so that if — I think John’s thing now — if it came to a push between Yoko and the Beatles, it’s Yoko. . . . She really is all right. They just want to be near each other. So, I just think it’s just silly of me or anyone to try and say to them, ‘No, you can’t.’ It’s like that we’re striking ’cause work conditions aren’t right. But it shouldn’t be. It’s like they’re going overboard about it. But John always does, you know . . . But it’s gonna be such an incredible sort of comical thing, like in fifty years’ time, ‘They broke up because Yoko sat on an amp.’ It’s not as though there’s any sort of earth-splitting rows or anything.”
• Michael Lindsay-Hogg bugged a flowerpot to eavesdrop on one of Paul and John’s private conversations. To me, the clandestine recording reveals how inarticulate John and Paul were at expressing their honest feelings toward George’s rising interest as a songwriter. Of course, I can’t discern all their shorthand, nor can we see their facial expressions during their exchange . . . so they may have very well communicated clearly to each other.
• Before Billy Preston arrives, George reminds the other Beatles that when they played in Hamburg in 1962, Billy suggested they add “A Taste of Honey” to their repertoire. When Billy enters the room, George plays “A Taste of Honey” on his guitar, bringing a smile to Preston’s face.
• In Let It Be, Paul reminisces about the Beatles’ 1968 trip to India to take a Transcendental Meditation Course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In Get Back, Jackson provides the full reminiscence, accompanied by the Beatles home movies from India.
• When Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Glyn Johns propose the idea of playing on the roof to a frustrated and seemingly defeated Paul McCartney, I love how Paul’s face lights up.
• Heather Eastman frolics around the Apple studio and imitates Yoko’s squawking, during a jam session.
• Even though I have an extended bootleg version of “Something,” in which John advises George on songwriting (“Just say whatever comes into your head each time — ‘attracts me like a cauliflower’ — until you get the word, you know?”), I love seeing the actual film footage of the interchange.
• John tells George and Ringo that, until Paul returns to the room, he doesn’t want to reveal his opinion about meeting prospective Beatles manager Allen Klein, but then, against his own better judgment, John proceeds to gush with overzealous enthusiasm about Klein. “He knows everything about everything,” says John. “Very interesting guy . . . He even knows what we’re like. The way he described each one of us, you know, and what we’ve done and what we’re gonna do and that.” Glyn Johns gently attempts to warn John against Klein, which John, easily duped by charlatans like Magic Alex, brushes aside. I was surprised to see John attempt to sway George and Ringo behind Paul’s back. “John, of course, Allen Klein knows everything about what you’ve done,” I screamed at the screen, “you’re world famous, you idiot.”
• Magic Alex is revealed as a con artist. John met Greek electronics engineer Alexis Mardas in 1965 at the Indica Gallery, during an exhibit of Alex’s Kinetic Light Sculptures. John dubbed him “Magic Alex” and made him head of Apple Electronics. Alex claimed he could build the Beatles a 72-track tape deck for Let It Be, which turned out to be a sixteen-track recorder with sixteen tiny speakers. George Martin calls Magic Alex’s system a disaster and works over the weekend to install legitimate recording equipment. In Get Back, we also see Alex’s ridiculous prototype for a reversible rhythm and bass guitar.
• Music publisher Dick James — who finagled a controlling interest over the rights to Lennon/McCartney compositions — shows up on the set to pull the wool over the Beatles’ eyes, illustrating that Paul and John, lacking guidance from Brian Epstein, are in way over their heads.
• When George tells John that he’s considering recording a solo album of the backlog of new songs he’s written and suggests that the other Beatles do so as well, I was taken aback that John encouraged George to do so (rather than more fully embracing George’s burgeoning songwriting skills by allowing more of his songs on Beatles’ albums). John clearly wants to retain dominance with Paul over the songwriting on Beatles recordings. In the wake of their secretly recorded conversation, John and Paul definitely work harder to accommodate and encourage George’s songwriting talents as witnessed by them helping him with “Old Brown Shoe” and “Something.” But they weren’t about to let George have more than two or three songs on each album…. even though “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” are two of the more spectacular songs on Abbey Road. (For the White Album, the Beatles recorded more than 100 takes of George’s song “Not Guilty” but ultimately rejected the song from appearing on the album — in favor of even lamer tracks like “Wild Honey Pie,” “Good Night,” and “Revolution 9.” George ultimately released “Not Guilty” on his eponymous 1979 album. The song also appears on the Beatles Anthology 3, released in 1996.)
• Peter Sellers seems incredibly uncomfortable hanging out with the Beatles. As teenagers, the Beatles deeply admired The Goon Show, a British radio comedy show featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine. At Twickenham Studios in 1965, Peter Sellers had presented the Beatles with their Grammy Award for “A Hard Days’ Night” on the studio set of Help! Sellers also appeared with the Beatles on the 1965 television special The Music of Lennon & McCartney. Dressed as King Richard III, he performed a Shakespearian rendition of “A Hard Day’s Night.” And yet, when John, Paul and Ringo — seated with Peter Sellers — start improvising feeble Goon-inspired wordplays, Sellers makes a hasty retreat. “I’m notoriously bad at this type of thing,” says Peter. “You noticed we are too,” replies Paul.
• Peter Jackson does an excellent job of showing the creation of songs that the Beatles later used on Abbey Road, including “Something,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Carry That Weight,” and “Oh! Darling.”
• Seeing Linda Eastman chat with Yoko Ono while the Beatles practice the song “Let It Be” debunks several myths at once. Not only do the two women get along, but clearly Linda was present for a lot of the Get Back sessions. Linda’s face doesn’t appear at all in the original Let It Be movie. As the group’s new manager, Allen Klein demanded that the edited Let It Be movie focus on the four Beatles. Yoko sat next to John much of time (while Linda sat across the room from Paul), making it much more difficult to cut Yoko from the original film. When Linda gives her opinion on where the final concert should take place, I love how Paul jokingly chastises her (“Stay out of this Yoko!”).
• The full forty minutes of the rooftop concert is riveting and enthralling.
My only disappointment with Get Back is that Jackson failed to include a few songs the Beatles played during the Get Back sessions: “Let It Down” and “Hear Me Lord” by George Harrison, “Oh My Love” by John Lennon, and “Hot as Sun” by Paul McCartney). Of course, having to narrow down 56 hours of film and 150 hours of taped music and conversations must have been a daunting task, and there was obviously no way Jackson could include everything. For instance, on Day 1 alone, the Beatles recorded fifteen takes of “Don’t Let Me Down,” twenty takes of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and nine takes of “Two of Us.” Thankfully, Jackson spared us the tedium of sitting through them all by employing quick cuts like an outtake reel. I’m grateful for the full eight-hour movie, a real treat for Beatle fans, far more satisfying than the originally planned three-hour movie could ever be. Peter Jackson has given Beatles fans everywhere a beautiful gift: Visceral insight into the Beatles’ collaborative and creative process. (For me, the highlight of the film is witnessing Paul create the song “Get Back,” watching the other Beatles join in, and observing how the lyrics develop over time.)
In 1970, when the Beatles released the single “Let It Be,” I thought the bittersweet lyrics were telling us to accept the breakup of the Beatles on April 10, and that somehow, everything would be all right. The song always made me sad. But now, thanks to The Beatles: Get Back, the song fills me with hope and joy.
Although John remains my favorite Beatle, Paul delivers my favorite line in the entire eight-hour documentary. On January 14, 1969, while demonstrating how to play piano, Paul says, “Unless you stop yourself, there’s no stopping yourself.”