Get Back, Loretta

It dropped over Thanksgiving weekend, and I finished watching the third installment Sunday night. I made it through all eight hours (give or take), and never really suffered from the tedium some critics noted about the film, in fact quite the opposite. After all, rock and roll is actually tedium.

I’m speaking from experience, and truthfully I have these four lads to blame. If it hadn’t been for them, I would not have picked up a guitar in the first place, or so I like to brag. But, for me, Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” was thrilling, intimate, honest, evocative and above all reassuring. The Beatles were exactly who and what I’ve come to think of them as.

I would not call myself a Beatles scholar, nor an ultimate, consummate fan¹, but I have read about them quite a bit — and full disclosure, I was barely a teen when they broke up in 1970, so “I was there.” Since then, I’ve read a few books that try to tell all without rendering too much harsh judgement given the facts, even though some do. Every day of these men’s lives as The Beatles has been researched and documented and published, so I have very little to add to that vast pool of information other than my own observations and reactions.

In no particular order:

I fully expected to see John Lennon crippled by heroin use. The film was kinder to him than that. I guess the addiction hit him harder later — there were certainly many glass-eyed takes from him, especially in Episode 1, but as the project moved from Twickenham Studios to 3 Saville Row, Johnny Boy came to life, and that’s one of the magical arcs of the film. Maybe it’s because George left the band, and after they convinced him on the third try to come back, John felt he owed the project some deeper investment and got his head together, albeit briefly. I think it’s also because the music started to take shape, and he got excited by it, and the good old Lennon-McCartney love affair rekindled. Once Billy Preston joined the jam, you can feel the energy levels start to soar. George actually started to smile.

Soaring energy, despite the drudgery of playing dozens of takes of the same stuff over and over — but this is precisely what The Beatles were good at, starting with when they recorded “Revolver”. Even with their best take in the can, The Beatles always wanted to do one more, “just so we have that.”

And also, tedium: studio work is work. It’s not magical lightning strikes of inspiration. It’s not show up, play your guitar and walk out after one take. It’s hours of boredom, sitting in the studio. Waiting for something to get set up. Waiting for someone to get a good overdub take. Waiting for a microphone change. Tweaking a guitar sound. Playing multiple takes. Go in and listen to playback. Go back out and do another take. Over and over. I’ve heard it said that if you don’t get it in two takes, you’re done and you should move on (the Miles Davis school of thought, or the law of diminishing returns, call it what you will.) But watch “Get Back” all the way through, and you realize that sometimes the 26th take that has no clowning around or clams in it was the take we all got to hear when the record came out.

Let’s consider clowning around, which John and Paul excelled at. I’d bet my bippy ² that the clowning started in high school and never stopped. It’s how they let off steam. It’s how they turned a song on its head to try to pry out something new, something that hadn’t occurred to them. Play it as a tango. Play it really slowly. Play it as crazed ventriloquists. Without the dialogue in front of me, I can only attempt to recall some of the things Paul said during those sessions: “No, it’s not right, it’s just too bland, too normal. I can’t put my finger on it…” It wasn’t enough that the songs were stemming from the deep well of harmonic and melodic Beatles water— they had to have uniqueness as well, which is elusive and very hard to tease out.

At every turn, Ringo floats above it all, joining in with the backbeat. Ringo, the quiet glue, despite attacks of illness.

George quits.

I’ve already seen a few comments out there about the bugged teapot conversation, the most heartfelt and revealing moment of the film. John: “It’s like a festering wound. And we didn’t give him any bandages.” There were only four Beatles, there could only ever be four Beatles, and George was one of them. John and Paul realized how poorly they had treated George, and as friends they were filled with remorse and accepted their role in pushing George away. They had to ask him to come back, they really wanted him back.

Paul tells John, “You were always the boss.” Then later, “I don’t want to be the boss, I’m afraid of it, it’s not something that I am good at or want to do… (paraphrased)”

I found it very interesting that they referred to Brian Epstein as “Mr. Epstein,” never as “Brian.³” The chronicles tell of how Mr. Epstein groomed the band, made them dress uniformly, made them bow after each number on stage. The chronicles like to say that his death was the beginning of the end. As far as the “Let It Be” sessions went, Paul took an active role in trying to get some songs going because a) he had brought some and b) he knew there was a deadline and c) nobody else was stepping up until d) George brought in his songs (“All Things Must Pass”, for crying out loud!) and was politely ignored in favor of Chuck Berry jams. It ultimately fell to Paul and John to somehow steer the band⁴. Mr. Epstein was still sorely missed.

The chronicles also like to say that Yoko Ono broke up the band⁵. Well, I just watched eight hours of lofty, chilly soundstage aimless noodling and cramped, musty, ciggy-smoke polluted basement studio jams, and I did not see any active band breaking up happening on Yoko’s part. How was she breaking up the band? By knitting? By reading magazines? Folding origami? Painting characters on large paper with a brush? Paul makes the point: “They just want to be close to each other.” Yoko was just there, no interjections, no opinions about artistic direction, no cause for vitriol. That must be the reason all the critics are saying, “JACKSON REWRITES BEATLES HISTORY! ONO CAST IN NEW LIGHT! INTERNET SIDES WITH YOKO!”

What struck me the most were the moments when The Beatles, and more specifically Paul and John, spoke of not having confidence. They were afraid that this public event — which by the way morphed from TV special at Twickenham, to an ocean liner cruise to Libya to play at Sabratha, back to TV special at Twickenham with a see-through plastic set, to eventually the rooftop concert at 3 Saville Row — would fail. They weren’t sure they could actually do what they used to do best — play songs back-to-back like any run-of-the-mill bar band can. Their goal was 14 songs, they had six or seven. John gets fired up at one point and says, “We’re at our best when our backs are against the wall!” Up to the roof with a six-song set list.

Seeing the rooftop footage, John was right. They brought it. They were a rock band. Glyn Johns and George Martin captured audio good enough to put some rooftop takes on the album release⁶. For those keeping score though, when they ran out of material, they played the same songs over again. OK, why not? After all, they were The Beatles. They could do what they wanted.

Mr. Jackson: thank you for bringing my childhood heroes into my living room. It was a gift to welcome them home again, to welcome them into my heart.

Footnotes:

¹ If I was a superfan, I’d have among other things a bootleg copy of all 60? 100? hours of Nagra tape bootlegs from all the sessions. Superfans have that stuff. Dark web vendors will gladly exchange them for your identity details.

² Kudos to you if you know that’s from “Rowan and Martin’s ‘Laugh-In’.”

³ As far as we know from the footage/audio. If Mr. Jackson chose to portray The Beatles reverence towards Mr. Epstein thusly, let it be. (Couldn’t resist.)

⁴ Opinion: the moment when John steered the band into the hands of Allen Klein and Phil Spector was the actual beginning of the end. Everything else up to that point made the atmosphere primed for immolation.

⁵ Might I add white, male chroniclers. Just saying.

⁶ “One After 909” for example — if we’re to believe Mr. Jackson’s editing, they only rehearsed this one a week or so before and rejected it, then pulled it out of their asses in real time the day of the rooftop concert. (I guess I could check all those Nagra recording web sites to see if this is accurate…) The poignancy is the “Beatleness” of the song: it could have been on “Something New” as a throw-away cut that they pulled from their old high-school songs. Instead they dropped it ~10 years later.