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Culture

How “Get Back” Became “Let It Be” and the End of The Beatles

Photo: ISA

The documentary film “The Beatles: Get Back” directed and produced by Peter Jackson has been premiered this week on Disney+.

Saturday, 27 November 2021 11:44 (UTC)
Albert Kropf — Article first published 30 May 2020
Sozialistische LinksPartei — ISA Austria
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Peter Jackson, director and producer of films such as Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and King Kong, is taking a new approach with the movie “Let It Be” which will, hopefully, be in the cinemas in September.

Almost 50 years ago, in May 1970, the last Beatles album “Let It Be” was released. Still today, many of the songs on it remain very popular with fans and the media, and can be found in various playlists. However, amongst many die-hard Beatles fans the album is controversial — and for good reasons. After all, it was intended as a soundtrack to a film of the same name but in the end had hardly anything to do with either the film or the original concept. It was put aside by The Beatles themselves in spring 1969. Instead they went their own way, and in late summer 1969 returned to the studio and recorded the last Beatles’ album “Abbey Road”. Neither the film Let It Be, nor the album aroused their interest and so the film premiere took place without a single member of the “Fab Four” in attendance.

Nevertheless, the film won an Oscar in 1971 for the best soundtrack. Not for the album itself, but for the music used in the film, and thus for the actual “Get back“ concept. Apart from a short video release in the early 1980s, the film has not been re-released. The reason, it appears, is that The Beatles’ marketing company, including descendants and surviving members of the band, is not interested in the distribution of such a negative image of the band.

In an attempt to address the problem, the company broke with their former meagre release policy, which only allowed previously unreleased Beatles material to be issued in small homeopathic doses. Instead, Peter Jackson, the star director, was supposedly allowed unrestricted access to the “Get back” session archives, almost as if he was descending into Mount Erebor. He did not return with the treasures of the Dwarves or with the dragon Smaug, instead he discovered a positive “re-evaluation” of the “Get back“ sessions, now to be presented to the public in his new film in 2020. There should be no surprise if, in line with the management’s attempts to paint the band in a positive light, as nice guys and that everything was fine between them, that after all The Beatles remained friends, even after the break-up.

Commerce and the end of The Beatles

The Beatles started out in the early 1960s as a rowdy beat-pop band, finding their musical imprint in Hamburg’s red light district and harbour milieu. The harmonica on their first hit “Love me do” had been stolen by Lennon in the Netherlands, the Beatles were always involved in fights. They were a rough band whose music reflected this social milieu. As rockers dressed in leather, they didn’t get a record deal. This only changed when to promote them their manager, Brian Epstein, fitted them into suits. But the music stayed rough and aggressive and that gained attention!

Later the Beatles founded their own company, Apple Records and managed themselves. Based on their own experience, they wanted to free art and music from the harmful influence of the entertainment industry. The driving force behind this approach was initially McCartney, and then Lennon. But in reality Apple demonstrated that isolated islands cannot survive for long in an increasingly aggressive capitalist environment, and Apple Records soon suffered. Many people today know Apple as the company of Steve Jobs of ‘iphone’ and ‘macbooks’ fame. This, of course, is a different company and in 1981 was sued by Apple Records and as a result had to pay millions for the use of the name. It is ironic that what started as an anti-commercial project and only survived because the Beatles couldn’t agree how to wind it up, went on to receive a major source of income from suing others.

Apple became a giant financial-drain for the band. That’s when the problems started to escalate. Lennon and McCartney, as authors of most of the songs, not only received their share of the sales and revenues, but also millions for royalties. This also shows how little civil law is suited to “protect” artistic property, but only to market it. Most of The Beatles’ songs were created in the studio in a joint effort of all four until the “White Album” in 1968. Nevertheless, most of the songs were credited to Lennon/McCartney, because it was usually one of them, who had come into the studio with an idea. As so often this may be correct, but it is and was not fair, something the other two Beatles felt more and more.

Ian Gillan, singer with Deep Purple in the early 1970s, once described his performance as a singer and lyricist in such a way that while the others were developing the songs in the studio, he sat in the pub and scribbled the lyrics on beer mats. In contrast to the others, he still collects a small fortune in royalties. So it’s not surprising that George Harrison and Ringo Starr, looking at their dwindling mountains of money, grew increasingly sceptical about Apple. When the lid finally blew off at Apple, Lennon, Harrison and Starr, against the will of McCartney, employed the American star manager and super capitalist Allen Klein as universal manager to re-organise the Beatles’ finances. Today, it is Lennon who has a left image, while McCartney has the aura of the stingy super-rich with all the associated negative qualities. This makes it hard to believe today that it was McCartney who wanted to hold on to Apple’s anti-commercial orientation the longest, against the resistance of others.

By now, it was no longer possible to talk about friendship and the image of the funny “Fab Four”. Because it was no longer the case, Allen Klein gutted the Beatles like a Christmas goose ...

How “Get back” eventually became “Let it be”

In the growing confusion as The Beatles began to fall apart, McCartney came up with an idea to save the band.

Actually, The Beatles were a live band, their first album had been recorded more or less live in just a few hours. This, together with the very close and intense life together while on tour created a strong familiarity between them. Yet The Beatles hadn’t performed live since their appearance in Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966. Studio work became more and more complex and also more individualistic as the use of technology increased. The group’s cohesion weakened further as they lost authenticity and their artistic unity.

This took place against the background of the social and political developments of the mid-1960s onwards. The four began to develop in different directions. The artistically creative centre was still undoubtedly McCartney. Yet it was precisely The Beatles who made a significant contribution to and promoted studio technology. In this way they were both the initiators and the victims of this development.

McCartney still saw a future for The Beatles and wanted to go back to their origins. He proposed using “Get back“ and playing live again. To do so, rehearsals had to start on January 2, 1969 — the launch of the “Get back“ project.

Originally the project was only supposed to use existing songs, then the idea was expanded to develop new songs. While McCartney initially envisaged a concert scenario lasting several days as a TV event, the others persuaded him to reduce it to one single concert, which was finally reduced to a performance. This took place on the roof of the Apple building on 30th January 1969. But it was accompanied by a new album — virtually a soundtrack of the film — and new songs. A compromise that was accepted by all, but met the wishes of no-one. They wanted to turn the clock back, as anyone would when a situation has become increasingly difficult. Something similar is encountered in politics when we see reformists trying to return to better times, but unfortunately, it works no better in politics, than it did with The Beatles. To emphasise their notion of returning on “Get back“, they returned to the location they had used on the cover of their first album “Please Please Me” — the EMI staircase in London. Although “Get back“ was never released as an album, the cover image will be familiar, because it was later used for the “Blue Album” — the collection of the hits from 1967–70.

So while McCartney wanted to go back, the others were quite happy with their situation. After his depressive “Fat Elvis period”, Lennon found in Yoko Ono not only a new partner, but also artistic and political inspiration. He got to know her through McCartney, who wanted to drag Lennon out of his lethargy and into the pulsating, artistically creative life of London in the Swinging 60s. But Lennon went further, even if at the beginning in a confused and flippant way, in the direction of politically motivated art and forms of expression.

McCartney was less and less able to deal with this. Instead, he began to give in to his inclination for a ‘Happy Sound’, rather than pass on his less meaningful songs to other artists, he used them to try and revive The Beatles. Finally, after the “Abbey Road” album, McCartney discovered his love for the rural, secluded life in a supposedly petit-bourgeois idyll on a farm in Scotland, while Lennon docked with Yoko Ono on New York’s radical left-wing scene.

Harrison developed his song-writing skills and after the White Album increasingly worked with other musicians outside of The Beatles including Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan. Harrison surprised many with his successful album “All things must pass” after The Beatles had broken up, and demonstrated his musical potential that had been suppressed when he was a member of The Beatles. Unfortunately, he later succumbed to the unfavorable and exhausting effect of combining too much intoxication with Far Eastern mysticism and spirituality.

Even the always “humorous” drummer Ringo Starr began to write and interpret his own songs as his solo albums, also released in 1970, testified, and increasingly devoted himself to acting.

The original film ‘Let It Be’ showed, not surprisingly, an “overambitious” McCartney and three others, ranging from the rather lethargic to annoyed Beatles. Actually, besides “Get back“, only the song “One after 909” fits the film’s concept. This was one of the first songs by Lennon/McCartney, which had been recorded for “Please, Please Me” but didn’t make it onto the album. With Lennon standing in the middle, and with his comments at the end of the rooftop concert, the impression is briefly created that he is still the band’s leader. In reality, he already felt that The Beatles was weighing him down, and in July 1969, he created a new musical and, above all, political field of activity with the Plastic Ono Band.

Harrison and Starr also saw little further potential for The Beatles and played in the Plastic Ono Band for a while. So Lennon had only a few songs to bring into the ‘“Get back“ sessions. To hide this, two songs, “Across the universe” and “Come together”, which Lennon had passed on in favour of his political work, ended up on The Beatles albums. “Across the universe” Lennon gave to the WWF, but much more exciting is “Come together”, which Lennon wrote and “gave” to Timothy Leary’s political campaign in California against the arch-conservative Ronald Reagan. Lennon took the name of his song from that of Leary’s campaign “Come together, join the party”.

Harrison had announced at the beginning of the sessions that he did not want to contribute his own material. From the beginning “Get back“ remained McCartney’s project, who was the only one without a real solo project besides The Beatles and Apple Records. After the concert on January 30th he wanted to listen to the tapes for a short time, and then record more songs in the next few days. It did not come to that.

Who disbanded The Beatles?

Formally, April 10, 1970 is considered the official end of The Beatles. At that time, an interview appeared in the newspapers in which Paul McCartney officially declared his departure and thus the de facto end of the band through the release of his first solo album. But he gave the interview one day earlier, and logically therefore the end of The Beatles should be backdated. But in reality it doesn’t matter at all, because the band had already ceased to exist as a band. Ringo had already left during the recordings of the “White Album”. On January 10, 1969 Harrison left the Beatles after a fight with Lennon. Lennon wanted to continue with Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix as a substitute instead. This scene doesn’t appear in the film, but it did show a short argument between McCartney and Harrison. That’s why McCartney is still considered by many people as a bogeyman and the reason for Harrison’s departure. After “Abbey Road” Lennon finally turned his back on The Beatles. But the other three convinced him not to make this public because of upcoming releases.

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had more than 130 hours of footage from the recordings and the rooftop concert, which was then being edited. The sound producer Glyn Johns also had a lot of material and started to create an album parallel to the film. But there was no common thread and so the film and the album did not fit together very well. In the film there were songs for which there were no suitable sound recordings. At the same time, strong songs had been used for the new, already finished album “Abbey Road”. However, as The Beatles still had a contract with Universal Pictures for a film and soundtrack to fulfil, The Beatles management did not want to bury “Get back“ completely. Under the aegis of Allen Klein the most commercial way was chosen. The Harrison song “I me mine” appeared in the film but with no suitable recording. So the three remaining Beatles returned to the studios in January 1970 — one year after “Get back“, now without John Lennon to fill the gap between film and album.

None of the other three were bothered by the fact that the band had ended. What went against the grain for them was that McCartney used it to promote his solo album and violated the agreement to take each other’s releases into consideration. In this phase, The Beatles/Apple Records management saw another chance to make money with the tapes of the “Get back“ sessions, which thus became “Let it be”. Allen Klein found the soundtrack design by Glyn Johns no longer suitable and, with the support of Lennon and Harrison, hired Phil Spector. A producer who was known for his US-American “bubble-gum” sound, slipping slightly into bombastic mainstream music. The result was, appropriately for the end of The Beatles, the album “Let it be”. After ‘Sgt.Pepper’s’ it is certainly the most elaborately produced album of The Beatles. The originally raw, live sound of “Get back“ finally became the overproduced and overloaded “Let it be”. Suitably, a farewell with strings such as the last track “The long and winding road”.

And here the circle closes again. Just as Phil Spector cut a commercially usable album out of those tapes that existed at that time, Peter Jackson has cut a new, commercially marketable version of the movie “Let it be” in recent months, with the aim of creating a beautifully colored image of the Beatles. It is not surprising that a different, less depressive and controversial image of the band is presented 50 years after their break-up. This way, the survivors and heirs can make a much better life and almost certainly more money.

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How “Get Back” Became “Let It Be” and the End of The Beatles (27 Nov 2021)

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