Peter Jackson's documentary of the Beatles Get Back sessions begins with a ten minute dash through the band's history to provide some context (with an irritating factual error at the very beginning - John was indeed 16 when he formed the Quarrymen late in 1956, but Paul and George were 15 and 14 when they joined the following year, rather than 14 and 13). That done, the three parts of the film present a kind of summary of the Beatles studio activity over the last 30 days of January 1969.
The film presents it all in sequence, as it happened - so what it provides amount to a series of twenty minute highlight reels of a full day's activity - days spent talking, drinking tea, screwing around, but mostly playing lots and lots of music. They weren't actually at work on all of those days - they took the first weekend off (the 4th and 5th) and a band crisis the following week interrupted them for ten full days. Jackson still had six and a half days of work at Twickenham Film Studios followed by nine full days of work in the basement of their Apple headquarters before the legendary rooftop concert on the 30th. Jackson had 150 hours of audio and 60 hours of film to work with. He was obliged to leave the vast majority of it all on the cutting room floor.
The idea of the project itself was always rather fluid, and it would end up changing drastically by the end of the month. The basis was always going to be the band writing, rehearsing, and recording a clutch of new songs. It was all supposed to conclude with some kind of performance, perhaps in some exotic location. Perhaps the recording would be of the performance, and the studio sessions would merely be assembling and rehearsing material for it. At any rate, all of it was going to be filmed. They planned to do this in less than three weeks, with the live shows planned for the 19th and 20th of the month.
The Beatles were no strangers to working to a deadline, and the conditions they had imposed on themselves weren't very different from the conditions in which they had recorded thirteen songs for the magnificent Rubber Soul over 30 days in late 1965. They have may have forgotten how close they had cut it back then. Back in late 1965, one session actually had to be cancelled because they simply had no new material. With one day left before EMI's deadline they still needed two more songs - and on the final day Lennon and McCartney both delivered the goods in smashing fashion, bringing in "Girl" and "You Won't See Me" at the very last minute. So they'd pulled it off. They could do it again, surely.
But they did not find working at Twickenham Film Studios very congenial. First of all, they were surrounded by a bunch of strangers pointing cameras at them. By this point, they had grown more accustomed than any of us will ever be to the phenomenon of being stared at every moment of their lives. But it was still an unusual circumstance when they were trying to work.
Twickenham was an unfamiliar locale, a vast empty film studio, somewhat cold and drafty - and having to keep union hours and begin work in the morning? That was truly alien. Since Sgt. Pepper, Beatles recording sessions had normally begun at 7:00 in the evening and lasted as long as was needed. Even in the days before that, they typically started work at 2:30 in the afternoon. None of the band members lived anywhere near Twickenham - it was always at least an hour's drive simply going to work. No wonder they were in such a shitty mood. After a few days of this, George simply walked out on the band. They would lose most of a week persuading him to return and fixing up some kind of recording studio in the Apple basement.
Needing material, the band had quickly hauled out one of Lennon's old numbers. As it turned out, "One After 909 " would be the only song that ended up in the project that had been fully written and learned by the band before the sessions started. Granted, they had written and learned the song almost six years earlier. They had recorded it back in March 1963, during the session for their third single "From Me to You." At that time, they hadn't much liked the song itself, the lyric in particular. They'd left it in the vault and never gone back to it.
We first see the band try it out on Friday the 3rd, the second day of work. While Lennon still sounds uncertain about the quality of the lyrics, McCartney absolutely loves them now. Six years on, the band seems to remember the song perfectly. They played it three times this first day. Jackson can only spare the time to show us one of those attempts - and then we won't even hear the song again in Jackson's documentary until they play it on the roof with Billy Preston, almost four weeks later.
What did we miss? Well, we missed a few run-throughs each of the next four days at Twickenham. Then, three weeks later with Preston present at Apple, they went back to it, playing it several times on both the Tuesday and Wednesday before the rooftop show on Thursday. Obviously this was when Preston worked out the memorable piano riff that he plays on the verses. The final version of "One After 909," recorded on the Apple roof and issued on the Let It Be album, was just their 24th pass at the song that January.
They did have a few other more or less completed songs they could begin with. Lennon seems to have had "Dig a Pony" more or less finished, as well as the basic components that would make up "Don't Let Me Down" and "Sun King." McCartney brought in "Two of Us," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," "Through the Bathroom Window," and the basic idea for "I've Got a Feeling;" Harrison brought in "All Things Must Pass" and "Let it Down." While all of these songs would eventually be recorded at some point, five of them seem to have been dropped from consideration fairly quickly. We never even see or hear "Sun King" (which would end up on Abbey Road) or "Let it Down (destined for Harrison's All Things Must Pass) in Jackson's film.
They did give some serious effort to Harrison's "All Things Must Pass" before scrapping that one as well. (I may be alone in thinking that it's not that great a song. While it has both a fine melody and a good lyric, I don't think the melody and lyric are well suited to each other - I think a melody that swoops up and down so dramatically generally requires a simpler set of words, and a lyric so ambitious needs a simpler tune.) Still, the real problem here was how they were attempting to play it. Harrison at this time was absolutely besotted with Music From Big Pink, and he tried to turn the Beatles into The Band for the occasion. A Lowrey organ was hauled in for Lennon to play and the group approaches the vocal harmonies rather as The Band often did - with no worked out harmonies at all, just three guys singing however they liked. The problem was, John Lennon was hardly Garth Hudson's equal as a keyboard player (very few people are.) Furthermore, the Beatles were brilliant harmony singers and the Band's rather homely approach simply didn't suit them. Harrison would in fact adopt a completely different musical approach when he eventually recorded the song on his own album.
Harrison would also present the band with four new songs that he would write in the course of the month, as the sessions were proceeding. The band ran through "Hear Me Lord" on the first Monday, but never returned to it. It's not heard in the film, and would have to wait for All Things Must Pass. That same day Harrison also first showed them something he describes as practically a skiffle tune - this was "For You Blue," which they would return to three weeks later with Lennon's interest being guaranteed by giving him the Hawaiian guitar on which to play a solo. This would end up on the Let It Be album as would a waltz tune - a fragment, really - called "I Me Mine" that he brings in a few days later. Lennon doesn't seem too enthused about it - "we're a rock band" - but the other three would eventually record it for the Let It Be album as well, albeit a year later. Finally, just a couple of days before the rooftop, Harrison has yet another new song to show them This one he's written on piano, an instrument he doesn't really play. "Old Brown Shoe" still needs some work, but the band would record it that April and issue it as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko."
Almost all of McCartney's contributions to Abbey Road (all but You Never Give Me Your Money") get some kind of preview during these sessions (as well as songs that would later be issued on his first two albums) - but most of these are fairly fragmentary. Only "Bathroom Window" and "Oh! Darling" seem more or less completed. The band took several runs at "Bathroom Window," but it would end up on Abbey Road, in a faster version, as part of a medley with Lennon's White Album leftover "Polythene Pam." They spent a fair bit of time on McCartney's very weird "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" (it is, after all, a song about a homicidal maniac and his fan club.) Such deeply disturbing material seemed to call for especially non-threatening music to go with it, but McCartney obviously went way overboard making it sound cute. No one else in the band would ever admit to liking the song, ever - while it was dropped after the Twickenham sessions it too would resurface on Abbey Road.
They had a few other songs left over from the sessions for the White Album, but while some of them were played during the Get Back sessions, none of them seem to have been seriously considered. Neither was Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity." Harrison performed a hauntingly lovely solo version later in the sessions (although we hear it at the end of Part One and the Twickenham sessions, it was actually recorded over the final weekend at Apple.) Lennon, however, had rejected it as far back as Revolver.
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There's a moment early on in Part One that has practically gone viral. It comes about an hour into the film, from the morning of their fourth day of work on the project. George and Ringo are sitting on the drum riser looking bored and hungover. Paul arrives, sits in front of them with his bass, and starts strumming it aimlessly, as if it were a guitar. This is actually an unusual thing to do with a bass. But still, the four strings of a bass are tuned to the same notes as the four lowest strings on a guitar and McCartney was a guitar player long before he ever took up the bass. And within a couple of minutes, McCartney appears to pull the chorus of "Get Back" out of - nowhere? The clear blue sky? His behind? Out of wherever the songs come from.
It looks like magic - well, it is magic - but even so, all songwriters know that this is just how it works sometimes. You keep playing and suddenly there's something right in front of you. It's happened to me. Or sometimes you wake up in the morning with a melody in your head. That's happened to me as well, although nothing as omnipresent as "Yesterday" ever came to me while I slept. Or sometimes you're out on the world, travelling from one place to another, humming to yourself, and if you're Paul McCartney, what you're humming turns into "Hey Jude." I should be so lucky, or so good. But that's how the process works, for all of us. It's only remarkable to watch it actually happen in real time, with a camera recording the process.
But there's another kind of magic that gets documented in this endlessly fascinating and wonderful film. It's the magic of another kind of process. While the initial inspiration for "Get Back" unfolded right in front of us, all McCartney really had at this point was a rhythm and a chorus line. The song still had a very long way to go, and unfortunately we will only be able to drop in on a few of the stops along the way. But Beatles recording sessions, like practically everything in their lives from late 1963 right through to their final breakup in April 1970, are very well documented. The historical record says that the band played "Get Back" 157 times at Twickenham and Apple in January 1969, from that initial Tuesday morning when McCartney first found the song through to the four final versions on the rooftop (this includes all manner of false starts and incomplete takes, of course.)
On the second Thursday, two days after McCartney first dreamed it up, we see the band decide to turn "Get Back" into a protest song about the anti-immigrant sentiment being whipped up in the UK by far-right politicians like Enoch Powell (the same Powell whom Eric Clapton would loudly praise a few years later.) The next morning, John and Paul are preoccupied with working out how to play the off-beats in the chorus, as George looks on grimly (he would quit the band at lunchtime.) By now the Pakistanis and Puerto Ricans of the protest song have been shelved and a couple of characters called JoJo and Loretta have been introduced. The following Monday, with George absent, we see John and Paul piecing together the lyrics (alas, we don't see John working out the lead guitar part, which falls on him with George not available.)
Ten days pass before the band returns to "Get Back" - by now they're in the Apple basement and the arrival of Billy Preston has turned them into a quintet. This sequence is mostly about how to structure the song, and I live for this stuff. The song is down to two verses, which Paul thinks might be enough, and a few solos. Ringo once said that no matter how bad things got between them personally, when they got excited by a track everything was always fabulous. This ten minute sequence shows us how. John is both excited at being the lead guitarist on the track and a little worried about whether he's up to the job. George, so grim and silent the last time we'd seen him work on this track, is positively engaged - he knows the song needs something more and he has a couple of ideas. One of those ideas, a kind of "Reach Out I'll Be There" breakdown sounds pretty good (it just sounds too much like "Reach Out I'll Be There;") the other, with some of the instruments dropping out at some point to provide some dynamic contrast is eventually modified and adopted to be the transition between the shortened second chorus and the second solo, which is now given to Billy Preston's piano (John notes that he'd only actually worked out one guitar solo, even if Paul thinks he could just play it again.) Lennon nails down the song's ultimate structure: verse, chorus, solo, short chorus, solo, verse, chorus.
Or consider "I've Got a Feeling," which is the very first song we see the full group working on during the first day of the sessions. Paul's song is so new that he's actually calling out the chord changes in the middle section. But the song itself is almost childishly simple. He's singing that he's got a feeling as he goes back and forth between the tonic (A) and the sub-dominant (D) - the simplest, most obvious chord pattern in the known universe. There's nothing to it, nothing at all- and that's all the song amounts to, along with a middle bit where he pulls out his old Little Richard trick of piling up as many words as possible into as short a space of time as he can manage. That section comes to a full stop and Ringo tries out filling the four beats of the empty measure with a drum fill. We quickly learn that Lennon has a fragment of his own built over the same two chords in the same general tempo, which will be grafted onto Paul's song.
Over the next few weeks, we will see what the band - and this will be the work of the band - makes of this exceedingly humble material. They made 120 passes at "I've Got a Feeling" in January 1969. The first 54 of those takes came during the Twickenham sessions, including no less than 20 of them on this initial Thursday. Jackson can only show us three of them. We see them back working on "I've Got a Feeling" on the second day, with Paul worried that his middle section is weak. John agrees, saying it's "just power" (as if that's a bad thing!) and they experiment with a Lennon harmony part. They quickly discover it would be way out of his vocal range.
They worked some more on the song in the following week, spending a little time on it all five days (especially the Tuesday.) We hear almost none of it. We hear a brief excerpt from the Wednesday session, taken at a somewhat faster tempo. We actually saw much more of their Wednesday work on this song in the Let It Be movie. By now the song structure was in place - it will end with a verse with Paul and John each singing their own bits over top of one another, and conclude with an ascending and descending guitar riff over the tonic. Lennon's rhythm part is beginning to evolve from strumming the chords into a riff. By now, the drum fill that follows Paul's middle section has been replaced by a single note guitar fill and Paul tells George exactly how it needs to be played - by pre-bending a D note up a full step to E and releasing the bend in a series of gradual and imperceptible steps until that it comes back down to the D. George never looks happy when Paul is telling him how to play something, but McCartney can hear it in his head and he has the bit in his teeth.
While the band went over "I've Got a Feeling" on both of the final two days spent at Twickenham, we don't see any of it. So almost two weeks had passed before we hear the next version of the song, from their first proper working day in the Apple basement. By now the song has found its final form. The parts have all been worked out. What's especially interesting to me is the development of Lennon's rhythm guitar part into the rock that the song will rest upon.
Lennon had started out with various patterns of semi-picking and semi-strumming, using the most usual fingering of the A and D chords that the song is built around. An A chord is a triad of the notes A, C#, and E; it is normally played with a single finger barre on the second, third, and fourth strings on the second fret. Two open strings are sounded: a high E on the first string and a second A on the fifth string serves as a root. And a D chord is a triad of D, F# and E which is usually played with the index finger playing third string second fret (the A), the middle finger playing first string second fret (the F#) and the ring finger playing second string third fret (the D). The open fourth string is allowed to ring a second D as a root.
By this time, however, Lennon has begun playing both chords with a single finger barre across the four high strings on the second fret. He gets his A chord by playing the first string with his pinkie on the fifth fret, which gives him a third, higher A in the chord, and he leaves his pinkie there for the D chord. He plays the whole thing with his index and pinkie locked in place and gets the notes he needs for the D by hammering on to the second and fourth strings with his middle fingers. Each measure begins with the open A on the fifth string, which is allowed to ring for the entire measure, until he picks it again. Glyn Johns hears that, and asks Lennon to turn down the bass on his guitar. Lennon tries it, but immediately objects - he wants that droning A underneath the chords. It's quite a bit like what he did on "Ticket to Ride." The earlier song likewise began with the open A on the fifth string ringing out like a drone but while "Ticket to Ride" was built on a sequence of arpeggios on the A chord, the new song constantly moves between the two chords But the way Lennon now plays it has turned a chord pattern into a riff so solid it supports the song all by itself (which is now how it begins.)
After lunch, their old Hamburg chum Billy Preston wanders by to visit and is instantly recruited to play electric piano. He quickly comes up with a memorable part for "I've Got a Feeling," based on a riff George has been playing, and will continue to play in the measures between the verses. By now George is playing stabbing high string bends behind Paul's screaming middle eight. Preston's presence also frees George up to add chord accents at various times, to double Lennon's playing an octave higher at other times, and to add occasional single note phrases.
The band is now playing with spirit and enthusiasm - the presence of another musician in the house, someone they respect, naturally prompts them to raise their game. They're also not above showing off a little. They know they're a great band when they want to be one. All that really remains now is repetition and refinement. Two days before the rooftop performance, while Paul is away, John and George continue working on the guitar parts. George works out a chromatic run for the end of each verse. The song gets a single run-through on Wednesday, and then they play it two times on the rooftop that Thursday, with the first version being issued on the Let It Be album.
This is a different kind of magic. It's not the magic of inspiration. It's the magic of perspiration. How do you make the music better? By working at it. By playing it this way, and then playing it that way. By trying this, and then trying that. We don't usually get to see that kind of magic very often either, not as it's happening. And so my overwhelming response to Jackson's documentary is gratitude. I am so happy that this thing exists. Sure, this wasn't their best work. Sure, I'd rather have something like this for Rubber Soul or Revolver or Sgt Pepper - but I'll happily settle for this. With all my heart, I'll settle for this. These guys never did make a bad album - the range basically goes from good to great to timeless immortal stuff that makes life worth living. So yeah - 'tis enough, 'twill serve. I'd also prefer a behind the scenes documentary of Shakespeare, Burbage and the rest of the company rehearsing and blocking King Lear or Hamlet. But you'd better believe that I'd settle for The Merry Wives of Windsor.
So if I ever hear it suggested that the almost eight hours of Jackson's documentary is too much, all I can say is - wrong. Sadly, tragically, hopelessly wrong. It is utterly impossible to overstate how important the Beatles were and how important they remain. They changed everything. Of what other musicians is that true? Many other musicians changed music forever, but the Beatles did much more than that. They changed the fucking world. That alone makes Jackson's film as important as any film about music anyone has ever made. Eight hours is not enough. Not even close.
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They didn't quite meet their target. They didn't record the fourteen new songs that would be the basis of some kind of live performance and constitute their next album. But they did okay. Despite losing a big chunk of their allotted time in the middle of it all, they still managed the final recordings of nine songs - both sides of their new single and another seven tracks that would eventually appear on the Let It Be album. That album would be padded out with the A-side of the single, a song recorded a year earlier ("Across the Universe,") a song recorded a year later ("I Me Mine,") and two studio improvisations. And the whole affair concluded with the last live performance of their career, which remains one of the most legendary moments in the history of rock music. And rightly so.
It had all happened so very, very fast. Not just the sessions for this album. Their whole incredible story, which would come to an end just seven months after these sessions, in August 1969, when the four would be together in a recording studio for the very last time. The Get Back sessions concluded at the end of January 1969. It had been less than six years since they recorded their very first album. It had been less than five years since they had appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Radiohead took more time than that between their last two albums. The Beatles' story, like their achievement, has no parallel. They were the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century, by an order of magnitude. They remain the best-selling musical artists of the twenty-first century.
Come on. Eight hours is nowhere near enough.
One of the finest books in the vast Beatles bibliography is Devin McKinney's Magic Circles (the working title of Revolver was Magic Circles.) There were always magic circles around the Beatles. There were their old comrades from the earliest days in Liverpool, Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall. There were the professional associates and helpers like George Martin and the late Brian Epstein whom they met along the way. There were the many, many others who became a part of their brief, incredible journey. But the ultimate magic circle was always the four musicians, the four boys from Liverpool who formed a band. Four men with memories longer than the road that stretched out ahead. No one else could possibly fathom what that must have been like, the overwhelming strangeness at the absolute centre of the hurricane that was Beatlemania, and the nature of the bond that resulted.
Jackson's film does not document the dissolution of that circle, or any of the others. The Beatles would reassemble over the spring and summer of 1969, make one final album, and name it after the street on which they did their work. Nevertheless, those magic circles were beginning to break apart, to spin off in separate directions, and there are indeed moments when you can see it happening. The end was not yet upon them, but it was beginning to emerge as a possibility. It's something we saw most obviously in the scene at the beginning of Part Two. George had walked out on Friday, the band members had had a disastrous meeting on Sunday, and on this Monday morning Paul and Ringo (along with Linda, Mal Evans, and various others) are sitting around wondering what's next. Is Lennon even coming in? Do they still have a band? Where do we go from here? Can this really be the end?
There's a sequence when Paul is talking about their trip to India nine months earlier, and how they weren't really being honest with themselves. George is clearly offended by all this and asks Paul if he regrets going. Paul quickly says that he doesn't regret it at all. Which was true - Paul speaks fondly of the Maharishi to this day. (Paul wasn't the one who angrily denounced him and wrote a nasty song about it.) George is still unhappy, but Paul isn't addressing George anyway. He's not even thinking about him. He's trying to reach John, he's trying yet again to find his old friend, the man who had been his comrade and partner since he was fifteen years old.
For even within the magic circle of the band there was always a smaller circle, the most magical circle of them all. That was the unique connection between John and Paul. So much of the film shows us these two men playing only to one another, sometimes trying to impress the other, sometimes trying to make the other laugh. There's a fair bit of clowning around during the sessions and almost all of it comes from John and Paul. It's always aimed at the other guy. Even when George and Ringo are in a good frame of mind and enjoying themselves, they almost never indulge in any of this kind of horseplay.
Harrison, to his eternal frustration, could never quite be a part that innermost magic circle. (This was never an issue for Ringo, older than the others, already an adult "with his own car" when he was hired for the quality of his musicianship.) It's perhaps not coincidental that the two occasions where George most clearly shows his unhappiness - his "I'll play whatever you want me to play" and his brief walkout - both surface right after the band has been working on "Two of Us," a song they try over and over in a number of different arrangements (not all of them particularly serious.) It's a song that actually sounds like it's about the two singers, McCartney's denials notwithstanding.
From the first time we heard "Two of Us", the song was a Lennon-McCartney duet. Because of the way their voices naturally tended to blend, Lennon was effectively the lead singer on all their duets, from "She Loves You" and "If I Fell" to "Two of us." John of course was notorious for not being able to remember lyrics - he was making up his own words to "Come Go With Me" on the day Paul first met him in 1957. On the rooftop we'll see him need a cheat sheet for "Dig a Pony" after hilariously forgetting his own words to "Don't Let Me Down." But he learned Paul's song, right away. Every last word.
Get Back wasn't the end, after all. Not quite. But after growing up together they were now beginning to grow apart. It's life and life only. That's all. But despite everything, in January 1969 they were still a band. Any great band is its own magic circle, and the Beatles forever remain the greatest band of them all. In the end, what's so moving - what's positively thrilling - about this film is how often we're permitted to share that magic, to see it happen, to see these four men make it happen. To see them in perfect harmony with one another. The love you take and the love you make.
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