Half a century after The Beatles called it quits, history's most famous rock 'n' roll band continues to fascinate – a combination, perhaps, of the undeniable greatness of their music and baby boomers' unflagging obsession with selling the 60s as pop culture's halcyon period.
Filmmaker Peter Jackson's three-part documentary series The Beatles: Get Back unearths what feels like one of the band's last remaining mysteries: unseen footage of John, Paul, George and Ringo during the notoriously fraught January 1969 sessions that would yield their final album – and film of the same name – Let It Be (1970).
The nearly eight-hour series – whose producers include surviving band members Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono – won't quite change the narrative around The Beatles's dissolution, but it does recast the Fab Four's death throes in a much more complex, and often unexpectedly joyous light.
"There is proof in the footage," McCartney said recently, of the film's more generous perspective on the sessions. "Because I definitely bought into the dark side of The Beatles breaking up and thought, 'God, I'm to blame'."
Another long-held break-up theory, at least among misogynist bores – that Yoko Ono's presence spelled the end of the band – gets amusingly shot down in the film.
"It's going to be such an incredibly comical thing in 50 years time," McCartney jokes with Lennon and Ono at one point. "'They broke up 'cause Yoko sat on an amp'."
Jackson's film is assembled from some 60 hours of footage shot by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, for what ended up as Let It Be: a generally unloved work that — despite featuring The Beatles's famous rooftop swan song at Abbey Road Studios in London – was greeted as a kind of grim epitaph upon release.
The band members, who had by then gone their separate ways, didn't even show up to the film's premiere.
The Beatles: Get Back is a deep, deep dive into that footage, which has been pristinely restored and reassembled by Jackson and his series editor, Jabez Olssen, in rigorous chronological order.
It begins with the band convening in Twickenham Studios in January 1969, where they're set to perform and record a new album for a planned TV special – an attempt, as the project's original title suggested, to get back to their live roots after the strained sessions for 1968's The Beatles (aka The White Album).
If it's not an immediately tense beginning to the project, then these early sessions do show McCartney very much in charge, playing the necessary taskmaster – or just a pep-talking dad – to a listless, strung-out Lennon, cheerfully sleepy Starr and a quietly simmering Harrison.
The situation comes to a head when Harrison, whose passive-aggressive spat with McCartney is glimpsed in Let It Be, walks out of the sessions and quits the group. A mic hidden in the kitchen flowerpot captures a juicy conversation between Lennon and McCartney, who throw around the blame like parents who've lost a child.
With deadlines crumbling – ideas to stage the final performance everywhere from a Libyan amphitheatre to aboard the QE2 ocean liner seem headed for Spin̈al Tap parody – and tensions on the boil, the band relocates, at Harrison's insistence, to the more familiar surrounds of Abbey Road, where they're joined by keyboardist Billy Preston.
It's here, in the series' richly rewarding middle act, that the scope of the footage pays off, revealing a band characterised less by interpersonal strife than a shared musical camaraderie – shading in the little moments of joy that have rarely factored into the legend around the final year of the band.
Lennon, in particular, flourishes, indulging in his characteristic comedic riffing – whether he's introducing the band as "The Buttles" or replacing the spiritual visitation of Let It Be's lyrics with a cheeky "Bloody Mary comes to me".
His energy bounces off McCartney's as the old songwriting pals trade vocals and quips, experiment with riffs and finish off each other's improvised lyrics – a dynamic that, however frayed it may have become, still sends off sparks of magic in the studio.
It's a compelling look at the way the band created their songs, the speed at which they worked under pressure, and how they were in constant dialogue with both their own catalogue (playfully tooling with Love Me Do and Help) and the rock 'n' roll they loved (firing off covers of Chuck Berry and The Everly Brothers among several amusing Elvis impersonations).
In one of the series' most thrilling scenes, McCartney reads from a scurrilous tabloid story about the band like he's performing beat poetry at the West Village, while Lennon thrashes his way through an old rock standard – an electrifying moment of a band united against a common enemy.
Elsewhere, there's wonder in seeing now-canonical rock songs enter the world via random noodling or stream of conscious babble – like McCartney casually strumming his way into the riff for Get Back, the melody seeming to form around him like an aura, or Harrison conjuring up the gorgeous I Me Mine after a dizzy daydream about a science fiction show.
While the sheer volume of footage might be exhausting for casual viewers, Jackson and his team have generally made smart creative choices, steering clear of unnecessary editorialising and commentary and allowing the scenes to play out as they were captured.
Next to the radical way Jean-Luc Godard framed The Rolling Stones in Sympathy for the Devil (1968) – a film also shot by Get Back's original cinematographer, Tony Richmond – this footage becomes almost insular in its lack of wider context.
What it does offer is a vivid portrait of a band responding creatively and organically in real time.
The fact that The Beatles rallied themselves to create all of this in the space of a couple of weeks is a reminder of how prolific they were. It's an even more impressive feat when you consider that, among the Let It Be setlist, the band runs through many of the songs that would appear on their next album, Abbey Road, while tinkering with future solo projects from Lennon (Gimme Some Truth; Jealous Guy), Harrison (All Things Must Pass) and McCartney (Another Day).
By the time the series reaches that historic rooftop performance – in which The Beatles took to the top of the Abbey Road building and treated unsuspecting Savile Row punters to a free show – the sense of inspired creativity makes their impending end somehow more poignant.
The performance – executed by Jackson and his editors in lively split screen – is great, of course, but it's the reactions from the crowd of onlookers that linger: regular Londoners going about their afternoon business who react with a mixture of polite enthusiasm (ageing teenyboppers and grannies alike are fans at this point) and mild consternation (the pair of bobbies dispatched to address the noise complaint are practically reverent in their requests to keep it down).
Hardly an explosive rock 'n' roll ending for a culture-shifting pop phenomenon.
It's this air of melancholy that's always made this footage so moving, given the retrospective knowledge that this is The Beatles's final public performance.
By the time this footage was released as Let it Be, the band were no more, Altamont and the Manson family had spooked the counterculture, and all the dreams of the 60s were effectively going down in flames.
Get Back offers a living, breathing glimpse of what might have been if things had gone in a different direction – at least for these guys. It's a bittersweet experience.
The Beatles: Get Back is streaming on Disney Plus.
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2021-11-27 19:46:49Z
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