The Beatles: Get Back thoughts

[If you haven’t watched Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, please know that this post is full of spoilers.]

Fifty-two years after the fact, we now have seven hours and forty-eight minutes of the Beatles’ rehearsals, conversations, and famed rooftop concert (a concert about twice as long as what the film Let It Be depicted). The Beatles are forever.

People

~ Paul is the dominant figure here, always dapper, often insufferable, occasionally smoking cigars. John is along for the ride. He and Paul engage in endless fun and games, sloppily spoofing ’50s R & B and rock ’n’ roll and their own earlier material. And when there’s a discussion about how to approach the impending live performance, it’s just John and Paul.

~ George is a disaffected figure early on. At Twickenham Studios, he sits on the edge of Ringo’s drum riser. Perhaps that’s just how George preferred to sit, but I find it telling that he doesn’t take a chair with Paul and John. When Paul’s criticism of George’s playing prompts George to announce that he’s leaving the band (in a scene kept out of Let It Be ), all John can say is “When?”, followed (after George has left the building) by a declaration that if he isn’t back by Tuesday, they’ll get Clapton. In part two, after a difficult (offscreen) reconciliation, George seems like a different guitarist, filling his spots with much greater clarity (and without the dumb wah-wah pedal). But he’s still diffident about introducing his own songs. He describes “For You Blue” as something short and simple, as if it won’t take much of anyone else’s time or effort. When he demos “Something,” we see no reaction from John or Paul. (But listen to Abbey Road : Paul’s bass line makes a great song even better).

~ Ringo is a patient and sometimes exhausted observer. At times his posture reminds me of what it feels like to sit through a committee meeting as other personalities act out.

~ I found Yoko Ono’s presence unnerving early on. I imagined what it might be like for a member of a string quartet to bring a silent partner to rehearsals, a silent partner who sits with the quartet and knits, reads letters, and sorts through papers. By part two I found myself ignoring Yoko’s presence, save for when the camera lingers on her in close (unheard) conversation with Linda Eastman.

~ Yes, it’s true: Billy Preston does enliven the proceedings. When he plays (for the first time?) on “I’ve Got a Feeling,” the room (now the Beatles’ own studio) comes alive.

~ I’ve always admired George Martin for his work in the cause of music. But when I hear him say of John and Paul that “They’re our songwriting team,” and that George Harrison is on his own team, I’m taken aback. And when someone points out that John and Paul no longer write much together, Martin insists that they’re still a team. Because, as someone points out, that’s what it says on the record label.

Moviemaking

~ Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director of Let It Be (1970), had some strange ideas. How about a cruise — with British audience onboard — to Sabratha, Libya, where the Beatles would perform at an ancient Roman amphitheater? How about a television special, with the Beatles’ performance punctuated by news bulletins, the last of which announces the breakup of the band? Nearly as bad: Lindsay-Hogg hides a microphone in the lunchroom where John and Paul go to have a private conversation. The microphone catches their admission that they’ve treated George badly, and John’s admission that he wishes he had pushed back against Paul’s taking control of the group.

~ Technically, Peter Jackson’s film is miles above Let It Be, which feels dark and gloomy and, save for the rooftop concert, claustrophobic, even on the vast Twickenham sound stage. Here, even when things in the band are dark and gloomy, the image and sound are clear as can be. You can even read the lettering on the Swan Vesta matchboxes.

~ My one objection to Jackson’s editing of the material: it gives the movie a reality-TV quality. The many quick closeups of a silent George foreshadow his departure from the band. A shot of the Apple rooftop early on foreshadows the concert that ends the film. Putting in Paul’s comment “And then there were two” after George has walked out and John doesn’t show up for a rehearsal feels like a cheap, weird, knowing touch.

Musicmaking

~ I love the scene in which Paul calls out the chords for the middle eight of “I’ve Got a Feeling”: “E, G, D, A.” In a later scene, George is at the piano: “What’s this chord, Billy?” Billy: “I don’t know.” (It’s an E chord with a C at the top, a raised fifth, an augmented chord.) There’s no vocabulary here aside from a seven-letter chordal alphabet: A through G. Everything else is shown, not named.

~ There’s lot of mucking around, lots of parody, lots of playing at music (even a brief bit of Canned Heat’s “Going Up the Country”). I think of it all as a creative form of procrastination. There’s a deadline to be met: the band has to be ready for a live performance of new material (to take place on the Apple rooftop), after which Ringo will begin work on the film The Magic Christian, but things don’t come together (no pun intended) until very late in the schedule, when they have to.

~ There’s an extraordinary degree of invention here, not very much on view in Let It Be. You can see songs take shape in real time. As the band runs through Paul’s “I’ve Got a Feeling,” John adds lines from his “Everybody Had a Hard Year.” Later, after Billy Preston has signed on, someone asks him to add a riff to “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and he invents a bouncing figure on electric piano that now feels like an inevitable element in the song. Also feeling inevitable: the step-like countermelody that George Harrison worked out for the bridge of John’s “Don’t Let Me Down.”

~ And then there’s the magic of playing for people. When the Beatles and Billy Preston are up on the roof, playing for an audience, even if it’s an audience five stories down, even if it’s so cold that John says his fingers can’t make a chord, the feeling is joyous, the energy is abundant — at least until the police put a stop to things. Strange: when the Beatles were playing stadiums, they could be seen but not (really) heard. And in this last rooftop performance they could be heard but not seen, aside from the few dozen people on their own and other rooftops.

Other

~ I have the same guitar strap that’s on George’s Gibson acoustic. Who knew? My strap, which hangs on a tie rack in a closet, not far from my guitar, goes back to high-school days, not long after Let It Be came out. But now I play only while seated.

[That’s the one.]

Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)