"Get Back"
Brilliance by The Beatles and Peter Jackson
Directed by three-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson, ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ is a three-part documentary series that takes audiences back in time to the band’s intimate recording sessions during a pivotal moment in music history.
- Excerpt from Disney+’s description of the series.
I was in love with The Beatles, and had been since I was a three-year-old singing “yeah, yeah, yeah!” around the house at the top of my lungs. When I was four or five, I watched The Beatles cartoon show religiously. The Beatles were a constant in my life. I was three when they came to America, and I was ten when they officially broke up. The Beatles and their music are part of my DNA and my soul.
I was nine years old in the beautiful spring of 1970. I listened to Abbey Road in my bedroom, at night, with the windows open and the curtains swaying in the breeze, the earthy, sweet smell of spring in the air. The sound effects of “Sun King“ and “Because” fit perfectly with the air and the light. By the time “Her Majesty” ended, I was calm; I was in bliss. It was perfection.
And then, in April 1970, The Beatles broke up. It was the first real break-up of my life.
In May, the album “Let it Be” was released. And I didn’t care. My nine-year-old heart was broken, and it didn’t help that Phil Spector larded up “The Long and Winding Road” and “Across the Universe.” Listening to the ”Let It Be” album when the Beatles were broken up was like listening to a corpse. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t like it. I was too young to see the movie, and I ended up never seeing it, because all the feedback I ever got regarding the movie was that it showed the Beatles breaking up and I never wanted to see that. The break-up scarred me.
The rumors I heard about the break-up were filtered down to kid-level. It was Yoko Ono’s fault. It was that Paul was really dead (after all, he’s the only one in bare feet on the Abbey Road album cover, and in England, they bury you in bare feet, apparently). It was the drugs, or Hare Krishna. So many reasons, but they all boiled down to: The Beatles hated each other.
For the last fifty years, “Let it Be” was understood to be the blackest period in the Beatles’ lives.
And then last November, the documentary Get Back was released.
“You’re playing that bass again.”
- George Harrison
I saw the shared clip where Paul is strumming his bass and singing, with George playing chords with him. Paul conjures “Get Back” from the ether. The song gels and springs forth into the world. It is a profound moment of artistic brilliance and here it was captured on film.
I knew I had to watch the documentary.
I realized I’d been had from the very start of the first episode. The Beatles were having fun. It was obvious Paul and George and John and Ringo loved each other. They were fooling around, laughing, making jokes, creating, and caring. The first thing I noticed is how relaxed and fun the sessions were, and how, when George “quit” the band for a while, the love and caring were still there. To say that my world view shifted watching this documentary is putting it lightly. Peter Jackson exposed history and broke the lie I had been living with for fifty years.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
- Arthur C. Clark’s Third Law
Peter Jackson and his team in New Zealand had lots of pandemic time to create this beautiful documentary from film and audio that was not recorded with this type of documentary in mind. The mikes captured all the room’s noises and conversations at once, like if you were to set up a mike in Grand Central Station and capture the crowd. Jackson's team used artificial intelligence sound magic to "de-mix" the recordings into separate tracks. The technology to do this is astounding. The original tapes were a mass of room noise and echo and instruments strumming and folks talking. Jackson’s team had the technology listen and pull out from this mass of sound each voice, each instrument, and all of the other elements. It’s just unbelievable.
Then, the team took the film stock and rebuilt the color, took out the flaws, and sharpened everything up. Jackson had experience with this work from producing “They Shall Not Grow Old,” the extraordinary film in which he took primitive silent film from World War I and turned it into reality, even to the point of hiring voice actors from the regions of England the soldiers were from to give them an authentic voice. He took the technologies that transformed the WWI footage and applied them to the Get Back project’s sixty hours of film, resulting in color and clarity and warmth that is beautiful and present.
Jackson then took the audio and film and edited and mixed it all down to this nine-hour masterpiece. This documentary is a perfect example of technology enabling artistic brilliance.
The result of all this brilliance is that you are in the room with The Beatles. It feels as if what is on the screen is happening right now, in this moment, with you sitting right there along with Mal Evans and Glyn Johns and George Martin and George’s Hare Krishna friends and Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono, hanging out while John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Billy Preston do the work and the play of creating great music. You are in the room, right now, with the best band in the world. It’s amazing.
Jackson’s choice to only show footage from the sessions was inspired. There are no cuts to “now” where people who were involved in the sessions are interviewed for commentary and color. Because there were no cuts to “now,” you are in January 1969 for the whole of the series. You are not sent back to 1969. Rather, 1969 is brought up to you.
“Morning! Morning, everybody. Another bright day. Morning camera!”
- Ringo Starr
“And now for your host this evening, the Bottles!”
- John Lennon
The Beatles were having fun. This is the most mind-blowing thing about Get Back. They were have a gas of a time. For fifty years, the Get Back / Let it Be period was The Beatles version of the Bataan Death March. It was children of divorce crying because Mommy and Daddy were yelling at each other. But no. It was fun. It was shenanigans. It was John cracking jokes. It was Paul singing British bar songs. It was John reading out tabloid bullshit while Paul strums along with his bass, and George and John getting into a mock fight, and many, many alternate lyrics, and screwing around with the songs, and occasionally breaking into other people’s classics, like “Blue Suede Shoes.”
I really enjoyed watching the creative process. John and Paul working out a song, working and smiling together, with George attentive and adding color. George working out one of his songs and working with John and Paul. George helping Ringo with “Octopus’s Garden.” Their work was a beautifully intense labor of love. You can see the rapport all four of them had, and you can see how each was who they needed to be when they needed to be it. I loved being in the room with them. They were having fun, but their work ethic was remarkable. They were doing the work. How many times did they play each song? and how many ways did they do it? By the time they got to the rooftop, they were polished. In less than four weeks, they went from zero to the rooftop concert. There is a lot to learn about how to work together and be creative in this documentary.
Ringo intrigued me. He looks like he's just there for the ride, just sitting at the drums watching the other three work things out, maybe drumming a simple beat, or maybe not. He seriously looks like he's not doing a damned thing... until the song starts to gel. And then he nails it with his Ringo toms and fills. Ringo is phenomenal, and a true professional. Apple Records released the full rooftop concert as an album, with all the tunings and discussions and banter between the songs left in. Between “God Save the Queen” and the second take of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” there is about a minute of Paul, John, and Ringo jamming. Ringo plays a beat that, honestly, I’ve never heard before. It was just a few seconds, but it was a great jam, and a great riff by Ringo. To me it was a reminder that Ringo is pure talent that shows up when needed.
Yoko is supposed to be that evil harridan who broke up The Beatles. This is another damned lie! Another evil myth shattered! There’s film of Paul talking to director Michael Lindsay-Hogg about John and Yoko: “It’s going to be such an incredible sort of comical thing like in fifty years time, ‘they broke up because Yoko sat on an amp’… there’s nothing wrong, really.” Here we are, fifty years later, and the documentary backs that up. Yoko was there. John was playing and working. And that’s it. No tension. This just shows to go you that tabloid journalism and bullshit are not new. Yoko didn’t break up the band. But we believed she did.
Billy Preston was the fifth Beatle. Do we believe in Kismet? Do we believe in Fate, or the Divine Hand? Billy Preston’s visit to the Apple Studios surely is evidence in their favor. From the first note it’s obvious he had to be there. His playing is integral to the album and his presence was a jump-start to the band’s creativity. His joy and attitude lifted, I think, the burden The Beatles had of being “The Beatles.”
What also intrigued me was how much stuff was going on. This was not a closed set. Girlfriends, other friends, their crew, business associates, kids, all in the room at various times while they were recording! It was like a living room and studio and office park all rolled into one. During the rooftop concert there were people all over the place milling about and fixing things, or filming things, or dealing with police and hangers-on, all while The Beatles were playing. I have to think the years in Hamburg made it so that The Beatles could knock out “I’ve Got a Feeling” even during an air raid. Hell, the police got to the roof when they were playing “Get Back” and Paul and the band just kept on going until they were done, with Paul singing “Get back, Loretta… she’s gonna have you arrested!”
I loved that moment at the end of the rooftop concert. Paul looked back at the cops with an “I’m not stopping” attitude, and The Beatles pushed forth until they were done, on their terms. I wonder if they knew at the time that that concert would be their last public performance as The Beatles.
“Ladies and Gentlemen… The Beatles!”
Ed Sullivan, February, 1964
The American experience with The Beatles started with the Ed Sullivan show in February, 1964. It is insane to think that from that TV show to the rooftop concert is less than five years. From “She Loves You” to “Let it Be” in five years? Unbelievable. It is a minuscule amount of time. On the other hand, The Beatles were burning like a Saturn rocket the entire time. I imagine that to them, it felt like a lifetime.
It is almost impossible to convey how powerful The Beatles were when they were together. The whole reason they were doing these sessions were to do a prime time television show… because they wanted to. They had a date in mind. The date shifted. No one questioned that they could just change the date of a nationally televised show that was scheduled for a few days away. They discussed venues for the show. Perhaps a park in London. Perhaps an ancient amphitheater in Africa - with the audience brought in from England on the Queen Mary. Or, just forget about it and not do a show at all. Or, well, hell, let’s just do it on the roof! They could do anything, in a way that is hard to comprehend now. They were The Beatles.
In my mind, I picture the 1960’s as bright yellow tie-dye with an explosion of incredible music. From Roy Orbison, to The Beach Boys, to Simon and Garfunkel, to Traffic, to Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, and Buffalo Springfield and Joni Mitchell, and The Doors, and The Rolling Stones and The Kinks and Bob Dylan. There was so much great music and so many great musicians. And yet, The Beatles were and are in a completely different category. There’s The Beatles, and then there’s everyone else. It’s hard to convey how true this is. It’s to the point where you have to exclude the Beatles from consideration when dealing with “Best of” lists from that era. The ten best songs from the 1960’s were all Beatles songs. That is a fact that cannot be disputed. But, you know, rock magazines have to look like they are being fair. Most have “Hey Jude” or “A Day In The Life” in their top ten, but these are just placeholders for “Hey Jude… and everything else.” Or “A Day In The Life… and the rest of Sgt. Peppers.”
You need to understand, I am not downplaying any other band. The Stones were and are phenomenal. I wish I had been old enough to see The Doors when they played The Whiskey in LA. It’s just that, The Beatles are on a different plane.
I am eight years old in January 1969. I am in the room with The Beatles when they were each less than 30 years old. I am watching these people, and everything I thought I knew melts away. A time I assumed was too painful to contemplate turns out to be… beautiful. “Let it Be” is resurrected and becomes a great album. I fall in love again, my heartbreak healed.
The credits roll. I wake up - snap! - and I am back in 2022. Over 50 years, vanished! Paul is 79 years old, and Ringo is eighty-freaking-one, and I’m over 60. I half expect to walk outside and see women with bangs and lavish eye makeup, and daisy-embossed VW bugs everywhere. But no - Holy Christ! That was half a century ago.
I feel at peace. I feel that a wound is healed and the scar is gone. I feel like I spent good time with good friends. And for that, I am forever grateful to Peter Jackson, his crew, and The Beatles.