December 12, 1968: Countdown to the Get Back sessions

21 days until the start of the Get Back sessions

A thousand miles separated Paul McCartney and John Lennon on December 12, 1968, yet the Beatles remained entwined in spirit, meeting the press and teasing a glimpse at the project they shared on the horizon.

Paul, girlfriend Linda Eastman and her daughter, Heather, vacationed for several days in Portugal in mid-December 1968 – contemporary reports put it at eight days, while host Hunter Davies maintained it lasted two weeks in later accounts. The January 1969 Beatles Book magazine said it was just a week, and that’s what I’m leaning toward myself for reasons that I’ll make clear when we get there.

It didn’t take long for locals to catch wind that a Beatle was there on holiday — even with his late-night arrival on December 10 and access to private lodging. As Davies related in his 2006 book “The Beatles, Football and Me,” upon landing at the airport, Paul asked someone “official looking” to exchange £50 to Portuguese escudo, but Macca grabbed a cab before getting the currency back.

“A story had gone round about this idiot Englishman giving money away,” Davies wrote. “Then one person had said, ‘Oh no, I recognized him, he’s not an idiot, he’s a Beatle.’”

And so the Beatle was out of the bag. It was around that point, on his third day in Portugal, Paul called on the media to make a deal. Per Davies, the Beatle offered to meet reporters one time in exchange for privacy for the rest of his vacation. Common wisdom holds this small, informal press conference happened on December 12, because it’s mentioned in newspapers dated the following day, and because Davies later wrote it happened on Paul’s third day in Portugal. But like many other events in this period, we’re going with educated guesses.

Paul held court on the private beach attached to Davies’ home. Photographic and film evidence of the meeting survived. What doesn’t seem to be circulating is a decent scan of any news coverage that emerged from the interviews. If one surfaces before I make it to a library in Portugal, please let me know!

The best we seem to have is the above scan from page 11 of the December 13 issue of Portuguese daily Diário Popular. If you’re one of the proud few who have studied Paul’s ’68 vacation to Portugal to any degree, you’ve probably seen this page.  It’s clear enough to make out headlines and images, but most of the text is too fuzzy to get any decent read on what’s being discussed.

What we can make out (via Google Translate):

• The photo’s caption is simply “Paul McCartney & Louise [sic] Eastman, photographed on Luz Beach.”
• The box under the photo says: Paul McCartney speaks to << Diário Popular>> about his eventual marriage to photographer Linda Eastman.
• The main headline reads: “Anything could happen …”
• A subhed in the middle of the story says: “A new Beatles show on English TV.” Presumably this is Get Back-to-be.
• There’s a reference to “was a fool on English TV.” Maybe it’s something about Magical Mystery Tour? Just a guess.
• Hunter Davies and wife Margaret Forster earn a mention, and she’s named in reference to her popular novel, Georgy Girl.

Paul also wrote a greeting to the newspaper’s readers in English. Let’s note he represents his full group, not himself or even his family-to-be, inking “Love from the Beatles,” with a heart and arrow through it and his signature. On the other side of the page was a photo that looks like Paul sketching this very message. Again, Linda is named “Louise” in the caption. (When I worked at a newspaper, they would have skewered me if I got that sort of thing wrong so many times in one place.)

Never one to avoid his own media coverage, Paul was captured by Linda – that’s her name, I promise – checking out (we think) this December 13 issue of Diário Popular on the beach. You’ve seen it elsewhere on this blog, and now you’re going to see it again:

In 2006, Davies shared previously unseen footage at a book festival, just a few minutes of a short 8mm home movie of Paul, Linda and Heather along with his own family during the stay, including a moment from the above media meeting.

Davies recalled the media held their end of the bargain, but for the remainder of Paul’s stay businesses from nearby Lagos tried to lure him with tributes of flowers, fruit baskets and wine left at Davies’ home.

While Paul worked on ensuring the press stayed away from his temporary beachfront residence, John eagerly welcomed the media to his own home. Paul mentioned the possibility of an upcoming television show, but John actively performed for the cameras, including a tiny glimpse into Get Back sessions-to be.

We know Let It Be’s “I’ve Got a Feeling” pieced from two separate songs – Paul’s main section and John’s “Everybody Had a Hard Year.” John’s contribution was written and recorded prior to this date in late 1968, though it’s not clear precisely when. Musically, it’s quite nearly “Julia,” not just the distinctive fingerpicking style, but the guitar’s melody, too. This initial take uses the lyric “everyone” instead of “everybody.”

John revisited the song on this Thursday, singing a register lower and in harmony with Yoko. As opposed to the earlier version, we know everything about this one: It was filmed by an Austrian TV crew from public broadcaster ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk) on the patio at John’s Kenwood estate on December 12, in color on a cloudy day, and later tacked onto the end of the March ’69 Austrian broadcast of the couple’s “Film No. 6 (Rape).” The camera pans across the estate to find John and Yoko seated on a white iron bench, both behatted and in black from head-to-ankles, with white footwear. John is playing acoustic guitar.

The lyrics remain a work-in-progress, but it’s the same gist later used by the Beatles. The song fades in, and you can hear John quickly say “again” as they restart:

Everybody had a hard year

Everybody had a good time

Everybody had a soft dream

Everybody saw the sun shine

Everybody had a hard year

John pauses, points to the camera, nearly touching the lens, and says: “Surprise, surprise.”

Everybody had a hard year

Everybody had a good time

Everybody had a soft dream

Everybody saw the sun shine

Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah

The fine line between this song and “Julia” blurs again, musically. And as quickly as the camera arrived, it pans away from the house and the clip ends.

We can present this is as a tidy metaphor: The day after the Dirty Mac performance of a White Album track, John turned the page and now has his sights set on the next project, or at least on new material bouncing around his head. Perhaps he’s just realizing that as he interrupts himself after a verse: “Surprise, surprise.”

ORF moved operations inside the house, where Yoko hosted a tour of the in-home gallery while John occasionally played a funky little riff on the acoustic guitar. Some of this day’s footage was packaged as part of a documentary on John and Yoko that also aired in Austria in March 1969 (some clips ended up in the 1988 film Imagine: John Lennon as well as in the Beatles Anthology).

Included in the footage is a chess game between John and Yoko on an all-white chess set. “John has a marvelous sense of color and all that, he’s a very sensual artist,” Yoko explains. “I’m not particularly good in using color. White is just to say that you can color it and to say that you can imagine it. It doesn’t mean that I insist on white.”

Presenting items from her Half-a-Wind Show, Yoko invokes the other half of her sky: “A person is a half anyway. … My concept was maybe subconsciously, I was half a person without meeting John.”

Like a lot of events in this narrow period, there are conflicting reports on dates — I should have this disclaimer on every post, really. For instance, the book packaged with the 2021 Let It Be deluxe reissue dated the “Everybody Had a Hard Year” film clip to December 15, 1968. But that’s wrong. I’m trying to get these dates as accurate as they can be and correcting the record where it should be corrected (like the dates of Paul’s Portugal trip).

When it comes to all things John and Yoko, Lennonology is the essential reference, and I’m considering it the authority when there’s any conflict between dates. Co-author Chip Madinger confirmed to me the date of the December 12 filming – it was the second of a two-day visit by ORF, which also shot footage at the Rock and Roll Circus.  Likewise, the Internet (among others) wrongly attributes a series of interviews John and Yoko gave on December 14 to December 12. So that’s why I’m not writing about those interviews in this post. (And thanks for the help, Chip!)

In the wake of his divorce with Cynthia being finalized five weeks earlier, December 1968 would be near the end of John’s time at Kenwood. For at least the last week, newspapers reported he and Ringo Starr had both put their Weybridge estates up for sale. According to AP, John’s asking price was £40,000 (about $96,000), while Ringo sought £50,000 (about $120,000).

There was one other relevant news item involving John and Yoko on December 12. The Ministry of Health issued a statement defending John, who slept on the floor during Yoko’s stay in the hospital when she suffered a miscarriage weeks earlier.  In response to a complaint, the Ministry wrote, “Although routine visiting is generally channeled to regular times, when necessary prospective parents may be afforded the facility of remaining together when such a course is considered to be medically desirable.”

George Harrison remained under the radar at the start of December. The Quiet Beatle’s parents, ironically, made news for simply “living quietly.” Per a story in the December 12 Manchester Evening News, with the “hustle and bustle of ‘Beatlemania’ behind them, Louise and Harry Harrison “are seldom troubled by callers and receive only 500 letters a week.” Louise is three months behind, but still responds to all the fan mail.