Tag Archives: 1970

May 7, 2024 · 1:13 pm

TMBP Extra: Then and now

It’s spring 2024 A.D., and when we last saw the Beatles, they were vanishing before our eyes in the “Now and Then” video, ascending to Pepperland, probably. In the moment, it was a powerful and tidy conclusion to the clip and the greater arc of their career.

But to paraphrase Paul McCartney, there is no end to what they can do together. Having reclaimed the top spot on the charts in what they trumpeted as their “last song,” the Beatles have chosen to re-audition after all.

The Beatles don’t really do tidy endings. They keep the accidental outtake “Her Majesty” after the majestic “The End.” They break up the band in the most clumsy fashion. And now, after the triumphant back-to-back successes of the Get Back docuseries in 2021 and “Now and Then” last November, the Beatles exhume a movie George Harrison called a “fiasco” and “painful,” John Lennon said made him “sick” and Ringo Starr said had “no joy.” Ringo’s quote is from two weeks ago. Ringo still has issues with Let It Be. Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to promote this thing?

Leave it to me, Ringo. I’m excited, because the return of Let It Be to Beatles canon is critically important, even as it comes off now as the Beatles trying to be completists.

Once I started listening to the full run of Nagra Tapes on my own in 2012, it completely changed my point of view on how the sessions played out. I’ve been writing that story here for 12 years.  And for most of that time – until Get Back premiered — I could only cross-reference the Nagras’ account with what amounts to a late 20th century antique (a video cassette of Let It Be) and nearly 50 years’ worth of public grievances. And that’s precisely why I didn’t think the film should have remained inaccessible for so long and truly feared it would stay buried. Because Let It Be didn’t tell the story of the Beatles breakup, the reaction to it did. This, above all else, is why Let It Be matters.

I first saw Let It Be on VHS in the mid-1980s – we rented it and subsequently pirated our own copy in a nod to the tradition of Let It Be/Get Back bootleging. Of course I bought into the idea that Let It Be showed their breakup – I was an impressionable fan, didn’t dig independently into it (where were the counter-narratives back then anyway?) and if the Beatles themselves said that’s the way to interpret the film, who am I to say otherwise? If it’s in Compleat Beatles, it was gospel. Also, remember we didn’t have the full Nagras leaked at the time, only a few hours of bootleg records, mainly of performances.

That VHS release, along with an edition on Laserdisc (a contemporary technology with the video cassette) and Betamax, represent the most modern formats on which Let It Be exists prior to its  streaming debut. I’ve written this before, but it’s worth repeating: In the time since street-legal Let It Be appeared on store shelves, you could have picked up A Hard Day’s Night on VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K UHD and streamed it.

The last UK television broadcast of Let It Be came May 8, 1982, according to the Radio Times. The film was screened sporadically in American theaters into the mid-1980s, but then it simply disappeared. Other Beatles productions remained stocked, promoted and upgraded. Magical Mystery Tour (which had its own terrible reputation for a long time) was belatedly released on VHS in October 1988 – like the other Beatle movies, it had its subsequent reissues on modern formats.

Once in a while, Let It Be’s absence was made conspicuous to the general public.

Buried in a 1991 news story about the future collectible value of Disney VHS tapes (which was really a thing, I remember it!), a mail-order video store reported it was tracking down copies of Let It Be videotapes for $180. For context, you could have bought a decent name-brand VCR for that price – or about 10 new copies of “Star Wars” or “Driving Miss Daisy” (or 13 copies of “Sweatin’ To The Oldies”).

Only three years later, on Anthology Eve, a copy of Let It Be was truly priceless.

“[A]pparently the collectors who own it aren’t willing to part with the title,” said a representative from a different specialty video store in 1994.

That was 30 years ago.

Let it Be is haunted by more than a half century of degradation and denigration as a physical product and a featured work in Beatles history, a ruin by which it’s defined.

If you wanted to watch the movie prior to its Disney+ debut, you were forced to view it on technology that peaked in the 1980s in its native format or on a digital copy ripped from those same 40-year-old analog formats. It’s a bad experience. And even in 1970, the original theatrical release was trashed, including the decision to blow up and crop the original 16mm print to 35mm, and it was hit for poor sound quality too.

(David Bowie deliberately had the Blackstar LP, released days before his death in 2016, physically degrade before your eyes, employing a hard clear plastic sleeve destined to aid in wrecking your record beyond routine wear and tear on the turntable and viewable through a window in the front cover.)

Let It Be on Laserdisc

Before you even slipped your Let It Be Laserdisc (for instance) into your player, you were hit over the head with the breakup story on the back cover:

The Beatles were breaking up. The Beatles were boys becoming men. … One squirms as Paul snips at George and Ringo for not playing their parts correctly, as if the Beatles magic was of a kind that could be whipped into shape. But you can’t blame Paul, because he, like us, saw the Beatles coming to an end.

(Paul said exactly as much during 1990s interviews for Anthology, too: “When we got in there, we showed how the breakup of a group works. We didn’t realize that we were actually sort of breaking up as it was happening.”)

That the film originally reached theaters — a reported 225 in the U.S. alone — a month after the “PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES” headline shattered the music world is critical, but not alone in its importance. Some people still expected the wacky, scripted Beatles to appear on the big screen.

Let It Be followed Help! into theaters by less than five years (to get into that headspace, here are some films that came out in 2019 — it doesn’t feel like too long ago). Magical Mystery Tour, which was considered a misstep in its own time, was shown to British television audiences less than 2 ½ years prior.

Don’t think that matters? To give one example, Variety’s May 20, 1970, review of the film bemoaned “the Beatles’ past togetherness, the chummy camaraderie, the quickness to seize on a line and build a series of gags is no longer there.”

Los Angeles Times movie listings, June 20, 1970

We can nitpick even further and argue that if someone wanted to spend their $1.50 or 6/1 ½, maybe it was better spent on Woodstock, which was in theaters much at the same time (Woodstock was reaching more theaters as Let It Be completely ran out of steam). Running 100 minutes longer than Let It Be, the cinematic release of the concert documentary earned widespread critical and commercial acclaim.

Just a few pages away from the movie listings for Let It Be, reviews and stories touted the Beatles’ recent split, and record store ads promoted Paul’s new solo LP.

Or, as that same Variety review said, “If the film has an air of emptiness and resignation, it is because we know that this is almost certainly the last Beatles picture we are going to see.”

Let’s be clear about the Beatles’ audience, now and then. The younger Beatles fan base that exists today is utterly outstanding, bringing a completely different perspective on the group and, critically, lacking the baggage so many of us had to live with and work to shake free. I’m a second-generation fan, a born in the mid-1970s and too late to be around for Beatles’ first run, but I remember the possibility all four could one day reunite. And I remember hearing on the radio John was killed.

I grew up with The Compleat Beatles, Lennon Remembers, Shout! and later aged with Anthology and Drugs, Divorce and a Slipping Image – so the story was baked in: Let It Be was hell, period.

Even the Beatles’ own records promoted that this was a bad time.  The back cover  to Reel Music (1982) said “Let It Be poignantly documents the group’s disintegration while capturing their inimitable songwriting technique,” while the liner notes to Let It Be … Naked nearly 20 years later put it this way:

It is the Twickenham sessions that have characterised the whole Let It Be project as an unhappy one both in the minds of the Beatles themselves and anyone who saw the documentary footage in the movie.

In 1970, Get Back was merely the name of a song and an abandoned LP (and film title) while the Nagras sat securely in Apple Records’ vault. Multiple generations loved the Beatles, but they were all “first-generation” fans who witnessed the group’s evolution and dissolution in real time, not forced to read about it in a book or watching it from a documentary. When Let It Be was promoted in theaters, there wasn’t a new generation of fans to reach.

Let It Be movie posters as displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.

Much as the audience mattered, the four most important figures requiring appropriate contextualization are the Beatles themselves. To them, Let It Be wasn’t just a monthlong session in 1969 and a movie premiering after a breakup in May 1970.  The Let It Be experience spanned the 16 months in between too. That’s a long time.

It’s time that included rejected cuts of the film (“Let me put it this way. I’ve had three calls this morning to say [Yoko Ono footage] should come out” is how director Michael Lindsay-Hogg remembered the reaction to an initial screening).

Those 16 months included several rejected Glyn John edits of the soundtrack album, tapes eventually being dumped on Phil Spector and Paul hating much of what Spector did.

It included John saying he wanted a divorce from the Beatles, and later McCartney accepting it, properly beginning the Beatles solo era.

It had all of the Northern Songs drama and the disintegrating Apple. And Allen Klein brooding over everything.

All of that happened to the Beatles as part of their Let It Be-era experience, when a long and lonely “winter of discontent” really spans six calendar seasons. We can separate an 80-minute film from the period, but how could they?

The music wasn’t blackballed the same way the movie was. I always thought it was great, and I never bought John’s complaints about it (“[Phil Spector] was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit – and with a lousy feeling to it – ever. And he made something out of it … When I heard it, I didn’t puke.”).

I may not have been in under the lights and in front of the cameras, but I do listen to the music and haven’t puked either. It makes me feel quite good! Let It Be made its CD debut in tandem with Abbey Road to great fanfare in 1987, capping the band’s reissue campaign on the new-ish format. A dozen songs from the sessions appeared on 1996’s Anthology 3.  Seven years later in 2003, a reworked mix emerged as Let It Be … Naked.  We can even throw in Reel Music and the Movie Medley for more examples that they fully incorporated Let It Be’s music into their catalog since its release.

I think the film just sat there as this giant symbolic target. It was harder to pan the companion soundtrack LP when it was such a smash – it had the biggest initial sale of any LP in American history at $26 million in 2 weeks. The movie, on the other hand, was a relative box office failure, pulling in $1.06 million gross. That sounds like a lot of money until you see A Hard Day’s Night made $11 million and Help! pulled in $12 million.

If the music from the same sessions have been tolerated by Beatles Inc. over the last 50 years, what was so damning about Let It Be’s visuals for so long? Was it the scant minutes featuring Yoko in the frame? The “confrontation” between Paul and George. The waltz? We know it wasn’t about Billy Preston, and the rooftop has long been justifiably lionized. The three completed songs performed in the basement (“Two of Us,” “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road”) are perhaps staged a bit too formally, but those have resurfaced at various times in Beatle releases (eg., two of the three on the 2015 “1” DVD).

There is very little in the way of actual dialogue – as in full, extensive conversations — in Let It Be (and in its original print, which is very muddy compared to the MAL-enhanced sounds of the 2020s).

Much of that dialogue fits on one side of a 45, in fact:

George has been quoted multiple times referring to Yoko’s “freakout” with John in Let It Be – but that never made the final cut. An early edit long colored George’s opinion of the film – it wasn’t a first-hand memory, since he wasn’t in the room when Yoko performed with the others. Did George even see the theatrical version of Let It Be?

It’s probably a matter of simple bias: When you listen to Let It Be you can’t see Paul and George bickering, John asking if they can “play a fast one,” Paul yawning, Ringo looking like he’s going through the motions or Yoko just sitting there.

“I’ll play, you know, whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all, if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”

The result is actually backed up by science – what we hear isn’t as sticky as what we see.

Paul and George did bicker. Yoko did just sit there. That’s real, even if that’s not all they did.

What is spread out over eight hours in Get Back simply didn’t translate as well over 80 minutes in Let It Be. Some of that was by choice — maybe it could have benefitted by one less oldies cover and one more evolution of an original song — but there was really little wiggle room in the format.

We’re lucky to have Get Back, for its clarity of picture and sound, and all that footage. Normally a recording session wouldn’t have a particular story to tell — group frustrations come to a boil, a member walks out, but they rally and stage a memorable performance, etc. — and in 1969/70, the Beatles never intended to tell anything more than “this is how an album is made, and here we are performing it as the payoff” as the original TV concept.

And to that end – with Get Back as its companion — Let It Be should be considered an honest depiction of the band. Still, it’s always been a struggle to describe what exactly Let It Be is.

The original movie trailer (which was given an homage in the 2024 Disney+ trailer) asked viewers to view the band “rehearsing, recording, rapping, relaxing, philosophizing, creating.”  One movie ad was more blunt: “The Beatles singing their songs, doing their thing.”

Let It Be appeared on HBO in the late 1970s, and the cable network’s guide described the film on different occasions as “A film to make you smile” and, simply, “McCartney sings Besame Mucho.”

The original movie poster (“an intimate bioscopic experience”) and present-day blurb on Disney+ (“Available for the first time in over 50 years, the original 1970 film about the Beatles”) both tout the plain fact that Let It Be is a movie as it’s main descriptor.

It feels like the original VHS box got the story right, with a positive spin not common at the time:

An exhilarating documentary of the making of an album by The Beatles, the film concentrates on the many recording sessions that went into the production of the “Let it Be” album. It offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of this world-renowned group as well as the subtle relationships among the individual members. There is jamming of old songs and painstaking work on new ones. In search of a new direction, The Beatles play an inspired concert on the roof of their London offices.

In the announcement of the 2024 reissue of Let It Be, Peter Jackson said Get Back and Let It Be “enhance each other.”

 ‘Let It Be’ is the climax of ‘Get Back,’ while ‘Get Back’ provides a vital missing context for ‘Let It Be.’

That first part sounds reversed, but the director is absolutely right. Let It Be isn’t backward compatible because of how it directly influenced the subsequent 50 years of Beatles history. Let It Be owns it’s baggage, period.

Get Back told a specific story, but it was reactionary, too, not simply giving a nod to Let It Be, but deliberately clarifying — and in a sense undermining — some of the original film’s more negative moments.

My favorite example (of several): Paul tries to stifle a yawn in Let It Be,  50-year-old proof that the band is bored. But a drowsy Beatles performance of “I’m So Tired” results in a minute-long sequence in Get Back, with everyone yawning. George yawns his way through Paul’s magical “Get Back” origin story.

For all the drama in Get Back — agonizing over the band’s future, dealing with walkouts (George) and sit-ins (Yoko) — the only real resolution we get was to the problem of how to stage the show, by going onto the roof. Both films feature the same ending, with Get Back criminally dustheaping the full indoor performances, a robbery rectified with Let It Be’s restoration.

No matter how Michael Lindsay-Hogg edited Let It Be, he was stuck in his time. We all knew what came after the credits in 1970 — it wasn’t a gag reel or sneak preview, but a very public breakup, a breakup that was inevitable whether the January 1969 sessions were in front of cameras or not.

“We filmed the whole thing showing all the trauma we go through,” John said in the April 12, 1969, Melody Maker, which hit newsstands right around the time the “Get Back” b/w “Don’t Let Me Down” single was released and more than a year before Let It Be reached theaters.

Tellingly, there’s more to the quote: “Every time we make an album we go through a hellish trip.” (emphasis mine).

Let It Be was put together  in the Beatles’ time, yet could only reflect the past tense. It’s no accident Michael put Paul’s piano rendition of “Adagio for Strings” —  once voted the ““saddest classical” song — over the opening credits.

Fifty years later, with a different concept and such a different, wider audience, Get Back allowed — and still allows — us to dream on a future.  It freed the Beatles from the events that came after it. That story, so focused on the friendship of the band, directly set up “Now and Then.” The same rooftop ending delivered an alternate ending.

The existence of Get Back offers the original Let It Be the same liberation. Today, in 2024 and beyond, it’s indeed the climax to Get Back, the scar that healed over, at once an apocryphal footnote and a window into the post-breakup era — if you know to look for it.

Leave a comment

Filed under Extra

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 10, 2023 · 12:28 pm

TMBP Extra: Stay till it’s time to go

“The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops – that’ll be the time to worry. Not before. Until then, The Beatles are alive and well and the Beat goes on, the Beat goes on.”

These were the instructions Apple publicist Derek Taylor articulated April 10, 1970, the marker for the end of the greatest pop music group there ever will be, the day the papers blared “PAUL QUITS THE BEATLES.”

That was more than 53 years ago, and it’s still not time to worry.

I felt compelled to write about “Now and Then,” the Beatles’ new single, and “last song,” even though I generally keep my focus to the Get Back sessions of a half-century earlier. One of the reasons I started researching and writing They May Be Parted in 2012 is because I thought I was investigating the endgame of the Beatles, and I wanted to understand that ending. Listening to the Nagra tapes of the sessions themselves, the January 1969 sessions weren’t what we were led to believe, a revision to history that now is mainstream opinion since the release of the Get Back docuseries.

I’ve posted some takes on “Now and Then” on social media and voiced a few others as a podcast guest, but since I have this permanent platform, I wanted to post here for posterity, too.  Maybe this is more for me than anyone else. I tried to keep my thoughts in some kind of order, but this is certainly a brain-dump of high order. 

“Now and Then” was released just over a week before I published this post, and today hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts. My feelings on the song and the accompanying video evolved in that short time, and may continue to, I’m sure. 

There simply won’t be and can’t be consensus on any aspect of “Now and Then.” Contemporary critics routinely called Beatlemania a fad. One writer famously said Sgt. Pepper was “ultimately fraudulent.” Abbey Road was described by another as “an unmitigated disaster.” So from the jump, we can abandon any thought of a common opinion and there doesn’t need to be. It only matters what it means to you, if anything. It’s like attending a funeral — you go because you feel compelled to mourn for your own personal reasons. 

Assuming we all know the original backstory – John Lennon committed the idea to cassette in the late 1970s and widow Yoko Ono handed the tapes of this and three other songs to Paul McCartney in 1994 for use as potential new Beatles songs – let’s pick things up in 2023 with the song’s rollout.

One basic truth to have any “Now and Then” discussion: We simply have to accept the fact this song and video exist in order for us to have a reasonable conversation about it. Whether the song should or shouldn’t exist never was our call. It was up to the two living Beatles and the two estates.  In the 1990s, the decision was made to break the seal and reopen the Beatles as an active unit. This is just a continuation of that act in the 1990s. 

Is it real, or is it TDK?

George Harrison left explicit instructions to his son, Dhani, and Jeff Lynne outlining how he wanted Brainwashed, his posthumous 2002 LP, to be finished after his death. John didn’t leave behind anything except for the music itself.  If the tape of “Now and Then” actually said “For Paul” in John’s writing, we just don’t know if that meant it was dedicated to him, meant to give to him to listen to or something else altogether.  It could imply there were tapes that said “For May” or “For Sean.” Maybe there were and no one else has seen them.

Since I’m picking up the story in 2023 via 1995, I’m not really going to get into John’s original intent or inspiration in writing the song, the deeper Lennon-McCartney relationship, the Carl Perkins “My Old Friend” stuff or anything along those lines. There are some terrific voices in the Beatles-sphere who can offer their opinions on that. But ultimately, the most important interpreter is Paul. If we all (myself included) can hyper analyze every word and every note the Beatles play and find deeper meaning, certainly Paul McCartney has the right to decode and determine how a song by his longtime songwriting partner and dear friend spoke to him.

The 2023 rollout window for “Now and Then” was highly compact, and it allowed for knee-jerk takes and then knee-jerk reactions to those initial takes.

Straight away, Paul stumbled into the first step of the rollout in June, saying AI was key to completion of the song. Really, the blame goes to the person who wrote the BBC headline: “Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence has enabled a ‘final’ Beatles song.”

The clumsy description spoiled the promotion of project from the outset, even if the actual use of the the technology wasn’t anything wrong. If he just said “we’re using same gadgets Peter Jackson used to clean up the Get Back tapes” it wouldn’t have put the rollout on the back foot from the start.

Jackson put together the magnificent making-of documentary, unveiled the day before the song’s actual release, on November 1, pulling together unseen home movies of John and Anthology-era footage of George. How remarkable it was to be able to enjoy them both so alive again. Watching Paul singing along to “Now and Then” in the 1990s was extremely moving. 

Regardless of whether the musical performances of “Now and Then” in the documentary were a solid sync job or authentic, the sequence made a straight-line link between the ’90s and now, pulling “Now and Then” into the Anthology era as second-act Beatles song and doing everything it could to ensure George was part of this story. Utilizing the Yellow Submarine time travel and timeline was deft, and little easter eggs like using Magic Alex’s sound “technology” was clever and really gave a deep nod and wink to let even the most diehards know, “We’re with you, and this new song can speak to you too.”

It’s entirely anecdotal, from social media, but people started to weep once they heard John Lennon’s voice in isolation. It took me until a few seconds later, when Paul joined him in harmony.

To me, that’s one of the most important and enjoyable features of “Now and Then,” which was officially released on November 2  — Paul owns his “old-man voice,” which he really hasn’t done during his solo career as it’s become more prominent. He’s treating his Beatles work separate from his solo work, which often takes him out of his realistic vocal range.  But for this final Beatles track, he leans into that feature of his singing voice as a complement to John, who in his mid-to-late 30s when he recorded “Now and Then” was about 40 years Paul’s junior at his current age. It would have been like John singing with an 81-year-old George Burns in 1977.

I think the strings do a great deal of heavy lifting. Superficially, this is the biggest difference with whatever they would have worked on in the ’90s, when they didn’t employ strings at all on “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” I found the arrangement lovely and not overwhelming, evocative enough of “I Am the Walrus” and “Eleanor Rigby” without overwhelming the listener.  

I’ll say the same for the harmonies that were sampled from “Because,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Here, There and Everywhere.” Giles Martin applied them tastefully and subtly enough into the fabric of the song it sounded completely natural. 

Ringo was typically fab on the kit, and his added color on vocals were welcome. But it’s too bad surviving guitar parts were mixed low as they were. Much has been said about Paul’s slide solo in tribute to George — it did make you miss George, and it probably would have had a little more flavor and guts to it had he been around.

I do really feel like they were playing together, instead of this cross-generational, cross-dimensional, analog-digital hybrid. It’s all very tidy, under four minutes, not at all ponderous and conscious of overstaying its welcome. 

I thought John’s original recording was a little slight — I didn’t love any of the original piano sketches as they were taped, to be completely honest.  Certainly they were never meant to be release-ready or anything close to it. 

In contemporary interviews from the Anthology era, Paul himself didn’t pull any punches when it came to the quality of the content itself. On what was clearly “Now and Then,” from the November-December issue of Beatlefan:

Yeah, what’s it called – I don’t know, it didn’t really have a title [Sings: “You know/it’s true; it’s up to you…] That beginning bit’s great and then it just goes a bit crummy. We all decided that it’s not one of John’s greatest songs. So that we’d have to manipulate all of that, which is just a little bit more difficult.

I think it’s worth considering how different a 1995 version of the song would have been. We can be assured the overall sound would be different with Jeff Lynne at the helm as originally planned. Would the song have been adjusted, arranged and edited the same way? At the minimum, George would have had a say in the song’s writing and arrangement, probably in a 50-50 manner with Paul (minus some percentage offered to Ringo Starr, to be fair).  This is in no way meant to come off crass, but without George’s presence, it freed Paul to fully arrange “Now and Then” with complete freedom. 

Even if every now and then he’d feel so insecure, Paul had the confidence to open up the door to collaborate with John as an equal partner, as he felt he had every right to do and had done so many times. If Paul thought the song’s original bridge was clunky, extraneous and “crummy,” he was justified in killing it. I know it seems insane to say “No, we don’t want to hear any more unreleased John Lennon,” but the Beatles were always great editors. Paul McCartney is a magnificent song fixer, and this is the ultimate, final fix.  

And this returns me to Get Back. I long heard on the Nagras and everyone has since seen in the series that the others explicitly trusted Paul with their songs. He led the way, whether it was John letting him arrange “Don’t Let Me Down” or George welcoming input to “I Me Mine.” That’s just two small examples in a career of such collaboration.

Does “Now and Then” sound like it belongs on a Beatles LP? Of course not, and why should it?  Not quite a mashup, but think of it like the single version of a compilation album. It’s pieces from four of the last six decades woven in under four minutes, I think quite seamlessly. At times “Now and Then” sounds natural in any of those decades, though without fitting comfortably in any of them, either.

What is the essence of a Beatles song? Is it the personnel or the sound? The Beatles didn’t always record as a quartet, certainly not as the years went on. You only needed one Beatle to make Beatles song sometimes. “I Me Mine” was written and rehearsed with no input from John in 1969, and then recorded with him out of the country and having quit the band in 1970. Yet it’s undeniably a Beatles song.

Paul and Ringo got together recently for lunch, but had to send each other files of “Now and Then” — they couldn’t even bother to record the last song in the same room. Maybe there’s something calculated to that: If they couldn’t be in the same room as John and George, then they wouldn’t record without them as a unit. They’d all be apart, together.

The Beatles’ wild variety of styles defines the group’s music. So if it’s not the personnel or sound that makes a Beatles song a “Beatles song,” maybe the essence of a Beatles song rests in its original time — the 1960s. But, as George and John sang in response to “you say stop” in “Hello Goodbye,” they can stay till it’s time to go. And they decided it wasn’t time to go.

In the last 30 years, since the Threetles first attempted “Now and Then,” we lost George Harrison, Linda McCartney, George Martin, Neil Aspinall, Geoff Emerick and so many others, people close to the Beatles, their story and their music. John wasn’t the only one missing anymore, and each of these people to some degree must have been on Paul’s mind as he worked on “Now and Then,” this song of memories and loss. 

And to that end, it’s also quite clearly a song of closure. The promotion — so actively screaming that it’s the “last” Beatles song — leans completely into that. But the music does too. I’m not any kind music theorist, but I have two operational ears, and this is what I hear:

“Now and Then” is the only one with a conclusive ending. 

I love the concept of the butterfly effect, so let’s apply it here. There’s no answer, but what if “Free as a Bird” had the poor demo tape recording and “Now and Then” ended up salvageable in 1995? Maybe the quote I shared earlier, where Paul said it was “not one of John’s greatest songs” would have meant “Real Love” would have been the lone reunion song? We’re left to guess.

And that brings us to the video. It’s divisive and a little insane. 

There’s a lot to unpack. My initial reaction was that it was too contrived, too scattered. The 1990s Anthology outtakes were outstanding, as it was in the making-of film — images of George we hadn’t seen before and the Threetles at work. But my overall first impression was that this video was the kitchen sink, trying to stuff so much in four minutes: present-day performances, ’90s video, archival footage and photos. 

I would imagine that if they didn’t do the “Free as a Bird” video already, that would have been an apt solution. 

That’s one way to go, when there’s a member of the band who’s not around anymore, a creative film that had few images of the Beatles as they had been and none of the surviving members pictured in the ’90s. “Real Love” took a more straightforward approach, compiling moments from throughout their career with 1990s footage. But there’s no narrative.

Roy Orbison died shortly after the first Traveling Wilburys album came out in 1988, and in the “End of the Line” video, released a few months later, he was represented by a rocking chair with a guitar and a photograph shown during his vocal lines. It was moving and sad, but I don’t think it was an approach that would have worked for the Beatles, with half the band gone. It would have come off maudlin, and completely against the idea that “Now and Then” was a full-group effort. (Mind you, I don’t think “End of the Line” was maudlin — it was still in the early phases of mourning Orbison.)

I was completely skeptical when I first saw 1967-era “Hello, Goodbye” John and George intermingling with 2023 Paul and Ringo. The word “cringe” was thrown around a lot on social media, and I get that. My thinking on the video quickly evolved from the first to second viewing — your milage may vary. 

We’re faced with two issues: Would the departed Beatles want to be represented this way? And if so, should it be as silly as presented? 

Paul as Beatle Paul (above) in 1980 and George as Beatle George (below) in 1974.

Let’s not pretend George and John didn’t revisit their Fab Four period in their solo years. Putting aside the many callouts in songs, either cryptic or overt, George did things like dress in the same Sgt. Pepper costume he wore in “Now and Then” and elsewhere, and John literally had the Beatles on the cover of a solo record. Complicated feelings they may have been, they never wrote off that time.

St. Pepper George in the 1974 “Ding Dong” video, one of many Beatle guises he employed as he tried to “ring out the old.”

In their day, the Beatles embraced comedy in their films and promos, and beyond into the solo years (George was the funniest of all, with his estate keeping that flame alive). Even with a wistful lyric at play, it wouldn’t be the Beatles’ way to match it with a bleak visual. 

One way they could have gone would have been to make multiple videos, something the Beatles did themselves over their career and when they went solo. Build out a full video of the ’90s sessions co-mingled with appropriate ’70s Lennon home or studio footage. The Beatles at work on their last song.

Another direction would be a more direct clip/highlight reel, something they added to the video for “Real Love,” but now with another 30 years of memories added, and earlier footage cleaned up.

Finally in the last video, they could have really owned the time-travel element and gone completely bananas. Stick Paul into the “How Do You Sleep” sessions. Put 60 years of Ringos into one room. Get the 1980 Paul pretending to be the 1960s Paul and put him on stage with the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto. You get the idea. Really play into the fact these four guys were always together, even when we can document they weren’t.

Those were my knee-jerk impressions of the video, kind of a mixed bag. Then I watched the video again, this time with my wife, who helped me open my eyes to a better interpretation.

A lot of people really don’t like the video, and I get it. It’s jarring, uncomfortable and the technology — as impressive as it is — still isn’t perfect. 

Peter Jackson described the concept as “Ringo and Paul in 2023 trying to work on a song and they get invaded by the 1967 Beatles,” but I think there’s much more to it than that. 

It’s Ringo and Paul deliberately surrounding themselves with the John and George they knew so well. At a funeral, wake, shiva – this is when we remember and talk of the vibrant life of the person we’re remembering, sharp and in color, not memories of their weakness or death. These days are filled with silly memories and pictures from all across their lives, laughter among the tears. I don’t think there’s any doubt Paul and Ringo vividly remembered a vitalized John and George — and even their own former vigorous selves — when they were in the studio last year working on “Now and Then.”  It’s just the Beatles and their closest associates:  George Martin was embodied through his son, and Mal Evans through the MAL technology used to extract John’s voice. 

This part of the video isn’t meant for us, it’s for them. We just get to be voyeurs. 

As the video nears the end, their life literally flashes before their eyes. Again, the animation is awkward in spots, but I’ll argue in favor of the concept. When I look at a photo of people I’ve lost in my life, their memory isn’t stuck in that 4×6 print. They live, they move. Every time I see their face, it reminds me of the places we used to go, a concept Ringo and George certainly understood.  

And then we were snapped back into reality, the reality of 1964, and the Beatles all together in a single time and place. With their concluding bow, taken from their performance of “She Loves You” in the “A Hard Day’s Night” film, the Beatles vanish before our eyes, and the lights spelling out their name burn out. That was the point in the video I lost it. 

If the rest of the video was for the surviving Beatles, this ending was for us, the Beatles fan, the rest of the world. They were singing to us now, not each other. 

Deliberate or not, this ending evokes a dramatic sequence in The Compleat Beatles, an unauthorized but highly valuable biography of the band from 1982. In the sequence on the breakup of the band, we see the iconic black-and-white photos of the band from April 1969, with George, Ringo, John and Paul vanishing, in sequence, as “I’m So Tired” plays in the background, the aggressive lyric, “I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind.” 

In the “Now and Then” video, that tone has changed. Go to the source in “A Hard Day’s Night,” and you can hear the valedictory statement they give prior to their bow: “With a love like that, you know you should be glad.” See, it does work both ways: If Paul McCartney and Peter Jackson can search for deep meaning in these kinds of things, so can I.

The Beatles have said “Hello, Goodbye” many times. Breakup rumors started in 1964, and continued until they actually broke up. Until their partial reunions. The only endings that ultimately matter are John Lennon’s death in 1980 and George Harrison’s in 2001.

I’ll bring things back one more time to Get Back, Let It Be and original breakup, with these points: No living Beatles (out of four) approved the Get Back edit by Glyn Johns in 1969 (it later came out packaged with the Let It Be reissue in 2021). That’s two fewer Beatles that approved “Now and Then.”

I don’t think they could have sold “Now and Then” as a genuine cosmic reunion of friends, not merely co-workers, without the Get Back docuseries coming first. That set the stage to a mainstream audience that the the Winter of Discontent was much milder than forecast. 

And thus ends the Beatles’ final act. Or does it?  Paul offered this relevant remark to his fan club magazine, Club Sandwich, in the Winter 1995 issue, when asked if Anthology was the “last word” on the group:

I don’t know. That’s the difficult thing. In the electronic press kit we all enigmatically said, “Where does the circle end and where does it begin? An end is a beginning, of sorts.” But to me, for now, it’s an end.

An entire new generation of fans had the experience of hearing the “last” new Beatles song as their first new Beatles song, something some of us got to experience in the 1990s, in the 1980s, in the 1970s and all the time in the 1960s. Where does the circle end and where does it begin?

There is no end to the Beatles, as long as they occupy our lives, our ears, our eyes. Don’t take it from me. Just ask Derek Taylor, who said this on April 10, 1970: 

“The Beatles have changed so many lives, that the need for them still exists. The hope that they represent still exists. And as long as that exists, then they have to exist. They’ve got to be there to fulfill that need, and who are they to take themselves away, to say ‘OK kids, that’s it’? …

“If the Beatles don’t exist, you don’t exist.”

4 Comments

Filed under Extra

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 22, 2021 · 8:00 pm

TMBP Extra: That road before

As a film, Let It Be has more backstory than story.

In Beatle-time, the 15-plus-month turnaround from the end of their January 1969 sessions until the film’s release in May 1970 was simply a glacial pace. Then from the moment it reached theaters, Let It Be has been treated as a snuff film.

You can virtually see them breaking up … it’s a wonder the picture was made at all.

That’s director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, quoted in a syndicated wire story the week of the film’s release, ostensibly to promote the film. We’ll never know if he’d have said the same thing if the film come out in sometime in 1969 as originally planned, when it was provisionally titled Get Back.

It only took 51 years, but Get Back is about to be on television after all — a movie-turned-television-show, the reverse of Let It Be’s trajectory from TV show to feature film.

To put 51 years into context, it’s 11 more years than John Lennon spent in the material world. It’s about as far away from today as the release of Let It Be was from the Treaty of Versailles. It’s a relative eternity.

Let’s pick up this story after January 1969. The Beatles completed busy and fruitful winter sessions split between Twickenham Film Studios and their own basement recording studios at 3 Savile Row with dozens of hours of audio and video that would emerge as a TV show and springtime LP, their follow-up to the White Album.

The February 1969 issue of the Beatles Book, their fan club magazine, said that while there was “still no fresh progress” on the Beatles’ next film, it was a “priority job” for the new year. They hadn’t yet realized the film was already in the can.

For the next several months, a clear pattern emerged: The release of the album was delayed because the movie was hung up.

April 29, 1969: Melody Maker reported 68 hours of footage was about to be edited down, “from which two films will be produced.”

May 3, 1969: “This film … somebody’s editing that at the moment. It’s sixty-eight hours, and they’re trying to get it down to five for several TV specials. Or then, it might be a movie. I don’t know” — John, to Melody Maker

Early July 1969: The Beatles Book reported the release of the album and a companion book would be delayed because “the fellows would like the film to go on television in August so that everything comes together at the same time.”

July 12, 1969: “[The LP] is tentatively set for September release … to coincide with the screening of the group’s TV special. … If the TV show is delayed until later in the autumn, it is possible that an alternative album … will be released first. From all the many reels of film shot during their recording sessions, the Beatles are hoping to produce a three-hour cinema film, from which the two-hour TV special would then be extracted.” — NME

The Beatles and family, at the July 20, 1969, rough cut screening.

July 20, 1969: The same day mankind made a giant leap on the moon, the stars of the film sat in place for a while to view Michael’s working cut of the film, which at the time clocked in at about 2 1/2 hours. This was about three months after editing was reported to be getting under way.

July 21, 1969: The day after the screening, Beatles assistant Peter Brown phoned Michael, asking on behalf of the group just one required edit: Whack a half-hour of John and Yoko footage. In his 2011 memoir Luck and Circumstance, Michael wrote he was told, “Let me put it this way. I’ve had three calls this morning to say it should come out.”

July 29, 1969: Variety reported plans to screen a TV special to coincide with the release of the Get Back LP. “The TV show and a three-hour cinema version are still at the editing stage,” the magazine said.

Early August 1969: The Beatles Book said the Get Back LP will be pushed back again to coincide with the film, “probably towards the end of November.”

August 30, 1969: “There is still no news of release of the … ‘Get Back’ album. … It is understood that this will still be issued as a soundtrack album for the film, however, and that Christmas is a possibility.” — NME

September 1969: After screening a new cut at some point this month, the group signed off on the film to business manager Allen Klein, according to Michael. In what could simply be a coincidence, the same month also saw John announce to the others that he was quitting the Beatles. They released Abbey Road in September, too.

September 20, 1969: Six days before that very release, NME reported the 85-minute “Get Back” film would premiere early in 1970. The paper said the documentary had been edited from “five hours of film taken at the time,” quite the error of scale. The paper does say, however, that the movie is expected to be picked up by United Artists in order to fulfill their three-film commitment. The Beatles’ priority for the year, as mentioned in February, was now complete. This is definitely a scoop, with Variety reporting the same UA deal the following April.

October 1969: Counter to the NME story, the Beatles Book maintained the LP and film would come out in December. Elsewhere in this issue, in Steve Turner’s article on the Beatles’ effect on modern culture, the rumor that the Beatles may film a version of Lord of the Rings was revived.

November 1969: The Beatles Book was back to reporting a 1970 release with UA distributing.

On the very eve of the Let It Be’s ultimate release in May, we can catch a glimpse of contemporary opinions of the film.

Based on interviews conducted prior to the release of the McCartney LP, the traditional marker for the breakup of the Beatles, BBC Radio 1 broadcast a promotional special on May 23, 1970, in conjunction with the film’s wide release in the UK.

Paul compared the film to watching a painter fill his canvas, calling it a “good film” and “interesting.”

George, however, said he “can’t stand” seeing the “pure documentary of us slogging.

“But for other people who don’t know what we’re really about, who like to go in and see our warts, it’s very good. … It’s the complete opposite to the clinical approach that we’ve normally had.”

Of the album, he says “you can actually get to know us. It’s more human.”

“Exploitation materials and posters” intended for theaters to use for promotion of Let It Be.

Speaking to Rolling Stone for a cover story on the eve of the release of his solo debut — the magazine is dated April 30, but the interview was clearly conducted prior to April 10 — Paul continued to point to the film, which he still referred to as Get Back, in positive terms.

“The Get Back film is a good film. And it is a real film. The troubles are in it as well as the happy moments.”

Paul went on to complain about the delays of the record’s release in interestingly prescient terms while blaming Klein for the holdup.

“The LP is looking to be a joke, for it is a bit of a cliff hanger. I would have liked to have seen it out there three months ago and now I don’t even remember making it.”

It’s tough to keep pace in Beatle-time. Paul’s point is clear, though, even with the tremendous exaggeration.

While the Beatles may have been in a difficult spot in early April 1970, it wasn’t the same spot — difficult or not — they were in January 1969.

When Let It Be was first shown to the public, on May 13, 1970, there was no glitz or red carpet. Instead the film was screened in ordinary theaters dotting the United States, not at a promoted premiere in New York as Apple had initially promoted.

A week later, May 20, the film received a more proper launch, premiering in London and Liverpool with the pomp missing stateside. In London, Beatle exes Jane Asher and Cynthia Lennon were among the guests, which also included Mary Hopkin, Lulu, Spike Milligan and other notables as thousands of fans showed up at the scene. Kevin Harrington, equipment manager at the time, wrote in his memoir that he took an Apple Scruff to the premiere. No Beatles were present, however.

At this moment, two key figures were across the globe, in Los Angeles. John Lennon was in Bel Air undergoing Primal Scream therapy while Michael Lindsay-Hogg was at work about a half-hour away in Hollywood (traffic pending).

The most accurate review yet: “Singing their songs, doing their thing!” (From the May 13, 1970, Californian)

John and Yoko joined Rolling Stone chief Jann Wenner and his wife, Jane, for a showing Let It Be at a sparsely attended theater in San Francisco in the early part of June 1970.

“After the show — moved at whatever level, either as participants or deep fans — we somehow cried,” recalled Wenner.

In a Los Angeles Times interview published just a few days after Lennon saw the movie, Michael again reflected on the difficulty of filming the sessions in terms dramatic enough the reporter remarked “the wonder of it is that he put together even a reel.”

In the June 10, 1970, article, Michael complained the group would disrupt “a lot of good, funny and antagonistic conversation” by playing music and moving microphones away. “I don’t think I got them when they were their most charming,” he said, essentially acknowledging they were never charming given the amount of footage he actually did get.

The article was memorable enough for Michael that he remembered his reaction to it decades later in his book.

… [I] was surprised, or concerned, that what had seemed clear to me when I’d said it had been reported without insight, with no recognition of irony or jokes. The Beatles were portrayed only as argumentative people, without extenuation, without subtlety.

The article prompted a further response, a phone call from fellow director — and father, as he later learned — Orson Welles, who asked Michael if he was happy with Let It Be.

“Some of it,” Michael replied. “It’s hard when your stars are your producers. And there were four of them. … A lot I liked got cut out. … But the footage was good.”

Let It Be arrived at theaters at various points in May 1970, but it was absolutely impossible to separate it and its impact from the April release of McCartney. Ringo’s late-March release of his solo debut, Sentimental Journey, wasn’t necessarily seen to have been as critical to the story as McCartney, but it simply piled on the narrative. Let It Be was the breakup film paired with a breakup soundtrack LP. Reviews of one usually paired with reviews of the other.

Variety’s review, published in their May 20 issue, called the movie “relatively innocuous, unimaginative piece of film. But the musicians are the Beatles, and coming hard on the group’s breakup, … [it’s] charged with it own timely mystique.

The fascination of “Let It Be” is that it is, in a sense, probably the last public appearance of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as a group, with all the gossip and speculation attending the split, reading between the spoken lines of the film becomes a game in itself.

Variety did wisely predict “McCartney … will probably emerge strongest as a major individual talent of the Seventies as a composer and singer.”

Chicago Tribune legend Gene Siskel gave Let It Be three stars, writing “Beatle fans will search the 80-miunte film for foreshadowing of the recently announced breakup.”

In the the Sydney Morning Herald’s review headlined “Let It Be For the Staunch Fans,” writer Evan Williams smartly noted:

It seems a pity that we are not shown at least one song in its early stages of composition. This might have given us a genuine insight into the way the Beatles work. … I never once had the feeling that we were witnessing the creative process at work, or sharing in the mysterious, painful rituals of music-making.

(This key point is something the 2021 Get Back film is set to get right).

Tony Palmer gave a brutal takedown of the film in the Observer’s May 23, 1970, issue.

The film is a bore. … Shot without any design, clumsily edited, defeatedly titled ‘A Feature Film,’ uninformative, awkward and naive. It would have destroyed a lesser group. How could 200,000 feet of film have produced nothing but an extended promotional exercise?

Writing for Punch magazine, Richard Mallett, who described himself “as no pop fan” called the film shapeless but wrote it “will entertain anyone not enraged by the mere idea of the Beatles.” He enjoyed the film’s mood, visuals and interplay of the four Beatles, concluding, “One feels oddly regretful that so bright a bunch has broken up.”

“The Beatles and Friend” – from Punch magazine

These are just a small sampling of reviews. I could have posted hundreds, but you get the idea.

The film performed OK at the box office, seeming to peak in Variety’s weekly rankings at No. 5 in its third week. Per those same rankings, it dropped from No. 8 to 41 on June 17 and then slowly vanished from theaters overall. The film ultimately won an Oscar for its score, but no there weren’t any Beatles around to pick up the trophy. 

From Billboard, June 11, 1970

It’s an understatement to say the Beatles, especially John and George, piled on subsequent years, advancing and ensuring the film’s terrible standing.

Even Capitol Records eventually called out the film’s dim reputation. Remember Reel Music? (Don’t answer that). The 1982 compilation of Beatles movie songs promoted Let It Be like this:

Let It Be poignantly documents the group’s disintegration while capturing their inimitable songwriting technique.

For his part, Paul continued a working relationship with Michael, tapping him for a few promotional videos in the 1970s.

In July 1981, a decade after it was in theaters, Let It Be saw its first home release on VHS (it was later issued on Laserdisc). Again using Variety’s rankings, the tape debuted at No. 31 and kind of bubbled around the 20s, peaking at No. 19 before eventually falling out of the Top 40.

VHS charts, August 1, 1981, Variety.

That makes it 40 years since the movie was last issued for a home audience. In January 2022, “A Hard Day’s Night” is slated for a 4K Criterion Collection reissue. You could have bought that fab film on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-Ray and streamed it online in that same period of time. It’s a big game of telephone, but Michael says that Paul told him George blocked the DVD release in the 1990s, while a planned DVD to be released in tandem with Let It Be … Naked in 2003 never materialized.

Footage from Let It Be trickled out officially on occasion, like in Anthology in 1995, when a whole new audience was exposed to George playing if Paul wanted him to play during the “winter of discontent.” On the flip side, part of the rooftop show ran during the credits of the 2014 documentary “Eight Days a Week,” a lovely — if strictly anachronistic — conclusion to a movie about the Beatles’ touring years.

But for all intents and purposes, the original Let It Be film had its reputation established by its release, with the breakup taking on a disproportionate stake. Decades of unavailability for mainstream viewers cemented the movie as a straw man for late-era Beatles. The only two views of it were “watch the Beatles break up” or “watch for the symptoms of the Beatles breaking up.” There was little middle ground. Maybe Michael Lindsay-Hogg offered up too much subtlety.

Or maybe we also lost some context along the way.

“Once we were everyone’s darlings,” George said in an interview published by AP. “But it isn’t like that anymore. They hate us.”

Ringo agreed in the same article. “It’s shocking the way some sections of the public have turned on us. It’s completely unmerited.”

Those quotes are from April 1969, a year before the band broke up.

It only took 51 years, but Let It Be is Get Back again. It’s out in conjunction with the release of the LP and a book (and within months of competing solo Beatles products). Yet with all this history behind it, it instead arrives with excitement from the band and fans alike, and it’ll draw upon its own blank slate.

6 Comments

Filed under Day by day, Extra

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 19, 2019 · 7:45 am

Jan. 9: Crossroads he’s standing at

During a brief transition immediately preceding the extensive “Let It Be” session late on January 9, 1969, George Harrison opened himself up to significant, retrospective armchair psychoanalysis in just five minutes of music.

He also became a human bootleg.

Everybody’s got somebody to lean on: Lucky and Nelson, November 1968.

Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes with the Band (a huge influence on the Beatles’ Get Back sessions) had been privately circulating since 1968, and the first true rock bootleg — Great White Wonder, which featured two LPs of his music that stretched back to as early as 1961 — surfaced in record shops starting in July 1969.

But this January 9, George — just a few weeks removed from his first collaboration with Dylan — seized a few moments of spotlight and shared a few of his friend’s songs, and ones that the others in the room hadn’t likely heard.

“I Threw It All Away” was so fresh a cut, Dylan wouldn’t record it for his forthcoming “Nashville Skyline” until Feb. 13, precisely two weeks after the Beatles’ rooftop performance and while George was in a London hospital recovering from a tonsillectomy.

Dylan first shared the song with George and wife Pattie Boyd around Thanksgiving 1968 at his home in upstate New York. George retained quite a bit of the song in performing at Twickenham, injecting intensity in his solo acoustic take.

George didn’t perfectly nail the lyrics, but he captured guts of the chorus and parts of the verses — “No matter what you think about it, you just can’t do without it. Take a tip from one who’s tried … And I threw it all away.”

The performance seamlessly went into “Mama, You Been On My Mind,” written in 1964, but to that point another unreleased Dylan track.

Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

When you wake up in the mornin’, baby, look inside your mirror
You know I won’t be next to you

There could be no reason at all George plucked these songs out of thin air this Thursday afternoon, as meaningless as the group’s brief forays into “Tennessee” or “Slippin’ and Slidin‘” within the same hour. He’d been playing Dylan throughout the sessions, after all.

Or …

Maybe the songs reflected George’s mood as he was less than 24 hours from quitting the group. Paul transparently sang the blues about the Beatles in “The Long and Winding Road,” “Let It Be” and “Golden Slumbers,” so why wouldn’t George do likewise? It’s not a significant stretch to consider George was speculating about what he was throwing all away, at these crossroads he was standing at.

Without question, those two Dylan songs did hit home with George.

But …

Maybe it wasn’t necessarily only for the reasons we’ve always supposed.

The January 9 tapes begin with the Paul’s muse, Linda Eastman, visiting the studio. John’s girlfriend, Yoko Ono, had been a Beatles session fixture for months, and this day was no different.

George’s wife, Pattie, was very much not hanging around Twickenham. And when she looked inside her mirror, George wasn’t next to her, because she had walked out on him. But that didn’t mean he was alone at his Kinfauns home.

From Pattie’s autobiography Wonderful Tonight:

I was friendly with a French girl who was going out with Eric Clapton. She was always flirtatious with George, but so were a lot of girls and he, of course, loved it. Then she and Eric broke up — Eric told her to leave — and she came to stay with us at Kinfauns.

It was January 1, 1969, and George and I had seen in the new year at Cilla Black’s house. … We arrived home in good spirits but then everything went swiftly downhill. The French girl didn’t seem remotely upset about Eric and was uncomfortably close to George. Something was going on between them, and I questioned George. He told me my imagination was running away with me, I was paranoid.

Soon I couldn’t stand it so I went to London to stay with Belinda and Jean-Claude. Six days later George phoned me to say that the girl had gone and I went home.

The French girl was 20-year-old Charlotte Martin, and she had been dating Eric for more two years. Eric has since said he left Charlotte because of his growing feelings for Pattie. Why, you can almost say George tried to give her consolation when her old man let her down.

George’s fling was in its final day on January 9 — and after leaving the Beatles the next day, he asked Charlotte to leave Kinfauns, ending the affair.  He would  reconcile with Pattie, and separately, with the rest of the Beatles shortly thereafter.

The two Dylan songs George touched on wouldn’t drift far from his consciousness. Sixteen months after this date, George joined Bob in New York City, where they recorded both “I Threw It All Away” and “Mama, You Been On My Mind,” and the sessions have since surfaced on bootlegs.

George continued to show love for “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” laying down a solo studio version in the 1980s; this was still before Dylan’s first authorized release of the song in 1991. George’s recording would get a proper release in 2012 on Early Takes, Vol. 1.

From Giles Martin, who produced the compilation:

He recorded it at home in Friar Park at some point during the ‘80s, and it originally had programmed drums and loads of keyboards on it, and George had overdubbed himself for a three-part vocal harmony.

I asked [George’s widow] Olivia if it would be OK to break it down a bit, I thought it sounded a lot better stripped to its bones. You can still hear a bit of the drum sound in the background, because there was bleed on the tape — probably coming through from George’s headphones.

George did his own three-part harmonies in the ’80s, but his first vocal partners, John and Paul, were silent on the tapes during George’s brief Dylan set on January 9, 1969.  Walking out on the group, George silenced himself the next day, not only because of his increasingly tense relationship with John and Paul, but with trouble surrounding his marriage, as well.

***

Charlotte Martin remained in rock-and-roll’s inner circle. In a coincidence of the calendar, exactly one year after her last day involved with George, on January 9, 1970,  she met Jimmy Page after a Led Zeppelin concert. The couple would maintain a relationship into the 1980s. Their daughter, Scarlet Page, is a rock photographer of note; she’s shot Paul McCartney and contributed to the Visions of Dylan photo exhibition in 2007.

11 Comments

Filed under Day by day

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 10, 2015 · 11:15 am

Jan. 8: All through the day

It all came together thanks to television, LSD, a dance and a dare.

George Harrison started the fifth day of the Beatles’ sessions at Twickenham, January 8, 1969, with the dare, challenging director Michael Lindsay-Hogg with a new song in hand.

“‘I Me Mine’ it’s called,” George says to the crinkling of paper being unfolded. “Should I sing it to you? I don’t care if you don’t want it, I don’t give a shit about it. I don’t give a fuck. Can go in my musical. [laughter]

“It’s a heavy waltz.”

An edited version of this moment — the origin story of what would become one of George’s two contributions to the Let It Be LP — along with a performance of the song, appears in the film of the same name in a three-minute sequence that closed out the Twickenham portion of the movie. On the Nagra tapes, the band is introduced to the song and would later work through and rehearse it roughly five separate times in the five hours of the day’s tapes, covering about an hour total.

The first 45 seconds of the song are familiar: It’s George accompanying himself on guitar to the first two verses of the song, and those lyrics are the same as would eventually be released. But to this point, there is no chorus, instead a brief flamenco-inspired guitar part bridges the verses.

After this initial debut, George interrupted himself to again gush about John’s 1969 diary — “Got up. Went to work. Came home. Watched telly. Went to bed.” — providing himself a segue to his prior night’s entertainment. Once more, it was the Beatles talking about and drawing inspiration from television.

“It was the TV, you see.” George said, recounting he was watching “that science fiction thing, but then it suddenly turned into that crap about medals and things.” That crap was an episode of the weekly program Europa, “The Titled and the Unentitled.” Per the original TV listing, the show “looks at the aspects of pomp and circumstance through European eyes-with a special report from French Television on the investiture this summer of the Prince of Wales.”

George Harrison, MBE, may have found the subject matter “crap,” but in his role as musical prospector, he found value amidst the precious medals being discussed. Specifically some incidental music during the program — Johann Strauss’ “Kaiser Walzer” — sparked George at some point between 9:55 and 10:25 p.m. GMT the night of January 7.

(George would have seen a different performance. This one is from 1969 but from West German or Austrian television.)

“That’s what gave me the idea. Suddenly, it was the bit where they were all coming in from the ball. I think it was Austria, and they all had their medals. And there was some music that was just playing … like a 3/4 thing. Some things like that happen where you just hear something, and it registers in your head as something else. And so I just had that in there, the waltz thing.

“It’s like one of those things where they’re all swaying.”

Years later, in his pseudo autobiography that took the name of this very song, George addresses the origins of the lyrics.

I Me Mine is the ‘ego’ problem. …

I suppose having LSD was like somebody catapulting me out into space. The LSD experience was the biggest experience that I’d had up until that time. … [A]fter one dose of acid I felt I was stuck in this thing, which later I realised is called ‘relativity’. So, the big ‘I’ I’m talking about is the absolute, whereas we’re in the relative where everything is good-bad, yes-no, up-down, black-white. That’s why they called it the heaven and hell drug! But life is heaven and hell, we see it as, or make it into hell or heaven: there’s no heaven and hell beyond relativity.

So suddenly, I looked around and everything I could see was relative to my ego — you know, like ‘that’s my piece of paper’ and ‘that’s my flannel, or ‘give it to me or I am’. It drove me crackers; I hated everything about my ego — it was a flash of everything false and impermanent which I disliked. But later, I learned from it: to realise that there is somebody else in here apart from old blabbermouth …

Anyway that’s what came out of it: I Me Mine. The truth within us has to be realised: when you realise that everything else that you see and do and touch and smell isn’t real, then you may know what reality is and can answer the question ‘who am I’?.

After an extensive return to discussion of the “science fiction” — the series “Out of the Unknown” and the episode “Immortality Inc.” as excitedly shared in rich detail by George and Ringo — George presents the new song to Paul, who had just arrived at Twickenham.

“Is that grammatical? Flowing more freely than wine? Flowing much freer?” George asks. “If there were such a word as ‘freer’ is it ‘f-r-e-e-e-r?” George asks. “It’s ‘f-r-e-r’” Michael concludes before Paul chips in, “It’s like ‘queer.’”

It would be more than two hours until the group returned to “I Me Mine” — what they did in the interim will, of course, be the subject of subsequent posts. Once they did return to the song, George addressed John, who wasn’t yet at the studio when the song was first introduced. “Would you like to learn a new one?” George asks. “Very simple,” George assures him.

After John clowns around through a couple abbreviated spins through the song and making sure George knows “we’re a rock and roll band, you know,” he mockingly suggests he play the barrel organ.  George had more seriously considered adding an acoustic bass. “Want the accordion?” Paul asks George, who’s open to that sincere suggestion. “If it’s not here, then just fuck it.” Alas, Paul’s accordion — he did have one, you know — wasn’t at Twickenham. What John would really like is an electric piano setup, but that too isn’t yet available. One thing they do have is some working effects, and an upbeat John has plenty of fun with the echo.

Some of the above highlights are edited down and rearranged in the 2021 Get Back docuseries:

“Are you going to teach us this?” John asks, and George supplies the band, at last, with chords to “I Me Mine.” Soon enough, however, John doesn’t play at all. Instead, as Strauss intended, he and Yoko waltz on the soundstage as George, Paul and Ringo provide the soundtrack.

George loves the antics, and doesn’t need the extra musical accompaniment John would offer anyway.

“Do you want to do that on the show?” George asks John. “That’d be great, ‘cause it’s so simple to do, the tune. But to do that waltz, or something, if you want to bag it up a bit.” Laughing, Paul offers a mock show introduction to the song: “John and Yoko would like to waltz in their white bag, And there’s a white bag waltzing around. They were doing things inside it.

“We should do it like an escapoligists thing. You can see they’re not tied at all. There’s nothing up their sleeves. And we put the bag over them.”

Excitedly, George thinks about playing up the character of the song itself, too. “Castanets on that bit,” he suggests for the flamenco part. Through the entirety of the song’s development and rehearsal, the Beatles are animated, embracing the fun of a song outside their normal sound, and thinking visually for the show. Excepting some of Paul’s offbeat ideas for “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” it’s one of the rare times on the tapes the band actively discusses a performance of a song and explicitly how it could be staged.

“Are you sure that’s grammatic?” George asks once more. “Flowing more freely?” Michael assures him it’s fine.

As rehearsals continue and the group works out the transition from the verses into the flamenco bit, Paul finds a bit of inspiration, recalling “Domino,” a hit for Tony Martin nearly two decades earlier, and covered by the likes of Doris Day, Bing Crosby and Andy Williams (whose cover Paul seems to evoke most) in the years since.

While the group worked out the newest Harrisong, the conversation twisted to George’s very first composition, “Don’t Bother Me,” which surfaced on With The Beatles in 1963.

You know I was in bed, at Bourenmouth, we were on a summer season. And the doctor gave me some tonic, which must have had amphetamine or something in it. And the rest of you all just drank it to get high. And that’s when I wrote that one.

John and Yoko apparently continued to dance with enough frequency that Paul called them out on it. “You’ll spoil the spontaneity of the dance when you actually have to do it,” he said. Paul, along with George, offered dance instructions to the pair as the song sharpened quickly. Soon enough the production gained Lindsay-Hogg’s attention, as he must have missed several of the rehearsals as the day progressed.

“That’s great,” MLH says, apparently seeing the dance for the first time and being told it was for the show. “Its beautiful. The whole thing should be very Brechtian. … [The show] should be called ‘January 20, 1969,’ and that every song has a character. Like that’s the character of that one.” The conversation continues about the “very theatrical” live show. But that’s a story for another blog post.

imemine-clip

The Threetles rehearse “I Me Mine.” From the Let It Be film.

Returning to the song, Paul plays the role of fixer again, like he did with “Don’t Let Me Down” days before, as George troubleshoots the transition from the verses into the flamenco break. “That sounds like it would be a good rock bit, it gets out of the idea of the waltz.” The next take on tape (there’s a cut but it doesn’t sounds as if much time had passed) has Paul and George hashing out a chorus that starts as “my my my” to a 12-bar blues progression.

“Just do it like a beep-beep harmony,” Paul says before singing “my my my” in a high register, as he sang “beep beep, beep beep, yeah!” in “Drive My Car” less than four years earlier. This chorus then fell into the flamenco break.

We’re left with another tape cut, but here it is clear a little bit of time has elapsed. The 12-bar progression remains, but now “my my, me me, mine” is sung over it. In a few minutes that would evolve into the “I I, me me, mine” that was later immortalized on wax, but not first without a little bit of push and pull between Paul and George.

Paul: “My my” is good to sing. It’s like “mm-mah, mm-mah.”

“I, I” is not … as easy to do. … It’s like “nn-night” is easy to sing. “Rr-right.” The “mm-mah” is easy … It’s like “my, my, my” is easy to shout.”

While he says Paul can sing what he wants, George’s mind is made up and he continues to sing “I I, me me, mine.” It stuck, and Paul subsequently sang George’s suggestion for the day’s final few attempts (and, of course, on the eventual release).

The final stab at the song for the day, a complete take, is what appeared in the film. For the final hour on the tapes, the band moved onto “The Long and Winding Road” and “Let It Be” before wrapping the day with a lengthy discussion about the live show.

By way of comparison of other songs the group had been working on these first few days, the writing/rehearsal sessions for “I Me Mine” were painless. The development and improvement of the song was linear, resulting in a final run through that may not have been release-ready — nothing at Twickenham was nor was intended to be — but was a sharp, concise (clocking in at under two minutes), complete song that was a reasonable contender for the live show. At that point, with the performance looming in 11 days, that’s all they needed. “Bits” were generally worked out, and there was even a visual to add to the live production.

rockband

You can play “I Me Mine” on the Savile Row rooftop in Rock Band: Beatles, but George himself never played the song live on either his 1974 or 1991 tours.

And about that visual: John and Yoko’s dance. It’s entirely feasible and reasonable to say their waltz, however cheeky and contrived it was, is the reason “I Me Mine” exists at all, at least in the Beatles’ catalog. To explain, we must look beyond January 8, 1969. Well past.

The Beatles didn’t attempt “I Me Mine” during the balance of the January 1969 sessions. This was it; the song’s introduction and development on January 8 marked the entirety of the Beatles’ work on the song during the Get Back sessions. George demoed three songs seven weeks later on his birthday, but “I Me Mine” wasn’t among them (instead, he recorded “Something,” “All Things Must Pass” and “Old Brown Shoe,” versions of which appeared on Anthology 3). If the Beatles ever considered “I Me Mine” for Abbey Road, evidence is lacking.

The song’s sound and words were born of TV and LSD. But the reason “I Me Mine” exists at all as a song by the Beatles is because of the dance.

When John and Yoko waltzed to “I Me Mine,” the underdeveloped show idea finally had a specific visual Michael Lindsay-Hogg could attach to a song. Yet, in less than two days’ time, George quit the group, and upon his return, he made clear he didn’t want to perform any of his songs live (although he did bring several more new songs to the studio to work on). But for the purposes of the Let It Be film, the job was done. The waltz ensured a place for “I Me Mine” in the movie, and thus, required the song a place on the soundtrack. Thing is, there was never a proper recording done of the song at Twickenham, and there wasn’t suitable recording equipment there anyway. In every prior iteration of a potential Get Back/Let It Be album, as compiled by Glyn Johns, “I Me Mine” was left off, since it hadn’t otherwise been a consideration for the LP. The movie changed that.

Paul and George work on “I Me Mine” in January 1970. From George Harrison’s Twitter, 2000.

Once the song was earmarked for the film and thus the album, the Threetles made their debut. On January 3, 1970 — almost a year to the day after George wrote the song and brought it to Twickenham — George, Paul and Ringo spent one last session together at Abbey Road, recording “I Me Mine.” John was on holiday in Denmark, but that almost didn’t matter: He had already privately quit the band more than two months earlier. As George remarked, “Dave Dee is no longer with us” as they went ahead, for one last time, to “carry on the good work that’s always gone down in [Studio] No. 2.”

Phil Spector took the recording, embellished it, doubled its length and tacked it onto Let It Be as the Beatles formally expired as a group. Like John’s “Across the Universe,” the song it follows on Let It Be and precedes on Let It Be … Naked, “I Me Mine” in its final form is not a product of 1969. It’s worth noting, too, that George turned around “I Me Mine” in a relatively complete form in less than 24 hours. John dragged out a nearly year-old “Across The Universe” and still couldn’t make it workable for the show.

The same three men who laid down “I Me Mine”  — George, Paul and Ringo — returned to the studio together 24 years later to record John’s “Free as a Bird.” Paul convinced himself it was OK to record a new Beatles song without John.

“I invented a little scenario,” Paul said of recording the group’s first song since “I Me Mine.”

“[John’s] gone away on holiday.”

28 Comments

Filed under Day by day

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,