Tag Archives: Get Back film

May 23, 2025 · 7:00 am

TMBP Extra: You are here

Gazing at 20 Manchester Square in London, I squinted trying to visualize the Beatles hanging over the stairwell, flashing their grins. They did it in 1963. They did it again in 1969. What a backdrop was EMI House!

At the same time, my then-13-year-old son stared at the same building standing today at 20 Manchester Square, a structure decidedly not EMI House, which was torn down at the turn of the century.

This was his breaking point. The Mad Day Out had little on our Furious Day Out.

We had been in England nearly two weeks, and on this Wednesday morning, 20 Manchester Square was the second location we purposely visited over the previous five minutes that was purely a street name and number. The first Apple Records headquarters once stood at 95 Wigmore Street, literally in shouting distance of 20 Manchester Square, and in the place of the former Beatles HQ, another modern construction rose where a historic Beatles site once stood.

“These aren’t even the buildings the Beatles went to!” he screamed at me – I was very much in shouting distance. “Why are we here? Why do even you care? It doesn’t make sense!”

And to a point, he was right, even if I wasn’t crazy about my teenager yelling at me in Marylebone. While we were in England, we visited Hadrian’s Wall, Stonehenge and the Rosetta Stone precisely because they survived centuries and millennia. The kids never asked to see the site of the Euston Arch or Crystal Palace, and I get why they didn’t.

95 Wigmore St, Apple’s first HQ (early ‘68). That building is gone; the one here was built in 2013. It’s Colliers UK’s head office.

I knew the names, and I looked up the numbers. But much as I wanted to see where the Beatles made their magic and soak in that residue, 20 Manchester Square and 95 Wigmore Street remain merely addresses on a map. Still, to paraphrase one of my favorite Liverpudlian philosophers: Some places have gone while some remain, and all of them had their moments.

***

I always planned to write about my trip to England. My family of four traveled for two weeks June 2024, mostly split between Liverpool and London and with various Beatles pilgrimages at the center of the itinerary, which included several other non-Fab (but still fabulous) destinations. I’m not convinced you want to read How I Spent My Summer Vacation, but I think I can interest you in a broader review of precisely how I did end up spending my summer vacation, even if you’re from Merseyside or the capital or know the Beatles every bit as much as I think I do.

This is a result of some deep reflection, and will be part-essay, part-travelogue and complete expression of child-like wonder at how exciting it was to step in the Beatles’ footsteps and unlock an understanding of who and what they were and are and why that matters to me.

The trip was special. I gazed at the rooftop and stood by the basement. I crossed the road. The lane was in my ears and in my eyes. There was so much more.

I was very fortunate. I shared a few hours with a man who was on that rooftop. I spent time alone in a very different, but more formative basement. I visited a lot of places that had their moments, and a lot of locations that once did – but really always will, even just as addresses on a map.

I’m not going to tell this story chronologically. How I planned my trip really only mattered to my schedule and ultimately doesn’t matter. This should read as an evergreen story, as we say in the business. But hopefully there’s a tip or two in here if you’re planning your own journey. Extroverted as I am, I hate writing about myself, but without it, this won’t be much of a story.

***

The most striking thing about being in the Beatles’ England was how it felt mundane, in so many ways. At once, I appreciated them and their music much more deeply, although at the same time recognizing I didn’t need to be there to understand that.

I wasn’t expecting grandeur, necessarily, though as I write this out, maybe I was? The Beatles are on that historically vital level. Buckingham Palace, Salisbury Cathedral — these are larger than life destinations I admired in person. So what does that make Mendips or 34 Montague Square? The Beatles certainly mean more to me than the monarchy and Anglican Church.

At the beautiful Chapter House at Salisbury Cathedral (where one of the Magna Carta originals is housed), decorative cushions ring the perimeter, and I was able to compile one variant of the set.

It’s one thing to view, say, John Lennon’s Epiphone Casino behind glass at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (which I’ve done multiple times!). It’s another to see the rooftop, basement and front door of 3 Savile Row as part of its surrounding environment. There it stands between other buildings that have their own rooftops, basements and front doors, too.

The Rosetta Stone stands behind glass at the crowded British Museum, while about a mile away, 3 Savile Row — as important as it is — does not. We have to already know it’s special, blue plaque notwithstanding.

***

It’s really hard to change a first impression. Liverpool long cast to my aging eyes in black and white, its sounds blared in mono. That’s the Beatles’ Liverpool I’ve always known from photographs and films.

The city as viewed (by me) from the Wheel of Liverpool

Personal experience broke that bias. I found the city – our first stop on the trip — lively and electric, full of the color missing in my expectations. It’s not an exaggeration when I say it was a spiritual experience to walk the streets and follow in the footsteps of the Beatles.

Mathew Street, Liverpool

So full of magic, one of Liverpool’s incredible tricks is to effortlessly convince you of something Apple has subtly promoted for years, most recently with the “Now and Then” experience: The Beatles never really split. This is the city of John, Paul, George and Ringo. And Pete. And Stu! Brian Epstein lives. It’s Mathew Street stuffing decades of history over just a tenth of a mile. It’s at once authentic, reconstructed and behind glass.

The Brian Epstein statue is just footsteps away from the former location of NEMS.

The Beatles’ entire origin story happened in Liverpool: childhood, crossing paths, forming a band and superstardom. You can retrace their origins to the depth of your own desire and timetable.

My favorite Mathew Street location was the Liverpool Beatles Museum, which carries a breathtaking, unique collection. It’s a must-visit if you’re visiting Liverpool.

liverpool beatles museum mad day out statue

liverpool beatles museum let it be corner

As displayed at the Liverpool Beatles Museum.

The National Trust conducts tours of John and Paul’s childhood homes only in conjunction. While not the same route they would have taken in their day, we were bussed between the two houses. The Lennon/McCartney partnership, forged when they called these places home, lives in perpetuity as a combined experience.

“It was important then whether you lived near each other or not,” Paul recalled in the Anthology book. “There were no cars for kids in those days.”

Our first stop on the Lennon-McCartney house tour was John’s childhood home at 251 Menlove Ave. Despite Mike McCartney growing up on Forthlin, it was Mendips that was enveloped in scaffold.

I found no light bulb on visiting the childhood homes of, oh, the way this room is laid out is why Paul learned to play things this way. Or John became that way because of the kitchen. The acoustics in the McCartney bathroom, as good as they may have been, didn’t create Lennon-McCartney.

However that magic manifests itself, though, it lingers.

We played Paul’s piano. No, not his childhood piano – that’s now at one of his own homes. But it’s a piano played by Paul, and that’s good enough for me. Who cares when he played it?

20 Forthlin Road

By their natures as simple residences, the Lennon-McCartney homes stood among the more pedestrian destinations, even with some things behind glass: The spot where Paul slept (though probably not his original bed). The room where John ate (though probably not the table).

12 Arnold Grove

Privately owned, George’s and Ringo’s childhood homes were only street-level photo-ops, but just experiencing these neighborhoods added depth to their stories. Seeing the Empress Pub step out of the Sentimental Journey LP cover only a few footsteps away from 10 Admiral Grove in the Dingle was added value.

The Casbah Club is very much alive, with Pete Best and his family literally welcoming you into his childhood home. We visited a couple months too early to stay there (it opened as an Airbnb in August 2024). It’s in the Casbah’s basement that the colors of Liverpool perhaps glow most bright, the paint jobs of the Quarrymen (plus the future Cynthia Lennon) still adorning the walls and star-studded and Beatle-etched ceilings. The club area and the spaces where the Quarrymen and Beatles played stand claustrophobically small when you allow yourself to visualize the crowded houses they played for. Mona Best’s incredible legacy looms and lives strongly.

The remarkable Casbah Coffee Club. What a destination! Thanks to Roag Best Jr. for the fab tour inside.

But beyond the artifacts Beatles once handled and spaces they occupied, the locations they chose to be inspired by made their mark.

Like both sides of the greatest single in pop music history. We visited Penny Lane and Strawberry Field consecutively, with Paul’s contribution our first needle-drop.

Your host at Penny Lane. Squint close and you’ll see Paul’s signature on the sign. Also, gaze upon the shelter in the middle of the roundabout, the one-time bank and the barbershop.

The magic of “Penny Lane” speaks in that the song doesn’t have to be taken as personal at all. It’s observational, and we can see the same surface elements today. The barbershop, the (former) bank building, the roundabout’s shelter – these are tangible, ordinary locations like ones I have in my own town, and every one I’ve ever lived in. We don’t really need to know the motivations of the banker or firefighter or nurse to really understand the song, which still creates a relatable story.

No wonder “Strawberry Fields Forever” made such a natural flip side, it really was the opposite experience, even today as Strawberry Field itself remans a functioning Salvation Army facility that’s also a popular tourist destination. You can still experience the quiet isolation John sought, and find your own tree after a wander in the garden.

Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Field.

Rather than demystify these destinations, walking through I found them enhanced, spotlighting the proximity of the Beatles’ world. Strawberry Field sits so close to Mendips. And then seeing the central terminus that’s Penny Lane plus John and Paul’s childhood houses in the same short afternoon — on a long tour as led by Dave Bedford, bursting with of endless insight and access – it was beyond expectations.

Penny Lane and Strawberry Field weren’t just name checks. These places mattered to the Beatles, but being there put it in such a better context. It’s something they evoked themselves, and they tried to give us an idea to the context on the single’s sleeve and promotional materials (depending on the country).

As seen in Cashbox in February 1967.

“A lot of our formative years were spent walking around those places,” Paul said in Anthology. “Penny Lane was the depot I had to change buses at to get from my house to John’s and to a lot of my friends. It was a big bus terminal which we all knew very well.”

Penny Lane mattered enough to John as a location to originally appear in the the draft lyrics to “In My Life,” along with several other locations.

In his 1980 interview with David Sheff, John recalled how a basic rollcall of locations didn’t work.

‘In My Life’ started out as a bus journey from my house at 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place I could remember. I wrote it all down and it was ridiculous. This is before even ‘Penny Lane’ was written and I had Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Tram Sheds — Tram Sheds are the depot just outside of Penny Lane — and it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holiday’s Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all. I cannot do this! I cannot do this!

But then I laid back and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember. Now Paul helped with the middle-eight melody. The whole lyrics were already written before Paul had even heard it. In ‘In My Life,’ his contribution melodically was the harmony and the middle eight itself.

“Ordinary” Beatles should not have been a surprise to me. I study the Nagra tapes the most of anything Beatles, and that is them at (what I always assumed) was their most mundane — talking about TV, food, the news and anything else. I find ordinary Beatles to be extraordinary Beatles.

Want to know why I believe John when he said “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was based after a drawing by Julian and not LSD? Because of the ordinary things they wrote about otherwise.

So much of the Beatles has to do with their time. I couldn’t turn back the clock, but I could get to their place.

Like St. Peter’s in Woolton. It’s the Church of the Immaculate Conception, at least when it comes to the Beatles. Your own bias will say whether this is where Paul met John or John met Paul. Lucky us, the doors to the church hall were unlocked (maybe they always are, I don’t know!) and we stood in the very spot – at least our best guess within a few feet – of the Big Bang.

St. Peter’s

Strip away the origin story, and it’s today a rec room sincerely not unlike any other at this kind of church community building. Here children’s Sunday School scrawls are given equal status to placards documenting the fête-ful encounter in 1957. This could be a room in any one of our hometowns.

Outside the building at the church’s cemetery was one more bit of inspiration, even if the Beatles didn’t realize it deliberately. RIP Eleanor Rigby.

“I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subconsciously.” Paul wrote in Lyrics. “We visited her grave in a much more deliberate fashion.”

***

What Liverpool enjoyed and embraced but London lacked is a broad Beatle presence. This wasn’t a surprise, but was certainly tangible after spending time in Liverpool. It’s a big city. I get it, I’m from New York. There’s a lot going on.

I’d been to London before, as a teenager in the 1980s. I had a lot of places I wanted to see myself this time around, with one obvious destination circled several times.

I’ve been writing about the Get Back sessions since January 2012, a long while after Let It Be hit theaters (May 1970), and a quite a bit before Peter Jackson’s Get Back revitalized the sessions into the mainstream (November 2021). My visit to 3 Savile Row – the centerpiece of our busy London visit — was a powerful moment to become a 21^st century Apple Scruff and linger outside the building; there was no entry.

I wasn’t waiting for anyone to arrive or depart, but simply loitering delivered a unique satisfaction. This went beyond the rooftop performance. And that in and of itself was very powerful. The roof didn’t feel as high as it appeared in Let It Be and Get Back. Really, it felt short. It was five stories, like other buildings on the same block and any other five-story buildings in my hometown or anywhere else. I know the Beatles played a concert on that particular one.

The Apple of my eye: 3 Savile Row

And obviously that’s what made it a powerful moment. I was very surprised – like I was at so many Beatles-related destinations – at how few people were there to pay tribute. I visited around 1 p.m. on a Wednesday (the Beatles played at around the same time on a Thursday). Unlike January 1969, Savile Row was very quiet this afternoon in June 2024.

There was a small tour group listening to a stock spiel about the Beatles and the rooftop. If anyone around needed to know the building was special, they could have looked at my idiot self photographing it from all angles, peering into the basement, dodging back and forth across the narrow road – it wasn’t much wider than Mathew Street – and rubbing the metal No. 3 bolted to the front door as I insisted I could absorb the building’s mojo and mystically ascend to the road that stretches out ahead. I made sure to inhale whatever Beatle dust lingered.

The proximity was interesting: The Heddon Street location where David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust LP cover was shot pretty much stands around the corner from Savile Row. From there it was a 10-minute walk to the former location of Trident Studios, where not only Bowie made his mark, but the Beatles cut “Hey Jude,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and a few others. Depressingly it looked like an office today. I could see a printer, but no piano. But that obscures the point: Everything was right there.

The same day we made it to St. John’s Wood — and it was a day, spanning more than 15 miles by foot alone — we did the least surprising thing possible and lined up to cross Abbey Road. It should have occurred to me before but I never thought about it: It was only as I crossed the road that I realized I was – in the Beatles’ footsteps – walking away from the studio. (But they all left together, at least.)

Of every Beatles-related location I visited over two weeks – and there were many – only the rebuilt Cavern rivaled Abbey Road for walk-up crowds. We fans had each other’s backs, gladly offering to take pictures for strangers so we all could have that killer crosswalk photo.

A kind Australian nailed for posterity my family’s crossing in two takes. The reckless New Yorker I am, I giddily stood in the middle of the street, forcing traffic to dodge me – not the other way around – taking photos to make sure a couple from Los Angeles had the perfect picture. It took four takes, and I would have done a fifth. Iain MacMillan I’m not, but I tried.

Abbey Road

Paul famously lived just down the road, and we recreated the quick walk to Cavendish, surprising ourselves at just how close Paul lived to EMI Studios on Abbey Road (not even half a mile).

The home today didn’t seem much different than description in Hunter Davies’ biography of the band, published in 1968:

The front of the house has a paved courtyard with an old-fashioned lamp-post. On the left, attached to the house, is a double garage in which he keeps his Mini Cooper and Aston Martin. The house is guarded by a high brick wall and large double black gates controlled from the house. You speak into a microphone, someone inside answers, and if you say the right thing, the doors swing open and then clank shut again to keep out the fans.

I did talk like an absolute maniac at his security system, but I wasn’t surprised the gates did not swing open. We were the only fans on Cavendish. And this was helpful to give the space to consider things and experience the proximity like the band did – I tried to do this at every destination. We considered crashing Billy Fury’s old place, which was just a few houses down, when the door opened to welcome guests in.

London’s Cavendish Avenue, featuring the homes of Liverpool’s Paul McCartney and Billy Fury

It wasn’t deliberately scheduled this way, but Abbey Road and Cavendish were the last two main Beatles-related destinations on our trip (we left England a couple days later). They were also two of the remaining locations that were as they were when it was the Beatles’ England in their time. Music continues to be recorded at Abbey Road, and Paul still has the keys to Cavendish today.

***

I walked in the footsteps of the Beatles on Abbey Road and rubbed the door at 3 Savile Row for the best of luck. But can a place really leave magic? Do people leave some of their essence? I thought about this a lot when I was in Liverpool, and again when we got to London, especially in Mayfair. When my teenager lost it outside the former EMI House, our next destination was the fascinating Handel Hendrix House.

George Frideric Handel called 25 Brook Street home from 1723 until his death in 1759, composing “Messiah,” “Water Music” and many other lasting pieces in that building, where his legacy is lovingly preserved. I’m no Handelhead, but the site was terrific.

The other half of the Handel Hendrix House is named for James Marshall Hendrix – you know him as “Jimi” – who lived at the adjacent 23 Brook Street more than 200 years later.

Handel, with care: The Handel Hendrix House was a definite highlight among Beatle-adjacent destinations

“I didn’t even know this was [Handel’s] pad, man, until after I got in,” Hendrix told the Daily Mirror on January 6, 1969, in an interview published five days later. “And to tell you the God’s honest truth I haven’t heard much of the fella’s stuff. But I dig a bit of Bach now and again.”

Handel wasn’t any kind of musical inspiration on Hendrix, so if the composer left any juice for Jimi, we can only guess — although Jimi did reveal he once saw “an old guy in a nightshirt and gray pigtail” walk through a wall.

When Jimi moved in, it wasn’t even the most historically significant thing that happened in Greater London rock history that day. Because on January 2, 1969, as Jimi Hendrix schlepped his guitars and other belongings up the stairs into his new pad – it was actually his girlfriend’s apartment — the Beatles began the Get Back sessions 10 miles away in Twickenham. So is there magic in a time, and also a place?

***

While I could approach some places, I could never get to the Beatles’ time. But I could spend moments in my own time with someone who was in the Beatles’ circle.

Milton Keynes wasn’t out of the way as we drove from Stoke-On-Trent, the base for our visit to the amusement park Alton Towers, toward London. Paul McCartney adopted sweet pup Martha in Milton Keynes, and dog-lover I am, that’s reason enough to give the town a nod. But I’d be lying if I said it was on our original itinerary.

On a trip filed with journeys to places that mattered, at this vacation’s heart was one destination that didn’t matter at all – it was the person there that gave it meaning. This moment was right in the middle of the trip, between our Liverpool and London legs.

All thanks go to Robert Rodriguez, who you know as the host of the Something About the Beatles podcast and author of several books (buy his newest one now!). He’s also a kind human being who incredibly connected me with someone who was in the middle of it all: Kevin Harrington, former Beatles equipment manager. If you know him for nothing else, you’d recognize him as the young redhead on the rooftop and throughout Get Back/Let It Be.

Kevin spent what he called “three, four years out of a long life” working for Brian Epstein and later the Beatles. We spent about 2 ½ hours at a pub in Milton Keynes. He said it wasn’t his local, and that set the tone for the conversation – he felt he could speak with candor. This wasn’t an interview, but a conversation. I asked about his time working with Tina Turner, Motörhead and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. We talked about instant replay in sports, navigating roundabouts and his recipe for herb sausage.

Obviously, we talked most about those three, four years with the Beatles and the incredible cast of characters that surrounded (and included) him. It was clear there were some “pub stories” not meant for broadcast, and I will hold them near and dear.

In a remarkable happenstance, not even 48 hours before we met, the Lennon Estate released the promo video for “You Are Here” as part of the Mind Games reissue campaign. One of the first recognizable heads in the clip is Kevin Harrington. The very existence of the video – which is drawn from John’s 1968 exhibition of the same name — was news to him.

In a very big life filled with outsized experiences, Kevin watched himself, on my 6.1-inch phone screen, hauling a giant, round canvas down a London street nearly 56 year earlier, during a weekend in the midst of the White Album sessions.

Kevin named every face he remembered as they were shown on screen, a roll call bringing true flesh to the conversation. It was one of those moments when cardiologists be damned, I blindly allowed my heart to skip a few beats.

Going into our afternoon together, I knew how Kevin would approach this sort of meeting. From his 2015 memoir “Who’s The Redhead On The Roof….?”:

The time line is a bit hazy. Do I wish to look up all that happened in those far off days to check dates and so on? Honestly no, I don’t. I’ll leave that to the experts. Maybe if we meet one day you can tell me exactly what I was doing, when and where. I can only tell you what it was like for an 18 year old to work for the biggest band in the world.

Kevin wasn’t a docent speaking from a memorized script. When he talked about John Lennon or Derek Taylor or Mal Evans or former boss Brian Epstein — who more than a half-century later he still referred to formally as Mr. Epstein, just like the Beatles would — those were memories. There’s something to speaking to a person that’s so much more fulfilling than to going to a place or searching for a time.

***

It’s deep into spring now, after a long, cold, lonely winter. I couldn’t get myself motivated to finish this piece. I love to write, and I love to write about the Beatles. Yet, here I am, more than 4,000 words in and not sure if I had anything to say.

In true Get Back/Let It Be fashion, this unfinished mess of words (in my case) sat shelved. I’ve reworked and revised, and I’m still not sure I like any of the finished product. Scraps of unrealized points, salient and otherwise, lay saved in text files, waiting for an eventual bootleg leak.

There’s no Glyn Johns or Phil Spector to bail me out. And where is the ending? To put it in John’s words, I’m afraid “it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holiday’s Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all. I cannot do this! I cannot do this!”

A few weeks after the trip, I saw Pete Best perform live at a venue just 15 minutes from my own home in Ohio (more in the last post about our interaction). I didn’t have to travel across the world to be in a Beatle’s world.

Pete Best in Kent, Ohio, in July 2024.

Pete Best (and my family) in Kent, Ohio, July 2024

But that’s not an ending, just an epilogue.

Our trip ended quietly. A week after seeing Kevin in Milton Keynes and on the heels of nearly a week in London, we flew out of Heathrow and returned home. The night before our flight, I had to run out to fill our rental car. We were staying in Slough, which I know best from The Office, but it also was once home to the former Adelphi Cinema. One of the Beatles’ performances there was the night after their iconic 1963 Royal Variety Show performance, which prompted this exchange between Paul and the Queen:

“The Queen Mother said, ‘Where are you playing tomorrow night?’ I said, ‘Slough.’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s just near us.’”

Bonus Beatles site! We fly out early tomorrow to come home, but I snuck in one more place, the site of the former Adelphi Cinema in Slough, where the Beatles played twice. Today, it’s undergoing renovation as a banquet hall. (As in, people were there working at 8pm on a Friday) pic.twitter.com/IqRA8X13Xg

— They May Be Parted (@TheyMayBeParted) June 14, 2024

I didn’t even have to go out of my way to see the former venue, driving right by it on the way to the petrol station. The ex-Adelphi was another address on a map, a building under reconstruction literally before my eyes. One of the running themes took us to the very last stop.

It’s OK for things to change. The Beatles switched drummers. John gave “In My Life” a rewrite – he made it less a travelogue and much more personal. I found inspiration in that.

I would have rather seen 3 Savile Row’s windows dressed in daffodils and the basement door surrounded by Scruffs than its current state, and I wish the original Apple HQ at 34 Montague Square was there to be gazed upon. But it’s just not reality.

: Then …

: and now

I lived in two different houses over the course of my childhood. Both have since been torn down. They’re only addresses now, but I don’t need the buildings to have the memories of the people and things that went before.

There’s a magic in a time and a magic in a place. Most of all, the magic is in the people. Huw Spink – you know him as Teatles — guided me around his Liverpool, centered in particular around beautiful and essential Sefton Park, just hours after I arrived in the city. This set the tone for just how great this trip would be. We talked Beatles, we talked friends and family. We had tea.

Paul Abbott – you know him as half of The Big Beatles and 60s Sort Out podcast – showed me his Liverpool shortly before we left Liverpool. It reinforced how lovely the people, transplants or not, are. We talked Beatles, we talked friends and family. We had beer(s).

: Checking off a true bucket-list item: Tea with Teatles

: Deeply gratified at Big Sort Paul’s mini-tour of his local Liverpool

These places didn’t mean anything without the people. Whether it was our AirBnB hosts in Liverpool who gifted us a Beatles T-shirt in our unit simply because they knew that’s why we were in town or Kevin and his incredible generosity with his time.

It reinforced so much of what this trip exposed to me.

Places can be ordinary. And times aren’t special in isolation. It’s the people at those places and living in those times that make them worth returning to, something I think that’s easy to lose sight of.

The Beatles unlocked the magic of these places in their own time with the people they surrounded themselves with. Now, these locations are inseparable from the people and my own time, like Kevin Harrington and Milton Keynes last summer.

That’s why it’s just another front parlour on Forthlin Road if Paul didn’t write songs in it. No one, I think, would talk about a particular tree at Strawberry Field if it wasn’t John’s.

For me, it’s my wife loving life on the Steeplechase and Valhalla at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, my youngest enjoying baseball at London Stadium.

And it’s my oldest at 20 Manchester Square, no matter what is standing there today.

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Tagged as 10 Admiral Grove, 12 Arnold Grove, 20 Manchester Square, 3 Savile Row, 95 Wigmore Street, Adelphi Cinema, Apple Corps, Billy Fury, blue plaque, Brian Epstein, Casbah Coffee Club, Cavendish, Eleanor Rigby, Empress Pub, Garden fete, George Harrison, Get Back film, Handel Hendrix House, In My Life, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Kevin Harrington, Let It Be movie, Liverpool, London, Mal Evans, Mathew Street, Mendips, Menlove Avenue, Milton Keynes, Paul McCartney, Penny Lane, Pete Best, Quarrymen, Ringo Starr, Rooftop, Rosetta Stone, Salisbury Cathedral, St. Peter's, Stonehenge, Strawberry Fields Forever, The Cavern, Trident Studios, Woolton, You Are Here

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.

<Getting on soapbox again> I talk about the Let It Be film all the time not only because it was something the Beatles did, but because it shaped 50 years of their history. Maybe it's not the same now, but it mattered for a very, very long time. </end soapbox for now>

— They May Be Parted (@TheyMayBeParted) January 29, 2024

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.

From our retrospective standpoint, we can see what film is conspicuous by its absence https://t.co/UHajUtcuMc

— They May Be Parted (@TheyMayBeParted) September 24, 2022

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.”

I'm working on a post (of course I am) for next week in advance of the restored Let It Be & now's good excuse to share these from HBO Guide (remember those?), Aug 1978. They had no idea how to describe Let It Be, had to over and over again. Yet I'd call each description accurate! pic.twitter.com/jUvmyrrmj2

— They May Be Parted (@TheyMayBeParted) April 30, 2024

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.

Jan. 14: Morning, Paul! Morning, Rich!

This time, Paul McCartney’s line was delivered with a smile: “And then there was one.”

It was up to the viewers of the 2021 Get Back docuseries more than 50 years later to make out the invisible wink and deliberate nod to Paul’s tearful “and then there were two” from a day before — though in 21^st century TV time, it was only 12 minutes earlier.

While there was just one Beatle at Twickenham Film Studios in the early going on January 14, 1969, Paul wasn’t alone for too long, not even 20 minutes on the Nagra reels capturing the sessions’ audio largely in real time.

Then there were two once again as a sleep-deprived Ringo Starr bounded in, and the Beatles’ rhythm section exchanged exaggerated greetings.

Ringo: “Morning, Paul!”
Paul: “Morning, Rich!”
Ringo: “How are you this morning?
Paul: “OK!”

After a full-arm stretch and crack of the knuckles, Paul – who had been sitting at the piano — struck the keys, and Ringo immediately joined in.

Maybe I’m not giving January 1969 Ringo enough credit as a piano player, but I’ll leave it as an open question if this was a pure improvisation or something specific Paul and Ringo had worked on before.

This is not to say Ringo was a finished product as a piano player. You can see him bracing one hand with another as he slapped out high notes — maybe it was just a gag — playing the high notes while Paul pounded out the chords.

Paul casually delivered a lyric to their song. A jumpy slice of New Orleans improvisational piano jazz, it lasted all of 70 seconds.

Well, I bought a piano the other day
I didn’t know music to play
You had to play the goddamn thing
Oh, baby!
(Or something close to that)

It’s an amusing callback to Ringo’s own “Picasso” from early in the sessions, from the “I bought a Picasso” line down to the closing “oh baby,” which was a signature Ringo closing lyric at this point. Paul and Ringo clearly had a great time playing together, something that was obvious to viewers in 1970 as much as it is to us today.

This little slice of life coexists in Let It Be and Get Back in nearly identical presentations. Let It Be’s version lasts all of 5 seconds longer – both are slightly edited down from the original performance. The differences between the two visuals are purely cosmetic and seem like change for change’s sake, showing the duo’s hands at the piano when the other shows a view from their left, for instance.

But then there were two (more important differences).

The first is the timeline. In Let It Be, the sequence is preceded by a January 9 version of “One After 909,” appearing about 13 ½ minutes into the film. After the piano jam, Let It Be sends the viewer into a January 6 rehearsal of “Two of Us” that eventually leads to the “I’ll play if you want me to play” argument (Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg uses Paul’s running his hands through his hair at the end of the performance to lead directly to the next scene of ensuing frustration.)

The transition as it appears in Let It Be.

Get Back roughly follows the progression in real time on the morning of January 14. It doesn’t come immediately after clapper loader Paul Bond said he wanted himself to buy a piano as it does in Get Back, but you can certainly see why that narrative device was used, and it was close enough in real time to work.

There’s another very notable divergence between the two films. When it came to the credits in 2021, then there were three (songwriters). Based on that clear first lyric and presumption it was a newly published original, the song was credited on screen as “I Bought a Piano The Other Day,” a Lennon/McCartney/Starkey composition.

Even with John clearly not yet on site, the Lennon/McCartney credit structure was used (as it was elsewhere with similar absent credits – but not future solo songs), with Rich Starkey an obvious contributor. (Just look at “Piano Piece [Bonding].” That shouldn’t be a Lennon/McCartney song, since it’s probably already a Jesse Fuller original. More on that in the previous post.)

To paraphrase an earlier lyric credited to the Lennon/McCartney/Starkey songwriting trio, they didn’t even think of it as something with a name — or something long-forgotten that already had a name for the last 50 years. After all, it already had a title, and it wasn’t “I Bought a Piano The Other Day.”

Nobody has never spun an official version of “Jazz Piano Song” on a turntable or streamed it on Spotify. But that recording, originally released as part of the Let It Be film but not on the soundtrack LP, is the real thing. “Jazz Piano Song” – admittedly not the most dynamic title — was copyrighted in the U.S. on July 8, 1970, by Northern Songs and Startling Music, credited to McCartney/Starkey. It’s a matter of semantics if it was really released, but it certainly came out.

From the July-December 1970 volume of the Library of Congress’ Catalog of Copyright Entries of Music.

Today in 2024, then, there are two (copyrighted versions of the same song): “Jazz Piano Song” and “I Bought A Piano” are one in the same. I can only guess the decision to separately copyright the latter was an oversight, a generic disregard and abandonment of “Jazz Piano Song,” Let It Be and its era. Kudos to the Lennon Estate for sneaking away a few extra dollars and pounds for a song he had absolutely nothing to do with and was already accounted for, credit-wise.

It took more than 25 years for the McCartney/Starkey duo to team up on a follow-up composition. The liner notes to Paul’s 1997 LP Flaming Pie might obliquely reference “Jazz Piano Song,” saying in the description of “Really Love You” that it was “[c]redited to McCartney/Starkey – a first-ever credit for a released tune.” That note could also be referring to “Angel in Disguise,” an early ‘90s Paul demo with an added verse by Ringo, and thus another McCartney/Starkey unreleased track. Or it could just be covering behinds on the assumption there must have been other unrecorded and unreleased McCartney/Starkey tracks from 1962-1997.

From the 1997 liner notes to Flaming Pie.

It’s at this point on January 14, 1969, the focus shifted from an obscure McCartney/Starkey song credited twice into a modest hit song written by Paul McCartney alone that wasn’t credited to him at all. (Some of this sequence appeared in Get Back, albeit compressed and a little out of order, too, although not in any way that misrepresented the moment.)

“Did you write ‘Woman’ by Peter and Gordon?” Michael asked. “I loved that song.”

Paul said he did too.

“Woman” was a 1966 single for the since broken-up duo. It was also a deliberate experiment conducted by Paul.

“Bernard Webb, an English law student in Paris, sent this song to the Beatles, who having plenty of their own, passed it on to their old mates,” wrote one representative review of the song, outlining the origin story fed to the press.

Like Paul Ramon before, and Apollo C. Vermouth and Percy Thrillington to come, Bernard Webb was one James Paul McCartney, this time taking a pseudonym – “a very inconspicuous name,” per Paul in the May 1966 Beatles Book magazine — in a ploy to see how well his song would chart as an anonymous author and not half of the world’s most famous pop songwriting team. The answer was modestly well, with the big production number landing in the top 30 in the U.K. and inside the top 15 in the U.S., although some of the movement up the charts did come after the secret was let out that Paul was behind the curtain.

The “mammoth Peter and Gordon treatment,” as Paul described it, gnawed at the songwriter years later. (Meanwhile, as we learn by watching Get Back, Ringo spent part of this performance mugging for the cameras.)

“We did a much better one very first time we ever did it,” Paul said on January 14, after singing the first verse a capella. “It was very dry. Just little. With like about eight violins. … We were very fussy at the time, didn’t like it, so it got turned into a mammoth ballad.”

Modestly, he concluded, “It’s a great song” before delivering a straightforward performance at the piano, repeating the first verse several times. He later played it again imitating the “great big Gordon bit” to laughter.

I wonder if Peter’s still got the original thing of that, cause we did a great version first time we did it. Only Gordon couldn’t get the high notes. … But it was all right though, it was OK. It’s just we were so fussy we thought “this is the song, this is the one.” And they’re so fussy about it, that we chucked it, jacked it in and just let them go and do it again. But they did it the next time as mammoth Peter and Gordon treatment. It’s too sort of big. The first time we did, it was little, it was great.

An acetate of the “original thing” – purportedly featuring Paul on drums — went to auction in 2013, and quickly founds its way online.

A mammoth treatment isn’t necessarily a disqualifier for Paul, though, who resumed playing the piano after a brief conversation celebrating Johnny Cash (look for that in a future post!). In Get Back, Paul introduces the song saying, “I had one this morning.” In fact, he said that earlier, when playing “The Day I Went Back to School.” On the Nagras, Paul gave no indication the song was an original or anything beyond something he was improvising.

Paul scatted a few indecipherable lines, although a few are identifiable, sung in an exaggerated fashion: “We’re just busy riding, driving in the back seat of my car.”

Two years before it concluded RAM (and eight years before Thrillington’s “cover”), “The Back Seat of My Car” was new enough Glyn asked if Paul was playing a Beach Boys song.

“It’s just like a skit on them,” Paul replied.

Indeed it played out like a comedy– thankfully, this sequence made Get Back, too – as Paul openly played to his audience, embellishing high and low harmonies and vocalizing brass and percussion as he shared draft lyrics of teenage romance. “Gee, it’s getting late!” drew big laughs, for instance. Mexico City hadn’t been introduced as a destination, and the subjects didn’t yet believe that they can’t be wrong.

Conceived in summer 1968, “The Back Seat of My Car” — which was ultimately credited to Paul alone — wasn’t finished in January 1969, but Paul clearly had scoped out the grand scale of the song, more than two years before he’d ultimately employ an orchestra to perform George Martin’s score for the song.

Having completed his enjoyable reveal of “The Back Seat of My Car,” Paul left the stage to take a call, and the Nagra microphones shifted to a conversation between Ringo and Michael, following a brief appearance by Mal Evans. The roadie himself had just taken a call from John, who for a consecutive day was late to the session.

“What did Mal say? … What’s going to happen this morning?” Michael asked Ringo.

“Nothing,” he replied. But …

“This afternoon, watch out!”

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Tagged as Bernard Webb, future solo, Get Back film, I Bought a Piano the Other Day, January 14, Jazz Piano Song, Let It Be movie, McCartney/Starkey, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Paul McCartney, Percy Thrillington, Peter and Gordon, piano, Picasso, RAM, Really Love You, Ringo Starr, The Back Seat of My Car, Twickenham, Woman

October 19, 2023 · 6:09 am

Jan. 13: Et cetera

For all the storylines and spectacle of the Beatles’ January 13, 1969, there’s even more detail that just didn’t fit into the 20,000 words I’ve already written about this single day. For context, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis checks in around 21,000 words, most about a bug yet not a single one about a Beatle. Here are some of the delicious leftovers from our Fab Four’s day:

***

It’s the opening theme to the second episode of Get Back:

“You’re my world, you’re my only love,” croons Ringo Starr as the credits roll.

This audio is displaced. In its original context served on the Nagra tapes, the moment comes a good hour after the documentary implies, happening when Ringo is exiting, not entering, the Twickenham Film Studios main stage on January 13, 1969, just before the drummer joins Paul McCartney in meeting John Lennon at the Twickenham canteen.

It’s not obvious what song Ringo’s singing. The vocal could be a misquote from Liverpool pal Cilla Black’s 1964 smash “You’re My World,” a four-week UK chart-topper that was ultimately knocked out of the top spot by Lefty Wilbury.

Years earlier, Ricky Nelson had a hit with “You’re My One and Only Love,” but that doesn’t seem like the inspiration, either.

It could just have been spontaneous on Ringo’s part.

There is another song he could be quoting more directly, though the source is a mystery. A clue could be in a hit song not by Ricky Nelson but Lefty’s brother Nelson Wilbury — Ringo’s bandmate George Harrison.

George’s “When We Was Fab” paid homage to life as a Beatle, but one line that fit unassumingly in 1987 stands out a little bit more as we revisit January 1969.

“You are my world, you are my only love”

Remember when around the same time, George pulled a largely unknown, decades-old B-side and album track from his memory and record collection and stuck it on his new album?

It sure seems there’s a missing link for “you’re my world, you’re my only love” — maybe it’s something the Beatles’ drunk uncles would sing at the pub in the Dingle or Speke in 1947 — a composition since lost to time that inspired callouts from both Ringo on January 13, 1969, and George, nearly 20 years later.

***

The near(er) future — more like 1974 — was tangible on January 13, 1969, too. Just ask Paul.

With two future members of Wings in the room at Twickenham Film Studios, a third was an occasional topic of conversation throughout the course of the day. Linda Eastman wasn’t a keyboardist yet, but Jimmy McCulloch, all of 15 years old and more than five years away from joining Wings, already earned status as a sharpshooter guitarist.

In flight: Jimmy McCulloch, Paul and Linda McCartney of Wings

McCulloch’s new band, formed by The Who mastermind Pete Townshend only a few weeks earlier, had barely started recording. Still, word certainly got around in the right circles in early 1969.

“[The Who’s manager] Chris Stamp told me that they’ve got a new group now … the guy (Andy Newman) that works in the GPO (General Post Office),” director Michael Lindsay-Hogg said. “What’s he called? Clapperbell or something. And they’ve got a guitar player who’s 14 [sic], who looks like he’s 6.”

“Plays like he’s 80,” Ringo retorted.

It wasn’t called Clapperbell, instead it was …

“Thunderclap Newman,” Paul said, hours later and out of the blue — perhaps he caught a glimpse of them on the front cover of the most recent issue (January 11) of DISC and Music Echo — in the closing moments of the day’s Nagra tapes.

“That’s the guitar player they’re telling me about who looks 6, who’s going to be 14,” Michael replied, excitedly.

They may have been formed by the Who’s leader, but Thunderclap Newman’s early biography tied closely to the Beatles, too. The group’s smash debut single “Something in the Air” – originally titled “Revolution” but renamed for obvious reasons – has the distinction of knocking “The Ballad of John and Yoko” from the toppermost of the poppermost in July 1969. The song later appeared on the soundtrack to The Magic Christian which, of course, starred Ringo and was co-headlined by Badfinger’s version of “Come and Get It,” as penned by Paul.

“Something in the Air” was recorded at Townshend’s home studio in Twickenham – precisely one mile from where the Beatles were presently gathered.

***

If it wasn’t enough to dream of future bands, the January 13 Nagras revealed pre-Beatles adventures, too.

On the heels of Linda’s relating a story of a horse stepping on her toes, Ringo described a more catastrophic injury suffered by his previous bandleader, Rory Storm.

“[He was] diving off New Brighton diving stage, going down and down, and he thought, where’s the water? And just as he decided to look up for the water, he slipped, and he broke his nose. So with a broken nose, blood everywhere, he ran right back up and dived off again.”

“He would, yeah, that’s Rory’s thing,” Paul chimed in before saying he recently ran into Rory “in the drive, washing his car.”

“He’s a swimming instructor when I saw him, and DJing, and trying to put a new group together. He’s great though, Rory, I like him. He’s a hustler.”

***

You’ll remember the sequence as comic relief in an otherwise sobering segment in Get Back.

A man delivering flowers to George seemed to be the last man standing who couldn’t recognize the absent Beatle. Doubled over laughing, Michael pulled himself together in time to ask Ringo if he liked the Hare Krishnas, who sent the gift.

“No, not really,” the drummer replied in perfect deadpan.

***

“Have you seen [that of] the top nine records in America, five are Motown?” Michael asked early in the day.

Music was always on everyone’s lips, even as the Beatles’ own production stalled.

“Penny Lane, I think, is one of the greatest songs I’ve heard in my whole life. You like it?” Michael asked later.

“Yes, but I don’t think it’s the greatest song I’ve ever listened to in my whole life,” Ringo replied in earshot of the song’s author.

Conceding how much Penny Lane “moved” him, Paul asked Michael if he was “from suburbia.”

MLH: No, it had to do with nostalgia for me.

Ringo: His father’s a fireman.

MLH: No, nor [worked at a] barbershop. But it’s about nostalgia, which always makes me break up and cry. That’s why Otis Blue is a very big [album] in my life.

We also learned a little trivia about the first records ever bought by some of our protagonists.

For Michael, it was “Quarter to Three” by Gary U.S. Bonds, while Glyn Johns’ first single was Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line.”

***

I mentioned this quote from Ringo in an earlier post somewhat in passing, but I thought it was interesting enough to call out again with greater surrounding detail.

With the time-limited Get Back sessions ongoing as filming for The Magic Christian loomed on the horizon, he was asked by Michael what he enjoyed more, drumming or acting. The answer revealed Ringo’s strong professional motivation. Someone give this guy a raise — and a little more vacation time.

“Well, it’s hard to say, doing so little movies and such a lot of the drums,” Ringo answered. “‘Help!’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was all right because its the four of us and we played, and did it. The only trouble with those [was] when I didn’t know what I was doing. … So I did ‘Candy‘, which was only two weeks — which was great because I have to do something.” (emphasis mine).

It wasn’t enough to be a father of two young children and drummer of the biggest band on earth and galaxies beyond. Ringo just had to work and eliminate extended down time. No wonder he got along so well with Paul.

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Tagged as Cilla Black, Cloud Nine, Et cetera, future solo, George Harrison, Get Back film, Got My Mind Set on You, Hare Krishnas, January 13, Jimmy McCulloch, Lefty Wilbury, Linda Eastman, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Penny Lane, Pete Townshend, Ringo Starr, Rock Island Line, Rory Storm, The Who, Thunderclap Newman, Twickenham, When We Was Fab, Wings, You're My World

March 27, 2023 · 1:29 pm

Jan. 13: The Lunchroom Tape (Pt. 3)

To write about the Beatles’ lunchroom discussion on January 13, 1969, is to write about a conversation that has no particular aim and a sudden ending. As I wrote last time — I cut-and-pasted this part — it’s sincerely impossible to give a linear rundown of this 30-minute discussion, as it isn’t a linear discussion. My disclaimer remains: You may have already read some of the below in previous posts. Now three parts in, this isn’t a straight recap — instead I’m trying to follow themes as they moved across different points in the conversation.

If you haven’t already, please read Part 1 first and then Part 2. It’ll get you right where you need to be to start off here.

***

There’s no snark, no playing for the cameras, no sarcasm. Otherwise absent, John Lennon revealed his instinctual charm in his vulnerability.

“I played a weaker game now than ever,” John was recorded saying at one point during the Beatles’ lunchroom discussion on January 13, 1969, as captured by the Nagra Tapes.

He did know, however, that whomever he was speaking to, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Linda Eastman could listen in and follow up. This wasn’t complete privacy.

This conversation, like so much on the lunchroom Nagra tape and so much of the serious discussion around the band these days, is framed around the group’s approach to George Harrison’s role in the group. John and Paul certainly admitted to treating him “like a mongrel.” But much of the conversation is really centered on John and Paul themselves, the conjoined Nerk Twins and compositional heart and soul of the Beatles, the two biggest heads of the mighty four-headed monster that embodied the Beatles.

Much drama lay in store for the John and Paul relationship in years to come, but a lot had developed already. The threat of a further fracture — of the greater four, of these specific two — hung over Twickenham on January 13, 1969. The four were really three at this point anyway, with George gone.

And then there were those two. It was clear the relationship between John and Paul was, at best, impaired. The Lennon-McCartney partnership was discussed at some length before John and Yoko arrived for the day. In the presence of Ringo, Linda and others, Paul admitted his relationship with John — certainly when it came to songwriting, their job — wasn’t the same.

As the tapes secretly rolled in the Twickenham canteen, John came off as sincere in airing his grievances, which he must have held close prior, given how fresh his admissions sound.

“It’s like George said,” John conceded 12 minutes in, a line captured in the 2021 Get Back docuseries. “It just doesn’t give me the same sort of satisfaction anymore, because of the compromise we’d have to make to be together.”

The end result of the records now aren’t enough. … When something came out, like Revolver or [Sgt.] Pepper or whatever, there was still that element of surprise that we didn’t know where it came from. But now we know exactly where it comes from, and how it arrived at that particular noise, and how it could have been much better. Or it needn’t have been at all. The only way to do it satisfactorily, for yourself, is to do it on your own. And then that’s fucking hard.

So what’s the way out? It should have been these very sessions — the Beatles were in the midst of conducting exactly what it seems like John sought. The Get Back sessions weren’t delicately curated, and even if the actual noises weren’t necessarily unique, the process of creating new songs for a show demanded spontaneity unseen in their history.

John didn’t say the above to Paul, who was engaged in conversation with Yoko. Instead, John was speaking to Linda, who challenged her partner’s partner.

Linda: But you were saying yesterday … you write good songs and it can’t be any better way. You don’t want just studio musicians. I mean, that’s how I look at it. You make good music together, whether you like it or not.

John: I like it.

Linda: And making good music is also … it’s really hard working at a relationship.

Issues clearly emerged in 1968, and whether it sprouted from the death of Brian Epstein or the trip to India or during the White Album sessions itself isn’t necessarily relevant to this discussion. While the 1967 noises still surprised, the White Album left John “dissatisfied” (Ringo disagreed), even though “the end result was as good as it could’ve been.”

At once, John yearned for time on his own, while also lamenting that the Beatles had turned more in that very direction – more actively working separately — during the recording of their last album. To this end, The Beatles LP should have been called “John, Paul, George and Ringo.”

“I dig it, individually, far more than Sgt. Pepper,” John said. “But as a whole — as a Beatles thing, I think it didn’t work as a Beatles thing.”

There’s another contradiction. To get The Beatles Thing, they had to be themselves. But that behavior alienated George.

I wrote about some of what’s written below when I recounted Paul’s concept of a “breakup show” earlier on the 13th, but it’s worth not only repeating but going into further detail in the context of the rest of the lunchroom tape. We’re now in the post-Get Back docuseries world, which requires more commentary than before to amplify or clarify what a broader audience has now seen.

“You try and make George play competently, because you’re afraid that how he’ll play won’t be like you want him to play,” John told Paul. “And that’s what we did.

“And that’s what you did to me.”

The accusation came as no surprise to Paul, who simply mustered a “yeah,” like he did so many times during this conversation in response to John.

We can’t pretend this is a surprising point of contention. Paul Was Bossy largely defined the iconic Winter of Discontent. It was why the Let It Be Sessions, as we often called it once upon a time, was a “failure,” and why we believed the Beatles entered the summer of 1969 to produce Abbey Road as a way to go out on a high. This is 50 years of how Beatles history was recounted, whether you like it or not, to quote Linda.

We know better today, but even if it wasn’t the ultimate casus belli, of course Paul was bossy, even if that’s just in the lowercase. The other Beatles struggled with it: George quit at least in part because of it, and at the canteen, John protested. Paul may have placed himself as merely “secondary boss” earlier in the conversation when discussing an expanded lineup, but now, with around seven minutes left on the lunchroom recording, John conceded he felt powerless working with Paul, and had for some time.

“I’d got to a bit where I thought it’s no good, me telling you how to do it, you know? All I tried to do on [the White A]lbum was just sing it to you like I was drunk, you know? Just did me best to say, ‘Now look, this, this stands up on its own.’

“And I’m not doing this quite well this time, ‘cause I — like, even with ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, the first time I sang it. Because I hadn’t allowed meself to say it was a whole song. I couldn’t — it was only after we’d done it that I’d realized it was done. You know, and on The Beatles album, I just sort of said, ‘Here it is, ignore here, this is me singing it drunk, but I’m pretending as if I’m not. What would you do with it? George, you play whatever you like.’”

Paul arranges “Don’t Let Me Down,” from the January 6 sequence of Get Back.

Paul laughed at John’s second mention of singing drunk, but it goes to John feeling he had to be stripped of inhibitions to present and arrange a song to Paul as finished in his ears and in his eyes. John entered these sessions feeling unsure again, though. As he said regarding “Don’t Let Me Down,” it took Paul and George to help arrange it earlier in the sessions after John himself said he wasn’t sure in which order the song’s three sections should be presented.

You know, and that’s what it was. It wasn’t -– it wasn’t the arrogance of, “Listen, this is it, baby.” It was that I can’t tell you what to do because you won’t play, here, like what I think you should play. And I’m not going to tell you what to play.

Paul and John continued to speak to and over each other. It wasn’t angrily, they just were doing everything to make their respective points.

Paul: OK, and that’s great, you know. And then – it’s just being able to say that, on the occasion, just being – say, “Look, I’m not going to say anything about the song, because it’ll be difficult … to sing it to you.”

John: Yeah, I know, but you wouldn’t say – listen to me – you probably arranged it you know?

Paul: I know, I know.

…

John: Well, I’m saying that “Dear Prudence” is arranged. Can’t you hear [John vocalizes part of the song]. That is the arrangement, you know? But I’m too frightened to say “This is it.” I just sit there and say, “Look, if you don’t come along and play your bit, I won’t do the song,” you know? I can’t do any better than that. Don’t ask me for what movie* you’re gonna play on it.

Because apart from not knowing, I can’t tell you better than you have, what grooves you can play on it. You know, I just can’t work. I can’t do it like that. I never could, you know. But when you think of the other half of it, just think, how much more have I done towards helping you write? I’ve never told you what to sing or what to play. You know, I’ve always done the numbers like that. Now, the only regret, just the past numbers, is when because I’ve been so frightened, that I’ve allowed you to take it somewhere where I didn’t want.

[* Author’s note: I swear “movie” is what John said there, even if it doesn’t sound like it makes sense in context.]

What made the last bit a dialogue instead of a monologue was only the occasional “yeah” delivered by Paul.

John was pouring it out. He admitted fear, regret and submission.

“And then, my only chance was to let George … take over, or interest George in it, because I knew he’d …”

“’She Said, She Said,’” Paul interrupted, and John confirmed.

Interestingly, you can hear Linda replying, “yes, yes,” which means this was a big enough deal to Paul that he shared the story of that song’s recording with her (the couple didn’t meet for nearly a year after that session, so she wasn’t around at the time). It’s easy to reason why he did, and why he likely brought it up within the last 100 hours. With George having just quit, Paul probably told Linda about the time he himself walked out on the band – during the recording of the final song cut for Revolver, on June 21-22, 1966.

An anecdote absent from Beatles history until 1997 — the post-Anthology era — Paul recalled the walkout for Barry Miles’ authorized biography Many Years From Now.

I’m not sure but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we all had a blarney or something and I said, “Oh, fuck you!” and they said, “Well, we’ll do it.” I think George played bass.

Paul’s account had been the single source of this incident. It’s now part of the Beatles’ official history with this passage appearing in the book that accompanied the 2022 Revolver deluxe reissue (along with Paul’s quote):

The disagreement that happened in the dead of night seems to have been about how to resolve differing ideas for the arrangement. A recording sheet in the Abbey Road archive indicates a piano was added to the song at one stage, but no trace of the instrument remains on the tapes.

Back in the Twickenham canteen, John was clear about what mattered to him that night in 1966: “He’d take it as it is,” John said of George before continuing.

“So on [the White Album] … it’s probably George, you know, if there’s anything wrong with it. Because I don’t want your arrangement on it … I only want your … If you give me your suggestions, let me reject them, or if there’s one I like, it’s when we’re writing songs. The same goes for the arrangement.”

Exasperated and resigned, John continued, “I don’t want it to … I don’t know.”

Both Paul and Yoko said they knew what he meant, even if John couldn’t pin it down.

Opposite sides of the same coin. Not captured in Get Back: Yoko chiming in.

In the tape’s final moments, John returned the focus to his in-studio working relationship to Paul and continued to show what, at best, can be called inconsistencies.

And that’s all I did on the last album was say, “OK, Paul, you’re out to decide [how] my songs [are] concerned, arrangement-wise.” … I’d sooner just sing them, than have them turn into, into ‘[Being For the Benefit of] Mr. Kite,’ or anything else, where I’ve accepted the problem from you that it needs arrangement. … I don’t see any further than the guitar, and the drums, and, and George Martin doing the … I don’t hear any of the flutes playing, you know? I suppose I could hear ‘em if I [spoken as if straining] sat down and worked very hard! You know, I could turn out a mathematical drawing, if you like …

Indeed, John was more likely to tell George Martin he wanted “to smell the sawdust” in “Mr. Kite’s” circus atmosphere, or that he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s all consistent with John’s outspoken, retrospective dissatisfaction with arrangements on his own songs, like “Across the Universe” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

And I really am relying on your touch: Paul’s hand-drawn instrument charts from the gatefold of 1986’s Press to Play LP.

Isn’t John lucky to have run into a guy like Paul McCartney (and a producer like George Martin) to help him take the song beyond guitar and drums and happily chart out those mathematical drawings?

It’s the archetypal refrain when bands splinter: There were musical differences. The Beatles didn’t really have musical differences. Just listen to the music they kept making and their general output as solo artists. These guys just had differences in how to make music. Despite the protestations, John and Paul weren’t incompatible but perfectly complementary, they knew it and we all know it.

How to fit in George (Harrison) was an entirely different issue. This was all part of the “compromise we’d have to make to be together,” as John said earlier at the canteen.

Paul: I’m onto the same thing, you know. … It is only, like, if you can just remember that we’re, you know, the four of us are trying to do that. ‘Cause I mean, all of those things you say, you know, in some way, apply to me. Not always —

John: Yes, yes, because everything applies a little bit to each other.

Paul: It is just you saying it. They’re all, you know, in some way, to some degree, will apply to me.

John: But there was a period where none of us could actually say anything, about your criticisms.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

John: ‘Cause you would reject it all.

Paul: Yeah, sure.

John: And so George and I would just go, you know, “I’ll give you a line here,” “OK,” you know, “We’ll do four in a bar, and I’ll do…” [resigned, sincere] And a lot of the times you were right.

Paul: Yeah.

John: But a lot of the times you were the same as they always are. But I can’t see the answer to that.

The “we’ll do four in a bar” bit is what the Get Back docuseries claimed was “I’m Paul McCartney” — my complete forensic analysis of this sequence is here at CSI: Twickenham. Regardless if the show’s transcription decision was human (or AI) error or a deliberate editorial misrepresentation, even if John wasn’t actually mocking Paul we can understand why Peter Jackson and Co. either thought he was or just wanted that quote to have some traction.

Paul’s ego at this moment was justifiably boundless, and it extended to his thoughts on the band itself. The Beatles’ reputation earned them wiggle room. It ties indirectly to an imaginary scenario he laid out earlier in the conversation: drunkenly playing the piano just because he felt like it and “everyone in that room will dig it, because it’s me really doing it.”

Here Paul insists the Beatles don’t have to play perfectly to sound that way to listeners and critics.

The thing is, like, within each other, within ourselves, we’ve reached something that’s nearly perfect. And everyone else who’s listening to it — “That’s it! We’ve done it!” … OK, so we know we nearly made it, but we’ve really made it for everyone else. ‘Cause, OK, we’re into the fine, finest, finest technicalities, you know, I mean, that’s where it’s at, you know? If one day, we can even keep all the people who are listening to this, nearly, nearly made it, they think we’ve made it. They think that’s it.

The next bit is familiar from the opening moments of the lunchroom scene of the Get Back series, although on the tapes it actually was said very close to the end.

“Like last week,” Paul said, “I say I was doing all right for me, I was really trying to just say to George, ‘Take it there,’ you know? Whereas I wouldn’t have gone, previously — I would have said, “Take it there – with [vocalizing] ‘diddle-derddl-diddle-der.’ But I was trying last week, to say, ‘Now, take it there, and it needs to be like…”

“You see, the point now is we both did that to George this time,” John replied.

The policy that kept us together. The compromise we’d have to make to be together. John had asserted in the canteen several times there was a system, and in not so many words, he believed that system had collapsed and they broke George. This was, like so many issues these four had, a communication problem.

John put it succinctly: “It’s like if I say, ‘All right, take it,” he’ll say, “Well, look, I can’t take it.”

Before the tape ran out in the lunchroom, as John and Paul continued to discuss their inability to get through to George, musically, we get to hear part of an exchange that was introduced in an edited fashion very early in the Get Back version of the sequence.

Paul: So he knows that when we say, “Take it,” we expect [Paul vocalizing]. If I said that, then he’d … [vocalizing George playing a simplified version of that same part]

John: But it’s just that bit. The bit where we’ve — “I’ve Got a Feeling.” There’s no way we could have translated it to him to say …

Paul: He’d have said, “I’ll do it at home.”

…

John: He’s gonna go home. But so have I, you know. I’m gonna go home in a studio, rather than go through this with anybody.

Paul: I’ve never said to George, “Look, George, I think, when I want a guitar bit, I want it exactly like I want it.” And he’s never said to me, “Well, you can’t have it.” … But that’s it, while he’d never said that to me, and I’ll never say that to him, and we’ll go on. But, really, I mean it is gonna be much better if we can actually say, “Look George, ‘I Got A Feeling,’ I want … exactly [like this].” And he’ll say, “Yeah, but I’m not you and I can’t do it exactly how you do it.”

And that ended the near-30-minute reel. It’s unclear how much longer they spoke, and what direction the conversation took.

So where are we left after extensively eavesdropping on the Beatles?

Ultimately we only know what a 1960s-era miniature spy microphone shoved into a flowerpot in an active lunchroom was able to pick up over a single half-hour period. At several points, the conversation is completely indistinguishable. At others we have a conversation being picked up in the foreground when one in the background is completely obscured. Even with Get Back’s AI, we’ve learned it’s not all perfectly heard.

Thanks to the lunchroom tape we know the Beatles better than before if only because there are more data points to draw upon, but that doesn’t mean we understand things proportionally better. These Beatles were never ones to keep a story consistently straight when it was for public consumption, and it doesn’t seem much different in private.

All at once during this same conversation, John wanted to:

Assign song arrangements to Paul because he didn’t want to bother with the job himself
Ask for suggestions on arrangements with the right of refusal
Not have any additional arrangements to his songs

As relaxedly outspoken he was on the lunchroom tape as well as earlier in talking to the others prior to John’s arrival, Paul was likewise levelheaded, perhaps thinking all along, “John, you’re all over the place, as usual” while never coming close to saying as much.

The tape and these sessions overall allow us to witness a maturation in Paul’s temperament and what sounds anecdotally like a softening in his micromanagement style in the 30 months since his 1966 walkout. He could still be very stubborn, but if we assume the “She Said, She Said” situation was comparable to other tense moments in January ’69, he handled these recent situations with greater poise. Paul recognized it himself saying just above, “Like last week, I say I was doing all right for me.” There are several similar snapshots throughout the sessions at Twickenham where Paul can be heard stopping himself.

Get Back was misleading in its presentation of the “I’ll go home to do it” quote. It’s not that George wanted to quit the band — or for that matter that John wanted to also. Home was the space George was more comfortable working on certain things. Witness the “last-night” songs George composed alone at home. When John says George will go home, he didn’t mean he was quitting the band, as Get Back implies. The context is clear it was to be in a different space to work out his parts.

Still, George had quit the band, and attempts to get him back the day before failed. Perhaps John was so vocal at the canteen as a reaction to the complaints others had that Yoko was speaking for him over the weekend. John wasn’t relying on her, or code words or telepathy to communicate with Paul.

The Get Back edit of the lunchroom tape is a very frustrating viewing once you know the contents of the entire original half-hour audio tape. Deceptive at its worst and unreliable at other points, the TV edit simply blurs an already schizophrenic conversation. Even if the two central participants were John and Paul, the active presence of Ringo, Yoko and Linda needed to be acknowledged, period.

An alternate televised account of the lunchroom — perhaps openly presented as a supercut or trailer of sorts of the full conversation — would have come off cleaner. A movie trailer never presents the action in the final order, but that’s OK and assumed by a viewer. Openly presenting the lunchroom sequence as a sampler of the conversation — one that jumps in, out and all around — would have been a more fair portrayal to satisfy the critics (like me) while keeping with the show’s clear time limitations.

Paul was most outspoken when discussing the group’s future, both before and during the lunchroom tape. But to be clear, the Beatles always discussed their future, even publicly, going back to the dawn of Beatlemania. You’ve heard John’s quote from November 1963 before:

You can be big-headed and say, ‘”Yeah, we’re gonna last 10 years.” But as soon as you’ve said that you think, ‘We’re lucky if we last three months,’ you know.

That they were conscious of their future more than six years after that interview should be no surprise. Breakup rumors appeared in the mainstream press as early as 1964 and reignited periodically. They were always expected to break up until they unexpectedly broke up.

The issue date of this Beatles breakup rumor — November 23, 1964 — was the same day “I Feel Fine” was released in the U.S.

How often did the Beatles privately have conversations like this one at the Twickenham canteen? How often over their career during a bumpy period? How often in January 1969? This 30-minute sequence was a one of a kind capture, but it doesn’t make it a one-of-a-kind conversation.

The individual Beatles of January 13, 1969, were closer to 30 years old than 20. Closer to the release of the McCartney LP than Sgt. Pepper. Their egos were developed, and John said he needed to smother his in Paul’s shadow. George’s could hardly develop in the space of John and Paul.

Did John even want George back? That’s not my question, that’s John’s question.

At this point, there are conflicting goals: self-preservation and singing how you really sing it vs. the Beatles Thing. With the luxury of retrospection, we know it shook out OK. Abbey Road was terrific, Let It Be was great and the intermittent singles were fab. It was more in question on January 13, 1969.

Meanwhile, if John was looking for sounds that would surprise, in 10 days time, the embodiment of a new sound and new attitude would walk through the door, giving life to John’s search for an element of surprise.

***

Like “Her Majesty” — the conclusion to Abbey Road that had its origins in the Get Back sessions — the lunchroom tape cuts off unresolved. We only know what comes next some short time later: John, Paul and Ringo head back to Twickenham’s sound stage. George isn’t there. They don’t replace him either. They simply go back to the studio.

But George’s on their mind.

“Let’s go and see George,” Paul said about 10 minutes into the post-lunch Nagras, which were initially filled with idle talk — a little bit about camera work, some about television. There was one problem with that excellent plan, and Ringo delivered the news: George, in fact, had — quite literally — gone back home.

“He’s gone to Liverpool” and would be back Wednesday.

“Oh, then Wednesday’s the day we see him, right?” Yoko replied, cheerfully.

“Yeah, and I think til then … ” Paul said before being cut off by Ringo.

“Should we rehearse the numbers?”

And so the remaining Beatles got back to work.

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Tagged as argument, arrangement, Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, breakup, drunk, ego, flowerpot, George Harrison, Get Back film, I'm Paul McCartney, January 13, John Lennon, Linda Eastman, lunchroom tape, microphone, musical differences, Paul McCartney, Revolver, Ringo Starr, Sgt. Pepper, She Said She Said, Twickenham, White Album, Yoko Ono

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