Tag Archives: Let It Be movie

January 18, 2026 · 2:21 pm

TMBP Extra: Threetles’ Paradox

“It is no criticism of a thoroughly professional work that the Beatles will doubtless make sure it is out of date in a very short time.”

Writing for the Liverpool Echo on Sept. 30, 1968, Jonathan Cundy pointed to the velocity of the Beatles’ lives and musical innovation in reviewing Hunter Davies’ authorized biography that came out the same day.

No matter where they serve their guests, they seem to like the kitchen best: The Threetles in Anthology.

In real-time, the Beatles soared at the speed of light. Together or apart, across the 20^th or 21^st century, the history of the Beatles is fluid usually by their own design. And here we are talking about that again, nearly 60 years on. It wasn’t just their music and style that was constantly reinvented, so has their history in their own telling. Chisel Jonathan Cundy’s line in stone, it stands as an eloquent, evergreen statement on the Beatles biography business. Tomorrow really never knows.

I’m grateful we were served a new iteration of Anthology on Disney+ at the end of November 2025, grateful for enhanced visuals (clunky AI bits aside) and sound, because the more people are exposed to the Beatles and their history, the better. I wanted to weigh in and offer my immediate and subsequent impressions after watching Anthology ‘25. (I’m mainly writing here about the documentary, not the album set or book, although I will refer to both at times). In preparing for this post, I rewatched a broadcast version of the 1995 Anthology on the Internet Archive, my own DVD copies of the 2003 version and the 2025 streaming Disney+ cut. I also used this excellent resource documenting the changes across ’03 and ’25.

Watching the new Anthology exposed some issues in the original Anthology that I hadn’t really internalized after all this time. So I’m here to stare a hole through that version, too.

No time is a good time for a broad Beatles history. It’s always out of date in a relatively short time, even for a band that hasn’t worked as a quartet since 1969. We — the researchers, the curious, the informed — along with the somewhat fickle nature of the surviving members, estates and Apple itself, will always make that the case.

At least they acknowledge the problem. Here’s Paul as quoted in the Oct. 23, 1995, issue of Newsweek, in advance of Anthology’s release (I’ve held that magazine in my basement for decades, knowing I’d need it for this post one day):

I don’t know if you ever understand anything. That’s what happened at the end of the ‘Anthology’: I don’t understand it all any better than I ever did. But it’s all in one place now. That’s the thing.

I love the Beatles Anthology, it’s a critical document. I watched it on broadcast TV (for me it was ABC in the United States) during its first run 30+ years ago. Before that I learned the ropes as a teenager watching The Compleat Beatles all the time, usually starting at the “Strawberry Fields Forever” segment but often consuming the whole thing. That was my Beatles baseline when it came to history entering into the Anthology era. I read plenty of books, owned all the albums and a few bootlegs. I considered The Compleat Beatles as unimpeachable Beatles history, even if it wasn’t directly from Henry the Horse’s mouth. I think it influenced Anthology in various subtle ways, too.

I recorded Anthology off TV, explaining why I never bought the official VHS release in 1996. But I did get the DVDs when they came out in 2003, and it’s been a valuable research tool especially in tandem with the companion book that came out in 2000. A Beatles opinion may be mutable, but at the same time it’s gospel.

Paul, George and Ringo conducted interviews for Anthology in a narrow early-1990s period, and what they said for Anthology ’95 was drawn from the same interview inventory used in Anthology ’96 (VHS/Laserdisc), Anthology ’03 (DVD) and Anthology ’25 (Disney+), even if what was selected varied.

I hadn’t internalized how gone – like far gone — John Lennon comes off in Anthology until carefully rewatching it in Winter 2025. His absence is really contrasted by George Harrison, who isn’t with us either, but is vibrant and contemporary in Anthology. George was the youngest one interviewed in the 1990s, after all. He reminisces along with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr over decades gone by. He can directly debate the others.

“We’d all had enough time to breathe,” George said in Episode 9. “And I think it’s much easier to look at it now from a distance.”

John’s memories are airdropped in, and I can’t see past that anymore with the added distance we have from those clips. John’s contributions feel slight, relatively and understandably.

Obviously, John’s Anthology recollections are forced to come from decades earlier, culled from copious interviews, but those spanned a larger period of time and a wide band of moods. Jools Holland, who interviewed the other Beatles for Anthology, didn’t get to ask John a single thing, leaving his reactions shoehorned in, speaking to different media at different times via different prompts. John was never afforded the luxury of being relaxed for these interviews – he didn’t pilot a boat or sit poolside whilst reminiscing. And he didn’t have the distance that helped George. John’s moments come off lonely.

(Facing the same dilemma, the producers of last year’s Becoming Led Zeppelin used a similar approach to Anthology, mixing new interviews for the film with the three living members with archival clips from the late John Bonham. But at certain points they showed Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones listening and reacting to Bonzo’s quotes, humanizing the moment and bringing the drummer just a little bit more into the conversation.)

Across every release and in subsequent marketing, the Anthology brand held strict that the story was almost exclusively in the Beatles’ own words (e.g., look again at the above Best Buy ad). It’s even in big letters on the back of the Anthology book. The only new interviews outside the Threetles came from the deep inner sanctum of Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and George Martin. That meant hearing nothing from the five wives (Cynthia Lennon, Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney, Pattie Boyd and Maureen Starkey). Nothing from sympathetic figures like Billy Preston or Astrid Kirchherr, much less villains Allen Klein or Magic Alex.

Even a genuine Beatle was forbidden to retell the Beatles’ story, with Pete Best silenced in Anthology. All the above were alive and available to be interviewed in the early 1990s (Maureen died late December 1994). But if this is “their” story, the omission can be justified.

(Cynthia’s manager at the time disagreed, telling Newsweek, “They’ve made the be-all and end-all of the Beatles story without her! As if she wasn’t there! It’s ridiculous!”

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Notably, according to multiple contemporary accounts, Yoko was offered the chance to be interviewed, but she turned it down. Would her inclusion have opened the door to the others and steered the entire documentary in a different direction? Would she purely have been a one-for-one surrogate for John as a relaxed 1990s interview? Or was it simply for a first-person perspective on her offering John’s demo tape to the band in the early 1990s, only? We’re left to guess.

The snapshot of the six contemporary interviews are memories based after nearly a quarter-century of post-breakup reflection. It’s the same kind of snapshot we’re left with reading Davies’ biography, which ends with John “happily married” to Cynthia. When the book came out on the last day of September 1968, the Lennons had already been to divorce court. Yoko isn’t mentioned in the original edition.

Davies was conscious of his book’s obsolescence, concluding it with this passage:

Doing a biography of living people has the difficulty that it is all still happening. It is very dangerous to pin down facts and opinions because they are shifting all the time. They probably won’t believe half the things they said in the last four chapters by the time you’ve read them.

Jools took the task of interviewing the Threetles with the appropriate attitude of a serious journalist. From his enjoyable 2007 memoir, Baldfaced Lies and Boogie Woogie Boasts:

The first person I went to interview was Paul … I then moved on to George, and then Ringo. At one point all of them individually mentioned a van they all hated travelling in, but each of them remembered the make and colour of the van differently. I brought this up with Chips Chipperfield, the producer, and he said, ‘Silly detail. Doesn’t matter.’ But my policeman’s mind had already gone to work and I was thinking, ‘Well, it might be a silly detail to you but, if they’re not remembering the same facts about this one horrid van, it might cast a shadow over their memories of other matters?’ And this was borne out throughout the course of the Anthology.

…

Occasionally I would say, ‘Can I just compare your evidence to the evidence put forward by your co-members?’ But they all found their differing memories amusing.

It was a feature not a bug. It’s who they are.

I can be as skeptical as anyone, but the Beatles controlled their narrative from the moment they were able to, and I think they should have — it’s their own history. And that narrative was everything from what they said in radio interviews to the clothes they wore to how they picked the running order of their albums. It’s how they chose to present themselves. Just like they chose the content for Anthology.

We’ve been in the Anthology era nearly as long as the pre-Anthology era existed. Why shouldn’t they update it where they see fit, attract a new audience and take advantage of the better technology? No disrespect to those who are, but I’m not a purist. Stream away, repackage and resell deluxe editions, scrape the bottom of the barrel and I’m on board.

So I have no issues conceptually with the many revisions applied to the new Anthology, from a libertarian angle. Also, I like change, and I’m not stubborn in my day-to-day life (I recommend it!). That said, they should not sell Anthology in 2025 as the same product that existed previously. This isn’t the same as restoring A Hard Day’s Night for Blu-ray or putting the 2009 remastered Rubber Soul on Spotify.

Let the Beatles tell their story, and at the same time, we can tell their story too, on blogs, podcasts, books, everywhere we can communicate.

Given that it’s my home turf, I want to dig a little bit into the Let It Be/Get Back sequences (primarily) for demonstrative purposes, but I’m sure whatever points I make translate across eras and the documentary.

Paul looks into the crystal ball on January 7, 1969, as seen in Get Back.

For those keeping score, the Get Back segment clocks in 5-6 minutes longer on Disney+ vs. the DVDs and the original ABC broadcast. So for a series that was shortened from the DVDs for streaming, this period is actually longer.

Here’s what’s NEW in ’25:

The big add was the January 10 jam with Yoko, post-George’s walkout. At least through the late-70s, George was under the impression this segment made the final cut of Let It Be, referring to Yoko’s “screeching number” in the film in a 1977 interview. Why now, and not in 1995/2003? Maybe George stood in the way then, and its use in Get Back broke the seal for its use here. Whatever the reason, it definitely is a positive addition, reflecting the chaos of George’s departure and dovetailing with the section on Yoko’s relationship with John and the band.
Another excellent, important addition was the “final bulletin” segment, Paul’s fake news show that would break the Beatles’ split. Enveloped by other 1990s-era quotes about a breakup in the air, this concrete and contemporary discussion really ties the room together as a weather forecast for the Winter of Discontent. If you’re keeping track like me, you’ll note the end of this sequence slightly differs from what is in Get Back. This Anthology edit is the real deal, what you hear on the Nagras.
Even though George walked out and Yoko sang from his cushion, George still said it was “a lot of water went under the bridge” and “everyone’s good friends and has an understanding of the past.” George said this in the 1990s, but it was not included in the first passes of the series. It certainly fits the “story of friendship” the Beatles have sold as the brand in recent years.
Paul’s concern that once the sessions ended John would be “off in a black bag” instead of following up with the band was another good addition. More fuel to the argument that the breakup was inevitable.
Also fitting the concept that the four of them could be the only ones who could understand each other is Paul’s worry Billy was joining the band. He was worried in Get Back — we heard his concerns then — and he didn’t change his tune come the Anthology interviews.
Incredibly, one of the greatest moments in filmed Beatles history — “I hope we passed the audition” — was not in any previous iteration of Anthology. So this is a layup, a must-add. The mind boggles how this wasn’t in there before.
As the segment neared conclusion, George said the group became stifling and restrictive and that “it had to self-destruct.” It’s not an earth-shattering line, but just adds to the inevitable breakup.

I found a few significant modifications, too:

George describing the Get Back sessions as his “Winter of Discontent” — such an amazing, biting line, still — was shifted from before the “I’ll play if you want me to play” argument to after it. I don’t see this as anything other than improving the flow of the story. I’m on board.
While the Beatles play “Don’t Let Me Down” on the rooftop, the DVD shifted to street-level audio while the camera showed the audience on Savile Row. Disney+ restored the rooftop audio for those scenes — and that matches the original broadcast. It’s a superficial change, but worth noting.
Paul’s fireside Army buddies story was moved to immediately before the wedding segment, another logical change for story flow.
“Can we giggle in the solo?” The addition of John’s one-liner prior to Let It Be is another way to lighten the mood (as it was when he first said it in 1969).

Looking at those lists, a lot was changed! On balance, I think the updates to this segment are positive, but it’s only positive in the context of Anthology as it had existed. Here’s the real problem: The story Anthology tells of the January 1969 period is really convoluted, especially on the heels of 2021’s Get Back documentary, which now is a well-known quantity for the Beatles community, old and young, immersed and casual. Yet Anthology tells the “original” story of the January 1969 sessions, which was never really right.

I wrote about this at length. Let It Be (the film) dictated opinions for half a century, influencing idiots like me to actual living, breathing non-idiot Beatles. I think it’s clear that Let It Be as an artifact influenced Anthology’s production in the 1990s. The “I’ll play if you want me to play” argument was the deliberate showcase of the Get Back sessions’ dysfunction in Anthology, the jump-off for the breakup conversation, and a reinforcement of what was said otherwise for decades. It continued to define the period until the Get Back documentary era.

I think that “row,” as George describes it, stays as a centerpiece in the new Anthology simply because it’s the one specific incident he comments on directly. We’re tied up because of the resistance to expand beyond the 1990s interview inventory.

Why not also show George suggesting the group “have a divorce” on January 7, 1969? Or saying he could work on a solo record January 29? Both segments were in Get Back and ready to load into Anthology, and either scene (or both!) would be better confirmation of the breakup vibes in January 1969 than a fleeting argument that happened to make the Let It Be film.

The changes to January 1969/breakup sequences went halfway in Anthology ’25, and I think shifting focus off the “I’ll play if you want me to play” scene would have been seen as tearing apart original production, even if, like some of the other changes, it would have proved clarifying.

Here’s Paul in August 2021, in advance of the release of the Let It Be LP reissue, shortly before Get Back came out, too:

I had always thought the original film Let It Be was pretty sad as it dealt with the break-up of our band, but the new film shows the camaraderie and love the four of us had between us. It also shows the wonderful times we had together, and combined with the newly remastered Let It Be album, stands as a powerful reminder of this time. It’s how I want to remember The Beatles.

Great news, even if we didn’t get the reissue of the Let It Be film until 2 1/2 years after this statement. I have something in common with Paul McCartney: This era is how I want to remember the Beatles, too! But it’s also the same period Paul describes in all the Anthology versions as “showing how a breakup works,” and you wouldn’t think that’s how he wanted to “remember the Beatles.”

This wasn’t Paul speaking off the cuff. All four Beatles maintained for a long time that January 1969 was toxic, two of them until their death. So let’s call them mercurial.

If you check the Anthology VHS and DVD liner notes, Derek Taylor concluded the text on the final episode by describing the Beatles’ career arc as “scarcely credible.” The band we’ve known for all these years conceded what we’ve known for all these years.

“Yet,” he continued, “here have been ten hours of unchallengeable evidence.”

The number of hours fluctuated with every release of Anthology – a point of contention nowadays — but the concept holds true: Beatles history borders on the unreal. And we have to admit at the same time the storytellers can sometimes be, to use his words, scarcely credible.

(By the way, one other thing we lose with the streaming-only focus is the beauty of liner notes as a medium. But that’s another, frankly sad, story.)

Deliberately, I only studied in detail the Get Back and surrounding sections for this post, but I’d imagine that if I did the same for another period, I’d reach similar conclusions. I know all about the “cripples” bits and Hamburg condom story being pulled. I took note of the addition of ’90s Ringo saying he and Barbara are inseparable like John and Yoko, and all the extra smiles now in the final Tittenhurst clips. The addition of John’s original “Yellow Submarine” work tape from Revolver deluxe is great and exactly sort of thing we should have after its discovery a few years ago.

I like a lot of the changes! Still … if you’re going to change, really commit to the changes.

I think Apple should have torn it all down produced a completely new Beatles documentary rather than present 2025 Anthology as the unimpeachable, singular career-spanning Beatles documentary. Davies’ biography was obsolete the day it was released. And that’s OK! Beatles Anthology ’95 is obsolete too. And that, likewise, is OK. If we think it can be better, let’s give it a shot. Anthology can be the Beatles’ history circa the turn of the century. Why do we have to work in that documentary’s template alone?

I think it’s been nice for us and the public to forget about the Beatles for a while, let the dust settle and now come back to it with a fresh point of view.

That’s George speaking in Episode 9 again, and making my case.

I haven’t seen a quote from Peter Jackson, whose team restored Anthology, but I did see Oliver Murray, the Episode 9 director, say this, which makes me think it was an overall strategy across Anthology ’25:

It was important to me that the pool of material we were working from had a time and a place. It was made in 2025, but the world that we’re absorbed in is from anywhere between ‘91 and ‘95.

And this is where I’ll plant my flag. Why did this world have to be from 1991-95? I know, it’s because it’s part of Anthology, a product of 1995. But this doesn’t have to be.

The Threetles in Episode 9

We’re in Theseus’ Paradox, if I can overdramatize this. How many pieces of the Beatles’ ship need to be replaced for it not to be the Yellow Submarine anymore, so to speak? Add this clip, shorten this other one, reorder something else — after how many revisions is it not the same documentary?

They promised the “ultimate form” of the product. I think we just got “another” form of it. I can wrap my head around removing some of the more PC-related issues, and I understand killing the Apple Boutique segment (for instance) because it doesn’t flow well or loom large in their legacy. (They could have at least put something like the Apple Boutique segment as a little bonus extra on Disney+ — it already was produced, is pretty harmless and is still part of the history.)

Anthology doesn’t cover anything between April 10, 1969, and 1994, the Threetles sessions. And then nothing after teasing the aborted “Now and Then” session in Episode 9. John Lennon doesn’t die in Anthology (neither does Stu Sutcliffe, for that matter). I get it – it’s not the John-Paul-George-Ringo Anthology. It’s the Beatles Anthology, and John is alive when the Beatles split. In Anthology’s world, the Beatles reunite, but without any context how or why.

“Having not done it for so long, you become an ex-Beatle,” Paul said in Episode 9. “But of course, getting back in the band and working on Anthology, you’re in the band again.”

But then he wasn’t in the band again. They chose not to finish the third song in the 1990s. We know how “Now and Then” turned out. Is this new Anthology for posterity or not? If it is, why end on a cliffhanger? Davies had an excuse when his book came out saying John and Cynthia were happily married, and with no mention of Yoko: He had to send his manuscript to the publisher. “Now and Then” came out two years ago, and this isn’t print. It’s another example of the new Anthology going halfway with that ending.

Maybe a new documentary can be honest about that too: If the Beatles are still together today, then we’re still in its history, and 1970-2026 is part of their history. Embrace it. I don’t mean have a segment on Flowers in the Dirt or John’s immigration case.

Paul said “we were at war” in Episode 9 — so show it. The lawsuits. “Too Many People” and “How Do You Sleep?” Show the collaborations, too. The Ringo LP. Clapton’s wedding. Even if they still don’t want to explicitly mention the deaths of John and George, present “All Those Years Ago” and Paul and Ringo (and Billy, and so many others) at The Concert For George. The Beatles enjoyed shared history after 1970 that gives important background.

Beatles history doesn’t have to be viewed perpetually from 1995, and that’s how Anthology as it stands is presented. It’s an arbitrary endpoint now.

Fly in post-breakup clips from the other Beatles, not just John. Paul in ’76 or Ringo in ’77 or George in ’71 – any of those clips (for instance) would have helped ‘70s John not come off like such a remote figure who didn’t get to have the same closure the other three had. No one could bring John to the 1990s, but they could have brought Paul, George and Ringo back to John’s ‘70s. Isn’t that what they did for “Free as a Bird,” “Real Love” and “Now and Then” anyway? The Threetles played John’s songs and were constrained by his limitations, not the other way around.

(Note that Paul took this very approach with his new Wings memoir, using a wide range of quotes over decades for the oral history.)

Peter Jackson and the technology he’s brought injected incredible life into the Beatles history, and also some questions. Do we want a Beatles history taking advantage of the advances, or improvement to the already existing Anthology? I personally don’t want an original-flavor Anthology that’s altered beyond whatever would qualify as “cleaning up” to account for today’s mediums (streaming, Blu-ray, etc.) I’m fully contented to have it be a product of its time, like Let It Be — which was indeed just cleaned up in 2024 — was as a complement to Get Back (and vice versa). But moving around quotes, removing some and adding others, leaving a bit of old history in and generally shortening the experience isn’t presenting the original document. Knowing the history I know, this feels incomplete.

I think a new Beatles history documentary could play a part in another revitalization of the group in the way the first Anthology did and how Get Back did, while also respecting the fact we’ve lost half of the band too. We may need to wait awhile until only estates are left to have a say. But it could take a replacement of every piece of the ship to truly rebuild and create clarity in their history.

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Tagged as Anthology, Apple Corps, Disney+, DVD, George Harrison, Get Back film, Hunter Davies, John Lennon, Jools Holland, Let It Be movie, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, The Compleat Beatles, Theseus' Paradox, TV, VHS, Yoko Ono

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.

: 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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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.

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Filed under Extra

Tagged as 1970, argument, bootlegs, context, degrade, George Harrison, Get Back film, HBO, John Lennon, Laserdisc, Let It Be movie, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Now and Then, Paul McCartney, Peter Jackson, Reel Music, Ringo Starr, The Compleat Beatles, VHS, videotapes, Woodstock, yawn

March 29, 2024 · 11:16 am

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

September 20, 2023 · 11:32 am

TMBP Extra: A conversation with Steve Matteo

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with author Steve Matteo, who not only is a fellow New Yorker, but even better, also shares the unique experience of writing at length about the Let It Be/Get Back sessions. You may have already read his 33 1/3 on “Let It Be,” and now his latest book — Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film — takes on the entirety of the group’s core movies in heightened detail with expansive context enveloping the period. If 33 1/3 was an LP, this book is a deluxe box set.

We spoke for almost 90 minutes, which was a great experience in real time — I suggest talking about the Beatles with people for hours, it’s always a wonderfully rewarding experience — but delivering a full transcript would cause severe eye strain. And I’m not going to start podcasting, despite my standout overnight freeform college radio stint almost 30 years ago.

So I did a little bit of both, transcribing the best bits of the conversation and then dropping extended soundbites when you want to hear a little more.

A caveat as you dig in with the hope you dig it: I’m neither a broadcaster nor professional podcaster (although I’ve appeared on several as a guest!). I recorded the audio by putting poor Steve on speakerphone and then taping the interview from a mic on a computer. I cough some. Dogs mournfully bark for treats in the distance. The conversation wasn’t originally meant to be heard, but I ultimately believed smaller soundbites would be an effective way to present further parts of the interview, even if it wasn’t properly produced.

One other minor note: We talked a little about the potential of a future “Let It Be” reissue. This conversation was held a few weeks before we starting hearing rumors of a late 2023/early 2024 re-release of the film.

The Beatles, literally, at the movies

They May Be Parted: Why did films appeal to the Beatles? Was it just general desire for fame and exposure? There was nothing their earlier biographies to suggest otherwise. They were performers but not necessarily people who dreamt of acting. Was it just a product of the time and their own love of films that drew them in?

Steve Matteo: One, let’s make some money. They’re still young kids who grew up in Liverpool and had nothing. I think it was part of just the way it was done. When you became popular and you became big in the pop music world, like Elvis and Cliff Richard, you made a movie.

And I also think that they just loved movies, especially American movies. I think that movies had always been an escape for people who are middle class or lower-middle class, where you can go, there was a time you can literally spend your 10 cents and go into these big, beautiful movie palaces and escape into this other world. And if you’re young kids in Liverpool that lived in this place that in this country was literally bombed during World War II and you’re lucky to be alive and you have no money and you have really nothing, to go into these beautiful movie theaters and see these incredible American, mostly American films of cowboys and Indians.

And, you know, Ringo loved Westerns. So it’s like a fantasy. Like you’re this kid watching these movies. You never thought you would become a movie star. You never thought you would be in a movie. That’s why the title of the book comes from that particular song (“Act Naturally”). It works so perfectly.

So there’s all of these reasons. I think once they did “A Hard Day’s Night” though, I think they kind of felt like once the train of “Help!” had started up, they were sort of like, “Oh, now we’re going to do this again.”

You know how they were, they didn’t want to repeat themselves. I think after “Help!” they were sort of like, “Well, we’re not going to make movies like that anymore.”

Listen for more

“Paul saw the potential for creativity and it was like, ‘Well, let’s try this. We’re the Beatles. We can do anything.’”

TMBP: Your book spends a great deal of space on films that predated and were contemporaries of the Beatles’ movies. How intimate were you with these films previously? Did you think, “I know the context around the Beatles films, so I want to include that?” Or, “I’m writing about the Beatles films so I need to learn this context?”

SM: I think I knew a lot about the Beatles films, but there’s always more to discover. I’ve always really loved the British films of the ’60s. I’m a big fan of spy movies, and it’s a very rich period. There was a lot that I knew, but then obviously once you start doing research, there’s so much more that you learn about. So I just felt like I didn’t want to write a book that was, “OK, the Beatles made ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ Oh, OK, and then they did ‘Help!'” And I wanted there to be context. I wanted there to be connective tissue.

It’s like the Beatles sort of influenced everything in that period, but they were also influenced by what was going on. So it is a film book. And when you write a book on the Beatles, you want to figure out a way to have it be somewhat different because there’s so many of them. So I felt like all of this context would kind of be a way to do that. And I think it became more than I thought it was going to be.

And there’s obviously, there’s musical context too. I give a lot of what’s going on, the British Invasion, the British music that came later, the psychedelic music. And I included the San Francisco sound and the psychedelic culture and all that was going on with mod fashions and photography. And it’s like a sort of cultural history of the ’60s where the sort of jumping-off point is the Beatles films. But then I give you all this other stuff.

“I hope that really hardcore Beatle people will appreciate the book … but I didn’t want to just write a book for the fans, or a book that was just for people who are only into the hardcore.”

TMBP: With hindsight we get it, but what did United Artists see in these guys to sign them for three films in 1963? You wrote it was for a quickie B-movie kind of thing, but the group had just a couple hit songs in the UK and no American footprint at all at the time. And UA took this incredible leap of faith.

SM: I think what they really were signing on for first was the soundtrack album. Capitol had this horrible contract where they did not have the rights to a soundtrack. And so United Artists, who had a really strong soundtrack component to their media company knew Capitol doesn’t have the U.S. rights to a soundtrack. “We got to sign these guys up. They’re selling records, and we’ll make money just on the soundtrack. And if we break even on the movie, it’s fine. It’s a cheap, old movie. It’s not going to cost us a lot of money.”

“They were one of the first United States artistic media companies that were formed by the creative people. … United Artists is really important to this story”

TMBP: There’s no question to the Beatles’ brilliance, but — whether it’s the serious Beatles fan, a Beatles scholar, music writers – do we almost give the band too much credit for inventing things out of whole cloth, instead of crediting them for synthesizing and improving upon their influences and contemporaries?

SM: That’s why I wrote it the way I did, because I wanted people to realize, for example, how important Richard Lester is. How important the other people who worked on the films — the cinematographers, the camera people, the writers, all of these folks.

“You do it because you love the Beatles, and there’s a lot of love that’s going on here. I try to be a journalist, though, too, and I want to be objective.”

TMBP: Researching the Beatles is a minefield, going through 10 years worth of the band’s history that’s more than 60 years removed.

SM: And that’s why I like to use books as a source of more than newspaper articles, because newspaper articles, it’s where they say journalism is the first draft of history. The newspaper articles often get it wrong because they’re rushing to hit a deadline. And it’s written by people who don’t know pop music. And it’s, “Oh, this is going to happen.” When you read about “Let It Be,” and you read about what was being said in Beatles Monthly or those things, they’re just talking about what it’s going to be. And as you know, this is your area, it constantly changed what it was going to be and what it eventually became.

That section in particular, I felt like whatever was sort of contemporary material is it’s just filled with conjecture on what the Beatles thought it was going to be. And you know, Derek Taylor’s saying whatever. And it’s not anybody lying. It’s just, well, on January 4th, it’s going to be X. By January 10th, it’s going to be something different. So books, I like to use more as a source because they’re after the fact. Here it is. This is what happened. It’s written down here, you know.

And I try to like, you know, and I go, as you know, I go deep into explaining my sourcing. I felt it was important to do. It is a minefield. And I really worry. And then the thing that drives you the most crazy is you read sources that are supposed to be the definitive, authorized, correct sources. And those people get it wrong. Humans make mistakes, and facts that are not facts get picked up over and over again where they become gospel.

There was one fact alone, when John and Yoko met with Klein, I could not get, we’re literally talking about not even 24 hours. I could not nail that down. I contacted Chip Madinger. He was great. He’s like, “Here you go, Steve.”

People are going to just read that one sentence in a 350-page book. I must’ve spent three days on that. Just that one sentence, literally. But it has to be right. I mean, if we’re writing history, we’re writing history, we’re not writing an opinion piece. And I’m a journalist. I’m not a music critic. I’m not writing Revolution In the Head.

TMBP: The Get Back sessions are always justifiably referred to as having no set plan. They’re making up everything as they go along. In reading your book, it seemed like there was a lot of making things up as they go along in “Magical Mystery Tour,” in “Yellow Submarine.” They were written on the fly, too. It almost seems like this is just the way they like to work.

Honey pie (chart): Paul’s “Magical Mystery Tour” breakdown

SM: With “Magical Mystery Tour” they had a blueprint. They had like an outline, as you know, the pie chart that Paul came up with. And then with “Let It Be,” it’s reality TV. It’s just like, “So we’re going to set up here, you guys turn the cameras on.” I mean, that’s really what it was. So that’s a documentary.

I don’t know if you’ve read my “Let It Be” book.

TMBP: I literally have it in my hand because I have a follow-up question about it.

SM: What I did was when I wrote that, I said, “OK, ‘Let It Be,’ it was a documentary.” So I think that’s my approach. I like the journalistic approach because first of all, I don’t think anybody cares about my opinion. And I would rather present the facts and let people come to their own conclusions. There are some people that they don’t like that. They find it a little dry. They feel like it’s just that you’re stringing a lot of facts together. I try to create a certain amount of, I have my opinions here and there, and I make observations. And obviously there’s, particularly with this [new] book, there’s a ton of context. So I just think that that’s what it is. It’s a documentary. I mean, you’re not going to script a documentary. You know what I mean?

So, of course, they would rather work sort of extemporaneously. I mean, that’s what they did when they wrote songs. That’s what they did in the studio. They would say, “Let’s try this. Let’s try that. Oh, let’s go down that road.”

One of the reasons why the music is so great is because they didn’t sit around thinking too much like, “But they’re not going to play that on the radio.” And, “Well, we’re only going to sell a million copies if we do it that way instead of 5 million.”

They were these geniuses. You had these great songwriters and that’s kind of where it starts. You’ve got these songs and you’ve got this great supporting cast in the studio. You’ve got George Martin and these great engineers. And yeah, there was limitations with Abbey Road Studios. We all know that, but there was also the amazing studio with the real echo chambers, real, not digital delay. And it just kind of all comes together, if you’ll excuse the joke.

TMBP: They were also — and this includes George Martin — great editors, and they knew they knew what should stay and what should go. And whether during the songwriting process or whether in the actual recording of the song, knowing just what was too much, what they didn’t need. And it seems, again, in reading your book, that they were good at that with their films — whether it was in “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” or “Magical Mystery Tour” — knowing what to cut, knowing what they need to rework, knowing what they need to shorten. And it wasn’t always just, “We’ll give you everything.”

SM: Right. I think that “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”, that was a lot in terms of Richard Lester and whoever was editing which particular film. You know, “Magical Mystery Tour,” they had a lot of help with that too, in terms of editing it down and creating something that was close to being cohesive. “Let It Be” is this thing of just hours and hours and hours because of the nature of it, because it was a documentary.

I mean, keep in mind, they obviously have all of this control over their music as time went on. But with the films, it is very much collaborative and various decisions in the way things end up is very much the filmmakers’ and not the Beatles. “Magical Mystery Tour,” they had almost total control over.

TMBP: So I was saying, I have your 33 1/3 on “Let It Be” in my hand. On the last page (this is a spoiler alert for anyone who has not read it yet) you write — and this is right after they found the stolen tapes – “Whether the recovery of the stolen Nagra tapes will impact the fate of the new DVD remains to be seen.” When you wrote that 20 years ago, what did you expect would happen?

I meant it when I said I had Steve Matteo’s 33 1/3 on Let It Be in my hand. Please visit the Contact Me page if you’re looking for an inexperienced hand model.

SM: When I interviewed Michael Lindsay-Hogg, he told me that he was interviewed for extras for a DVD release. And there were other people that I talked to who said the same thing. Now, of course, it never came out. The whys, we don’t know. There’s always been this speculation that the Beatles didn’t like “Let It Be,” particularly George. And that was a lot of the reason why it kind of sat on the shelf.

This is after George passed away [in November 2001]. I’m working on the book mostly in 2003. So that must have been the impetus, in some ways, to say, “Now’s the time to get this thing off the ground. George was never really a fan.”

I don’t mean this in a negative way. They weren’t being like, “OK, George is gone. Let’s put this out.” I don’t mean that. That’s not where I’m going with this. I think that I think it’s just the opposite. I think they respected, they all had an equal share, and he really wasn’t a fan of putting it out.

So now that George had left us, I think that was one of the projects they felt like, “We don’t like it, [but] people want to see it. So let’s get it out there.” But it never happened. And whatever the reason, I don’t think anybody really knows that. If somebody knows it now, tell them to e-mail me and let me know. Was there something? Because they put all this work into it. And if you remember, also, when they announced “Get Back,” they announced “Let It Be” would be re-released.

TMBP: It was the last line in the press release announcing “Get Back.”

SM: Right. And so here we are, once again. It’s, as Yogi Berra said, déjà vu all over again. Every time they do this, people start calling me and they want to interview me. And I say this, the story of “Let It Be,” “Get Back” — whatever you want to call it — it is not over, it will not die, it will not go away.

And that was one of the reasons why I did the 33 1/3 book. Because I felt like of all their albums, that was the one that the life of it was not finished. It wasn’t something that was done. I mean, look at it. As much as they hated it, we’ve had Let It Be … Naked, we’ve had “Get Back,” and we’ve had the Let It Be box. And whatever’s on the Anthology albums, the CDs, and it’s still not over.

You have to remember, too, that Peter Jackson said that he’s going to work on another project with Paul and Ringo. And whether that is the “Now and Then” thing or whether it’s hopefully more like the Star Club-type stuff. I think it’s more than just using that technology to get better recordings out of some of this to put out. But I don’t know, I have no inside information.

TMBP: What were your experiences listening to the Nagra tapes? Because there aren’t that many of us who have put in the effort to hear it all. For me was very eye-opening to get this full breadth of who they were. You got little bits of it in all the bootlegs that came out from 1969 on, but then to finally get the full extent of it — what was that like for you?

SM: I was never a big bootleg guy. I know there was almost an industry of Let It Be/Get Back bootlegs, but it always intrigued me and it was interesting. And then when I started working on the 33 1/3 book, obviously I started really digging deep into this stuff, and it is fascinating. You do kind of get into it and the history of it, the photography, the pictures. I love the way that — and I talk about this in the new book — these bootleggers would come up with these crazy names for these things, like “Jamming with Heather.” I named the last section of the book after “Posters, Incense and Strobe Candles,” the BCN bootleg. I love that stuff.

I mean, I know some people think this stuff should all remain dead and buried. Some people want to hear every note. Steely Dan, they’ve never wanted to release all of the outtakes and all of that stuff. They have this aversion to it. I think they’ve released one unreleased song in their entire history. They just don’t want this, they are such perfectionists. They don’t want people to see Picasso’s sketches.

TMBP: At some point in the 1970s or early ‘80s, didn’t George Martin say there’s nothing in the vaults anyone would want to hear? But that wasn’t true. And then you have someone like Bob Dylan, who in his lifetime makes the decision to put everything out there. And I think that’s what the fan wants to hear.

SM: Neil Young is doing that too.

TMBP: And I want to hear everything. But I guess that’s me. And again, I don’t know how many people would sit through 80 or 85 hours of Nagra tapes or whatever the band’s leftovers are.

SM: They could make it available digitally or something. I think that Capitol, Universal, Apple — I think they’ve gotten better at it. I think that the Anthologies were the kind of first step towards doing this stuff right. Whatever problems they’re all with it, and everybody’s got their opinion. And then I think the next kind of leap was once they started with the Sgt. Pepper 50th anniversary, I think they’re getting this stuff right. And I think the reason why is because I think they’re trying to be more open to listen to what the people who really know have to say, not just relying on whoever the person is at the particular label at the particular time who’s in charge of catalog development.

“It all ended in 1970. I think they’re going to reach a point where they’re going to run out of stuff. But I think there’s still stuff left to be put out.”

TMBP: What was your reaction to the “Get Back” series, to hear the tapes cleaned up and see those visuals? There are moments in “Get Back” not quite portrayed the way it really happened, some scenes not edited sincerely – there are some gray areas. How did you view how “Get Back” was presented overall?

SM: What you’re saying in terms of your knowledge of it, where you know, they played with that, they enhanced it, or it’s a little out of sequence, which is troubling. But I think that’s just what filmmakers do.

TMBP: It’s a good story. Peter Jackson made a great story.

SM: Right. And I don’t think they’re necessarily trying to mislead anybody. I just think there’s a sense of it doesn’t make sense, even though it’s correct.

Because you know, “No, that’s wrong. That’s enhanced. They overdubbed something there.” But maybe they didn’t, maybe it’s just this new technology. They were able to fix it. Maybe it wasn’t right before because you couldn’t hear it right. And now it is right because you can hear it now because of the new technology. I mean, that’s a discussion to have.

TMBP: For sure. I’ve thought everything that Peter Jackson did was certainly from a good place. Maybe I’m speaking like this is the world of sports, but “Get Back” invigorated the fan base, so to speak, and then brought in so many new, younger fans. I’m on social media and shocked in the best way at how many teenagers, 20-somethings are knowledgeable and fully invested in the Beatles. I think these were the right choices at the right time, the right phase of the Beatles to blow this out.

SM: Yeah. I think that it was — these guys are so cool and not just the four of them, but all the people that surround them. Glyn Johns wins the “Get Back” Fashion Award. I don’t think there’s any question about it. I think that they, the world, the media world is so used to these long-form streaming shows, these bingeable kind of things. Rather than just watch some dopey show on network television or go to a movie, this is almost like a new format, for lack of a better word. And it was so smart to put it on the first time over Thanksgiving weekend, when everybody’s home for this long weekend, and everybody’s exhausted from eating too much turkey and drinking too much wine. We’re kind of in the middle of COVID. So it’s sort of like, “Well, what do you want to do tonight? Yeah, let’s watch ‘Get Back.’”

And the critics seem to really love it. It’s Peter Jackson, too. He’s like the biggest at that time. No one could touch him as a filmmaker. He’s like this old hippie, too. So I think he comes from, like you said, the right place. It wasn’t just, “This brilliant director guy, we’ll just have him do it.” Don’t forget the Beatles wanted to do Lord of the Rings. Well, here’s the guy that did Lord of the Rings. So how perfect is this? I mean, it really, once you heard that this was going to happen, it was like, ah, perfect.

Peter Jackson and Co. cross the Road during the mixing of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack in the early 2000s.

TMBP: Exactly. There was, there were a lot of ways they could have gone. And it couldn’t have gone better.

SM: I could have written a book just on that. I’m in the 11th hour on my [new] book, and at that point that I was able to say — and we were cutting a bit from that section — I could have went on and on and on. I could go back and really do the “Let It Be” book again as “Let It Be/Get Back.” That would make a great book. Someone’s going to do that. I know it. I wish it would be me, but I’m not going to go retread that area again. It doesn’t make any sense. It will not go away.

I think part of it is it’s the end of the Beatles. So no one wants it to end. It’s the one part of their period that no one wants to see. It’s metaphorically, on so many levels, you know what I mean? Culturally, musically, generationally. It’s just like, “Oh no, wait, the Beatles broke up. What do you mean?”

TMBP: “Get Back” came at a time with so many generations of people watching, so many more than had seen “Let It Be” first-hand. So you have people who experienced the breakup in real time and read Lennon Remembers when it came out. And it’s like, you know what? Maybe John didn’t really mean all those things. Look how happy he was in the moment. And then you have people who never dwelled on the breakup, didn’t live through it, watching these guys creating songs out of nothing. It kind of hit something for every kind of fan.

SM: It’s like a soap opera, too. It’s like “Downton Abbey” or something. It’s “Downton Abbey Road.” It’s like “Bridgerton.” I’m stretching here, obviously, but it’s all those hours. There was a time where people would be like, “What, how many hours is it? Forget it. It’s more than a half an hour. I’m not watching it.”

But we’re all so used to this now, with Netflix and Apple TV+ and Hulu. People don’t read anymore. They don’t read long novels, but they’ll watch the eight-hour limited series on Netflix. They’re hungry for that. They want to be told an enveloping story, but they don’t want to sit down and read Thomas Wolfe.

“You get to watch them, and they’re silly, and they’re hysterical, and they have no computers, and they have no cell phones.”

TMBP: They had no cell phones and they were busy reading newspapers. “Get Back” is a beautiful time capsule, and while in that sense it’s dated, watching the footage, it seems timeless.

SM: Right, exactly. That’s what it is. You get to people. So there’s no time machine. Well, yeah, there is, and it’s called records and books and movies. And either it means you go back in time or you read something that somebody wrote yesterday about something that either happened in 1965, or they made it up about 1965. So that’s the time machine. People are stressed. I mean, between COVID and Trump and climate change, and I could go on and on, people are kind of fed up. So you go back to the ’60s and everybody’s groovy and having a good time.

Yeah, there were other things going on like the Vietnam War, and the world wasn’t perfect, let’s face it. But if you look at it through rose-colored glasses or kaleidoscope eyes, there’s this phrase for golden-age thinking — everybody thinks because something happened in the past, it’s better because you see it differently. It seems simpler, but it really was better. I’m sorry.

TMBP: In watching “Get Back,” I was struck by Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s work. I guess we know why he edited “Let It Be” as he did — he had four Beatles to please in real time — but he edited his own film in such a different way than Peter Jackson did with “Get Back.” Michael took such spectacular shots and we had to wait 50 years to see them.

SM: He is a great filmmaker. And one of the other things that I liked about “Get Back” is, Michael and Peter — it’s a mutual admiration society. They both really, truly like each other and respect each other. Michael went on, as you know, to have a great career. Before the Beatles, he was one of the main people in the evolution of Ready, Steady, Go!, probably the greatest music television show ever. And then after the Beatles he did “Brideshead Revisited.” That was huge. That was a phenomenon when it came out. In terms of critical acclaim and in terms of the amount of people that watched it, that was the “Downton Abbey” of its day. And of course he did other things, and he’s a painter. And I tell you what, he’s the nicest guy in the world. I’d like to hang out with him. He’s so talented. He’s a renaissance man. He’s a throwback. He really is, truly. And he’s royalty, too — he’s a baronet.

I’m glad that he is getting his just desserts, in a good way. That’s another reason why I would like to see “Let It Be” come out. Because I think that it will be reevaluated. And I think that Michael deserves his moment in the sun.

“Whether they’re collectively or as solo artists or the various labels, there’s so much material to re-put out again.”

TMBP: Twickenham Film Studios is part of their entire career. They’re going in and out of Twickenham, whether it’s for movies or promotional films, all these different things. Was that the only real feasible location in the UK or in London for such a large-scale operation?

SM: No, there are other places to make movies. I just think Twickenham just happened to be the place. I think it was just kind of happening at the time. I think maybe United Artists also had some sort of connection with them. It was probably the most fulsome setup. It was maybe a little bit more centrally located than some of these other studios that were a little farther outside of London than Twickenham was. They could just become like, ‘Oh, we just happen to work here first.’ And then they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, that worked out fine.’ So we’ll just go back there again. There’s not a lot of thought put into it.

TMBP: It’s like always going to EMI when you could go anywhere. I’ve always wondered if there ever any suggestion — and presumably wouldn’t be from them, but who knows – of shooting something in Hollywood. You would think that would be fun, at least for them.

SM: “Magical Mystery Tour” is mostly shot on location. And I think they even tried to film some scenes at Twickenham, but it was all booked up. And that’s why they used that big Air Force hangar, because they couldn’t get into one of the film studios at the last minute.

TMBP: And thank God they did that, because the “I Am The Walrus” sequence one of the great scenes in their history.

SM: And then “Help!,” obviously, is shot on location in the Bahamas and Austria. And “A Hard Day’s Night” is mostly shot on location. So yeah, they did a lot of promos at Twickenham. They shot almost half of “Let It Be” there. So I don’t think there was necessarily that much thought that went into these things. I think maybe it was just a question of a certain comfort level, you know?

TMBP: Sticking with “Magical Mystery Tour,” should that have been a cinematically released film instead of a TV show? We see how influential “Yellow Submarine” became, acknowledging how they weren’t involved with it. But would “Magical Mystery Tour” have had that same sort of acclaim had it been in theaters instead of on TV in 1967, and changed its historic trajectory?

SM: I think it was a film, but I think it was a short film. Let me just qualify that. And then, why it was shown on television? I think it was because they really couldn’t get film distribution because it was so freaking weird. And also it wasn’t the length of a feature film. So again, they’re in this weird place. I think they wanted to show it on television because I think they wanted to get it out quicker. And I think they perceived it as almost like partially, believe it or not, as a promotional tool. So if they released it as a film in the shape that it was in, and what I mean is by length.

And it was just shown at universities and at the UFO Club or Middle Earth or whatever, I think that it would have gotten the avant-garde media, underground media, which was ‘67 is just really coming into place. Rolling Stone magazine launches in October. I believe FM radio was actually around in ‘66 in New York with WOR. So you’re just getting the beginning of sort of the underground. I guess you have Oz magazine … and it’s very underground. So if it’s shown as a film in the kind of places where those kinds of people go, and it’s only covered by that media, then maybe it starts out in a different sort of spot. It was wrong for it to be shown the way it was shown, particularly on the date, but we all know that.

The day after. From Page One of the December 27, 1967 Evening Standard.

TMBP: Why was it kept off American TV for so long?

SM: NBC turned it down. They just thought, “This is just too weird. We’re not going to show this stuff.” You have to remember this is 1967. If you’re in New York or San Francisco or London or maybe some places in Colorado or Boston, yeah, you’re plugged into this counterculture underground, this thing is happening. This is the next phase.

It comes out after the Summer of Love. So we’ve been through all of that. It’s not quite the tail end of psychedelia, because psychedelia starts and ends. It’s a wide period of time, but the peak is a short period of time where it sort of peaks.

TMBP: What’s your favorite Beatles film?

SM: I think “A Hard Day’s Night.” Without getting into a long-winded explanation, I think “A Hard Day’s Night” still the best, it is still such a great movie. It stands on its own as a film. You can watch it and kind of separate the Beatles from it, but you can view it just a film. And it’s just great, it’s an important film. It’s part of this evolution of ’60s cinema, where you can’t really say that about the other films. Maybe “Yellow Submarine” in terms of it being the first sort of major important animated feature-length animated film for adults. But I think it’s “A Hard Day’s Night.” Give a lot of credit to Richard Lester.

Is that your favorite? Or is it “Let It Be?”

TMBP: It’s “Let It Be” and it’s sort of in a sick way, but I recognize “A Hard Day’s Night” as their greatest film –- I acknowledge the separation between favorite and best. What about something that someone else has done about The Beatles? Is there something that stands out?

SM: “Anthology,” I really would like to see it again. And I would like to see them fix it. I don’t know if you’re into Pink Floyd, but they took one of these films, it was from the ’80s. And what they did is they went back and they completely redid it — they made it in widescreen, they took away some of the clunky sound of it. They did a restoration to it. I would really like to see that done with “Anthology.” And then I think I would have a certain feeling about it.

I really loved “Across the Universe.” I thought that was really beautifully done. You know, it’s hard to kind of make a movie like that. I really like “The Beatles and India” film a lot. I thought that was really, really wonderfully done. I remember seeing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” when it came out in the movies. It was kind of cute, the idea of it. I think it was done with a lot of heart.

“Backbeat,” that’s probably my favorite, I love that movie. Everything about that movie just works. “The Concert for Bangladesh” is a great show. It’s a time capsule. I can remember, I had just gotten an FM radio of my own, a whole stereo setup. And I remember them playing that on the radio, premiering it and playing chunks of it in a row on the radio and just being blown away by it.

TMBP: “The Compleat Beatles” was really formative for me.

SM: Yes, me too. I have that on VHS. That’s never come out on DVD or Blu-ray. I think they’ve lost all the rights on that.

TMBP: The Beatles have all these little pockets of things that we’ll never see ever again. Or, who knows when we’ll see it, whether it’s “Let it Be,” or “Anthology.” I mean, unless you own the physical media.

SM: I think they will put those out. I think you’ll see these things — when, I don’t know. I hope they don’t just do like what they did with the rooftop concert audio, where they just put it out on streaming only. To me, I don’t think they know who their audience is when they’re doing that. You know, their core audience is still is physical media people. Especially vinyl. Now maybe their plan is at some point to do that, but I thought that was awful that they did that.

TMBP: Paul did something similar with the Flowers in the Dirt box set, where more than a dozen songs -– demos, B-sides, remixes – were bundled for purchase and download-only.

SM: If you see the way that they’re discounting some of this stuff, I think that from their point of view, whatever numbers they had in mind, I think there’s a certain degree of disappointment. I think it’s selling a lot, but I think that sometimes I think they have an overinflated sense. I also think that they, what they want to do is if they print a 100,000 copies, they’ve got to sell every last one. Like they want to wring out every last penny from it.

And I know that Disney did not handle the “Get Back” reissues on Blu-ray. That was not handled right. They did a terrible job on that. It was almost like they didn’t even want to do it. I have this conversation with my wife all the time — there was a time that a record, an album, a CD, a DVD, a Blu-ray, people love this stuff as a gift, because there’s a certain personal connection there. And it’s an inexpensive gift. Twelve-inch albums aren’t small, but it’s relatively small. It’s value for money too. Some of these are things people don’t want to spend the money themselves. They think it’s extravagant, but if you give somebody a $25 Blu-ray or if you give them a nice double vinyl album, they’re like, “Whoa, thank you.” And these record companies and film companies that want to phase this stuff out.

“Once you buy a record or a CD or, or an album or a book, you own it. It’s yours. You can do whatever you want with it. You can have it forever. They don’t like that.”

TMBP: : Your book stuck to the core films. Did you consider writing about “Anthology” or “Eight Days a Week” or anything like that?

SM: The only one that I thought possibly could have been included was the Shea Stadium concert. But again, I felt like it really was just a television show and it just would have made things so much more complicated. I think that those five films is the way that it is. That’s the canon, so to speak. I don’t think Shea Stadium is really part of it. I touch on Shea Stadium, but again, then the book becomes, it becomes unwieldy. It really ended, I have to let it be. That’s it. It’s over, you know? I mean, I give you a little sense of how these ’60s films would go on to influence. And then I give you a laundry list of film directors — Marty Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman and the usual suspects, how important ’70s American film is, how that kind of takes over. That’s like the golden age. Again, there’s that phrase, you know?

I thought about maybe at the end, I could put a couple of pages of a capsule review of some of the films that came after, but then where does it end? I’m having trouble with the length of my manuscript to begin with. So to even think about that, maybe that’s a Part Two, but I don’t know if I would ever actually do it.

I should probably have one of these disclaimers: Steve sent me a review copy of the book. But in all honesty, I would have bought it anyway.

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Tagged as A Hard Day's Night, Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film, Al Brodax, bootlegs, COVID, Downton Abbey, Help!, interview, Let It Be movie, Magical Mystery Tour, movies, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Shea Stadium, Steve Matteo, The Compleat Beatles, United Artists, Yellow Submarine

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