Dave Grohl told a funny story about Paul McCartney on “The Graham Norton Show” during the promotional tour for his 2021 memoir, The Storyteller, expanding on a brief passage from the book itself. The episode played out in 2014, when Paul and wife Nancy Shevell visited Grohl to meet his newborn baby and indulge in an evening of pizza and wine.
There’s a piano in the corner of the room and [Paul] just can’t help himself. … He starts playing “Lady Madonna” in my fucking house. And my mind is blown. I can’t believe this is happening. …
[Grohl’s 5-year-old daughter Harper] had never taken a lesson to play any instrument at that point. And she sat down and she watched his hands. They sat together, and he was showing her what to play. And they wrote a song together. …
The next morning, I woke up and I went to the kitchen. I was making breakfast, and I heard her playing the song that they had written the night before. And I came around the corner, and she looked at me as she was playing the piano. She realized I was watching, and she never played the piano again.
And then she’s like, “I want to be a drummer.” I’m like, “Are you out of your mind?”
The anecdote is relevant not because – in an outstanding coincidence – Grohl was born on this January 14, 1969. Instead, the story underlines Macca’s actions to start his own day, thousands of miles away, on the same January 14, 1969.
“The great thing about the piano is, like, there it all is, there’s all the music ever,” Paul told 22-year-old clapper loader Paul Bond. “That’s it. All the music that’s ever been written is all there, you know.”
(Going forward from this point, when I call someone just “Paul,” it’s McCartney.)
In the midst of a discussion of various music styles, Paul followed with chaotic cacophony on Twickenham’s Blüthner as a demonstration of “the latest things in music,” conceding “that’s music too.”
This sequence is short, but we can glean quite a bit from these five minutes of the two Pauls interacting in real time as recorded on the Nagra tapes (it’s only two minutes in Get Back). An incident like this opens up the space to tell the Beatles’ life and career biography, something that happens often during these sessions.
To his credit, Bond questioned if there was any origin story to Macca and the instrument. “What did you do, you just started tinkering about on piano?” he asked. McCartney blew him off with a “yeah, sure.” But there was more to it.
“To us kids, [my father] was a pretty good player, he could play a lot of tunes on the piano,” Macca recalled in Barry Miles’ 1997 biography Many Years From Now. “I used to ask him to teach me but he said, ‘No, you must take lessons,’ like all parents do. I ended up teaching myself like he did, by ear.”
Decades later, Paul told a similar story in his own book, 2021’s The Lyrics.
Dad wouldn’t teach me the piano, though; he wanted me to take lessons. He didn’t think he was good enough and, because my parents had aspirations for us, he wanted me to learn the ‘real stuff.’ I took a few lessons from time to time but ended up being pretty much self-taught, just like him. I found lessons to be too restricting and boring. It was much more interesting to make up songs than to practise scales.
Paul indeed received professional lessons, briefly. Here’s his old teacher, Leonard Milne, remembering Paul McCartney the piano student from a 2010 interview in Mark Lewishon’s Tune In:
I gave Paul one lesson a week, at a grand piano I had in the lounge at my parents’ house, 237 Mather Avenue. He started on The Adult Beginner’s Guide To Musical Notation but this didn’t last long because he said he wanted to learn by ‘chord symbols,’ letters printed under the notes — like ‘C7,’ say. It’s a musical shorthand he would have known as a guitar player. He didn’t want to learn the real technique, he wanted to rush ahead — he was clearly a boy with talent who didn’t want to be held back. I also didn’t set homework because Paul made it clear he wanted to press on, not fiddle around with paper.
Fiddle around he did, teaching himself on the piano at home in his teenage years. (Paul had another aborted attempt at formal piano training in the mid-1960s, when he was already established in the Beatles, a brief story he shared in his 2023 A Life In Lyrics podcast.)
Naturally, Paul pressed on in these early moments of the January 14 sessions, playing brief, catchy progressions on the piano. He was the only Beatle there anyway; he had the time to mess around.
“Unless you stop yourself, there’s no stopping yourself,” Macca told Bond – who was visibly beaming throughout the scene in Get Back, in awe and truly engaged at the piano lesson. “Unless you feel like stopping. there’s really nothing to stop you, ‘cause that’s it then. There it all is.”
Paul then launched into “Martha My Dear” – just an 8-week-old album track at this point in time – and added the comment, “See, but then you get to sort of wonder how people do all those contrapuntal things.”
“A lot of old tunes have just a set sort of chord pattern. Because that’s the great thing, once you stop trying to find out chord patterns, you really suss what people are doing and what musicians are doing.”
The decision to play “Martha My Dear” was clearly deliberate on Paul’s part. It wasn’t merely a piano song near the front of his mind. Here’s Paul, decades later, as quoted in Many Years From Now, discussing how he considered the song’s piano part when he wrote it:
When I taught myself piano I liked to see how far I could go, and this started as a piece you’d learn as a piano lesson. It’s quite hard to play, it’s a two-handed thing, like a little set piece. In fact I remember one or two people being surprised that I’d played it because its slightly above my level of competence, really, but I wrote it as that, something a bit more complex for me to play.
In Get Back (which edits it out of order, placing it prior to “Martha”), this 10-second piece is credited to them both as a Lennon/McCartney original retroactively titled “Bonding (Piano Piece).” I’m with the A/B Road bootlegs and others when it comes to credit – this doesn’t sound like Paul conjuring an original improvisation. Especially in the context of his follow-up statement.
“Old tunes, you know, they are just a certain way of going,” Paul told Bond. “And they hardly ever vary from it. I don’t really know it, you know, my dad knows that better than I do.”
The brief and highly unorthodox lesson was over, with Bond going back to work after admitting, “I must get myself a piano.”
We’re not going to pretend that Paul only started becoming adept at piano in 1968 – he was playing it on stage in the Hamburg days. Still, he considered himself a relative neophyte, whether we all believe that or not.
Only a few days earlier, prior to debuting “Another Day” on the Nagras, Paul said, “I better go and put in some piano practice.” True, he may have been trying to get out of a conversation with Michael Lindsay-Hogg, but he said it nonetheless.
For a man who didn’t know how to read music and thought of himself as a novice, teaching the instrument came comfortably. Perhaps it came from his own potential desire to be a teacher, if he wasn’t in a band.
Engaged with literature, a young Paul McCartney “didn’t know if I would actually get to university or get somewhere,” he said in Many Years From Now. “What was my next thing gonna be? Teachers’ training college?”
A brief edit of the conversation appeared in the original Get Back book published with the Let It Be LP in 1970.
Paul said as much to American audiences at the dawn of Beatlemania, too, in a February 11, 1964, interview with WWDC-AM’s Carroll James, one of the DJs credited with being the first to play a Beatles song on American radio.
“At that time, I thought of being a teacher, actually,” Paul said when he was asked what his plans were if he wasn’t a Beatle. “But luckily, I got into this business, because I would have been a very bad teacher.”
Only a few months before the Get Back sessions, Paul told Tonight Show guest host Joe Garagiola and American audiences, “I was nearly going to be a teacher, but that fell through, luckily.”
Still, here he is, January 14, 1969, embracing and excelling as musical instructor. School was on his mind, even if it was in the subconscious. He continued at the piano, this time playing a new song.
“I had one this morning,” Paul said about five minutes after Bond’s lesson ended. “But it was just like, ‘The Day I Went Back to School’ or something.” The estranged George Harrison presentedhis “last-night songs” earlier at Twickenham, and so did Paul.
There was only a single verse, repeated several times.
The day I went back to school, the day I went back to school, the day I went back to school
The teacher said, would you like to come back tonight?
I said, no thanks. I’m doing all right without you.
Paul was a long way from 1977’s “Girls School,” and resisting the kind of potentially illegal temptation mentioned in that song’s lyrics isn’t particularly rock and roll of him. But things were weird at this point in Beatles history, so I guess anything goes.
We’d never hear the song we all call “The Day I Went Back to School” again, not during the Get Back sessions nor anytime since.
But the point remains: Teaching and learning was something on the forefront and in the subliminal corners of Paul’s mind on January 14, 1969. Whether it was in private, like at the Grohls’ in 2014, or in the 2021 documentary series “McCartney 3,2,1,” when Paul was demonstrative to host Rick Rubin.
Like Grohl said, Paul can’t stop himself.
Paul Bond’s entire career was ahead of him when he worked on the Get Back sessions, and over the subsequent 40 years, his cinematographer and cameraman credits included “Downton Abbey,” “London’s Burning,” “Inspector Lewis” and all kinds of other things British audiences would know.
Bond also worked on “The South Bank Show,” and that’s where his path crossed with Macca again, in 1984, as part of the small crew working behind the camera.
Bond has also enjoyed a separate act in an a completely unrelated field.
Since at least the mid-1970s, Bond has been a beekeeper. No mere apiarist, Bond is a world champion at the art, earning international recognition in 1979.
From the May 29, 1992, issue of the Evening Standard under the headline “The buzz round town”
Modest in his mastery, Bond credited the bees and the process for his sweet success. Maybe that’s something Paul McCartney taught him when he pointed to the piano for having all the music inside it instead of his own remarkable skill in unlocking that power.
I’ve been waiting all post to write this: Let it Bee.
As Bond said in Idle Beekeeper: The Low-Effort, Natural Way to Raise Bees, published in 2019, when he was asked to share his secret of success: “Oh, I just rinsed out the jars.”
The Beatles, as depicted by John Lennon in November 1968, as published in the December 7, 1968, issue of New Music Express.
In my faith, we count down the 25 days to the start of the Get Back/Let It Be sessions. This is completely normal.
To operate this particular digital advent calendar, simply click the day below and read up on what our boys and their extended circle were doing in these days leading up to their Most Holy Assemblage at Twickenham Film Studios on January 2, 1969.
“The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops – that’ll be the time to worry. Not before. Until then, The Beatles are alive and well and the Beat goes on, the Beat goes on.”
These were the instructions Apple publicist Derek Taylor articulated April 10, 1970, the marker for the end of the greatest pop music group there ever will be, the day the papers blared “PAUL QUITS THE BEATLES.”
That was more than 53 years ago, and it’s still not time to worry.
I felt compelled to write about “Now and Then,” the Beatles’ new single, and “last song,” even though I generally keep my focus to the Get Back sessions of a half-century earlier. One of the reasons I started researching and writing They May Be Parted in 2012 is because I thought I was investigating the endgame of the Beatles, and I wanted to understand that ending. Listening to the Nagra tapes of the sessions themselves, the January 1969 sessions weren’t what we were led to believe, a revision to history that now is mainstream opinion since the release of the Get Back docuseries.
I’ve posted some takes on “Now and Then” on social media and voiced a few othersas a podcast guest, but since I have this permanent platform, I wanted to post here for posterity, too. Maybe this is more for me than anyone else. I tried to keep my thoughts in some kind of order, but this is certainly a brain-dump of high order.
“Now and Then” was released just over a week before I published this post, and today hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts. My feelings on the song and the accompanying video evolved in that short time, and may continue to, I’m sure.
There simply won’t be and can’t be consensus on any aspect of “Now and Then.” Contemporary critics routinely called Beatlemania a fad. One writer famously said Sgt. Pepper was “ultimately fraudulent.” Abbey Road was described by another as “an unmitigated disaster.” So from the jump, we can abandon any thought of a common opinion and there doesn’t need to be. It only matters what it means to you, if anything. It’s like attending a funeral — you go because you feel compelled to mourn for your own personal reasons.
Assuming we all know the original backstory – John Lennon committed the idea to cassette in the late 1970s and widow Yoko Ono handed the tapes of this and three other songs to Paul McCartney in 1994 for use as potential new Beatles songs – let’s pick things up in 2023 with the song’s rollout.
One basic truth to have any “Now and Then” discussion: We simply have to accept the fact this song and video exist in order for us to have a reasonable conversation about it. Whether the song should or shouldn’t exist never was our call. It was up to the two living Beatles and the two estates. In the 1990s, the decision was made to break the seal and reopen the Beatles as an active unit. This is just a continuation of that act in the 1990s.
Is it real, or is it TDK?
George Harrison left explicit instructions to his son, Dhani, and Jeff Lynne outlining how he wanted Brainwashed, his posthumous 2002 LP, to be finished after his death. John didn’t leave behind anything except for the music itself. If the tape of “Now and Then” actually said “For Paul” in John’s writing, we just don’t know if that meant it was dedicated to him, meant to give to him to listen to or something else altogether. It could imply there were tapes that said “For May” or “For Sean.” Maybe there were and no one else has seen them.
Since I’m picking up the story in 2023 via 1995, I’m not really going to get into John’s original intent or inspiration in writing the song, the deeper Lennon-McCartney relationship, the Carl Perkins “My Old Friend” stuff or anything along those lines. There are some terrificvoices in the Beatles-sphere who can offer their opinions on that. But ultimately, the most important interpreter is Paul. If we all (myself included) can hyper analyze every word and every note the Beatles play and find deeper meaning, certainly Paul McCartney has the right to decode and determine how a song by his longtime songwriting partner and dear friend spoke to him.
The 2023 rollout window for “Now and Then” was highly compact, and it allowed for knee-jerk takes and then knee-jerk reactions to those initial takes.
The clumsy description spoiled the promotion of project from the outset, even if the actual use of the the technology wasn’t anything wrong. If he just said “we’re using same gadgets Peter Jackson used to clean up the Get Back tapes” it wouldn’t have put the rollout on the back foot from the start.
Jackson put together the magnificent making-of documentary, unveiled the day before the song’s actual release, on November 1, pulling together unseen home movies of John and Anthology-era footage of George. How remarkable it was to be able to enjoy them both so alive again. Watching Paul singing along to “Now and Then” in the 1990s was extremely moving.
Regardless of whether the musical performances of “Now and Then” in the documentary were a solid sync job or authentic, the sequence made a straight-line link between the ’90s and now, pulling “Now and Then” into the Anthology era as second-act Beatles song and doing everything it could to ensure George was part of this story. Utilizing the Yellow Submarine time travel and timeline was deft, and little easter eggs like using Magic Alex’s sound “technology” was clever and really gave a deep nod and wink to let even the most diehards know, “We’re with you, and this new song can speak to you too.”
It’s entirely anecdotal, from social media, but people started to weep once they heard John Lennon’s voice in isolation. It took me until a few seconds later, when Paul joined him in harmony.
To me, that’s one of the most important and enjoyable features of “Now and Then,” which was officially released on November 2 — Paul owns his “old-man voice,” which he really hasn’t done during his solo career as it’s become more prominent. He’s treating his Beatles work separate from his solo work, which often takes him out of his realistic vocal range. But for this final Beatles track, he leans into that feature of his singing voice as a complement to John, who in his mid-to-late 30s when he recorded “Now and Then” was about 40 years Paul’s junior at his current age. It would have been like John singing with an 81-year-old George Burns in 1977.
I think the strings do a great deal of heavy lifting. Superficially, this is the biggest difference with whatever they would have worked on in the ’90s, when they didn’t employ strings at all on “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” I found the arrangement lovely and not overwhelming, evocative enough of “I Am the Walrus” and “Eleanor Rigby” without overwhelming the listener.
I’ll say the same for the harmonies that were sampled from “Because,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Here, There and Everywhere.” Giles Martin applied them tastefully and subtly enough into the fabric of the song it sounded completely natural.
Ringo was typically fab on the kit, and his added color on vocals were welcome. But it’s too bad surviving guitar parts were mixed low as they were. Much has been said about Paul’s slide solo in tribute to George — it did make you miss George, and it probably would have had a little more flavor and guts to it had he been around.
I do really feel like they were playing together, instead of this cross-generational, cross-dimensional, analog-digital hybrid. It’s all very tidy, under four minutes, not at all ponderous and conscious of overstaying its welcome.
I thought John’s original recording was a little slight — I didn’t love any of the original piano sketches as they were taped, to be completely honest. Certainly they were never meant to be release-ready or anything close to it.
In contemporary interviews from the Anthology era, Paul himself didn’t pull any punches when it came to the quality of the content itself. On what was clearly “Now and Then,” from the November-December issue of Beatlefan:
Yeah, what’s it called – I don’t know, it didn’t really have a title [Sings: “You know/it’s true; it’s up to you…] That beginning bit’s great and then it just goes a bit crummy. We all decided that it’s not one of John’s greatest songs. So that we’d have to manipulate all of that, which is just a little bit more difficult.
I think it’s worth considering how different a 1995 version of the song would have been. We can be assured the overall sound would be different with Jeff Lynne at the helm as originally planned. Would the song have been adjusted, arranged and edited the same way? At the minimum, George would have had a say in the song’s writing and arrangement, probably in a 50-50 manner with Paul (minus some percentage offered to Ringo Starr, to be fair). This is in no way meant to come off crass, but without George’s presence, it freed Paul to fully arrange “Now and Then” with complete freedom.
Even if every now and then he’d feel so insecure, Paul had the confidence to open up the door to collaborate with John as an equal partner, as he felt he had every right to do and had done so many times. If Paul thought the song’s original bridge was clunky, extraneous and “crummy,” he was justified in killing it. I know it seems insane to say “No, we don’t want to hear any more unreleased John Lennon,” but the Beatles were always great editors. Paul McCartney is a magnificent song fixer, and this is the ultimate, final fix.
And this returns me to Get Back. I long heard on the Nagras and everyone has since seen in the series that the others explicitly trusted Paul with their songs. He led the way, whether it was John letting him arrange“Don’t Let Me Down” or George welcoming input to “I Me Mine.” That’s just two small examples in a career of such collaboration.
Does “Now and Then” sound like it belongs on a Beatles LP? Of course not, and why should it? Not quite a mashup, but think of it like the single version of a compilation album. It’s pieces from four of the last six decades woven in under four minutes, I think quite seamlessly. At times “Now and Then” sounds natural in any of those decades, though without fitting comfortably in any of them, either.
What is the essence of a Beatles song? Is it the personnel or the sound? The Beatles didn’t always record as a quartet, certainly not as the years went on. You only needed oneBeatle to make Beatles song sometimes. “I Me Mine” was written and rehearsed with no input from John in 1969, and then recorded with him out of the country and having quit the band in 1970. Yet it’s undeniably a Beatles song.
Paul and Ringo got together recently for lunch, but had to send each other files of “Now and Then” — they couldn’t even bother to record the last song in the same room. Maybe there’s something calculated to that: If they couldn’t be in the same room as John and George, then they wouldn’t record without them as a unit. They’d all be apart, together.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr having lunch together, 2023. ✨ 📸: by Mary McCartney pic.twitter.com/CcZBK27bsD
The Beatles’ wild variety of styles defines the group’s music. So if it’s not the personnel or sound that makes a Beatles song a “Beatles song,” maybe the essence of a Beatles song rests in its original time — the 1960s. But, as George and John sang in response to “you say stop” in “Hello Goodbye,” they can stay till it’s time to go. And they decided it wasn’t time to go.
In the last 30 years, since the Threetles first attempted “Now and Then,” we lost George Harrison, Linda McCartney, George Martin, Neil Aspinall, Geoff Emerick and so many others, people close to the Beatles, their story and their music. John wasn’t the only one missing anymore, and each of these people to some degree must have been on Paul’s mind as he worked on “Now and Then,” this song of memories and loss.
And to that end, it’s also quite clearly a song of closure. The promotion — so actively screaming that it’s the “last” Beatles song — leans completely into that. But the music does too. I’m not any kind music theorist, but I have two operational ears, and this is what I hear:
“Now and Then” is the only one with a conclusive ending.
I love the concept of the butterfly effect, so let’s apply it here. There’s no answer, but what if “Free as a Bird” had the poor demo tape recording and “Now and Then” ended up salvageable in 1995? Maybe the quote I shared earlier, where Paul said it was “not one of John’s greatest songs” would have meant “Real Love” would have been the lone reunion song? We’re left to guess.
And that brings us to the video. It’s divisive and a little insane.
There’s a lot to unpack. My initial reaction was that it was too contrived, too scattered. The 1990s Anthology outtakes were outstanding, as it was in the making-of film — images of George we hadn’t seen before and the Threetles at work. But my overall first impression was that this video was the kitchen sink, trying to stuff so much in four minutes: present-day performances, ’90s video, archival footage and photos.
I would imagine that if they didn’t do the “Free as a Bird” video already, that would have been an apt solution.
That’s one way to go, when there’s a member of the band who’s not around anymore, a creative film that had few images of the Beatles as they had been and none of the surviving members pictured in the ’90s. “Real Love” took a more straightforward approach, compiling moments from throughout their career with 1990s footage. But there’s no narrative.
Roy Orbison died shortly after the first Traveling Wilburys album came out in 1988, and in the “End of the Line” video, released a few months later, he was represented by a rocking chair with a guitar and a photograph shown during his vocal lines. It was moving and sad, but I don’t think it was an approach that would have worked for the Beatles, with half the band gone. It would have come off maudlin, and completely against the idea that “Now and Then” was a full-group effort. (Mind you, I don’t think “End of the Line” was maudlin — it was still in the early phases of mourning Orbison.)
I was completely skeptical when I first saw 1967-era “Hello, Goodbye” John and George intermingling with 2023 Paul and Ringo. The word “cringe” was thrown around a lot on social media, and I get that. My thinking on the video quickly evolved from the first to second viewing — your milage may vary.
We’re faced with two issues: Would the departed Beatles want to be represented this way? And if so, should it be as silly as presented?
Paul as Beatle Paul (above) in 1980 and George as Beatle George (below) in 1974.
One way they could have gone would have been to make multiple videos, something the Beatles did themselves over their career and when theywent solo. Build out a full video of the ’90s sessions co-mingled with appropriate ’70s Lennon home or studio footage. The Beatles at work on their last song.
Another direction would be a more direct clip/highlight reel, something they added to the video for “Real Love,” but now with another 30 years of memories added, and earlier footage cleaned up.
Finally in the last video, they could have really owned the time-travel element and gone completely bananas. Stick Paul into the “How Do You Sleep” sessions. Put 60 years of Ringos into one room. Get the 1980 Paul pretending to be the 1960s Paul and put him on stage with the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto. You get the idea. Really play into the fact these four guys were always together, even when we can document they weren’t.
Those were my knee-jerk impressions of the video, kind of a mixed bag. Then I watched the video again, this time with my wife, who helped me open my eyes to a better interpretation.
A lot of people really don’t like the video, and I get it. It’s jarring, uncomfortable and the technology — as impressive as it is — still isn’t perfect.
Peter Jackson described the concept as “Ringo and Paul in 2023 trying to work on a song and they get invaded by the 1967 Beatles,” but I think there’s much more to it than that.
It’s Ringo and Paul deliberately surrounding themselves with the John and George they knew so well. At a funeral, wake, shiva – this is when we remember and talk of the vibrant life of the person we’re remembering, sharp and in color, not memories of their weakness or death. These days are filled with silly memories and pictures from all across their lives, laughter among the tears. I don’t think there’s any doubt Paul and Ringo vividly remembered a vitalized John and George — and even their own former vigorous selves — when they were in the studio last year working on “Now and Then.” It’s just the Beatles and their closest associates: George Martin was embodied through his son, and Mal Evans through the MAL technology used to extract John’s voice.
This part of the video isn’t meant for us, it’s for them. We just get to be voyeurs.
As the video nears the end, their life literally flashes before their eyes. Again, the animation is awkward in spots, but I’ll argue in favor of the concept. When I look at a photo of people I’ve lost in my life, their memory isn’t stuck in that 4×6 print. They live, they move. Every time I see their face, it reminds me of the places we used to go, a concept Ringo and George certainly understood.
And then we were snapped back into reality, the reality of 1964, and the Beatles all together in a single time and place. With their concluding bow, taken from their performance of “She Loves You” in the “A Hard Day’s Night” film, the Beatles vanish before our eyes, and the lights spelling out their name burn out. That was the point in the video I lost it.
If the rest of the video was for the surviving Beatles, this ending was for us, the Beatles fan, the rest of the world. They were singing to us now, not each other.
Deliberate or not, this ending evokes a dramatic sequence in The Compleat Beatles, an unauthorized but highly valuable biography of the band from 1982. In the sequence on the breakup of the band, we see the iconic black-and-white photos of the band from April 1969, with George, Ringo, John and Paul vanishing, in sequence, as “I’m So Tired” plays in the background, the aggressive lyric, “I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind.”
In the “Now and Then” video, that tone has changed. Go to the source in “A Hard Day’s Night,” and you can hear the valedictory statement they give prior to their bow: “With a love like that, you know you should be glad.” See, it does work both ways: If Paul McCartney and Peter Jackson can search for deep meaning in these kinds of things, so can I.
The Beatles have said “Hello, Goodbye” many times. Breakup rumors started in 1964, and continued until they actually broke up. Until their partial reunions. The only endings that ultimately matter are John Lennon’s death in 1980 and George Harrison’s in 2001.
I’ll bring things back one more time to Get Back, Let It Be and original breakup, with these points: No living Beatles (out of four) approved the Get Back edit by Glyn Johns in 1969 (it later came out packaged with the Let It Be reissue in 2021). That’s two fewer Beatles that approved “Now and Then.”
I don’t think they could have sold “Now and Then” as a genuine cosmic reunion of friends, not merely co-workers, without the Get Back docuseries coming first. That set the stage to a mainstream audience that the the Winter of Discontent was much milder than forecast.
I don’t know. That’s the difficult thing. In the electronic press kit we all enigmatically said, “Where does the circle end and where does it begin? An end is a beginning, of sorts.” But to me, for now, it’s an end.
An entire new generation of fans had the experience of hearing the “last” new Beatles song as their first new Beatles song, something some of us got to experience in the 1990s, in the 1980s, in the 1970s and all the time in the 1960s. Where does the circle end and where does it begin?
There is no end to the Beatles, as long as they occupy our lives, our ears, our eyes. Don’t take it from me. Just ask Derek Taylor, who said this on April 10, 1970:
“The Beatles have changed so many lives, that the need for them still exists. The hope that they represent still exists. And as long as that exists, then they have to exist. They’ve got to be there to fulfill that need, and who are they to take themselves away, to say ‘OK kids, that’s it’? …
Paul McCartney emerged January 13, 1969, as a journalist investigating a story of his own creation, and he spent the back end of his day at Twickenham Film Studios enduring some newsroom drama to sweat a co-byline with John Lennon and attack most of the five W’s of a catchy little tune the world eventually knew as “Get Back.”
True reporters, they worked on a tight deadline.
“OK, let’s try to get words to ‘Pakistani,’” Paul said of the song, which was very much in progress and still politically tinged. “We’ll do an hour,” telling director Michael Lindsay-Hogg “don’t worry,” because the staff will deliver content this afternoon (even if it didn’t last quite as long as promised).
But before attacking “Get Back” on the Nagra tapes, Paul continued to share what he felt his approach toward George should be right now, as he spoke presumably, to John and Ringo Starr and with the same candor everyone shared in the lunchroom earlier.
‘Look, I once thought the situation was that, and I don’t anymore.’
But I find that the most difficult thing ever to say. Because I hear myself say it, and I haven’t quite said it. I didn’t quite convince him. And as I think that, you think that, he thinks that — blah, blah, blah, it goes on forever.
Paul continued in another instance that’s unclear who he’s addressing, either straight to John or indirectly to George.
We’ve got the same problem that causes you to get on your guitar and wail. It’s the same one over and over. I’m wailing with ya. But I don’t say it right there and then, because I suspect we mightn’t be wailing about the same thing. So I won’t quite say it, and I never have quite said it, but some time I hope to say it. I may never say it, and fuck it if I don’t.
If Paul was speaking to John, he still wasn’t quite saying it. If it was directed to George, it remained theoretical — George was in Merseyside, as Ringo reported.
Mal sticks around, with pencil
This was a half-hour on the tapes resembling something closer to a vintage McCartney-Lennon writing session. Mal Evans — who Paul implored to “stick around with pencil” — took dictation and, as he did so many times over the past decade (including these sessions), participated uncredited in the songwriting process, too.
Jo Jo Jackson eventually lost his surname, though it stuck for now. Loretta kept her saccharine sobriquet, but her family name was very much up for debate on the 13th, with Paul souring on John’s suggestion: “Marsh.”
“We’re not sure about that, but put it in,” Paul told Mal early in the sequence, though he would quickly revisit that decision. We get to see this next bit in Get Back in an edited fashion.
Paul’s first choice suggests a tapping into the character-rich McCartneyverse.
“Sweet Loretta Mary. it’s got to be a name.” Paul tries out the name a few times, but Mary found her way in only one song from these sessions.
The process continued.
John: Sweet Loretta Marvin. Paul: It’s got to be a meah [sound] John: Meatball Paul: Martin
In other words, “Sweet Loretta Meatball” enjoyed a non-zero chance of being a Lennon-McCartney lyric.
Sweet Loretta Martin was already an option Paul suggested days earlier.
While the surname search continued, it’s notable the established first names — Jo Jo and Sweet Loretta — never encountered debate.
Many people have since claimed to be the Jo Jo and they’re not, let me put that straight! I had no particular person in mind, again it was a fictional character, half man, half woman, all very ambiguous. I often left things ambiguous, I like doing that in my songs.
Paul’s 2022 memoir Lyrics reveals no additional information on the people named in the song.
Upon his suicide in 2000, Joseph Melville See, Linda Eastman’s first husband — whom she met and later married in Tucson, Ariz., in 1962 — was commonly referred to as the inspiration of “Jo Jo.” There’s not much to go on beside the name Jo(seph) and the locale — his biography doesn’t otherwise fit the lyric. Moreover, he commonly went by “Mel.” So it’s a nice idea, but he doesn’t seem to be the answer.
That same singability informed the where of Get Back, too.
Since the song’s origin, the character in the first verse escaped the same southwestern state, Arizona. On January 9, as that verse developed, Paul sang on a few occasions “I left my home in Arizona.” Subsequently, including on January 13, he toggled between “Northern Arizona” and “Tucson, Arizona” as the point of departure. (Tucson is on the southern end of the state, for those unfamiliar.)
After one of the run-throughs, John fact-checked the lyric.
John: Is Tucson in Arizona? Paul: It’s where they make “[The] High Chaparral.”
January 13, 1969, BBC-2 listings
The American Western was a fixture on BBC-2, broadcast Monday nights, so it made for an obvious benchmark. More relevant to Paul, the second-largest city in the state was the former home of his girlfriend, who studied art history at the main Tucson campus of University of Arizona. Linda’s first child, Heather, was born in Tucson in 1962.
Just across Arizona’s western border lies the Golden State, and the line “California grass” predated most of the lyrics in “Get Back” as Paul sang it at the song’s origin on January 7. But the California reference wasn’t finalized, and this led them to work on the what and why of the lyric.
“Joey ran away from his home in Arizona,” Mal said, searching for a line.
Paul: Looking for a … something to last? … Looking for a what? What is it? Looking for a home to last … Mal: Looking for a love to last? Paul: Something like that, yeah.
Mal jumped off the suggestion and proposed both “looking for his blasted past” and “trying to escape his past.”
At the end of the day, Paul ultimately settled on “looking for the greener grass,” which comes off a little boilerplate and lazy, especially when he already had the more evocative “California grass” lyric in his back pocket for the time being. Paul was sure to this point, however, that he “had to be a loner,” with that lyric, also dated to January 7, remaining in the song today.
Upon the conclusion of the session, Paul settled on the first verse as such:
Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, looking for the greener grass Joey said you had to be a loner, but he knew it couldn’t last
“Leave that verse, exactly as it is,” he told Mal. “And next time it might be better.”
Throughout this 30-minute sprint working on “Get Back”, the power trio thrashed at full throttle. Like their jams following George’s walkout the previous Friday, they’re edgy and loose. Paul and John often share lead vocals, singing in unison.
With the Beatles’ lead guitarist 200 miles northwest, Paul appointed John for a spontaneous solo. He replied with something rudimentary, but the assignment stuck — the solo remained John’s own through the song’s final performance on the roof.
Even with the song unfinished in so many parts and rushing through a brief window this afternoon, Paul remained characteristically mercurial, criticizing Ringo’s drum outro (“you’re doing a bit too long on those breaks”), vocalizing exactly how he wanted it to sound and offering specific instructions.
“So once you go on to the top tom-tom it’s like four from there on,” instructed Paul.
For a band highly conscious of poor focus and squandered studio time — a week earlier, Paul complained, “I think we do waste, physically, waste a lot of time, the four of us together” — this concentrated “Get Back” session was a very efficient use of time. Whether it was because there was one less cook in the lunchroom or a general understanding the three of them had their own reasons to wail, this particular afternoon was not squandered.
Satisfied with their progress, Paul called it a wrap.
“OK, and we’ll go home now,” he said. “We’ll come in tomorrow and try to do a bit more.” They settled on an 11 a.m.-ish Tuesday reunion in the studio.
But was that aspirational? After all, citing the Twickenham facilities crew, Michael said Apple Films head Denis O’Dell “canceled all his stuff for the show.” That decision, made off screen, set off an obvious chain reaction.
Paul: The [show scheduled for January] 18th should be canceled. So we have to be flexible, we’re going to have to be very flexible now. The 18th today has changed to the 19th, cause we lost a day today. Tomorrow it will change to the 20th. The day after it’ll change to the 21st. If George comes back, put it back a full week.
MLH: I think to stay flexible is important.
John stuck an optimistic tone to close out the day in another sequence captured in Get Back. “I’m leaving my favorite guitar here as a sign,” he promised. Paul meanwhile brandished his Hofner bass, replete with the setlist from their final show.
As Paul read song names for the cameras, nobody was certain if that artifact would remain the setlist from the Beatles final live performance. A token from John may not be good enough, and the other Beatles didn’t have time to hang a sign on George.
The new Beatles show would now be pushed to about two weeks out from January 13. While the songs were gradually taking shape, it was a concert that still lacked form otherwise. But even as the producer was canceling “all his stuff,” Michael said in the closing moments of the day’s tapes, “I think at some point we need to talk conceptually about the show.“
With the future fuzzy and Michael clearly feeling the pressure, Paul played for the cameras.
“So I’d like to say to the cast of this whole production, good night, and thank you very much for having us, it’s been wonderful working with you. ‘Cause I know it’s been wonderful working with me, but it’s been wonderful working with you too.”
“Do you think this will help my movie career or not?” Michael asked.
“You know you need this kind of traumatic event,” Paul replied.
***
The Beatles lost a day, but January 13, 1969, wasn’t a lost day. A Beatles ‘69 Comeback Special clearly required George’s participation — otherwise, why put the show off any longer? — but the other Beatles proved they could at least cover the gaps, produce and adapt in his absence. The attention to the lyrics, John’s guitar solo assignment, the care paid to the music are all proof.
Paul’s Monday was exhausting and cathartic. As the workday began, he described the failure to lure George back into the band, detailed the difficulties of his songwriting partnership with John and shared a vision for the breakup of the Beatles. In the lunchroom, the band’s interpersonal relationships were laid more bare in a presumed private setting. And the day at the office ended with a concentrated, successful songwriting session.
The Beatles — minus George and plus Mal and Yoko — at work on January 13. (Photo by Ethan Russell)
John’s day played out differently. We can sketch a scenario in which he probably slept in and deliberately left the phone off the hook — this was when “telephone’s engaged” prior to the “and then there were two” moment — before dragging himself with Yoko to Twickenham in time for the lunchroom discussion. It wouldn’t be any sort of revelation to say drugs may have been involved in his day. In front of the cameras, in the visual we see in 2021’s Get Back, John didn’t look like he was entirely there. But, there he was.
To write about the Beatles’ lunchroom discussion on January 13, 1969, is to write about a conversation that has no particular aim and a sudden ending. As I wrote last time — I cut-and-pasted this part — it’s sincerely impossible to give a linear rundown of this 30-minute discussion, as it isn’t a linear discussion. My disclaimer remains: You may have already read some of the below in previous posts. Now three parts in, this isn’t a straight recap — instead I’m trying to follow themes as they moved across different points in the conversation.
If you haven’t already, please read Part 1 first and then Part 2. It’ll get you right where you need to be to start off here.
***
There’s no snark, no playing for the cameras, no sarcasm. Otherwise absent, John Lennon revealed his instinctual charm in his vulnerability.
“I played a weaker game now than ever,” John was recorded saying at one point during the Beatles’ lunchroom discussion on January 13, 1969, as captured by the Nagra Tapes.
He did know, however, that whomever he was speaking to, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Linda Eastman could listen in and follow up. This wasn’t complete privacy.
This conversation, like so much on the lunchroom Nagra tape and so much of the serious discussion around the band these days, is framed around the group’s approach to George Harrison’s role in the group. John and Paul certainly admitted to treating him “like a mongrel.” But much of the conversation is really centered on John and Paul themselves, the conjoined Nerk Twins and compositional heart and soul of the Beatles, the two biggest heads of the mighty four-headed monster that embodied the Beatles.
Much drama lay in store for the John and Paul relationship in years to come, but a lot had developed already. The threat of a further fracture — of the greater four, of these specific two — hung over Twickenham on January 13, 1969. The four were really three at this point anyway, with George gone.
And then there were those two. It was clear the relationship between John and Paul was, at best, impaired. The Lennon-McCartney partnership was discussedat some length before John and Yoko arrived for the day. In the presence of Ringo, Linda and others, Paul admitted his relationship with John — certainly when it came to songwriting, their job — wasn’t the same.
As the tapes secretly rolled in the Twickenham canteen, John came off as sincere in airing his grievances, which he must have held close prior, given how fresh his admissions sound.
“It’s like George said,” John conceded 12 minutes in, a line captured in the 2021 Get Back docuseries. “It just doesn’t give me the same sort of satisfaction anymore, because of the compromise we’d have to make to be together.”
The end result of the records now aren’t enough. … When something came out, like Revolver or [Sgt.] Pepper or whatever, there was still that element of surprise that we didn’t know where it came from. But now we know exactly where it comes from, and how it arrived at that particular noise, and how it could have been much better. Or it needn’t have been at all. The only way to do it satisfactorily, for yourself, is to do it on your own. And then that’s fucking hard.
So what’s the way out? It should have been these very sessions — the Beatles were in the midst of conducting exactly what it seems like John sought. The Get Back sessions weren’t delicately curated, and even if the actual noises weren’t necessarily unique, the process of creating new songs for a show demanded spontaneity unseen in their history.
John didn’t say the above to Paul, who was engaged in conversation with Yoko. Instead, John was speaking to Linda, who challenged her partner’s partner.
Linda: But you were saying yesterday … you write good songs and it can’t be any better way. You don’t want just studio musicians. I mean, that’s how I look at it. You make good music together, whether you like it or not.
John:I like it.
Linda: And making good music is also … it’s really hard working at a relationship.
Issues clearly emerged in 1968, and whether it sprouted from the death of Brian Epstein or the trip to India or during the White Album sessions itself isn’t necessarily relevant to this discussion. While the 1967 noises still surprised, the White Album left John “dissatisfied” (Ringo disagreed), even though “the end result was as good as it could’ve been.”
At once, John yearned for time on his own, while also lamenting that the Beatles had turned more in that very direction – more actively working separately — during the recording of their last album. To this end, The Beatles LP should have been called “John, Paul, George and Ringo.”
“I dig it, individually, far more than Sgt. Pepper,” John said. “But as a whole — as a Beatles thing, I think it didn’t work as a Beatles thing.”
There’s another contradiction. To get The Beatles Thing, they had to be themselves. But that behavior alienated George.
I wrote about some of what’s written below when I recounted Paul’s concept of a “breakup show” earlier on the 13th, but it’s worth not only repeating but going into further detail in the context of the rest of the lunchroom tape. We’re now in the post-Get Back docuseries world, which requires more commentary than before to amplify or clarify what a broader audience has now seen.
“You try and make George play competently, because you’re afraid that how he’ll play won’t be like you want him to play,” John told Paul. “And that’s what we did.
“And that’s what you did to me.”
The accusation came as no surprise to Paul, who simply mustered a “yeah,” like he did so many times during this conversation in response to John.
We can’t pretend this is a surprising point of contention. Paul Was Bossy largely defined the iconic Winter of Discontent. It was why the Let It Be Sessions, as we often called it once upon a time, was a “failure,” and why we believed the Beatles entered the summer of 1969 to produce Abbey Road as a way to go out on a high. This is 50 years of how Beatles history was recounted, whether you like it or not, to quote Linda.
We know better today, but even if it wasn’t the ultimate casus belli, of course Paul was bossy, even if that’s just in the lowercase. The other Beatles struggled with it: George quit at least in part because of it, and at the canteen, John protested. Paul may have placed himself as merely “secondary boss” earlier in the conversation when discussing an expanded lineup, but now, with around seven minutes left on the lunchroom recording, John conceded he felt powerless working with Paul, and had for some time.
“I’d got to a bit where I thought it’s no good, me telling you how to do it, you know? All I tried to do on [the White A]lbum was just sing it to you like I was drunk, you know? Just did me best to say, ‘Now look, this, this stands up on its own.’
“And I’m not doing this quite well this time, ‘cause I — like, even with ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, the first time I sang it. Because I hadn’t allowed meself to say it was a whole song. I couldn’t — it was only after we’d done it that I’d realized it was done. You know, and on The Beatles album, I just sort of said, ‘Here it is, ignore here, this is me singing it drunk, but I’m pretending as if I’m not. What would you do with it? George, you play whatever you like.’”
Paul arranges “Don’t Let Me Down,” from the January 6 sequence of Get Back.
Paul laughed at John’s second mention of singing drunk, but it goes to John feeling he had to be stripped of inhibitions to present and arrange a song to Paul as finished in his ears and in his eyes. John entered these sessions feeling unsure again, though. As he said regarding “Don’t Let Me Down,” it took Paul and George to help arrange it earlier in the sessions after John himself said he wasn’t sure in which order the song’s three sections should be presented.
You know, and that’s what it was. It wasn’t -– it wasn’t the arrogance of, “Listen, this is it, baby.” It was that I can’ttell you what to do because you won’t play, here, like what I think you should play. And I’m not going to tell you what to play.
Paul and John continued to speak to and over each other. It wasn’t angrily, they just were doing everything to make their respective points.
Paul: OK, and that’s great, you know. And then – it’s just being able to say that, on the occasion, just being – say, “Look, I’m not going to say anything about the song, because it’ll be difficult … to sing it to you.”
John: Yeah, I know, but you wouldn’t say – listen to me – you probably arranged it you know?
Paul: I know, I know.
…
John: Well, I’m saying that “Dear Prudence” is arranged. Can’t you hear [John vocalizes part of the song]. That is the arrangement, you know? But I’m too frightened to say “This is it.” I just sit there and say, “Look, if you don’t come along and play your bit, I won’t do the song,” you know? I can’t do any better than that. Don’t ask me for what movie* you’re gonna play on it.
Because apart from not knowing, I can’t tell you better than you have, what grooves you can play on it. You know, I just can’t work. I can’t do it like that. I never could, you know. But when you think of the other half of it, just think, how much more have I done towards helping you write? I’ve never told you what to sing or what to play. You know, I’ve always done the numbers like that. Now, the only regret, just the past numbers, is when because I’ve been so frightened, that I’ve allowed you to take it somewhere where I didn’t want.
[* Author’s note: I swear “movie” is what John said there, even if it doesn’t sound like it makes sense in context.]
What made the last bit a dialogue instead of a monologue was only the occasional “yeah” delivered by Paul.
John was pouring it out. He admitted fear, regret and submission.
“And then, my only chance was to let George … take over, or interest George in it, because I knew he’d …”
“’She Said, She Said,’” Paul interrupted, and John confirmed.
Interestingly, you can hear Linda replying, “yes, yes,” which means this was a big enough deal to Paul that he shared the story of that song’s recording with her (the couple didn’t meet for nearly a year after that session, so she wasn’t around at the time). It’s easy to reason why he did, and why he likely brought it up within the last 100 hours. With George having just quit, Paul probably told Linda about the time he himself walked out on the band – during the recording of the final song cut for Revolver, on June 21-22, 1966.
I’m not sure but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we all had a blarney or something and I said, “Oh, fuck you!” and they said, “Well, we’ll do it.” I think George played bass.
Paul’s account had been the single source of this incident. It’s now part of the Beatles’ official history with this passage appearing in the book that accompanied the 2022 Revolver deluxe reissue (along with Paul’s quote):
The disagreement that happened in the dead of night seems to have been about how to resolve differing ideas for the arrangement. A recording sheet in the Abbey Road archive indicates a piano was added to the song at one stage, but no trace of the instrument remains on the tapes.
Back in the Twickenham canteen, John was clear about what mattered to him that night in 1966: “He’d take it as it is,” John said of George before continuing.
“So on [the White Album] … it’s probably George, you know, if there’s anything wrong with it. Because I don’t want your arrangement on it … I only want your … If you give me your suggestions, let me reject them, or if there’s one I like, it’s when we’re writing songs. The same goes for the arrangement.”
Exasperated and resigned, John continued, “I don’t want it to … I don’t know.”
Both Paul and Yoko said they knew what he meant, even if John couldn’t pin it down.
Opposite sides of the same coin. Not captured in Get Back: Yoko chiming in.
In the tape’s final moments, John returned the focus to his in-studio working relationship to Paul and continued to show what, at best, can be called inconsistencies.
And that’s all I did on the last album was say, “OK, Paul, you’re out to decide [how] my songs [are] concerned, arrangement-wise.” … I’d sooner just sing them, than have them turn into, into ‘[Being For the Benefit of] Mr. Kite,’ or anything else, where I’ve accepted the problem from you that it needs arrangement. … I don’t see any further than the guitar, and the drums, and, and George Martin doing the … I don’t hear any of the flutes playing, you know? I suppose I could hear ‘em if I [spoken as if straining] sat down and worked very hard! You know, I could turn out a mathematical drawing, if you like …
Indeed, John was more likely to tell George Martin he wanted “to smell the sawdust” in “Mr. Kite’s” circus atmosphere, or that he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s all consistent with John’s outspoken, retrospective dissatisfaction with arrangements on his own songs, like “Across the Universe” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
And I really am relying on your touch: Paul’s hand-drawn instrument charts from the gatefold of 1986’s Press to Play LP.
Isn’t John lucky to have run into a guy like Paul McCartney (and a producer like George Martin) to help him take the song beyond guitar and drums and happily chart out those mathematical drawings?
It’s the archetypal refrain when bands splinter: There were musical differences. The Beatles didn’t really have musical differences. Just listen to the music they kept making and their general output as solo artists. These guys just had differences in how to make music. Despite the protestations, John and Paul weren’t incompatible but perfectly complementary, they knew it and we all know it.
How to fit in George (Harrison) was an entirely different issue. This was all part of the “compromise we’d have to make to be together,” as John said earlier at the canteen.
Paul: I’m onto the same thing, you know. … It is only, like, if you can just remember that we’re, you know, the four of us are trying to do that. ‘Cause I mean, all of those things you say, you know, in some way, apply to me. Not always —
John: Yes, yes, because everything applies a little bit to each other.
Paul: It is just you saying it. They’re all, you know, in some way, to some degree, will apply to me.
John: But there was a period where none of us could actually say anything, about your criticisms.
Paul: Yeah. Yeah.
John: ‘Cause you would reject it all.
Paul: Yeah, sure.
John: And so George and I would just go, you know, “I’ll give you a line here,” “OK,” you know, “We’ll do four in a bar, and I’ll do…” [resigned, sincere] And a lot of the times you were right.
Paul: Yeah.
John: But a lot of the times you were the same as they always are. But I can’t see the answer to that.
Paul’s ego at this moment was justifiably boundless, and it extended to his thoughts on the band itself. The Beatles’ reputation earned them wiggle room. It ties indirectly to an imaginary scenario he laid out earlier in the conversation: drunkenly playing the piano just because he felt like it and “everyone in that room will dig it, because it’s me really doing it.”
Here Paul insists the Beatles don’t have to play perfectly to sound that way to listeners and critics.
The thing is, like, within each other, within ourselves, we’ve reached something that’s nearly perfect. And everyone else who’s listening to it — “That’s it! We’ve done it!” … OK, so we know we nearly made it, but we’ve really made it for everyone else. ‘Cause, OK, we’re into the fine, finest, finest technicalities, you know, I mean, that’s where it’s at, you know? If one day, we can even keep all the people who are listening to this, nearly,nearly made it, they think we’ve made it. They think that’s it.
The next bit is familiar from the opening moments of the lunchroom scene of the Get Back series, although on the tapes it actually was said very close to the end.
“Like last week,” Paul said, “I say I was doing all right for me, I was really trying to just say to George, ‘Take it there,’ you know? Whereas I wouldn’t have gone, previously — I would have said, “Take it there – with [vocalizing] ‘diddle-derddl-diddle-der.’ But I was trying last week, to say, ‘Now, take it there, and it needs to be like…”
“You see, the point now is we both did that to George this time,” John replied.
The policy that kept us together. The compromise we’d have to make to be together. John had asserted in the canteen several times there was a system, and in not so many words, he believed that system had collapsed and they broke George. This was, like so many issues these four had, a communication problem.
John put it succinctly: “It’s like if I say, ‘All right, take it,” he’ll say, “Well, look, I can’t take it.”
Before the tape ran out in the lunchroom, as John and Paul continued to discuss their inability to get through to George, musically, we get to hear part of an exchange that was introduced in an edited fashion very early in the Get Back version of the sequence.
Paul: So he knows that when we say, “Take it,” we expect [Paul vocalizing]. If I said that, then he’d … [vocalizing George playing a simplified version of that same part]
John: But it’s just that bit. The bit where we’ve — “I’ve Got a Feeling.” There’s no way we could have translated it to him to say …
Paul: He’d have said, “I’ll do it at home.”
…
John: He’s gonna go home. But so have I, you know. I’m gonna go home in a studio, rather than go through this with anybody.
Paul: I’ve never said to George, “Look, George, I think, when I want a guitar bit, I want it exactly like I want it.” And he’s never said to me, “Well, you can’t have it.” … But that’s it, while he’d never said that to me, and I’ll never say that to him, and we’ll go on. But, really, I mean it is gonna be much better if we can actually say, “Look George, ‘I Got A Feeling,’ I want … exactly [like this].” And he’ll say, “Yeah, but I’m not you and I can’t do it exactly how you do it.”
And that ended the near-30-minute reel. It’s unclear how much longer they spoke, and what direction the conversation took.
So where are we left after extensively eavesdropping on the Beatles?
Ultimately we only know what a 1960s-era miniature spy microphone shoved into a flowerpot in an active lunchroom was able to pick up over a single half-hour period. At several points, the conversation is completely indistinguishable. At others we have a conversation being picked up in the foreground when one in the background is completely obscured. Even with Get Back’s AI, we’ve learned it’s not all perfectly heard.
Thanks to the lunchroom tape we know the Beatles better than before if only because there are more data points to draw upon, but that doesn’t mean we understand things proportionally better. These Beatles were never ones to keep a story consistently straight when it was for public consumption, and it doesn’t seem much different in private.
All at once during this same conversation, John wanted to:
Assign song arrangements to Paul because he didn’t want to bother with the job himself
Ask for suggestions on arrangements with the right of refusal
Not have any additional arrangements to his songs
As relaxedly outspoken he was on the lunchroom tape as well as earlier in talking to the others prior to John’s arrival, Paul was likewise levelheaded, perhaps thinking all along, “John, you’re all over the place, as usual” while never coming close to saying as much.
The tape and these sessions overall allow us to witness a maturation in Paul’s temperament and what sounds anecdotally like a softening in his micromanagement style in the 30 months since his 1966 walkout. He could still be very stubborn, but if we assume the “She Said, She Said” situation was comparable to other tense moments in January ’69, he handled these recent situations with greater poise. Paul recognized it himself saying just above, “Like last week, I say I was doing all right for me.” There are several similar snapshots throughout the sessions at Twickenham where Paul can be heard stopping himself.
Get Back was misleading in its presentation of the “I’ll go home to do it” quote. It’s not that George wanted to quit the band — or for that matter that John wanted to also. Home was the space George was more comfortable working on certain things. Witness the “last-night” songs George composed alone at home. When John says George will go home, he didn’t mean he was quitting the band, as Get Back implies. The context is clear it was to be in a different space to work out his parts.
The Get Back edit of the lunchroom tape is a very frustrating viewing once you know the contents of the entire original half-hour audio tape. Deceptive at its worst and unreliable at other points, the TV edit simply blurs an already schizophrenic conversation. Even if the two central participants were John and Paul, the active presence of Ringo, Yoko and Linda needed to be acknowledged, period.
An alternate televised account of the lunchroom — perhaps openly presented as a supercut or trailer of sorts of the full conversation — would have come off cleaner. A movie trailer never presents the action in the final order, but that’s OK and assumed by a viewer. Openly presenting the lunchroom sequence as a sampler of the conversation — one that jumps in, out and all around — would have been a more fair portrayal to satisfy the critics (like me) while keeping with the show’s clear time limitations.
Paul was most outspoken when discussing the group’s future, both before and during the lunchroom tape. But to be clear, the Beatles always discussed their future, even publicly, going back to the dawn of Beatlemania. You’ve heard John’s quote from November 1963 before:
You can be big-headed and say, ‘”Yeah, we’re gonna last 10 years.” But as soon as you’ve said that you think, ‘We’re lucky if we last three months,’ you know.
That they were conscious of their future more than six years after that interview should be no surprise. Breakup rumors appeared in the mainstream press as early as 1964 and reignited periodically. They were always expected to break up until they unexpectedly broke up.
The issue date of this Beatles breakup rumor — November 23, 1964 — was the same day “I Feel Fine” was released in the U.S.
How often did the Beatles privately have conversations like this one at the Twickenham canteen? How often over their career during a bumpy period? How often in January 1969? This 30-minute sequence was a one of a kind capture, but it doesn’t make it a one-of-a-kind conversation.
The individual Beatles of January 13, 1969, were closer to 30 years old than 20. Closer to the release of the McCartney LP than Sgt. Pepper. Their egos were developed, and John said he needed to smother his in Paul’s shadow. George’s could hardly develop in the space of John and Paul.
Did John even want George back? That’s not my question, that’s John’s question.
At this point, there are conflicting goals: self-preservation and singing how you really sing it vs. the Beatles Thing. With the luxury of retrospection, we know it shook out OK. Abbey Road was terrific, Let It Be was great and the intermittent singles were fab. It was more in question on January 13, 1969.
Like “Her Majesty” — the conclusion to Abbey Road that had its origins in the Get Back sessions — the lunchroom tape cuts off unresolved. We only know what comes next some short time later: John, Paul and Ringo head back to Twickenham’s sound stage. George isn’t there. They don’t replace him either. They simply go back to the studio.
But George’s on their mind.
“Let’s go and see George,” Paul said about 10 minutes into the post-lunch Nagras, which were initially filled with idle talk — a little bit about camera work, some about television. There was one problem with that excellent plan, and Ringo delivered the news: George, in fact, had — quite literally — gone back home.
“He’s gone to Liverpool” and would be back Wednesday.
“Oh, then Wednesday’s the day we see him, right?” Yoko replied, cheerfully.
“Yeah, and I think til then … ” Paul said before being cut off by Ringo.
They May Be Parted 
